That’s the question I ask today over at Downsizing Government. President Obama wants to take the country $50 billion deeper into debt in order to finance more public infrastructure projects. I argue that policymakers should instead give the private sector a chance to satisfy our transportation needs.
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A Debate Between John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama
What’s especially fascinating is that JFK intuitively understood the Laffer Curve, particularly the insight that deficits usually are the result of slow growth, not the cause of slow growth.
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Chávez Introduces ‘Good Life Card’, Better Known as Rationing Card in Cuba
The latest feature in Venezuela’s road to socialism was introduced yesterday by President Hugo Chávez. It’s the “Good Life Card,” an instrument that, according to the government, will make it easier to buy groceries at government-owned supermarkets.
Even though Chávez denies that the card is a way “to promote communism,” the concept of a government-sponsored card to buy food in a country suffering from acute shortages is well known. They call it a “rationing card” in Cuba.
Thoughts on Secretary Clinton’s CFR Speech
I have written often about the Obama administration’s unwillingness to confront reality when it comes to foreign relations. Every time there is a new opportunity to reorient U.S. foreign policy, I hold out some hope that the president has taken stock of our relative security, examined the potential strength of our strategic partners, and decided to discard our costly and counterproductive strategy of the past twenty years, one premised on American global primacy.
Once again the Obama administration had an opportunity to articulate a more restrained global posture, this time in a speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before the Council on Foreign Relations. And once again the administration has chosen to cling to the tired old approach that holds out the United States as the “indispensable nation” and that saddles American taxpayers and American troops with nearly all of the burdens of global governance.
Secretary Clinton’s speech today reaffirms the administration’s preference for “leadership” in all areas, and a lack of interest in encouraging other countries to play a larger role. Indeed, the speech seems a step backward from a similar address last year. Whereas Clinton eighteen months ago had stressed partnering with other countries and engaging with adversaries, the tone in today’s speech, notes the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, “was subtly different, focused much more on the importance of the U.S. role in managing difficult problems.”
This sort of meddling might appeal to Washington policy elites who are so confident in their ability to “manag[e] difficult affairs”, but it is unnecessary and dangerous. And much of this effort, good intentioned though it may be, is likely to fail.
It need not have been this way. There is ample evidence that a different approach could save hundreds of billions of dollars over the next ten years, while actually enhancing our security by reducing the likelihood that U.S. troops would become involved in unnecessary wars. Though his claims for what he would do to the domestic economy were grandiose, Obama’s rhetoric with respect to foreign policy evinced signs of humility. There was talk of a need to prioritize, and signs of open-mindedness to shedding some of the missions taken on by past presidents.
Within days of the election, however, the president-elect named Clinton Secretary of State, and announced that Robert Gates would remain at DoD. This move signaled continuity over change, and, more worrisome, suggested that Obama was now questioning some of his own good judgment in opposing the war in Iraq and other “dumb wars,” which other members of the incoming administration — Clinton most prominent among them — had supported.
Any lingering humility within the Obama administration seems to have been extinguished. The lesson to take away from the past decades, according to Secretary Clinton, is not of the need to temper our ambitions, husband our resources, and prioritize to deal with the most urgent treats. Rather, we are obligated to “lead” everywhere. “The world looks to us,” she explains:
because America has the reach and resolve to mobilize the shared effort needed to solve problems on a global scale — in defense of our own interests, but also as a force for progress. In this we have no rival.
“For the United States,” she continues, “global leadership is both a responsibility and an unparalleled opportunity.”
The language and tone is strikingly similar to Madeleine Albright’s confident assertion in 1998 that “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
Albright might have been forgiven such arrogance in the days before 9/11, before Afghanistan, before Iraq. But it is unconscionable for U.S. policymakers today to cling to American “leadership” in the face of our recent setbacks. There is an urgent need to rethink the purpose of American power. If we do not, the costs of attempting to police the planet will continue to mount, and the gap between our goals and the resources available to satisfy them will grow wider.
We should reaffirm that our military exists to advance our security, and shed our pretensions that we can manage other people’s conflicts, and build other people’s countries. While we will lead some of the time, we need not, and we should not, lead all of the time. It is long past time for others to step up.
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Speier (D‑Silicon Valley) Sows Techno-panic
“Techno-Panics” are public and political crusades against the use of new media or technologies, particularly driven by the desire to protect children. As the moniker suggests, they’re not rational. Techno-panic is about imagined or trumped-up threats, often with a tenuous, coincidental, or potential relationship to the Internet. Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka of the Progress & Freedom Foundation have written extensively about techno-panics on the TechLiberationFront blog.
Talking about techno-panic does not deny the existence of serious problems. It merely identifies when policymakers and advocates lose their sense of proportion and react in ways that fail to address the genuine issues—such as censoring a web site because it reveals the fact that some few among a community of tens of millions of people will conspire to break the law.
You’d think that a congressional representative from the heart of Silicon Valley would not sow techno-panic, but here’s Jackie Speier (D‑Calif.) on the Craigslist censorship issue:
“We can’t forget the victims, we can’t rest easy. Child-sex trafficking continues, and lawmakers need to fight future machinations of Internet-driven sites that peddle children.”
Of all representatives in Congress, Speier should know that Craigslist has been making it easier for law enforcement to locate and enforce the law against any perpetrators of crimes against children. Pushing them to rogue sites does law enforcement no good. Censoring Craiglist only masks the problem, which may be in the interest of politicians, but definitely not children.
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The Establishment Comes Up Short
Today Politico Arena asks:
How does the Koran burning controversy relate to the Ground Zero mosque controversy?
My response:
As with the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque, Rev. Terry Jones and his tiny band of followers have a perfect right to burn Korans, but it would be well beyond insensitive to do so. Yet where are the establishment voices drawing the parallels? Where is President Obama, leaping to his defense?
Instead, we find the likes of the editorialists at the New York Times giving moral instruction to benighted New Yorkers, two-thirds of whom oppose siting a mosque at Ground Zero even as they defend Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s right to build it there. Meanwhile, last evening on the PBS NewsHour, the very essence of establishment TV, the sole guest on the Koran-burning segment, George Washington University’s Marc Lynch, lamented that across the Arab media, “on the jihadist forums, the newspapers, everywhere, there is a lot of focus on the fact that America right now is in the grip of this — of this trend towards anti-Islamic rhetoric and — and actions.” The fact? What Islamophobic “grip” are Americans in? As the most recent records show, hate crimes against Jews in America are 10 times more frequent than against Muslims.
More Surprises from the Kentucky Senate Survey
You may have heard about the new survey in the Kentucky Senate race that shows Rand Paul up by 15 points. The disaggregated data from the survey are almost as surprising as the overall result.
About one-third of likely African-American and Democratic voters support Paul. He attracts solid majorities of young people, of college graduates, and of people who “almost never” attend religious services. Among the one-quarter of voters neutral toward the Tea Party movement, Paul receives 60 percent of the vote. He gets majority support from every region of the state. Paul’s support is the same from voters who make more or less than $50,000 a year. Paul’s weaknesses? People over 65 and women, both coming in around 45 percent.
Pretty amazing stuff, but there’s a caveat (there’s always a caveat).
One time in twenty, a well-done poll will return a misleading result. The 15 percent number may be wrong because of sampling error.
If not, Rand Paul might want to think about whether he really wants to keep his practice open on Mondays considering all that stuff he will be doing in DC. But maybe he’s not looking to make a career in the capital.