GLOBALIZE THIS!

Friday, April 16, 2004

YES, THIS IS FOR REAL

If only I were a cop...

AP (via CNN): Terry O'Brien of the Town of Geneva Police Department in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, said he was destined to win Wednesday's contest because law enforcement runs in his family.

I'm guessing heart disease and plumber's butt run in his family, too.

I just gotta know what the "handsome trophy designed specially for this event" looks like.

¶ 4/16/2004 01:49:13 PM

Thursday, April 15, 2004

WSJ ON JOBLESS CLAIMS

"...during the week of April 3 the number of workers drawing benefits for more than a week fell below the three million mark, to 2,980,000, for the first time since July 2001. Economists say that's a sign of an improving job market."

Or maybe the reason UI claims fell is because Bush and the Republican-led Congress refuse to extend unemployment benefits to the millions of long-term unemployed who have exhausted their UI benefits and hold precious little hope of finding work when the President's economic policies have helped create a paltry 766,000 private sector jobs in the past 8 months (for a whopping average of 95,750 per month).

¶ 4/15/2004 09:49:57 AM

OBL AIMS FOR THE 7-10 SPLIT

This would suggest that OBL is neither already dead--as some in the Bush administration previously suggested--nor secretly in US captivity--as the Kerry '04 camp despearately fears.

¶ 4/15/2004 09:14:04 AM

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

PRESIDENT BUSH NEEDS YOUR HELP

Let him know about his mistakes before and after 9/11 here so that he can make America--and the world--a safer place.

¶ 4/14/2004 12:44:59 PM

CHARLES MURRAY PRETENDS NOT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES

Charles Murray, author of one of the worst racist screeds since Mein Kempf, leads us on a thought experiement on the utility of government in this morning's NYT.

His logic is as contorted and misleading as any Platonic dialogue.

Murray asks, what if rational utility-maximizing taxpayers--as consumers of public goods--could shop from a menu of government services with their tax dollars? (In order to proceed in this dialectic, we need to ignore for a moment the fact that many consumers of government services do not pay taxes--particularly the young, the old, and the feeble--and many regular taxpayers have no voice in government--resident aliens).

He admits there is great public support for core government services that provide public goods (defense, fire departments, environmental protection, roads, etc.), which otherwise would not be provided in government's absence. And he contends, correctly, that given the choice "ordinary people, making sensible judgments...would put large segments of local, state and federal government out of business."

This is precisely the point of government. Government is a response to the failure of micro-incentives to individuals to yield desirable outcomes in macro-behavior. We need government because individuals cannot on their own make all the decisions (and do not individually command sufficient resources) to produce all that is needed for society to function. We need someone and something with the vantage to coordinate all the various activities and needs associate with producing public goods and services. Moreover, most people don't want to be burdened with these choices (hell, we can barely get people to vote every four years), which is why we have a professional government.

Could government resources be better allocated? Almost certainly. Murray derides government task forces on things like "diversity" (no surprise there). Others may lambast the corrupt government relations of the petro-military-industrial complex and ginormous transfers of wealth from working people to those making more than $300k a year.

How do we decide which government programs are truly worthy of our tax dollars? Murray suggests that government agencies should engage in marketing their utility to taxpayer-consumers, who would then be persuaded to vote for these hitherto obscure agencies with their tax dollars. This is, of course, patently absurd. It is plain to see why we would not want the majority of government offices to be engaged in active marketing (witness the HHS/Bush campaign television ads on the Medicare reform abomination).

Anyone who has walked down the aisles at Wal-Mart knows that consumers are perplexed enough with choice of a few dozen brands of shampoo, let alone the inumerable services provided by government in all its forms. Take away the packaging and the marketing glitz, and all the shampoo bottles contain essentially the same ingredients, and do essentially the same thing: clean your hair. Invariably, many, many, many people are going to reach for the unadvertised generic store brands.

A psychologist, like Murray, should know better than this. But alas, Murray, time and again, has shown he will travel to great lengths of intellectual dishonesty in order to advance his acrid social agenda.

¶ 4/14/2004 10:57:49 AM

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

BABY STEPS AND MEDALS IN IRAQ

Regular Iraqis may not have freedom from the fear of violent warfare in their neighborhoods. They may no longer have sanitation, running water, hospitals, schools, or electricity. But fear not, because the Iraqi's have a new Olympic logo:

American taxpayers have ponied up $10 million so that the Iraqis can have an Olympic sports program. The Iraqi governing council siad that "the unveiling signifies the completion of the regime change for the Iraqi Olympic Movement."

At least they have completed some kind of regime change, I guess.

¶ 4/13/2004 05:37:12 PM

MANNING THE BATTLESTATIONS, CRAWFORD STYLE

Thanks to Tapped for piloting the way back machine to August 2001, when President Bush took charge of the impending threat of Al Qaeda attacks by...going taking the longest presidential vacation in history:

"Maybe he's lazy, maybe he's not determined. It feeds into the impression that he's not in charge."

¶ 4/13/2004 05:00:23 PM

JAPAN IS SO CUTE

They even have cute Japanime logos for their customs service. Compare that with the US logo:

¶ 4/13/2004 11:56:18 AM

Monday, April 12, 2004

HOW SPECIFIC DO WE NEED TO BE?

According to Bush, quoted in the WaPo, the controversial and now famous PDB security breifing, "said nothing about an attack on America."

The briefing reveals that in 1998, US intelligence learned that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft. "FBI information since that time [and, as we have learned from elsewhere, strong signals in the summer of 2001] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings."

I'm wondering what is the value--in terms of this information--of being more specific? It seems that the government would focus its preventative actions on stopping a hijacking of a US aircraft irrespective of what analysts thought terrorists might intend to do once they hijacked a plane. It makes no difference whether terrorists want to hijack a plane to use as a bargaining chip against their imprisoned compatriots or to use to crash into really big buildings in New York and Washington. Either way, we would want to stop them from wresting control of the planes.

How would specific knowledge that planes were to be used as missiles change the government's response? Would Bush have installed bumpers on the Trade Center towers? Would he have pressed to speed up the development of his National Missile Defense system?

¶ 4/12/2004 09:55:43 AM

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: THE PROBLEM WITH BOURGEOIS LIBERALS

The NYT Magazine had this good piece on Sunday:

The real value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions ranging from U.I.C. to Harvard are meritocracies that reward individuals for their own efforts and abilities -- as opposed to rewarding them for the advantages of their birth. For if we find that the students at an elite university like Harvard or Yale are almost as diverse as the students at U.I.C., then we know that no student is being kept from a Harvard because of his or her culture. And white students can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of black people...In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more -- it might require us to give up our money. It's not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.

¶ 4/12/2004 09:34:10 AM