The Republican Debate; Assassinations; and more

View 700 Sunday, November 13, 2011

We don’t do breaking news, but sometimes breaking news triggers stories we’ve been holding on to.

· The Foreign Policy Debate

· Assassination in Dubai

· Explosions in Iran

· Brazil sends in the Army and the Marines

The Foreign Policy Debate

Newt Gingrich is generally the smartest man in any room he happens to be in; he certainly was in the latest Republican debate. As usual he followed Reagan’s dictum: don’t trash fellow Republicans. Instead he was careful to say that anyone on that stage was infinitely preferable to Barrack Hussein Obama. He was also responsive and decisive on the questions, and showed what everyone knows, that he has kept up with world affairs. He has presided over balanced budgets, he understands the need for science and investment in long range technologies, and he was the only candidate to point out that the US is a maritime power and we are underfunding our Navy and we will face severe consequences from that. He looked Presidential, and he sounded well informed. He understands American conservatism and he is politically principled. Newt’s negatives are personal, not intellectual.

Romney came off well. As usual he looks Presidential. He is well informed, and he has no personal defects that I know of. He has principles. Many of his views are conservative.

CBS News says

And despite being widely seen as the frontrunner for the nomination, Romney didn’t take any serious blows from his rivals. (Gingrich notably declined to elaborate on his not-so-veiled criticism of Romney as little more than a competent manager who wouldn’t change Washington.) Romney’s only cause for concern: If he’s supposed to be the man to beat, why aren’t his rivals more eager to take him down?

As to why his rivals won’t do the hatchet job on Romney that CBS News and the rest of the media want done, I don’t suppose I need to make any comment beyond saying the Republicans are getting smart. Romney can certainly beat Obama in a general election. He is a competent manager, and is likely to take advice from smart people. The media hope that if he is elected he will ‘grow’ which to them means he’ll become a liberal seeking the adulation of the liberal media. They may be in for a surprise. My Mormon friends are not all conservative but they are all strong advocates of individual freedom coupled with community, not government, collective responsibility.

And he scored points with conservatives in responding to a question from debate co-host CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley, who pointed out that al Qaeda recruiter and U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by U.S. forces without trial, was not convicted in court. You don’t get such privileges if you are at war with the United States, Gingrich said.

Herman Cain held his own. He is not a foreign policy expert, and he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t intend to be one, just as he doesn’t intend to be a military expert. He said clearly that in such matters he would call in a number of experts and have each present his views, then as commander in chief he would choose one. That’s what most managers have to do – few CEO’s are experts at everything that goes on in their companies. That’s what the best past presidents of the US have done. The alternative is to insist on some kind of collective recommendation so that the CINC is not bothered with the need to make tough choices. Cain doesn’t look to be afraid of tough choices, but he is also aware that there are many aspects to foreign policy and military policy that he doesn’t know a lot about. That sounds pretty good to me. He’s aware that he’s not a military or diplomatic genius.

Governor Perry held his own. He is clearly not all that comfortable in debates, but then few Presidents have engaged in debates while in office. You have to be good at debate to get the office, but the President doesn’t go out on the floor of the House or Senate and engage in debate, nor do we hold debates among heads of state. We know Perry can make good speeches. He is apparently dynamite at charming a small group, which is a skill that Presidents do need and need badly. The radio is reporting the Perry actually won the poll of those watching the debate. Interesting.

Ron Paul remains Ron Paul. He is a strict constitutionalist. His views on what we should and should not do in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are based on his rejection of the notion that those are legal wars: they were not declared by Congress. Ron Paul’s view of War is pretty close to that of the Framers, as is his view of the role of the States in domestic matters. That’s pretty close to my views on the subject as well. I have more than once pointed out that the Constitution says nothing about education, so why is the federal government at all involved in it? Indeed the Constitution makes the Congress the absolute sovereign of the District of Columbia: if they know how to educate kids, let them show the country how to do it in the place where they are in charge. Instead the federal government including the judiciary wants to run the schools in Kansas City, with the usual disastrous results. But I digress. My bottom line: I think the country would be a lot better off after four or eight years of Ron Paul as President even as I would be prepared to be critical about some of his foreign policy views: but Constitutional Republic is a far far better scenario than incompetent empire, which is what we’ve been trying. I am glad to see Ron Paul in the debates, but I confess that I don’t think he is a serious candidate. He can say what he wants to say because he isn’t going to win. I’d like to see him in the Senate when this is all over. Ah well.

Michelle Bachman remains a serious candidate. She was well informed, and a great deal more charismatic than she was in the early debates. Huntsman is a foreign policy expert, and it shows. He’d make a good Secretary of State, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him as grand duke of Foggy Bottom in 2013. Like Huntsman and Bachman, Santorum came out about where he went in, not losing but not gaining much. As Newt keeps saying, anyone on that stage would be far better for America than the present occupant of the White House; I saw nothing to make me doubt that.

Assassination in Dubai

They’re not calling it an assassination yet, but it sure looks like one. The son of an important Iranian official has been found dead in a Dubai hotel. It’s all remarkably similar to what happened to a Hamas official not all that long ago. It’s possible that this wasn’t a strike by Mossad, but I sure wouldn’t bet much money on it.

Note that this happens as there is news of explosions in Iran at bases connected with the Iranian nuclear program. There’s even video. All this happens as the Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, agree that they would use any means necessary including military strikes and joint covert actions with Israel to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

As to what’s going on:

Iran has long had a policy of providing strong incentives – positive and negative – to its smartest kids to study nuclear engineering and go into the Iranian nuclear program. It has long been thought that one way to make sure there is no nuclear program is make sure there aren’t any really bright nuclear engineers.

This rather drastic policy has been applied in the past, and neither Syria nor Iraq ever got nuclear weapons. Note that hostility toward Iran having nuclear weapons is universal in the Arab world with the single exception of Syria. The obvious author of the Iranian explosions and the death of the smart young man in a Dubai hotel is Mossad, but Israel is not the only country happy with these recent events, nor is Mossad the only intelligence agency capable of using these techniques. Welcome to the shadow world.

Brazil Sends in the Marines

Most Americans have never seen a real slum. Brazil knows a lot about them, and periodicaly the government sends in the Army to tame them down a bit. That’s happening again. The headlines talk about police, but these operations involve armored personnel carriers, Brazilian Marines and other elite troops as well as police. The military maxim that if a job needs a platoon, send a regiment seems to be governing.

It isn’t the first time Brazil has used its army for the reconquest of generations-old slum areas. The results have been mixed. When you have an area that for many decades has had no police, garbage collection, building codes, street repaid, or any of the other services usually associated with even the lowest level of western city life, establishing some kind of rule of law is a very difficult proposition.

Brazil has a thriving economy and seems to have tamed much of its bureaucracy. It will be interesting to see this experiment in nation building. We can all wish them well, and there will be a thousand dissertation topics…

Those interested in Cain may find these sites worth a moment.

http://www.norcalblogs.com/gate/2011/11/5th-cain-accuser-was-involved-in-return-of-elian-gonzalez-to-cuba-now-works-for-obama-administration.php

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=47438

The Cain events are not over. All this is a bit of a distraction. The real question is what can be done about the economy, and that requires an agreement on just what is the point of government, and who owns what. Is the purpose of government to reduce the gap between richest and poorest? That certainly was not the intent of the Framers, some of whom might have thought of that as a good idea, but it wasn’t what the Constitution was intended to do. If it is the job of a government it would have to be a state government. Of course if any state adopted a really serious soak the rich program, the result would be wealth flight – as is happening with the flow of wealth and jobs from California to Texas (or California to almost anywhere, for that matter).

Whatever the merits and demerits of the Cain 9-9-9 plan (and there is much to debate about it), an excise tax does reach everyone. Those who spend more pay more in tax, but everyone has to pay something. When some pay no taxes at all, there is no incentive for them not to vote for higher taxes. If you have to pay the tax you vote for, you have some reason to think about raising that tax.

I have no great objection to reducing the disparity between richest and poorest, but I have a lot of objection to raising the government’s revenue. The more money government gets, the more it will spend on bunny inspectors, Walnuts as Drugs, and thousands of other such programs. Government spending will always rise to exceed income. Raising taxes just raises spending. If you want to reduce the disparity in incomes, first eliminate institutions government and private that are too big to fail. The result of that may surprise you. But that’s another essay.

Just to clarify the above: I would very much like to see laws and regulations that limit the sizes of organizations, including private fortunes. The problem is that doing that has side effects. I do subscribe to the principle that any organization that is too big to fail is to big. I subscribe even more to the elimination of institutions that take high risks, keeping the winnings while saddling the public with their losses. It seems to me that we can go a long way in that direction fairly rapidly.

I would start with the banks: instead of a Big Five or Big Six I would have a not-so-big fifty or sixty. One way to do that would be to go back to the separation of commercial and investment banks, with investment banks unable to guarantee any funds or receive any bailouts. We had such a structure until about 2000. We also need to stop using public money to drive up the costs of education and housing. All this is relatively simple, and I suspect that all the necessary measures would be approved by both the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements.

What we don’t need is to rob the rich in order to give the government more money to spend.