View 688 Sunday, August 21, 2011

· Libya Falls?

· Teacher in America; Barzun on culture

The shores of Tripoli

It would appear that Qaddaffi is finished. Rebels have advanced to the outskirts of Tripoli, and there are risings among those in Tripoli itself. Khaddafi has up to now been able to hire Berbers and Tuarag and Bedoins and other tribal mercenary units to defend his rule in Tripolitania, but apparently that has not been enough.

It is significant to note that there seems to be actual coordination between the mostly Cyrenaican rebels of East Libya and the dissidents in Tripoli itself. We have no way of knowing how many actual Kaddafi loyalists there might be; certainly there are some, perhaps even a majority in Tripoli, but it is likely to be brittle support. After all, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, last Communist ruler of Rumania and his wife, were safe enough until the elite security guards decided to join the uprising, after which they were hastily “tried,” “convicted,” and shot by an eager firing squad despite his contention that he was the legal President of Rumania…

It is not clear where Qadafi is; he may not even be in Libya. There are reports that one of his sons has been arrested by the rebels. Another radio report says that Tripoli has fallen and Kadaffi has surrendered. Apparently it is only a matter of time until his mercenaries quit on the grounds that they will no longer be paid…

It is likely that Obama will claim credit when Kaddaffi falls. The real authors of the fall of Tripoli are probably British and French special forces who managed to turn a group of insurgents accustomed to firing all their ammunition into the air into an effective fighting force capable of sustained operations. There is also some likelihood of Delta Force and CIA involvement. It is clear that the NATO air and sea bombardments saved the rebellion to allow it to fight another day, and once that was assured allowed a rebel advance preventing the very likely outcome of stalemate and de facto partition of Libya into the Ottoman provinces from which it was formed by Italy after World War I. The story of the Libyan revolt will occupy historians for years. Who gets credit for what comes next is as unclear as to who will be the actual winner when the smoke clears.

It’s certain that it happened on President Obama’s watch, US participation was important if not decisive, and the entire cost of the operation was a lot less than if we had made a commitment to go in or become formally involved. It’s not over yet, but it looks now to be headed for a better outcome than we got in Iraq. Of course what I advocated in Iraq was the construction of monuments. Actually, it was more complicated than that: I do note, though, that I contemplated adding Tripoli to the places where we might build monuments – and that doing that would have been a very great deal cheaper than what we did.

Barzun, Teacher in America, and the language of rule

I was looking for a passage I dimly recall reading in about 1950 when I was still in Christian Brothers College high school in Memphis, and came across the incomparably valuable Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun. Barzun, born in 1907 in France, now lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is a national treasure, and has written at least two books I would put on the list of works that every educated person ought to read at some point in his life. Teacher in America is one of them. I grew up in a middle class family, and so far as I know no one in my ancestry was ever a college graduate, much less an intellectual. My father was a salesman who became a radio broadcasting executive. It was always intended that I should go to college, but the general expectation and encouragement was that I would pursue a medical career. Teacher in America didn’t really change that expectation – a partial color blindness coupled with the necessity to get an honor grade by identifying slides in Vertebrate Embryology did that – but it did give me to understand that there was such a thing as an intellectual, and there were intellectual careers other than Medicine or Law. The fact that I remember the book sixty years after reading it should be sufficient. In the course of looking for an on-line version of the book – there isn’t one so far as I can tell, and almost certainly no edition authorized by Professor Barzun – I found a Time Magazine review published the year the book came out. If you have any doubt that a book published in 1945 can still be relevant I refer you to that review.

The passage I was looking for is intended to be in my preface to the Kindle edition of The California Sixth Year Literature Reader, a public domain book that my advisors and a few readers have assisted in generating a Kindle edition with attractive format. Making it attractive turns out to have taken longer than I expected, but it shouldn’t be too long now.

The passage I was looking for from Teacher in America was

“Not a few of the students who apply to me for admission to the present form of Erskine’s [Great Books] reading course give me as a reason that they want “the background” and will have no other chance to “get it”, because they are about to study medicine or engineering. Their idea is we “give it” and they “get it.” But what is it that changes hands in this way? Background is the wrong word altogether. What is acquired is a common set of symbols, almost a separate language. I open today’s paper and I see over a story of naval action: ‘David-Goliath Fight by Foe at Sea Fails.” Immediately, I infer that some small enemy flotilla fought a larger force of ours. The image was instantaneous, and would have suggested more—namely the foe’s victory—had not the writer added that it failed.

“A common body of stories, phrases, and beliefs accompanies every high civilization that we know of. The Christian stories of apostles and saints nurtured medieval Europe, and after the breakup of Christendom the Protestant Bible served the same ends for English-speaking peoples. Bunyan and Lincoln show what power was stored in that collection of literary and historical works known as the Scripture, when it was really a common possession. We have lost something in neglecting it, just as we lost something in rejecting the ancient classics. We lost immediacy of understanding, a common sympathy with truth and fact. Perhaps nothing could better illustrate the subtlety and strength of the bond we lost than the story Hazlitt tells of his addressing a fashionable audience about Dr. Johnson. He was speaking of Johnson’s great heart and charity to the unfortunate; and he recounted how, finding a drunken prostitute lying in Fleet Street late at night, Johnson carried her on his broad back to the address she managed to give him. The audience, unable to face the image of a famous lexicographer doing such a thing, broke out into titters and expostulations. Whereupon Hazlitt simply said: ‘I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of the parable of the Good Samaritan.’

“It is clear that no account of explaining, arguing, or demonstrating would have produced the abashed silence which that allusion commanded. It was direct communication; the note that Hazlitt struck sounded in every mind in the same way and it instantly crystallized and put into order every irrelevant emotion. That, if I may so put it, is what ‘background’ does for you. Even today, without Bible or classics, everyone possesses some kind of tradition which he uses without knowing it. The man who should look blank at mention of George Washington and the cherry tree, or who had never heard of Babe Ruth, or who thought that Shakespeare was an admiral, would get along badly even in very lowbrow circles. He might be excused as a foreigner but he would be expected to catch on as soon as he could. This does not mean that culture is for keeping up with the Joneses; it is talking to your fellow man—talking more quickly and fully than is possible through plodding description.

“In college and after, it so happens that the fund of ideas which it is needful to possess originated in great minds—those who devised our laws, invented our science, taught us how to think, showed us how to behave. They spoke in highly individual voices, yet rely on the force of a common group of symbols and myths—the culture of the West.”<snip>

I have remembered the essence of that passage from the moment I first read it on a bus on East Parkway Avenue in Memphis more than sixty years ago. It remains true even if, in the past few decades, the cultural life of America has begun to come apart. It remains important that those who would be the ruling class be able to communicate; else those who can communicate become even more the ruling class. But that is another story. Barzun continues in that vein for several more pages; after reading them I was determined to become part of those initiates who understood the language of rule.

I took the trouble to type it out because I intend to include it in a preface to the California Reader when I get that formatted for Kindle. My intention is to put that out as a public domain work, not copy protected, with a preface and some commentaries for $0.99. The notion is that the small fee won’t prevent who intends to read it or expose it to younger readers from getting it, and it will trigger the efficient Amazon association machine which will make many aware of its existence.

In digging around for other stuff I found this review of Escape From Hell that may be interesting.

I have just re-read what I wrote about what we should do in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, and in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, and I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. It seems that back then – prior to my 50,000 RAD brain cancer treatments – I had the energy to put together a composite of some Views and Mail on the subject of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. It’s worth your reading if you find the subject interesting.

View 688 Saturday, August 20, 2011

The end of the evil empire.

Twenty years ago, in August, there was an attempted coup by the old line Communists of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – USSR – against the “liberal communist” General Secretary and first elected President of the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev. As part of that coup a battalion of guards armor was sent to the White House, the seat of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which was occupied by Boris Yeltsin, President of the RSFSR. He had been elected in a reasonably free election getting 57% of the vote (rather than the more traditional results of an election in the USSR). Yeltsin resisted the hard line KGB-led coup against Gorbachev. The KGB leaders sent the tanks to the White House. Many citizens of Moscow turned out to defend the RSFSR President.

The tanks surrounded the White House with their guns pointed inward toward it. One tank commander, a lieutenant, was invited inside by Yeltsin supporters. An hour later he came out and told his commander “Sir, we’re on the wrong side.” The commander went in to meet President Yeltsin. An hour later he came out and gave orders. The tanks, which had faced inward threatening the building, rotated to face outward. The coup was effectively over, and with it the USSR and the Cold War. The evil empire was finished. On Christmas Day Gorbachev resigned as President of the no longer existing USSR.

In 1989 I made my only visit to the USSR as part of a group of journalists and academicians that included Richard Pipes. Roberta and I twice had breakfast with Dr. Pipes and we shared a seat on one of the tours, I think the one arranged by Armand de Borchgrave. It was a heady experience. Pipes and Possony had been friends and associates. Regan had held fast on Strategic Defense. At one point Roberta and I saw a Guards officer and his sergeant shopping in a hard currency store to buy food for his troops. It was clear that the troops were loyal to their officer; it was not clear to whom the officer felt loyal. And at the demonstrations in Pushkin Square the government sent truckloads of military cadets to the square; there was no sign of the Army garrison of Moscow.

There was rebellion in the air; two years later the USSR would be gone.

As part of the observation of the end of the Cold War, there is an appreciation of Pipes with some of his recollections. I can recommend it to your attention.

View 688 Thursday, August 18, 2011

· Why new taxes are a bad idea

· How to restore prosperity

· Quality of Life: The Apocalyptics reconsidered

The Politics of Envy

Apparently I have not made myself clear: I have not been addressing Buffet’s contention that the rich aren’t paying their fair share. That is worth discussing, and perhaps he is right and perhaps not. There is considerable history on the politics of envy, and the gap between the very rich and the middle class, and the fairness of tax structures. Many authors have written on the subject and there is a rich store of discussion; but it is mostly irrelevant to the point I have been trying to make, which is that we should not raise taxes because we do not want the government to have the money.

If the government gets more tax money, it will spend it on keeping the exponential rate of government growth up where it is now – somewhere around 7% meaning that it doubles every 11.5 years. Not one of the Deficit Deals offered to cut government; at best there were offers to reduce the exponential from 7% to something less, perhaps 5%. Historically when there are tax increases coupled with “cuts” (inevitably cuts in growth, not actual cuts) the tax increases take effect immediately; the “cuts” take place later, and usually don’t happen at all, as it is discovered that the cut is too Draconian and would unduly burden someone.

The automatic exponential growth of government has to stop. If we allow it to grow at the present rate it will double in 12 years, and by then so many will depend on government that it will be nearly impossible to reverse the trend. Democracies fall when all men are paid for existing, and no man must pay for his sins – a trend we can see in every socialist state including the United States. We are already on that road.

What the United States needs is a reduction in the size of the Federal Government. An actual cut in the budget, that is, a budget that next year is actually smaller, say by 1%, than it was last year. If there are programs so important that they cannot be cut at all, let that be a separate legislative item to be justified on its merits, not as part of a general increase. We also need some actual cuts in the sense of dismantling programs that may or may not be desirable, but surely are not worth borrowing money to fund. Of course any such program will be portrayed as Draconian cuts to teachers, law enforcement, the poor, science, the environment, as if the nation were on the brink of Doom before the enormous expansion of government that began with Johnson’s Great Society; as if the Republic had not endured for 200 years before 1976; as if America were in desperate straits in1990 when the Cold War ended and we no longer needed to maintain an enormous Strategic Air Command, thousands of nuclear missiles on extreme ready alert, hundreds of young men and women in silos holding the keys of Armageddon. A return to the spending levels of the time when Clinton was President and Gingrich was Speaker would not mean ruin and destruction, starvation and floods of homeless.

Any such attempt will be portrayed as such, of course.

I outlined my proposal for what we ought to do now in a Republican Plan in a previous essay. This is a program for Republicans that could be trotted out now.

What else might we do?

We are in the Second Recession, or our Great Recession seems to be plunging toward a Second Depression. The situation is not yet desperate but it could get there.

Our big problem is restoring prosperity. The President will shortly propose his plan to create jobs. I don’t know what it will be but I can guess: it will be a massive stimulus program to pour billions of borrowed money into institutions like universities and schools that are already in bubble-funding land. There will also be grants and giveaways, direct presents to voters from the Obama Stash, and many appeals to raise taxes on the rich. All this will I give to you…

It hardly matters, since it will not be intended to be implemented. Its purpose will be to generate envy. See what you can have if you vote for us! And it will cost you nothing, for we will take it from those who are not paying their fair share. Never mind that what we take won’t come close to paying for what we are promising; never mind that the real purpose of any new taxes is to keep the exponential growth of government and government employees. All this would we have given to you had the Republicans not foiled us with their obstinacy. Turn them out.

The Obama Plan will be some variant on increased spending coupled with “fair share” taxes. If the stimulus strategy were going to work, one would have thought it would have worked by now: after all, the Democrats had supermajorities from January 2009 until January 2010, and in December 2010 they used that power to smash through ObamaCare. If they could pass that they could pass anything, including whatever stimulus they thought would bring about economic recovery in a year – say by August 2011.

In other words, that has been tried. You can’t lower interest rates much. If there are shovel ready jobs out there surely they have been commissioned. Nearly a trillion dollars was used to stimulate the economy, and the result has been long term unemployment and the rest. I don’t need to trot out the economic bad news.

So what might we do?

We might try economic freedom to bring about an American Economic Miracle.

Suspend most federal economic regulations: minimum wages; Americans with Disabilities Act; Various sex equality acts; environmental protection acts; all of them. If there are some that are absolutely necessary to the survival of the Republic – really long term irreparable damage to the Earth as opposed to temporary pollutions that are inconvenient or uncomfortable – they can be specifically addressed – not only the threatened damage but the actual threat that this will happen unless the Federal Government prevents it. Not just “reduce CO2” but “How much damage will suspending these carbon laws for five years cause? Be Specific.” And so forth.

The regulations are suspended until their importance is shown. By importance, it is with the understanding that we are broke. Should we borrow money to pay for this? It may be desirable, but can we afford it?

States may do as they choose here. If California wants to continue really stringent controls on motor vehicles, that’s California’s business, and if Texas wants to repeal some, that’s the business of Texans. The Federal Government suspends most regulations involving jobs and commerce, and those laws sunset if the need for them cannot be established.

My guess is that the consequent economic miracles will make it pretty clear which regulations were needed and which were not. As to the horrid economic damage we are doing, take account of what China and India and other places are doing. Look at what that costs us. Should we borrow money to cripple our economy while others are driving ahead? All that might have been fine when we were rich; but how much sense does it make when we are broke?

And Drill, Baby, Drill. Get the pipeline to Canada going. Encourage American refineries. Find oil and pump oil. Frack away.

On Quality of Life

One major argument for extensive federal regulations is that if we don’t prevent it, some action will release carcinogens into the environment; when we ask how much of what is to be released, we discover it is often trace amounts that were formerly undetectable before a recent development of new instrumentation. When we ask how much cancer is going to be caused, the numbers are generally vague, and often work out to a few hundred extra cases out of millions exposed over decades of time.

No one thinks cancer is a minor affair: but when it comes to misery, poverty for thousands now whose jobs were eliminated because their plant is to be closed because a new instrument has been invented is quite real and visible. Should such decisions automatically be made by Washington bureaucrats, or should the local people affected have a say in the matter? Who is better at determining effects on quality of life? At the moment the trend is toward trusting the experts and ignoring the locals actually affected. That may not be optimum.

If all this seems a bit vague, I suppose it is. Let it become specific; what I want is a renewal of the debate over principles.

For those interested in just what regulations do, and what relationship regulatory science has to real science, I recommend to you Edith Efrom The Apocalyptics, Cancer and the Big Lie (How environmental politics controls what we know about cancer). Published in 1984, it is still quite relevant (and of course denounced by the regulatory establishment as the work of a crazy woman.) You may be astounded by the effects of our “zero tolerance” laws on carcinogens even in 1984; most of that remains in 2011, but few notice.

Regulatory science is to science as rabbit hunters are to rabbits… And of course we continue to federally regulate the use of bunny rabbits in stage magic acts. We borrow a couple of million a year to pay for that. Are we getting our money’s worth? But in fact the stakes are a great deal higher, as toy makers and publishers of children’s books have recently found to their sorrow. Efrom’s book made a considerable stir in its day, but it was dealt with by being ignored, not refuted. It’s easier to tell the story of some victim than to look at what happened and examine probability of causal links.

Suspend regulations. Reconsider the whole principle of federal vs. state regulation, and re-justify the re-imposition of each regulation before it can become effective again. Look to cost of enforcement and the effect of the regulation on the economy. If we can’t afford it now, put it back in the hopper for reconsideration later.

And find ways to bring energy prices down.

The alternative is our continued decline: as of now there is more money owed for student loans than on credit cards; the entire middle class is now in bondage. The government has a monopoly on student loans, and you cannot be relieved of them by bankruptcy. They can garnish wages and seize pensions. That is the end of the independence of the middle class. And we continue toward exponential growth in spending. That means more money for universities. They use this to expand and grow – and charge more. They’ll help you get a loan.  A nation of bondsmen.

Salve sclave.