Friday, August 26, 2011

Those authoritarian Tea Partiers

In the wake of a North Carolina study proclaiming that the Tea Party movement contains both libertarian and authoritarian elements, Ben and I debate whether or not freedom-loving Tea Partiers have a bit o' dictator in them. My take:
It's obvious that the Tea Party mixes authoritarian and libertarian instincts. Candidates running on its platform surged to success in 2010 on a platform of lowering taxes and reducing government regulations. But when they entered Congress and state legislatures around the country, what they did instead was start to take away other people's rights.

A woman's right to an abortion? The House of Representatives tried to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, while legislatures in states like Kansas rewrote licensing rules to make it nearly impossible for abortion clinics to operate.

A worker's right to collectively bargain? Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin famously spearheaded the effort to take that right away from the state's public employees, and Republican legislators all over the nation have backed legislation that would make it more difficult for unions at private-sector companies to collect dues and advocate for their membership.

A couple's right to marriage? If there's a Tea Party effort to extend those freedoms to gay couples, I've missed it. Certainly, Tea Party favorite -- and Republican presidential candidate -- Michele Bachmann opposes those efforts.

You don't need an academic study to prove what the headlines clearly indicate. (And many liberals and libertarians believe in a parenting style that requires obedience from their children; it's difficult to defend the study's methodology.) For all the talk of liberty and the Constitution, Tea Party politicians have narrowed the rights of everybody who isn't their crony.

Tea partiers love to fly the Gadsden Flag when it comes to taxes on rich people and corporations; they love small government less able to prod corporations into keeping our water and air clean. They're fine, however, when government puts a boot heel on the necks of other people -- little people.

Maybe there's a principle involved there, but it has little to do with a commitment to liberty.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Josh Rosenau on liberalism and optimism

My friend Josh Rosenau picks up on that John Derbyshire post, and offers some thoughts about my pessimistic liberalism:
Liberals and (sensible, pre-teabagger) conservatives generally recognize the issues Joel raises. Some people sometimes suffer in unregulated markets, wars hurt some people, and majoritarian influence can have pernicious effects, especially on racial, religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

Conservatives who are willing to grant any of those premises, though, essentially throw up their hands. They'll grant that markets aren't always good for everyone, but they'll insist that government intervention would just make it worse. Or sure, Jim Crow laws are an affront to American standards of decency, but government can't just impose integration on the South, we just have to leave it for folks to sort that out on their own. And so forth.

In other words, both sides acknowledge the facts on the ground, an acknowledgment which Joel considers pessimistic. But what makes him (and me!) liberals is that we think something can be done about that. We think that government regulations can make markets fairer. We think government actions can improve the lot of oppressed minorities. We think government action can avert or at least alleviate the suffering caused by war.

And in practice, that optimism (in the capacity of government to do things) has been repeatedly vindicated. The Marshall Plan, the New Deal, civil rights laws and the Great Society all show government doing exactly these things, in ways that strengthen society and even out damaging inefficiencies. We've seen the same benefits from the stimulus bill, and from Affordable Care. There are comparable gains to be seen from enacting climate change policies.

Conservatism is pessimistic in that it rejects the possibility of fixing problems. And if you don't think you can fix a problem, you often try to ignore that it exists (as we see with global warming denial). Liberalism is not pessimistic for acknowledging that problems exist, it would only be pessimistic if it gave up on the idea of fixing those problems.
Read the whole thing, as they say.

The 'depravity of the poor'

Another reason I'm liberal—because, frankly, I don't want to be like this guy:
It is simply a fact that our social problems are increasingly connected to the depravity of the poor. If an American works hard, completes their education, gets married, and stays married, then they will rarely — very rarely — be poor. At the same time, poverty is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, divorce, ignorance, and addiction. As we have poured money into welfare, we’ve done nothing to address the behaviors that lead to poverty while doing all we can to make that poverty more comfortable and sustainable.
David French, I suspect, has the causation backwards. Being poor makes it difficult to make good life choices.
Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.
There are certainly some folks who are poor due to their own poor choices. But there are many people who are born into situations in which making good choices is, in fact, extremely difficult.

Conservatives believe folks should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In some cases, they mock and taunt those who never had access to bootstraps in the first place. Rarely do the offer actual solutions; they choose to complain about the solutions others offer, instead. Liberals—often imperfectly—try to make sure that people actually have bootstraps to do the pulling.

I am a pessimistic liberal

Over at The Corner, John Derbyshire repeats an argument I hear from time to time.
Liberalism is optimistic. It is a doctrine of progress and improvement. (Why do you think they call themselves “progressives”?)
I can't speak for others who call themselves liberal, but I think my liberalism has generally stemmed from a deep well of pessimism. Just to pluck out three examples...

• I think that over time, an un- or under-regulated market will accrue all or most of the rewards to the people who already have the most resources, generally squeezing workers who actually do much of the wealth creation in that market.

• I think that, without a government to step in and safeguard everybody's rights, majorities will generally stomp on the neck of minorities—be they racial, religious, or sexual minorities.

• I think that when we go to war abroad, lots of people whom we never think about get killed. That it generally costs more and lasts longer than we're promised.

So I favor regulated markets, the rule of law, and a dovish foreign policy. Not because—as conservatives allege—I expect government to create some kind of heaven on earth. I know that's not possible. But I think government can curb our worst tendencies and mitigate their results. I don't expect heaven, but I do think we can—and should—work to stay out of hell.

Paul Krugman is expected to defend or repudiate something he never said

As we know by now, Paul Krugman didn't actually praise Tuesday's earthquake as a potential source of economic stimulus, but conservative critics of Krugman find it truthy enough that they're continuing to push the meme. Here's Steven Horwitz:
1. As Roger Koppl pointed out on Facebook, Krugman only denies having said it, he doesn't deny that he agrees with that statement.
Hey: Can we agree that it's insane for somebody to make up something a person said, then expect that person to publicly state whether they agree or disagree—as though the onus is on the person who had their identity stolen to defend statements they didn't push into the public arena in the first place? If that's where the debate is going, we're all going to disappear up our own asses fairly quickly.

Hey, I heard Steven Horwitz say "It's OK to lie about anything as long as it makes a Democrat look bad." Now, I didn't actually hear that, but gosh—he hasn't denied that he agrees with that statement. I think we can draw the proper conclusions from that.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

How can we tell which scientists are right about climate change?

On the surface, Kevin Williamson sounds reasonable here:
Scientific disputes are highly specialized, and meaningful participation in them requires a great deal of non-generalist knowledge. I’m generally skeptical of argument from credential, but there’s a time for it. For instance, a great number of scientists have a particular view of global warming. Richard Lindzen has reservations about that view. Professor Lindzen is an atmospheric physicist a full-on professor at MIT. Your average politician is not packing the gear to get in the middle of that fight. I’m not. Chait isn’t, either. Is Lindzen not a real scientist? Is he a kook? Is Jonathan Chait going to make that case? Given two scientists with different opinions about climate forecasting, why exactly ought I to consult Jonathan Chait, or Jon Huntsman?
But here's the thing: We laypeople don't have to referee a dispute between two scientists. We can look at what the broader scientific community has to say about the topic. And it's not a 50-50 proposition.
In 2010, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a survey of 1,372 climate researchers, finding that 97 to 98 percent of those publishing in the field said they believe humans are causing global warming. That’s the same majority that existed in a similar 2009 survey. Dissenters do exist, the PNAS study found, but “the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced … are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.” Either way, the ranks of dissenters don’t appear to be swelling.
Now, is it possible that more than 1,000 climate scientists who comprise the leaders in their field are wrong about this? Sure. Anything's possible. But given the overwhelming consensus, it would seem that folks like Rick Perry who claim science has disproven climate change have an added burden to make their case.

That would be the case in the scientific realm. In the political realm, it's different, of course.

I'm concerned that Rick Perry (seemingly) cavalierly denies climate science because that suggests to me that he has decided to entirely disregard true facts and the conclusions that emerge from them. I have more respect for conservatives like Jim Manzi and Steve Hayward who generally acknowledge the scientific consensus and argue more about the appropriate response. (They think liberal solutions would do too much damage to the economy to be worth the trade-off, roughly speaking.) That's a great debate to have. But it seems ridiculous to debate whether climate change exists when the knowledgeable dissenters are so few.

Yes, that's exactly what we meant when we said Rick Perry is anti-science

Rick Perry's Sophisticated Campaign Machine | The Weekly Standard: "While his critics have been eager to dismiss the Texas Governor as anti-science, the The New York Times takes a look at an upcoming electronic book, "Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America." The book's author shows Perry's approach to politics is at once rigorously scientific and unconventional."

Pennsylvania public workers not overcompensated

News from EPI: Pennsylvania public-sector workers not overcompensated, EPI study finds: A new Economic Policy Institute study released today finds that full-time state and local government employees in Pennsylvania are not overcompensated, when compared to otherwise similar private-sector workers.  Pennsylvania public employees’ hourly compensation costs are a statistically insignificant 2.1 percent lower than that of private-sector employees.
That's a local note, but it's consistent with the findings of most similar studies. Republicans are trying to paint public workers as unfairly and grossly overcompensated, but generally speaking, they're not.

Monday, August 22, 2011

E.J. Dionne is delusional this morning

His column reads like a fit of pique, instead of the usual smart commentary from a columnist who knows how the real world works.
President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.

Obama should not be constrained by what the Tea Party might allow subservient Republican leaders in Congress to do. He should state plainly, eloquently and in detail what he thinks needs to happen. Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.
Ah, surely Dionne must be coming up with a laundry list of ideas that depend on executive action instead of a recalcitrant Congress! Let's hear them!
Going big means immediate action to boost the economy, even though this will increase the short-term deficit. His proposals to continue the payroll tax cut, extend unemployment insurance and enact patent reform are good, but they are not enough.
Wait. Pretty sure those items would all require action from a recalcitrant Congress...
At the same time, Obama should put forward a plan of his own to close the long-term deficit. He should not be hemmed in by his negotiations with congressional Republicans to get the debt ceiling raised. They don’t hold the nation’s credit hostage anymore. He should lay out exactly what he would do and abandon his practice of making preemptive concessions to his opponents.

That means Obama should not be shy about urging eventual tax increases, particularly on the wealthy. And let’s be clear: These would not be immediate tax hikes; they’d kick in a year or two from now.
Yeah, this really requires the cooperation of a recalcitrant Congress...
Ah, but won’t congressional Republicans block as much of this program as they can? That’s the wrong question.
Well, no, not really.

Count me among those who believe that Obama hasn't been a very effective negotiator, ceding ground to Republicans in his opening moves instead of making them make him give up stuff. That means the whole process gets pulled to the right. And what's more, I think Dionne's list makes sense.

However: Dionne is urging the president to lay out an agenda that has no chance of being enacted with Congress in its current political configuration. Doing so would most likely make the president look even weaker than he already does. This stuff would be great on the campaign trail, but as an actual agenda for the next year of governance it's suicide.

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Free lunch for all those rich kids in Detroit public schools

Via Rick Henderson, I see that Henry Payne is trying to stir up class warfare against the rich at National Review ... by taking aim at a program meant to help the poor. Specifically, it's a federal program that would provide free lunch to every student in Detroit's public schools, whether or not they qualify for free or reduced lunches.

The post is called "Richie Rich's Free Lunch," and it gets populist from there:
Funnily enough, they failed to mention the recent $4.5 billion expansion of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which will now provide free lunches to ALL — rich and poor, needy and non-needy — of Detroit’s 65,800 public school-students. (Detroit is one of three pilot programs starting this month for a free-for-all that will ultimately cover similar districts nationwide.)

This new program is part of Obama’s orgy of spending, a binge that has ballooned the federal budget by 25 percent since his inauguration. But the program’s logic is even more insane than the price tag: The administration says it is giving rich kids free food to eliminate the shame that less-fortunate students may feel in receiving free food. We’re not making this up.

What’s next — handing out free Chevy Volts to all 16-year olds in order to reduce the stigma that low-income kids feel driving used 1990 Geo Metros?

Does anybody but a desk-bound government bureaucrat honestly think that class stigma will disappear if you give Richie Rich a free lunch? School districts with 62.5 percent or more of students from homes below 130 percent of the poverty level qualify — a threshold Detroit easily clears with 78 percent.
I don't know if this is a worthy program or not, and I think Payne's concerns—less inflammatorily expressed—might be the genesis for a good debate: do we want to provide for families that can provide for themselves?

But Payne expresses himself in fundamentally dishonest fashion, imagining a world where gangs of rich public school kids roam the halls of Detroit High School (or whatever) fat on taxpayer-supplied baloney sandwiches. Why dishonest?

• Because do rich parents generally send their kids to inner-city public schools? C'mon. (Payne, who lives near Detroit, is presumably familiar with the situation.)

• As Payne himself notes, 78 percent of Detroit students fall below the qualifying standard for free-and-reduced lunches anyway. It's not a stretch to presume that a chunk more exist just above the threshhold. (If that presumption is incorrect, I'll happily retract the statement.) If there are any rich kids benefiting from the program, they comprise a small—and probably nearly non-existent—minority.

I can easily imagine a government program that becomes more efficient by just providing the lunch to every student instead of trying to separate out the few who don't qualify. Money, time, and bureaucratic energy are saved and a few people who don't deserve benefits get them anyway. Big whoop.

Again, I don't know if the program is necessarily worthy. But I know that Payne's framing doesn't fairly represent who, exactly, will be served by the program. Dishonest argumentation isn't very persuasive.



Thursday, August 18, 2011

How to respond to urban violence?

Ben and I talk about the Philadelphia "flash mobs" and the London riots in this week's Scripps Howard column. I argue that recession-era austerity isn't just cutting the safety net—it's also undermining our ability to police our cities:
Urban violence is nothing new but American city-dwellers are used to the problem being mostly contained to poor, largely minority areas of our cities. The recent incidents in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Kansas City are notable for one commonality: they took place in those cities' glitzier shopping districts, "good neighborhoods" usually untouched by strife.

Cynicism is easy; violence only matters when it happens to the white and well off. But the perception of increased violence, fair or not, can create a negative feedback loop that has real effects on a city and its prospects. Think of New York in the 1970s; it took decades for the city to make a comeback.

So while we need to plug away at underlying social ills -- and there are many -- we should also take quicker and more direct action. We must flood the streets with cops.

The idea has an honorable liberal pedigree. It was President Bill Clinton, after all, who pushed to put 100,000 new police officers on American streets back in the 1990s. And smart police forces have adopted "community policing" methods -- where officers walk a beat, like in the old days, getting to know neighborhood residents -- that have proven effective in preventing crime, but require manpower.

Here's where government austerity compounds the problem: The police forces in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Kansas City have been stretched in recent years by recession-era budgeting. The problem will get worse: Federal grants to local police forces across the country are being slashed in the name of deficit cuts. Police forces are being asked to do more with less. Like everybody else, they can't.

The drive to slash domestic spending isn't just affecting social programs and the safety net. It's cutting into protective services that could help put a lid on violence and unrest. Be sure to give thanks to the Republican Party.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Still here...

...obviously, I'm still posting the column once a week. But most of my energy this summer has gone to recovering from surgery. One more surgery in September. I want to get back to writing regularly, but this has proven to be quite the ordeal. Hope I'll see you soon.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Is it time for a balanced budget amendment?

That's the Scripps Howard column topic this week. Ben and I note: "The current proposal -- introduced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., -- would require the government to spend no more than it takes in, but it doesn't stop there. It would limit government expenditures to 18 percent of the gross domestic product, and require a two-thirds majority of Congress to approve any tax increase. The government could depart from those guidelines only when the country is at war."

My take:
Tea Partiers and conservatives make a big show of their fealty to the Founders, but the proposed balanced budget amendment is a big slap in the face of Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton, after all, urged Americans to adopt the Constitution precisely because it gave Congress unlimited power of taxation.

Limiting that power, he said, would leave the central government weak and toothless, unable to provide for the common good. He knew what he was talking about -- the Articles of Confederation that previously governed the country so restricted Congress' taxing power that it was unable to pay America's Revolutionary War debts.

"The federal government," Hamilton wrote in Federalist 31, "must of necessity be invested with an unqualified power of taxation in the ordinary modes."

He added: "How is it possible that a government half supplied and always necessitous, can fulfill the purposes of its institution, can provide for the security, advance the prosperity, or support the reputation of the commonwealth? How can it ever possess either energy or stability, dignity or credit, confidence at home or respectability abroad? ... How can it undertake or execute any liberal or enlarged plans of public good?"

Somebody should run these questions past the GOP, which seems not to care these days about the "dignity or credit" of the federal government. If Hamilton was right, the proposed balanced budget amendment -- which makes it virtually impossible to raise or levy new taxes -- would return America to the days of being a weak, fractious country with a weak, fractious government.

Balanced budgets are good things in times of peace and prosperity -- something Republicans forgot under George W. Bush. They can be actively harmful during wars or recessions. The proposed amendment addresses only half that equation, and is thus a danger to America's future.

The Founders knew better; too bad today's GOP doesn't.
Ben's take: He's agin' it too, but for different reasons.

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

About that FDA-sponsored SWAT team at Rawesome Foods

Stuff like this makes me think about becoming a weirdo libertarian:
A multi-agency SWAT-style armed raid was conducted this morning by helmet-wearing, gun-carrying enforcement agents from the LA County Sheriff's Office, the FDA, the Dept. of Agriculture and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control).

Rawesome Foods, a private buying club offering wholesome, natural raw milk and raw cheese products (among other wholesome foods) is founded by James Stewart, a pioneer in bringing wholesome raw foods directly to consumers through a buying club. James was followed from his private residence by law enforcement, and when he entered his store, the raid was launched.

Law enforcement then proceeded to destroy the inventory of the story by pouring the milk down the drain and / or confiscating raw cheese and fresh produce for destruction.
Understand: food safety regulations exist for a reason. Nobody's very happy when grandmas start dying of E coli because they ate bad spinach. At the same time, Rawesome Foods and its customers have made a deliberate—possibly even informed—decision not to abide by standard food practices, seeing possible benefits they think outweigh the risk.

Maybe there's a way to balance both the concerns and desires, in a way that protects public safety while giving producers and consumers the choice to experiment.

Here's my proposal: let raw food producers semi-opt out of FDA regulations—but require they plaster all their products with huge stickers and labels with a warning: "This product has not been inspected by the FDA and may not meet minimum food safety requirements." What's more, the FDA would retain the right to take away the opt-out status for five years if a producer ended up being the source of a bacterial outbreak of some sort. I'm guessing that provision would be used rarely.

What does my proposal do? Well, it lets producers and consumers make free, but informed, choices. (The cost barriers to entering the market would probably come down for new entrants, as well.) Major producers would probably opt to stay within the FDA system rather than afix those large labels to their products. But the FDA would be relieved of some of its more piddling inspection and enforcement duties. Everybody wins.

And we might not be treated to the spectacle of a SWAT team raiding a dairy farm.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Let's get rid of our government, start over with a parliament

That's the case I (probably needlessly provacatively) make in this week's Scripps Howard column.
The debt limit debate is only the latest, greatest manifestation of America's broken politics. For more than two years, President Obama has faced unprecedented Republican obstacles to getting executive branch appointees and federal district judges confirmed. The day-to-day business of government is increasingly going undone because the GOP is happy to obstruct for obstruction's sake.

Why is this the case? Partly because the two major political parties are more ideologically coherent than ever ― there are no more conservative Democrats like Scoop Jackson or liberal Republicans like Lincoln Chaffee in Congress. Politicians are less willing and less able to compromise, for fear the other side will get credit.

The problem is compounded by the divided control of Congress, where Republicans have the House and Democrats hold the Senate. Add the Senate filibuster into the mix and there are simply too many procedural roadblocks to getting even the simplest things done.

Maybe it's time to scrap the system, and start over again with a parliamentary democracy.

As commentator David Frum noted on Twitter recently, ``We're getting a good real-life poli-sci lesson as to why so few other democracies have adopted U.S. separation of powers idea."

He's right: In parliamentary democracies, one party ― or a coalition of parties ― captures control of parliament and appoints a prime minister.

It controls all the levers of government, and is thus responsible for everything that happens (and doesn't happen) on its watch.

It's no coincidence that a country like Britain was able to slash its budget a year ago, while American politicians are still dithering.

Here, politicians spend inordinate amounts of energy figuring out how to deny credit and pin blame on the other side; in the U.K., voters know exactly who is responsible.

Yes, the Founders wanted separation of powers ― but what we've ended up with is an abdication of responsibility. Maybe it's time to toss aside our broken machinery of government and start over.
Ben advocates a return to pre-FDR strict constructionism.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Back from surgery. Ish.

On July 8, I entered Thomas Jefferson University Hospital here in Philadelphia for the second surgery in my Summer of Surgery. The first was a colostomy to relieve the life-threatening diverticulitis inflammation that had brought my gastrointestinal system to a standstill. This follow-up was designed to remove several inches of diseased colon and, if all went well, to reverse the colostomy during the same procedure—making it possible to poop out my butt again, among my most cherished aspirations.

All did not go well.

Turns out a reasonably large section of my colon wasn't just diseased: it had collapsed, and the dead portions fused themselves to my bladder. And in the course of trying to separate live bladder from essentially dead colon, my bladder was nicked with a scalpel blade. A surgical urologist was called; an operation originally scheduled to take three hours or so took seven. The surgeon told me afterwards it was one of the three or four worst cases of diverticulitis he'd seen.

I came home Friday afternoon. I'm in more pain this time—my lower abdomen is basically a shambles, and it won't surprise you to understand how much THAT part of the body plays a nexus for the movement of the rest of you. But I feel more emotionally resilient. Except for one thing: after a week of inconsiderate roommates blaring their TVs without regard for anybody else, I've developed panic attacks when I hear Dr. Phil's voice. This is not nearly as funny as it sounds.

The colostomy wasn't reversed. I have to recover a couple of months from this surgery for that to happen. But I'm kind of back.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Should government do more to encourage marriage and prevent divorce?

That's the subject of this week's Scripps Howard column. It's prompted by news in several states of social conservatives leading legislative efforts to make it more difficult to divorce, as well as the unveiling of a new "Marshall Plan for marriage" by the conservative Heritage Foundation. My 300-word limit only lets me scratch the surface of the creepiness involved, but here's my shot at it:
Let's talk about freedom.

Republicans use that word -- and its cousin, "liberty" -- quite often.

Usually they're talking about financial matters. Individuals should be free from taxes. Businesses should be free from regulation. So it's odd that when the topic turns to marriage, conservatives rush to embrace the kind of nanny-state infringement on adult decision-making they otherwise decry.

What Republicans have failed to do is consider how their supposedly freedom-oriented policies may have undermined marriage in this country. One of the prime benefits of wedlock -- beyond the uniting of two persons in love -- is the economic security that comes from partnering. But such security has been increasingly difficult to come by: America's median household incomes have stagnated since 1980, even though many more households now have both a mother and a father working outside the home. That stagnation is easy to attribute to conservative policies that have steered more money to rich individuals and big corporations at the expense of workers.

In other words: It's much harder to raise a family. No wonder more middle-class Americans are "retreating from marriage," choosing cohabitation or divorce over the increasing economic strains of commitment. Rather than face those factors, though, Republicans would rather clamp down on freedom -- repeal no-fault divorce and require counseling sessions of couples that have already decided they're better off apart.

Marriage is, generally, good. That's why so many gays and lesbians have fought for that right in recent years, and why weddings and anniversaries are so significant to the rest of us. The conservative instinct to protect and promote healthy marriages is a good one.

But activists would be best served by offering carrots -- in the form of tax incentives and other economic assistance -- rather than using the stick of government to force couples to remain yoked. There's no reason to choose between promoting marriage and protecting freedom. We can do both.
Ben, needless to say, is more optimistic than I. Forget about gay marriage, though: I suspect plain ol' marriage marriage is the next front in the culture wars.

Time for my next surgery

I go under the knife again on Friday. It will probably be extra-quiet around here for awhile. I'll post a link to the latest Scripps Howard column today, and after that it'll probably be a week before I get back to a keyboard. If you want to keep up with my progress, or my half-assed opinions about anything else, you can always follow my Twitter feed.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

The Wall Street Journal's misleading op-ed about defense cuts and China

You know what? I really hate it when op-ed writers deliberately conflate apples and oranges to make the oranges appear to be hordes of Chinese soldiers bent on dominating the world. That's exactly what the Wall Street Journal gives us in an offering from Dan Blumenthal and Michael Mazza. The key graph:
Last year, the Obama administration took the first steps in a $400 billion defense spending cut, ending several crucial programs. The White House has now asked for another $400 billion in cuts. China, meanwhile, has averaged 10% annual spending increases for more than 20 years. As former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown once said of the Soviets, "When we build, they build; when we cut, they build."
Here are the three faulty points of comparison:

• The writers compare China's 10 percent annual increases with $400 billion in U.S. cuts that will be made through 2023. We're not cutting $400 billion out of next year's defense budget—that's the target spread out over the next decade. And you can argue whether that's good or not, but it certainly makes the comparison completely lopsided and completely misleading. That's not fair to the WSJ's readers.

• What's more, that $400 billion in cuts? Not actually cuts, but a cut in the projected growth of spending. The defense budget would still be bigger in 2013 than it is now. Republicans call BS when Democrats pull that trick with entitlement spending; it's just as misleading when applied to the GOP's pet causes.

• What's more, the writers compare the dollar amount in cuts versus the percentage increase in China's military budget. I hate to drag out this chart again, but I have no choice:
Using Wikipedia as a quick reference, we see that U.S. defense spending in 2010 was $685 billion—about 4.7 percent of the national GDP.  China's defense spending the same year $91.5 billion—a 12 percent increase from the previous year's $78 billion, and less than 2 percent of that country's GDP. China has a long, long, long way to go before it's making the same kind of investment as the United States. You wouldn't know that from the WSJ's very misleading comparison.

We need to have a serious national conversation about America's military posture in the world, and how we should approach China as it becomes increasingly confident, capable, and assertive in the Pacific. But that conversation should be grounded in facts. That's not what the Wall Street Journal gives us.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Bag O' Books: 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction' by Alan Jacobs

Three thoughts about this book:

• Since my May 1 surgery, I had—until this week—been able to read exactly one book front-to-back: Tina Fey's "Bossypants." It was clever and entertaining, but it took all of an afternoon to read. Everything else I've tried to read the last two months has either been a bit of a slog, or else I've simply been unable to maintain focus. But reading is important to me; it frightened me to think I might be losing my capacity somehow. So when I saw this slim volume at the Joseph Fox Bookshop in Philadelphia, I snapped it up immediately. Maybe, just maybe, I could find my way back.

• A wise choice, because one of Jacobs' chief messages in this book is: "Relax." He eschews reading lists and eat-your-veggies approaches to reading in favor of urging readers to follow their Whim. In Jacobs' hands, this is not a call to dispense with Great Books and devote oneself entirely to Stephen King. He makes it quite clear that one's Whim—he's the one doing the capitalizing—can lead one both to high art and splendid trash, and that one can derive different sorts of pleasures from both. (He's also quite keen on the virtues of rereading certain books.)

• But how does one continue to be a book reader when Twitter, Facebook, and life itself are lurking all around? Jacobs doesn't really offer an answer to this question: Instead, he suggests that it is possible, with some persistent effort, to create a "cone of silence" around oneself—if one chooses to do so. And perhaps he's right: I managed to read this 150-page book in three days. On a long holiday weekend, to be sure, but it was possible. Jacobs' book about the pleasures of reading turns out to be a pleasurable read in its own right.