Globalization Is Good For You

From time to time we hear laments in the media about the flow of jobs out of the country and the deteriorating economic position of the American middle class. Much of the blame is placed on globalization (when they get done blaming Bush), but this article by Daniel Griswold in the New York Post argues that the conventional complaints about globalization are little more than myths. Griswold points out, for instance, that:

Like so many assumptions about trade, the belief that more global competition has somehow lowered the living standards of the average American worker and family is just a myth. The critics have it all wrong: The middle class isn't disappearing - it's moving up.

The Census reports that the share of U.S. households earning $35,000 to $75,000 a year (in '06 dollars) - roughly, the middle class - has indeed shrunk slightly over the last decade, from 34 percent to 33 percent. But so, too, has the share earning less than $35,000 - from 40 percent to 37 percent.

It's the share of households earning more than $75,000 that's jumped - from 26 percent to 30 percent.

Trade has helped America transform itself into a middle-class service economy. Yes, the country's lost a net 3.3 million manufacturing jobs in the past decade - but it's added a net 11.6 million jobs in service and other sectors where average wages are higher than in manufacturing. Most of these new jobs are in better-paying categories, like professional and business services, finance and education and health services.

Critics of trade repeat as a mantra that real wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. But the data on real wages exclude benefits - which have been rising as a share of worker compensation. Those data also rely on a cost-of-living index that has systematically overstated inflation and thus understated real income gains.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average real hourly compensation earned by Americans has actually grown by 22 percent during the past decade - even as trade and other measures of globalization have grown rapidly.

There's more in the article to shine a ray of optimism into the gloominess you might be feeling today as the Dow continues its dispiriting free-fall.

RLC

On Scientific Theories

The conventional wisdom has long been that intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific, hypothesis and when Judge Jones' oracular ruling in the Dover trial reinforced the conventional view everyone nodded their heads in unthinking agreement. Dave Scott over at Uncommon Descent argues persuasively that this is simply wrong. He explains succinctly why it is that ID bears the chief qualification of any theory that aspires to be scientific - it's falsifiable.

Scott writes:

Karl Popper famously stated that a hypothesis is scientific if it can be falsified. He used swans as an example. He stated a hypothesis:

All swans are white.

Popper said that it can never be proven that all swans are white because there is always the possibility that a black swan exists somewhere but has not yet been observed. He stated that the hypothesis is still scientific because it can be falsified - the observation of a single black swan will falsify it.

The biological ID hypothesis can be stated as:

All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agents.

We already know, or may reasonably presume, that complex biological systems can be generated by intelligent agents. There's a whole discipline called "Genetic Engineering" devoted to it. What we don't know is whether any non-intelligent means can generate complex biological systems. A single observation of a complex biological system generated by a non-intelligent cause will falsify the biological ID hypothesis.

[The bacterium] P.falciparum replicating billions of trillions of times in the past few decades represents the largest search to date for a "black swan". This is orders of magnitude more replications than took place in the evolution of reptiles to mammals wherein there are many exceedingly complex biological systems that separate them. If P.falciparum had been seen generating any complex biological systems such as those that distinguish mammals from reptiles then it would have falsified the ID hypothesis. None were observed. This doesn't prove ID but it certainly lends strong support to it. All perfectly scientific.

It might be argued, however, by those who deny the claim that ID is science that had P. falciparum produced complex systems that it would have at best only falsified certain versions of ID. Many ID theorists believe that design was front-loaded into the cosmos so that the Designer produced a semi-deterministic process that would gradually unfold the varieties of living things we see today. Someone who holds this view, if confronted by empirical evidence of complex systems produced during the trillions of falciparum replications, could technically claim that the bacterium is simply playing out the program that had been downloaded into the universe (or into life) at its origin.

Thus, the critic might argue, ID is not falsifiable even if it appears that natural processes are producing the complex systems that ID alleges natural processes cannot produce. Therefore, ID is not a truly scientific theory.

Even so, whatever the technical refuges available to the IDer might be, discovering an actively evolving complex system in P.falciparum would deal a devastating psychological blow to intelligent design and would make it very difficult for anyone advocating it to get traction in the intellectual community. For this reason I agree with Scott that ID is in principle psychologically falsifiable if not technically so.

Moreover, it is at least as falsifiable as is the Darwinian claim that natural forces and processes are responsible for the great diversity of life we see in the world around us. What set of observations could be reasonably expected to prove that claim false?

Thus if that claim is considered to be within the domain of science there's no justification, other than metaphysical prejudice, for excluding the claim that natural processes are inadequate to account for specified complexity in the biosphere.

RLC

National Security Experts

Michael Ramirez comments on how Congress might handle a terrorist nuclear threat:

RLC

The Day the Music Died

Mark Steyn, who seems to know everything about music, commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Alan Bloom's classic work the Closing of the American Mind with a paen to Bloom's chapter on the music culture in the U.S.

If you liked Bloom's book - I won't believe you if you tell me you've never read it - and/or you're a student of music and/or music history, you'll be delighted by Steyn's essay which he opens with this:

We are all rockers now. National Review publishes its own chart of the Fifty Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, notwithstanding that most of the honorees are horrified to find themselves on such a hit parade. The National Review countdown of the All-Time Hot 100 Conservative Gangsta Rap Tracks can't be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who can't get a chick to dance with him. To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings. It was twen- ty years ago today, sang the Beatles forty years ago today, that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. Well, it was twenty years ago today-1987-that Professor Bloom taught us the band had nothing to say.

Read the rest. It's very good.

RLC

The Fence Works

One of the claims made by open borders advocates on both sides of the border is that a fence would not keep people from illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States. I always wondered how they knew that and why, if they did know it, they would so strongly oppose the fence since, according to them, it wouldn't stop illegals from pouring across our frontier anyway.

Their assertion always seemed at best counterintuitive and at worst disingenuous. Now we can add to it's list of shortcomings the fact that it appears to be empirically false. Just ask the people on both sides of the border who live near the section of fence that has been erected.

If you watch the video at the link note the statement of the third guy interviewed: People should be free to go where they want. I wonder if he keeps the doors of his home open to anyone who wants to wander in and out.

RLC

Defining Torture Down

The matter of torture has raised its ugly visage once again last week, this time in the hearings for President Bush's nomination for the post of Attorney General, Michael Mukasey. Mukasey was asked whether waterboarding was torture, in response to which he wiggled and waggled and never answered the question, an evasion which cast momentary doubt upon his confirmation.

What Mukasey should have said is that the question the Senators asked really can't be properly answered until Congress has legislatively established a meaningful definition of torture. Everyone is "against torture" in the abstract, of course, but few can say with any precision what torture is and under what circumstances, if any, it should ever be permitted.

The United Nations Convention on Torture, which is frequently cited as authoritative and to which we are a signatory, is so vaguely worded as to be not much help. Article 1 says:

For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind...

The difficulty is the phrase "severe pain or suffering." What constitutes "severe"? What metric do we use to assess mental pain to determine whether it is severe? What is severe for one person may be easily tolerated by another.

Another problematic construction is the phrase "intimidating or coercing." Anyone who is a prisoner and held under armed guard is going to be ipso facto intimidated and coerced. It would appear that, taken literally, the Conventions rule out holding prisoners.

Article 16 of the document states that in addition to torture all acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article 1 are also to be forbidden.

But this is no help either. What is inhuman and/or degrading is highly subjective. It is degrading to be yelled at or to be shackled or even detained by another, for heaven's sake. The U.N. Conventions, if taken seriously, make an interrogator who raises his voice to a prisoner subject to being charged with a war crime. This is ludicrous, of course, which is why no one takes the U.N. Conventions seriously. They define torture so broadly that almost anything the military does with detainees could be construed as falling afoul of the guidelines.

As matters stand torture is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. What is needed is for the Congress of the United States to do what President Bush has urged it to do and conduct a debate on these matters and produce more lucid guidelines as to what will be permitted to our interrogators and what will not.

Until then, questions like the one asked of Mukasey will remain pretty much meaningless.

RLC

A Conversion in Progress

Antony Flew, the world famous atheist philosopher who began having doubts back in the 1980s about the ability of atheism to explain certain facts about the world and who subsequently became a theist (though not a Christian), has written a book describing the thinking that led him to abandon atheism and embrace theism.

The volume is titled There Is a God and in it Flew, the son of devout Christian parents - his father was a Methodist preacher - recounts how he abandoned his parents' faith at about the age of fifteen, largely under the influence of the problem posed by the unfolding Nazi evil in the 1930s, and how he went on to become one of the most prominent philosophical atheists of the twentieth century. He was committed throughout his career to the principle that one should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and he could never see the evidence he was able to observe leading anywhere but to atheism.

This began slowly to change, though, in the 1980s. Throughout his career he had been in contact with some brilliant Christian thinkers - he knew C.S. Lewis - but by the late 80s the number of outstanding Christian philosophers had multiplied and their work was undermining several of Flew's chief philosophical arguments.

Following hard upon this state of affairs were the developments in cosmology which had been accruing for the past decade. Three questions in particular kept popping up and pointing Flew away from his atheistic assumptions: Where did the laws of nature come from? How did the cosmos come to be so finely tuned for life? And how did complex life arise out of nonliving matter?

Gradually, Flew was led by the evidence to the conclusion that there is indeed a divine mind behind the universe. He had no Damascus road experience, no moment of conversion, just a gradual realization that theism is true.

He is not a Christian and still finds the idea of an afterlife difficult to accept, but he's very open to Christian belief and even includes in his book an appendix written by renowned theologian N.T. Wright, with whom he has been in dialogue, in which Wright lays out the case for the resurrection of Jesus, a case that Flew finds impressive. He concludes with this assessment of Wright's argument: "It is absolutely wonderful, absolutely radical, and very powerful."

It will be interesting as the life of this great thinker draws closer to its end if there are not yet one or two further surprises forthcoming.

There Is a God can be ordered at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

RLC

Top 100

The Daily Telegraph of England unveils its list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America. Like most such lists there's much to quibble with.

For instance, the list of conservatives belies a real failure to understand American conservatism. They have Rudy Giuliani ranked #1, but Giuliani isn't really much of a conservative, and he's certainly not influential. General Petreaus is #2, but I doubt that he has ever publicly stated a political position, and despite his excellent service to our country, he's hardly influential in the realm of conservative ideology. Matt Drudge at #3 deserves to be somewhere on the list, perhaps, as does Newt Gingrich at #4 but certainly neither belongs in the top five. Drudge is best known for his news website, not his political views and although Gingrich is influential his influence is mostly confined to the more cerebral conservatives. The most influential conservative in America actually doesn't appear on the list until #5. You can go to the link to find out who that is.

In my opinion the most influential liberal doesn't show up until #9 on the liberal list. I certainly don't think the number one choice, Bill Clinton, is really all that influential or even all that liberal.

Another reason to not like the list is that Viewpoint doesn't appear anywhere on it. What's up with that?

RLC

1984 in 2007

This will make your jugular bulge. The University of Delaware has been requiring students to attend mandatory reeducation and consciousness raising sessions with the Resident Assistants in their housing units. The group FIRE has the details in this press release from last week:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university's own materials as a "treatment" for students' incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware's residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is calling for the total dismantling of the program, which is a flagrant violation of students' rights to freedom of conscience and freedom from compelled speech.

"The University of Delaware's residence life education program is a grave intrusion into students' private beliefs," FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. "The university has decided that it is not enough to expose its students to the values it considers important; instead, it must coerce its students into accepting those values as their own. At a public university like Delaware, this is both unconscionable and unconstitutional."

The university's views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to "sustainability" door decorations. Students living in the university's eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs). The RAs who facilitate these meetings have received their own intensive training from the university, including a "diversity facilitation training" session at which RAs were taught, among other things, that "[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality."

The university suggests that at one-on-one sessions with students, RAs should ask intrusive personal questions such as "When did you discover your sexual identity?" Students who express discomfort with this type of questioning often meet with disapproval from their RAs, who write reports on these one-on-one sessions and deliver these reports to their superiors. One student identified in a write-up as an RA's "worst" one-on-one session was a young woman who stated that she was tired of having "diversity shoved down her throat."

According to the program's materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university's residence halls to achieve certain "competencies" that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of "citizenship." These competencies include: "Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," "Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression," and "Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality."

At various points in the program, students are also pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate their agreement with the university's ideology, regardless of their personal beliefs. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations, committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20%, taking action by advocating for an "oppressed" social group, and taking action by advocating for a "sustainable world."

In the Office of Residence Life's internal materials, these programs are described using the harrowing language of ideological reeducation. In documents relating to the assessment of student learning, for example, the residence hall lesson plans are referred to as "treatments."

This Orwellian brain-washing is precisely what totalitarians have done everywhere they've had the power. Now it's being done by the lefties at Delaware. I'll be sure to scratch that school off the list of possible destinations for my college-bound child. I think I'll also send them a DVD of The Lives of Others. It's a movie the apparatchiks at Delaware should find inspiring.

UPDATE: The chairman of the University politburo, Patrick Harker, sensing the PR disaster that this program has turned into, has ordered it be terminated. Good decision, comrade.

RLC

Looking Grim

The situation in Pakistan continues to deteriorate. Pakistan military personnel fighting the Taliban in the northwest (Waziristan) are surrendering or being captured and beheaded in droves. President Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency and suspended the constitution. The Supreme Court has been disbanded. Thousands have been arrested and thousands more are marching in the streets in protest.

Why should we care? We should care because Pakistan has nuclear weapons and the Islamists fighting against the government want them. If they get them we will almost certainly be a target. We should also care because Musharraf has been a fairly steady ally in the war on terror. Should he fall, Pakistan, with its 160 million Muslims, may be lost to us.

Bill Roggio and Breitbart have further details.

The only silver lining here is that Musharraf may be getting desperate enough to take serious measures against the Taliban, and may even invite us to help him. This would go a long toward easing Taliban pressure on Afghanistan.

RLC

See No Evil

As Hugo Chavez moves inexorably closer to becoming a dictator in Venezuela and as thousands of protestors fill the streets to demand that he stop his quest for absolute power, the American left is showing its solidarity with ... Chavez.

It's not just Cindy Sheehan, of course. Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, and Danny Glover have all made the pilgrimmage to Caracas to pay homage to the man who promises to be the next Fidel Castro.

The left has a strange fascination with thugs and killers. They loved Fidel Castro, and they recently oberved the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara's death. Che was a mass killer, who did Castro's dirty work after he overthrew the Batista regime in 1959, executing hundreds of members of the previous government, but the left reveres his memory anyway, just as they loved Stalin and Mao who murdered millions of their countrymen in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students and others are marching for freedom in Venezuela and are being suppressed by rubber bullets, tear gas, and fire hoses, and the left in the U.S. is largely silent. Chavez wants to impose socialism in Venezuela and civil and political rights are expendable if they stand in the way of socialism.

RLC

Murder, Slavery and Islam

This story about Francis Bok, a Christian refugee from the Sudan, is a snapshot of what life is like for black African Christians living in an Arab Muslim country. It's a column you shouldn't miss. Here are the opening paragraphs:

It was the kind of excitement that made children uneasy. Grownups were pointing toward the river. Others were arriving at a run. The bustling atmosphere in the market place of the peaceful African town of Nyamlell in the Dinka tribal area in the southern Sudan was changing. Worried adults could see what a seven-year-old Dinka boy, Francis Bok, who had gone to the market that fateful day with older village children to sell his mother's eggs and peanuts, could not: "a storm of smoke" rising from a nearby village. Sellers frantically began to gather up their wares and hurry away with the buyers. The adults understood. They recognized the approaching signs of the dreaded scourge that most people believed had disappeared from the pages of African history long ago: a slave raid.

It was 1986 and Bok was about to see his happy world of family and village shattered forever by a centuries-old, barbaric practice that has never died out: the violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Arabs.

"The Arab militias were told to kill the men and enslave the women and children," said the now 28-year-old Bok, who was himself captured and enslaved that day, to an audience of 80 people at the University of Toronto recently where he had been invited to speak by the campus organization, Zionists at U. of T.

Bok, who would spend the next ten years working as a child slave, then outlined for his college listeners in horrifying detail the savage hurricane of violence he next witnessed when the Arab slavers attacked.

Read the rest of Bok's tale at the link.

RLC

Boys Adrift

In the movie Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughy plays a 35 year-old man named "Trip" who still lives with his parents who are growing increasingly desperate to have him leave the house. Unfortunately, McConaughy is in no hurry to give up this comfortable arrangement, and so the parents hire the services of a professional "interventionist" (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) to woo him out of the nest.

The movie is humorous, but Leonard Sax, a family physician and research psychologist, takes the main theme seriously. He cites a lot of evidence to support the claim that there is a growing and worrisome epidemic of boys and young men who seem listless, alienated from school, and unmotivated toward doing the things that one must do to achieve success in life. It's not that these boys aren't bright, many of them are. It's not that they're unmotivated, many of them are highly driven but not toward the goals that parents and teachers would prefer.

Sax assumes that boys themselves haven't changed much in the last thirty years but that our culture has. He discusses five changes in particular that have had a profound effect on young males and which he believes to be largely responsible for the lassitude many of them exhibit. Not every boy is affected to the same extent by these five factors nor do the five affect every boy, but, Sax argues, enough boys are harmed by at least one of them to have created a serious problem for many parents and teachers, not to mention the boys themselves. He concludes the book with some advice as to what parents might do to help their sons.

The five factors Sax discusses are these:

Changes at school: Many schools, particularly in the early grades K through 2 or 3, are not well-structured for boys. Consequently, boys fall behind early, become disengaged and often never develop an interest in academic success.

Video games: Sax points out that gaming often takes over a boy's life. He can have success, power, and thrills through video games that his normal activities can't come close to providing. As a result he's often not motivated to do much of anything but compete on-line and on-screen and this he often does for hours everyday.

Medications for ADHD: Alderoll and Ritalin are often over-prescribed and are now believed, according to Sax, to be damaging to a boy's brain.

Endocrine disruptors: This one was the most surprising to me. Some of the chemicals which leach out of the clear plastic bottles which are used to contain so much of the liquid we drink mimic estrogen, a female hormone. Some scientists believe that this is at least in part responsible for the decline in male fertility in much of the developed world. It has also, Sax, suggests had a number of other side effects which are harmful to male development.

Revenge of the forsaken gods: Recent generations of boys are unique in our history in that many boys have grown up without positive male models in their lives to pass on to them what it means to be a man. There are few masculine heroes today and many boys grow up surrounded only by their peers. Such boys tend to become either "slacker dudes" or they seek to emulate Akon, 50 Cent and other thugs.

There's much more to each of these factors than what I've sketched above, and the material Sax lays out for the reader in each of the chapters devoted to them is often fascinating.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter is one titled End Result: Failure to Launch. In this section Sax shares e-mails and other correspondence he has received from parents, girlfriends, and wives of boys and young men who exhibit the characteristics he talks about in the book. The e-mails are riveting in their pathos and the sense of wasted lives that they convey.

If you are a young man, the parent of boys, a teacher of boys, or one who cares about our future then this is a must-read. I'm buying a copy of the book for my daughter and daughter-in-law for Christmas. It may be the best present you can give a parent of a boy you care about.

You can order a copy of Boys Adrift for someone you think should read it at Hearts and Minds bookstore.

RLC

The Conservative Predicament

Jonah Goldberg pens an insightful essay on the subject of why people who are basically conservative nevertheless often tend to vote liberal. Here's an excerpt:

In 1964, two political psychologists, Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater's rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. "As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome," they wrote. "But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished."

Still, Goldwater went to Tennessee to blast the Tennessee Valley Authority, God bless him. That was like going to a brothel to denounce prostitution, or to Iowa to denounce ethanol -- but I repeat myself. He carried only six states in the 1964 presidential election.

Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, "pragmatic" expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse.

If Hillary Clinton promised to socialize medicine -- which, let the record show, she has attempted to do in the past -- she would lose. But her current campaign promise to simply expand coverage sounds reasonable enough -- even though there's no reason to think she'll stop pushing for a national single-payer healthcare system (a.k.a. socialized medicine).

"Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they're building," writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, "The Trouble with Limited Government," in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody -- when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.

Unless and until we start voting for what's in the best interest of the country as a whole and not for what's in our own best interest, special interest politics will continue to pull us further toward state socialism whether the government is run by conservatives or liberals. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans want to stroll toward socialism at a more leisurely pace whereas Democrats want to sprint to it.

RLC

Revisiting a Gold Primer

I've been meaning to post a thought or two on Viewpoint but other concerns have prevented me from doing so. However, I felt today was a special day of sorts so I determined to at least post this brief observation. It was just over three years ago that I posted A Gold Primer and at that time, gold was selling at about $400 per ounce. I suspect when, at the time, our readers saw that, they felt gold was way over-priced and certainly, there must be better investments. I suspect that when our readers see the price of gold today they may continue to believe that the price of gold is too high and...there are better investments. You see, gold just closed the trading session today at $805.00.

I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of those posts to see if they might still be relevant today and I was fascinated with the sense of timelessness I felt while reading A Gold Primer. The main threads of interest were gold, the dollar, and oil. This week oil hit record highs, the dollar hit record lows, and gold is closing in on its record high of $850 from 1980.

As I mentioned in A Gold Primer, the cost of gold hasn't really increased in the last three years, rather the purchasing power of the dollar has been diluted by the flood of "liquidity" from the Federal Reserve. Since the process of inflation tends to accelerate, as it is wont to do, it's becoming much easier to observe. In only three years, the Federal Reserve has caused the loss of a cool 50% of the dollar's purchasing power.

Ignore the representatives at the Fed who claim that inflation is "tame". Inflation is alive and well. Asia and the Middle East oil countries see it first hand. China holds $1 Trillion dollars in US government investments and in only three years they have realized a loss of $500 Billion. They can't feel very good about that. Oil is similar to gold. It's not that the price of oil has gone to record highs, the purchasing power of the dollar has gone to record lows so the oil-producers demand more dollars for a barrel of oil. That should'nt be a surprise.

The individual articles that make up A Gold Primer can easily be found using the Viewpoint Search facility but I have consolidated them into one document and shamelessly placed it in the Viewpoint Hall of Fame section.

Enjoy,

.

Anti-Choice Progressives

Liberals, George Will tells us, have taken to calling themselves progressives because the word liberal has become rightly identified in the public mind with lousy ideas. Changing the name, however, doesn't change the quality of their ideas. For example, consider the upcoming referendum in Utah over a school choice/voucher program. According to Will, the benefits of the program are substantial, but it is being opposed by those who label themselves progressives. Why would liberals, who claim to be all in favor of a person's right to choose, nevertheless oppose it when it comes to our children's education? Will writes:

Passed last February [in Utah], the Parent Choice in Education Act would make a voucher available to any public school child who transfers to a private school, and to current private school children from low-income families. Opponents of school choice reflexively rushed to force a referendum on the new law, which is suspended pending the vote.

The vouchers would vary in value from $500 to $3,000, depending on household income. The teachers unions' usual argument against school choice programs is that they drain money from public education. But ... every Utah voucher increases funds available for public education. Here is how:

Utah spends more than $7,500 per public school pupil ($3,000 more than the average private school tuition). The average voucher will be for less than $2,000. So every voucher that is used -- by parents willing to receive $2,000 rather than $7,500 of government support for the education of their child -- will save Utah taxpayers an average of $5,500. And because the vouchers are paid from general revenues, the departed pupil's $7,500 stays in the public school system.

Furthermore, booming Utah, which has about 540,000 public school pupils and the nation's largest class sizes, expects to have at least 150,000 more than that a decade from now. By empowering parents to choose private alternatives, the voucher program will save Utah taxpayers millions of dollars in school construction expenses.

Opponents of school choice argue that it will produce less racially and socially diverse schools. But because students are assigned to public schools based on where they live, and because residential patterns reflect income, most of Utah's public schools are either mostly wealthy and white or mostly nonwealthy and nonwhite. Utah's Office of Education reports that the state's private schools -- which are operating one-third below full enrollment -- have a higher percentage of nonwhites than do public schools.

Intellectually bankrupt but flush with cash, the teachers unions continue to push their threadbare arguments, undeterred by the fact that Utah's vouchers will increase per-pupil spending and will lower class sizes in public schools. Why the perverse perseverance? There are two large, banal reasons -- fear of competition and desire for the maximum number of dues-paying public school teachers.

What will defenders of that idea -- former liberals, now known as progressives -- call themselves next? Surely not "pro-choice."

I've omitted a few paragraphs for the sake of brevity, but the rest of the essay can be read at the link. When a "progressive" says he or she favors a person's right to choose, the only choice they're referring to, evidently, is the choice to kill one's unborn children.

RLC

Real Heroes

This story offers an excellent look and feel for what our troops have been going through in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last four years and what combat is like there. The courage and strength these men exhibit under unimaginably terrifying conditions is truly breathtaking. It's also a story which for some reason you'll never read in the MSM.

RLC

A Brighter Dark Horse

When Senator Sam Brownback dropped out of the Republican race for the nomination for President it opened the field for the guy we've kept our eye on for the past six months - Mike Huckabee. If Huck can do well in the New Hampshire primary he'll very likely vault into the first tier of candidates, and once he's there, and people get to hear him and learn what he's about, he may be competing for front-runner status by summer.

This Weekly Standard article, especially the second page, explains what makes Huckabee such an attractive candidate for many socially conservative Republicans and even some moderate Democrats. Or you might wish to read this piece by Dick Morris. They're both helpful in understanding who Mike Huckabee is and why, if voters got to know him, he'd be a formidable candidate not only for the nomination of his party but in the November election as well.

Unfortunately for Huck, conservatives are not unanimous in their appreciation of his positions. Dissenting views have been expressed by John Fund and Hugh Hewitt among others who explain that, though they sincerely like Mike Huckabee, he's not the conservative he appears to be, especially when it comes to economic matters.

Even so, he's probably more representative of many contemporary Republicans than anyone else in the race except, perhaps, John McCain who has burnt too many bridges in the party to get the nomination. If you're not sure what it means to be representative of Republican voters you might want to read one or both of the articles linked in the second paragraph.

RLC

Is It Torture?

Is it torture if you can volunteer for it and then talk about it while you're undergoing the treatment? It hardly seems the same as having one's fingernails pulled out. The guy in this video has himself subjected to the controversial interrogation technique called waterboarding, a technique critics call torture, but he certainly seems none the worse for the experience.

Anyway, when a terrorist is subjected to waterboarding in order to extract information that might save the life of one of your children, the terrorist is in complete control of how long it lasts. All he has to do is produce the information and it's over. Opponents of this technique, however, think that terrorists should have the right to withhold information that could save your child's life and should not be subjected to unpleasant experiences to make them give it up.

Here's a question for those who might be disturbed by the video of three men holding down the subject: Imagine the scene in a Civil War field hospital where men had to hold down a wounded soldier so that the surgeon could amputate his leg without anasthesia in order to save his life. What is the moral difference between what the surgeon's assistants did in holding down a screaming soldier in order to save his life and what modern interrogators do in holding down a panicky terrorist in order to save the lives of innocent civilians?

If you go to the post at Democratic Underground the guy talks about his experience of being waterboarded. He seems to be saying that since he couldn't take the treatment for more than a few seconds it must therefore truly be torture. This is a weird argument. If we accept it then we have to say that any technique that gets a terrorist to talk is ipso facto torture and therefore should be considered banned by the Geneva Conventions.

If the terrorist spills his guts after a few minutes of listening to AC/DC that would be torture according to the guy at Democrat Underground, but this is nonsense. Whatever torture is it doesn't consist simply in being unendurable.

RLC

Weak Argument

There are lots of arguments on offer as to why we should not have gone to war in Iraq and why we should not now stay there. Some of these arguments are good, many are not, but one of the worst is an argument that a correspondent on another blog trotted out against my concern that a premature retreat would be a human rights disaster in the Middle East. The same argument recently appeared in a letter to the editor of the local paper written by a woman who used it to disparage anyone who supports the effort to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.

The argument, sometimes called the "chickenhawk argument" goes something like this: Young men and women in the military are placing their lives at terrible risk in Iraq, and many are dying or being grievously wounded. Unless a supporter of the war has placed his/her own life in jeopardy in similar fashion (or has a loved one who has) he or she has no right to urge continuation of a conflict that will result in the deaths or maimings of some of those youngsters.

This line of reasoning is of a piece with the argument that since men can't get pregnant they have no right to tell women that they shouldn't have the right to an abortion.

There are so many problems with this kind of thinking that it's difficult to know where to begin to analyse it.

Let's start with an analogy that will show the flaw in the logic. If we accept the argument above then we must also accept any other argument of the same form. So, for example, unless we are willing ourselves to become police officers we have no right to insist that the police risk their lives to fight crime. Or, if the rigors and travails of missionary work do not appeal to us we have no business supporting and encouraging those who do feel called to risk everything, like those Korean young people in Afghanistan, by doing missionary work.

These arguments, which are of the same form as the original, are absurd, but if so, so is the original argument.

We might also point out that many who serve in the military never face combat themselves. Does this mean that they have no business offering an opinion on the war? Is it only those who have actually been shot at, and their families, who have the right to engage in the public debate on the war? Or, since most who have been shot at have come through the experience unharmed, perhaps we should restrict the qualifications to speak out in support of the war to those who have actually been wounded or to the families of those who have died. In other words, how do we decide exactly where we draw the line separating those who have the right to support the war and those who don't?

Do those who make the argument that no one who hasn't served should speak in favor of the war think that those who pay the nation's bills should have no say in deciding the most important issues that face us as a nation? Every person who pays taxes has an ipso facto right to express his/her opinion on every domestic or foreign issue, whether the issue is abortion or war. The fact that a supporter of the war hasn't served in the military himself no more disqualifies him from voicing his support of our mission in Iraq than the fact that a supporter of the police hasn't ever been a policeman disqualifies him from voicing his support of the mission of our police.

To try to silence supporters of the war because they have never themselves served in the military is a sign that one has no good arguments to counter the arguments cited in favor of what we are trying to do in Iraq. It's also a sign that one is rather desperate to come up with something to discredit those who offer those supportive arguments.

RLC