Maggie's Farm

For those who are inclined towards a federalist, libertarian view of the American nation, the debate about the Most Destructive President probably ought to be about Lincoln and FDR.

Lincoln - a superb and fascinating human being by any measure - squashed any pretense of voluntary confederation among the units of the young nation. FDR elevated the power of the Federal government over the individual to levels which never could have been imagined previously.

However, the ultimate result of the sickening Civil War has been positive - freedom for many and preservation of the union (although one may and should question whether maintaining the union was worth the destruction of the South and 620,000 dead - the most in any war in America's history). FDR's accumulation of power in DC has been an enduring disaster which, because of the numbers of clients and beneficiaries, may be impossible to undo short of rebellion (see Vermont's recent threats to secede, but for different reasons). Did the New Deal have any impact on the Depression? No, none - and some argue that New Deal policies helped to perpetuate the Depression.

But "he cared." I am sure that he did.

Individual freedom from government power is always stolen with the excuse of "crisis." (Thus the Left has learned to have a "crisis du jour" to try to justify the expansion of the Federal government at the expense of the states and the citizen.) The Great Depression was the seemingly permanent crisis which was used to justify almost any power grab by Washington.

How was this done? The notion of a permanent severe scarcity crisis was presented, which supposedly only Roosevelt's leftist (more acurately, Stalinist) government experts were smart enough to deal with.

A piece on the subject by Captain Ed pointed me to George Will's review of Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, which we have discussed here earlier. A quote from Will:

Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. In 1910, Congress legislated height limits for Washington buildings, limits that prevented skyscrapers, symbols of mighty business, from overshadowing the Capitol, the symbol of government.

In 1936, for the first time in peacetime history, federal spending exceeded that of the states and localities combined. Roosevelt said that modern "civilization" has tended "to make life insecure." Hence Social Security, which had the added purpose of encouraging workers to retire, thereby opening jobs to younger people. Notice the assumptions of permanent scarcity, and that the government has a duty to distribute scarce things, such as work.

The New Deal "brain trust" was wrong about theory, wrong about the American vision of freedom, and wrong about the direction of the future. You can read a couple of our previous pieces on this subject here and here.

Addendum: The Jacksonian makes a different argument - for Pres. Wilson, here. He makes the case that the political changes from 1909-1919 set the stage for FDR. A good read.

I have been lax with our fallacy fun, but suddenly some good'uns are thrown in my face. Reductio ad absurdum is not really a logical fallacy but, at its worse, a fallacy support and, at its best, a fairly compelling logical argument, eg (from Wiki):

Father- Why did you start smoking?

Daughter - All my friends were doing it.

Father- You're saying that if all your friends jumped off a cliff, you would do that too?

Reductio can serve the purpose of truth or the purpose of fallaciousness. Example:

"If we can go into Iraq to take out a murderous dictator, then we should take out every murderous dictator on earth."

As with the Slippery Slope Fallacy, some credibility is obtained via the logical thread, but the germ of logicality is rendered trivial by the reality and the context.

Attack Machine invented the entirely reasonable and useful notion of Dilatare ad Absurdum: Expansion to Absurdity. He presents a beautiful example of expansion to absurdity in a piece on the equating of basic human needs with human rights. In his example, both reality and context support the dilatare. It begins:

LA Mayor Antonio recently gushed, “Healthcare is a basic human need, and it ought to be a basic human right.”

If healthcare is a right, then:

• Food must be a right, too. After all, you cannot be healthy if you don’t eat.
• Clothing is a right because you cannot be healthy and naked (in most parts of the world.)

Read the whole thing. I like it. It's similar to the arguments I use to crush all of my commie friends, such as "People need cars to get to work. So why can't we all get free cars and free car insurance?" Or "Legal representation is a basic human right in a free country, so why don't we all get free lawyers?"

Being a black lesbian.

We must always remember that Victim Points accumulate exponentially, not arithmetically. A white guy treated the same way gets 0 Victim Points, and thus ends with 0, and therefore no cash award. And, under the updated rules, even white gay guys start with 0 points: the white part plus the testicles are the problem and white testosterone is, of course, the main obstacle to world peace and happiness - except for the crisis of Globalistical Warmening, of course.

Proof of AGW: it's darn hot today in CT. QED. Absolutely beautiful, with every Happy Hydrangea in Yankeeland shouting the Sabbath news that God Lives. Tennis (off the TV and onto the courts - inspired by the great Federer and the young Nadal), then maybe a drink by the pool - and not one more second for me today in the internets.

I will be able to recover my usual sanguine approach to life once I dump this comment on ye olde blogge.

How can it be possible to earn an undergraduate degree without having studied calculus, chemistry, economics, Plato, statistics, Classical History, Shakespeare, and physics? The sheer ignorance of supposedly "educated" (at great cost and parental sacrifice) Americans never ceases to amaze me.

I know why this is, too: it is market-driven. Give those young brains-full-of-mush nice dorm rooms and eliminate standards for what a degree means, and the applications will flow in. People aren't stupid: they know they are just buying a piece of paper. And yes, I know that many serious kids do not approach college that way, but today I have had several encounters with recent grads of fancy schools which were beyond appalling.

Some smart people, from outside the education establishment, ought to sit down and re-think the whole idea and purpose of "liberal arts education" in America.

American college education is a scam on the same dimensions as the scam of investment management. And now I feel much better. Thanks for listening!

Re Mayor Bloomberg's Learning for Dollars scheme, Heather MacDonald notes (my bold print):

Give the Bloomberg policymakers credit for one thing: The cash-for-responsibility plan violates the greatest taboo in the poverty industry. It implicitly recognizes that the long-term poor are held back more by their own behavior than by social inequities. Talk to any inner-city teacher and you will hear how difficult it is to get parents involved in their child's education, or students to bother with homework. Countless schemes for tutoring and job training sit on the shelves unused because the "clients" never show up. Free medical advice is wasted because patients don't return for follow-up visits, if they bother following the doctor's instructions at all. After the urban riots of the 1960s, political scientist Edward Banfield observed that the central trait separating the poor from the prosperous is future orientation. His insight has never been improved upon. The middle and upper classes defer gratification and invest effort in self-improvement, Banfield wrote in The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of our Urban Crisis; were the underclass to do so, they would not long stay in the bottom economic tier.

In unveiling his "conditional cash transfer" scheme on June 18, Bloomberg predictably eschewed Banfield's bracing honesty. The poor fail to "plan for the future," the mayor said, because they are "so focused on surviving." The idea that the residents of Brooklyn and Central Harlem are engaged in a "struggle," as Bloomberg put it, against starvation and depredation is a fantasy. Many teens who will be enrolled in "Opportunity NYC" likely wear the latest sneakers and carry pagers and cell phones. Their problem is motivation, not the unforgiving demands of a subsistence economy. Nevertheless, Bloomberg should be congratulated for implicitly acknowledging the behavior issue, however misleading the rhetoric in which he couches it.

She goes on to explain why, despite the above, it's a bad plan. Whole thing at The Weekly Standard.

This blowback against “globalization from above” has spread to every corner of the Earth. It now threatens to kill sensible, moderate steps toward the freer movement of goods, ideas, capital, and people.

What is the best way to help poor countries? What William Easterly in Foreign Policy terms "the ideology of development" entails sending in development experts to tell the country what to do, and it is all the rage these days among economists, organizations like the World Bank, and commentators like Thomas Friedman. Easterly says:

Like all ideologies, Development promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society’s problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent. It deduces this unique answer for everyone from a general theory that purports to apply to everyone, everywhere. There’s no need to involve local actors who reap its costs and benefits. Development even has its own intelligentsia, made up of experts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United Nations.

The problem is is that such top-down impositions of "reforms" and development plans have never worked anywhere. What does seem to work is for nations to find their own paths to prosperity, organically, from the inside, out. As Easterly notes:

Unfortunately, Development ideology has a dismal record of helping any country actually develop. The regions where the ideology has been most influential, Latin America and Africa, have done the worst. Luckless Latins and Africans are left chasing yesterday’s formulas for success while those who ignored the Developmentalists found homegrown paths to success. The nations that have been the most successful in the past 40 years did so in such a variety of different ways that it would be hard to argue that they discovered the “correct answer” from development ideology. In fact, they often conspicuously violated whatever it was the experts said at the time. The East Asian tigers, for instance, chose outward orientation on their own in the 1960s, when the experts’ conventional wisdom was industrialization for the home market. The rapid growth of China over the past quarter century came when it was hardly a poster child for either the 1980s Washington Consensus or the 1990s institutionalism of democracy and cracking down on corruption.

I think this is an important essay. Read the whole thing at Foreign Policy.

Addendum from The Editor: Closely-related. Jonah Goldberg via Driscoll argues that wealth does not come from material things: National prosperity is a reflection of a civilization - its laws, culture, knowledge, attitudes, morals, values, and personal and business habits. Buildings and dams and armies of bulldozers are the least of it. To quote Goldberg:

A potential lesson for the World Bank may be that building roads, dams, and factories in the third world is a fool’s errand until those nations have the intangible capital required to maintain such things. The Marshall Plan’s success in rebuilding Europe after World War II stemmed not from the U.S. footing the bill for concrete and bulldozers but from the intangible capital locked in the hearts and minds of everyday Europeans.

This helps explain, I believe, why some parts of the world, like much of Africa, parts of the Middle East, much of Central America and parts of South America are rich in resources and opportunities and yet remain poor by modern standards. It's the culture.

On the ride home from Home Depot this afternoon, I heard a re-run of Hannity interviewing Rudy this past week. I know that many conservatives do not trust his conservative convictions, but I do. Very impressive: cheerful, optimistic, common-sensical, market-oriented, quick-thinking, and happy to talk about the American ideal of limited government. It might have been a high-class con job, but it didn't sound like it.

His best sound bite in the conversation was "The Democratic candidates want to take America backwards."

President Calvin Coolidge began his Independence Day speech in 1926 thus:

"About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful."

What a great guy. Who gets credit for him, VT or MA? Read the whole thing. 

What is that photo in Camp Victory, Baghdad, all about?

It is good. Find out, at Gateway.

How easily we forget that the Declaration of Independence only predicted the USA in retrospect. The Declaration was the military and political alliance of 13 colonies, each of which was self-governing within the generous limits established by Britain. In the Declaration they proclaimed themselves to each be a "state," ie a nation, independent from Britain, and to join to remove British colonial control, by force of arms if necessary.

Each state coveted its autonomy, during and after the war. There was no US until 1789 when those independent 13 states, after much dithering, politicking, and ambivalence, agreed to cede some small amount of power, besides the power to run the Continental Army, to a united Federal government.

They were all, naturally, and rightly, suspicious about the idea. But the State of New York, as I understand it, gets the main credit for insisting on the addition of a Bill of Rights before being willing to sign on to the document. Many delegates felt that enumerating all of those rights - and more - was unnecessary and obvious.

Image: Weisgerger's painting of Betsy Ross presenting the flag of the Continental Army in 1777 - what was called the flag of the "Grand Union." Prior to that time, the Army had only State and militia flags and banners.

A quote from Peter Schramm's piece of the above title at Weekly Standard:

Over fifty years ago, when I was just shy of my tenth birthday, my family fled Hungary during the failed revolution against the Russian Communists. Our family's story was like so many of the refugees from communism, complete with relatives arrested, property seized, and a nighttime dash to freedom. The decision to escape was an easy one to make (although not so easy to execute), but the question I had--the one I distinctly recall asking my father--was "where are we going." We could have stayed in Europe--and indeed, the Germans would have welcomed us as Volk deutsche because of our German surname--but this was not my father's plan. "We are going to America," he said. "Why America?" I prodded. "Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place."

Read the whole thing.

Via Althouse:

Scooter Libby emerged as the least absurd character in the entire drama, and yet he was the one who committed a crime. President Bush entered the stage like a character from another world, a world in which things make sense.

His decision to commute Libby’s sentence but not erase his conviction was exactly right. It punishes him for his perjury, but not for the phantasmagorical political farce that grew  to surround him. It takes away his career, but not his family.

A brief look at the history of travel by Culver at History News Network. A quote:

Americans were long suspicious of leisure – it was for the wealthy and effete, not the hardworking and respectable.  A brief respite from work to recover one’s health was acceptable; leisure as a way of life was not.  Recreational travel was meant to be constructive, educational, or redemptive, such as nineteenth-century Chautauquas or visits to national parks.  Mere hedonistic fun was a danger to morals and a healthy work ethic.

While many Americans discarded their fear of leisure during the twentieth century, and even embraced it as a way of life – for an example of this, see retirees – academics continued to view tourism with suspicion.

Read the whole thing.

The swing guy has all of the power on a court with Clinton-appointed frozen-in-time 60s-era Leftist judicial activists on it. Nice summary by Betsy.

Apparently the joys of a sunny, golf-filled Florida retirement are not yet beckoning Justice Stevens or "Sleepy" Ginsberg. Power is difficult to give up, and to pass on to younger folks. It is getting to be a pattern where these Justices want to die in the saddle. Plus it's an easy job for the Justices: their associates do all the lifting, and the perks and vacation time (June to October) can't be beat. A pretty good gig, except for the lousy government pay. Senile dementia is no problem, because you have tenure and only God can fire you!

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in today's school decision.

I have three comments: 1) It always seemed insane to me to discriminate by race in order to pretend to try to eliminate discrimination, 2) There is no racial discrimination in the US anymore, except in schools and businesses which are trying to keep their black and Hispanic (which isn't a race anyway - it's a language) numbers up, and thus discriminate against all other races, especially Asians, and 3) It was interesting, but not surprising, to see the dissenters focused on their preferred results, as they imagine them, instead of on the law. That's not what we pay them to do - their job is not to make policy and, when they do, they are playing God. We are a nation of laws, not men.

From Harvard physicist Lubos Motl at The Reference Frame. It's about saturation effects, which are well-known to anyone who has taken basic chemistry. (Danger: Contains science.)

Photo: Palm tree which sprung up in my CT backyard this spring. Nice.

Addendum: Related topic: Sea-level expert Scientist accuses UN of fraud about sea level rise. He means deliberate fraud. Don't expect to hear that story on your MSM. (thanks, Buddy)

 Stossel on Hamilton and David Brooks. Excellent and to-the-point. A quote:

Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way (that is, with education). He continues, "Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation."

Excuse me, but why is that the market's fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition.

Abdullah Azzam and the death cult. The guy makes death sound much preferable to life. I have no doubt that it is more peaceful, if possibly dull and lacking in broadband access. But I have to wonder this: did Azzam blow himself up, or just preach it? Flopping Aces.

Readers know that our theory has always been that a mistranslation of the Koran lead to the notion of 72 virgins. The correct translation, we believed, was "one 72 year-old virgin." However, we have been corrected by our friend Theo Spark:

Took one of my smaller male Labs for a long walk this afternoon. He decided to hump a large male Lab, and, on his third try, the big homophobic one got truly pissed and gave him serious, deep bites just above the eye and on the nose. When we got home, he ran straight upstairs to our bed, curled up, and bled on our pillow. It is amateur vet time. I don't think the dog is exclusively gay - he just doesn't seem to discriminate, like a monkey: when he's in the mood, he doesn't care. This dog is supposedly spayed - wrong word - I mean castrated, or neutered, so maybe that explains it.

Reminds me of the great Tex Ritter song, Blood on the Saddle.