Punxsutawney Condi
Where's actor Bill Murray when you really need him?
On Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency released yet another report expressing alarm over Iran's lack of cooperation and candor on its nuclear programs. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice immediately warned that Iran could face more sanctions, while the European Union's Javier Solana announced another trip to Tehran to see if another dozen or so carrots might induce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stop enriching uranium.
![[Condoleezza Rice]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GE264_Rice_20051017161231.gif)
For a better flavor of this latest exercise in "Groundhog Day" diplomacy, type the words "Rice" and "Iran" into Google's search engine. Here's what we found among the first 10 results:
- "Rice: Iran must halt nuclear program" – February 9, 2005.
- "Rice on Iran: 'We can't let this continue'" – April 12, 2006.
- "Rice: Iran 'lying' about nuke program" – October 11, 2007.
And so on. These rebukes have often coincided with the IAEA's quarterly reports about its dealings with Iran, which have, without exception, stressed that Tehran has failed to be fully forthcoming about its nuclear programs. Monday's report makes for especially bracing reading: Though it has not yet been publicly released, we have obtained a copy available here.
According to the report, not only have the Iranians continued to enrich uranium (in flat contravention of three allegedly binding Security Council resolutions), they are adding thousands of new centrifuges. Some of these are of a more powerful and efficient second-generation type.
More worrying is what the IAEA delicately calls the "possible military dimensions" of Iran's programs. Given that Iran insists its nuclear drive is for peaceful purposes only, it's interesting to note "the fact that substantial parts of the centrifuge components were manufactured in the workshops of the Defense Industries Organization."
Also interesting is what the report describes as "the development of high voltage detonator firing equipment and exploding bridgewire (EBW) detonators including, inter alia, the simultaneous firing of multiple EBW detonators, an underground testing arrangement . . . and the testing of at least one full scale hemispherical, converging, explosively driven shock system that could be applicable to an implosion-type nuclear device." If there's an innocent explanation for this kind of work, we'd love to hear it.
The report notes in an annex that some of these weaponization experiments took place in 2004. This means the Iranians continued to work on weaponization well after the December U.S. National Intelligence Estimate claimed they had abandoned them. That estimate has already been discredited for suggesting that uranium enrichment and ballistic-missile development fall outside the definition of a "nuclear weapons program." But now it seems this U.S. intelligence "consensus" was wrong even on its own misleadingly narrow terms.
Where do we go from here? If this really were Groundhog Day, we would at least learn something from the previous, persistent failures. Even Mr. Murray's character changed his ways. But Iranian leaders have had six years to develop their nuclear programs since they were exposed in 2002, and the progress they have made has been formidable.
That period has also included years of negotiations with Europe and Russia, in which the Iranians have been offered progressively more generous incentives to suspend their enrichment. It hasn't happened. Nor will it ever as long as the worst the international community can do is impose a set of weak sanctions while offering ever-sweeter incentives for Iran to behave. Even assuming there's a package the West could offer Iran that it would accept, the logic of the current diplomacy gives the mullahs every incentive to continue to play for time.
As for the U.S., Secretary Rice's threat of still-more sanctions will be seen in Tehran for the diplomatic evasion it is. The last set of sanctions took months to pass and were watered down to nothing much. The Administration would do better to withdraw from this international charade and consider means by which the mullahs might be persuaded that their regime's survival is better assured by not having nuclear weapons. A month-long naval blockade of Iran's imports of refined gasoline – which accounts for nearly half of its domestic consumption – could clarify for the Iranians just how unacceptable their nuclear program is to the civilized world.
It might also have a clarifying effect on the U.S. political debate. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have declared that Iran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, and we're reasonably confident Mr. McCain means it. As for Mr. Obama, who has spoken of the need for "tough diplomacy," now is the time to find out what he really means by "tough."
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Lying With Statistics
Pentagon Papers
He served against Vietnam
Much like John Kerry
(Previous bye-kus: Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd combined, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, Tommy Thompson, Jim Gilmore.)
Lying With Statistics
David Carr of the New York Times, bemoaning the diminution of media coverage of Iraq, shows us how it's done:
"Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage," said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories--like the economy and the election--have come along and sucked up all the oxygen."
But the tactical success of the surge should not be misconstrued as making Iraq a safer place for American soldiers. Last year was the bloodiest in the five-year history of the conflict, with more than 900 dead, and last month, 52 perished, making it the bloodiest month of the year so far. So far in May, 18 have died.
Television network news coverage in particular has gone off a cliff. Citing numbers provided by a consultant, Andrew Tyndall, the Associated Press reported that in the months after September when Gen. David H. Petraeus testified before Congress about the surge, collective coverage dropped to four minutes a week from 30 minutes a week at the height of coverage, in September 2007.
In Carr's telling, Petraeus lulled Americans--or at least American journalists--into thinking the surge had succeeded in reducing U.S. casualties and thereby fooled the media into ignoring Iraq. But to persuade his reader of this conclusion, Carr engages in some highly selective reading of the numbers.
From iCasualties.org, here are the numbers of Americans killed in each month since the beginning of last year:
| January 2007 | 83 |
| February 2007 | 81 |
| March 2007 | 81 |
| April 2007 | 104 |
| May 2007 | 126 |
| June 2007 | 101 |
| July 2007 | 79 |
| August 2007 | 84 |
| September 2007 | 65 |
| October 2007 | 38 |
| November 2007 | 37 |
| December 2007 | 23 |
| January 2008 | 40 |
| February 2008 | 29 |
| March 2008 | 39 |
| April 2008 | 52 |
| May 2008 (so far) | 18 |
It is true that the number of U.S. Iraq deaths in 2007 was higher than in any other year. But this is because the numbers were so high in January through September. Petraeus's testimony coincided with the beginning of a sharp decline in the death rate of U.S. servicemen in Iraq.
It is also true that April had the highest number of deaths of any month so far this year. But the April count is below the count for every month between August 2006 and September 2007.
In a sense we "agree" with Carr: We would like to see more coverage of Iraq, and specifically the success of the surge. But Carr's own column exemplifies how resistant journalists are to deviating from the antiwar narrative. Most reporters, we'd venture, just aren't as enterprising as he is at cherry-picking information to make success seem like failure.
Chicago, Iraq
The Orlando Sentinel publishes a list of "U.S. War Casualties," including this one:
Army Pfc. Howard A. Jones, Jr., 35, Chicago; 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan.
Jones did indeed serve in Iraq, and he did indeed die, on May 18. But iCasualties.org, curiously, lists his "place of death" as "Chicago." And indeed, the Defense Department press release describes what happened:
Pfc. Howard A. Jones, Jr., 35, of Chicago, died May 18 in Chicago from injuries sustained when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver while on leave from the Iraq theater of operations.
Obviously one death in an auto accident is one death too many, but it's a bit of a stretch to count this as a "war casualty," is it not? If servicemen who die while on leave of causes unrelated to events in the theater are to be counted as war casualties, why not also count those who die of old age years after being discharged? Ronald Reagan, killed in World War II!
Terror on the Decline
Did the liberation of Iraq make America less safe? Conventional wisdom says yes, but Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria begs to differ. He notes that U.S. government figures show big increases in terrorism:
The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.
But Zakaria notes that a new study, by Canada's Simon Fraser University, argues that that attacks in Iraq, a war zone, should not be included:
Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.
The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them. An ABC/BBC poll in Afghanistan in 2007 showed support for the jihadist militants in the country to be 1 percent.
In Pakistan's North-West Frontier province, where Al Qaeda has bases, support for Osama bin Laden plummeted from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008. That dramatic drop was probably a reaction to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, but it points to a general trend in Pakistan over the past five years.
With every new terrorist attack, public support for jihad falls. "This pattern is repeated in country after country in the Muslim world," writes [study director Andrew] Mack. "Its strategic implications are critically important because historical evidence suggests that terrorist campaigns that lose public support will sooner or later be abandoned or defeated."
Power Line's John Hinderaker has a list of attacks on the U.S. and U.S. interests overseas starting in 1988 and, per Zakaria and Mack's advice, omitting those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The list has no new entries since October 2003. One may debate how decisive the liberation of Iraq was in diminishing terrorism, but anyone who argues that it's made us less safe ought to be laughed off stage.
What Do You Call 100 Silent War Protesters? A Good Start!
"Protesters Give Iraq War the Silent Treatment"-->
Party's Over
John Kerry* sent an email to supporters over the weekend with a holiday message:
A thought as we head into what I hope will be a great Memorial Day Weekend for you and your family: put aside the partisan politics, and on this solemn holiday, no matter what we think of this war policy in Iraq, let's keep the men and women who serve our country in our hearts and in our prayers every day.
Two rhetorical questions:
First, what kind of party does Kerry belong to that he thinks there is a contradiction between "partisan politics" and keeping servicemen in his prayers?
Second, what exactly does Kerry mean by "put aside the partisan politics"?
His email actually answers the second question:
And when you reflect on the meaning of service and sacrifice and love of country, consider the young veteran who will give our Democratic radio address this weekend--John Boccieri. John's an Iraq War veteran running for Congress in Ohio, and he summons all our citizens to keep our promise to our veterans. You can listen on the radio this weekend, or go to his site and listen to it now.
My fellow Americans, let us put partisan politics aside so that we can all join together and listen to a partisan radio address!
* "They gave me a hat. I have the hat to this day. I have the hat."
When Pigs Fly
The Washington Times reports on an effort by an adviser to Barack Obama to make the case for his man:
Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former Air Force chief of staff and an Obama campaign co-chairman, told The Washington Times that Mr. Obama's rivals are underestimating his ability to meet a challenge. Gen. McPeak likened him to Abraham Lincoln.
"I think people are only now beginning to realize that Barack is not your run-of-the-mill, ordinary Illinois politician," he said. "He's more like another Illinois politician who everybody underestimated."
Gen. McPeak added, "I feel bad about giving Barack advice because every time I do, I know that he's thought about it already. So I would draw him aside and say, 'The minute you're inaugurated, you will be tested.' He'll say, 'Oh, you mean like Kennedy was with the Bay of Pigs?' He'll show me some way that he's thought about that some time ago. The guy is absolutely scary smart. The real mistake al Qaeda can make is the one everybody else makes of underestimating the man."
For those who are too young to remember the Bay of Pigs--Obama was just a clump of cells when it happened--this was a failed attempt by CIA-backed guerrillas to topple Cuba's communist regime in April 1961. Not exactly an encouraging precedent, is it?
Unreliable Sources
The Politico reports that one Republican is refusing to predict a substantial McCain victory:
"A win by 40 or 50 electoral votes would be an astonishing upset, just a watershed event with all the issues that were stacked against him from the very beginning," said David Woodard, a Republican pollster and Clemson University political science professor. "But it could happen. I know this seems like wishful thinking by Republicans. I'm thinking that Republicans could win by 40 electoral votes. But I dare not say it," he added. "Certainly what is possible could come to pass."
One wonders what he'd say if he dared say it.
Reliable Sources
From an Associated Press report on survivalists:
Some are doing it quietly, giving few details of their preparations--afraid that revealing such information as the location of their supplies will endanger themselves and their loved ones. They envision a future in which the nation's cities will be filled with hungry, desperate refugees forced to go looking for food, shelter and water.
"There's going to be things that happen when people can't get things that they need for themselves and their families," said Lynn-Marie, who believes cities could see a rise in violence as early as 2012.
Lynn-Marie asked to be identified by her first name to protect her homestead in rural western Idaho.
No one will ever figure out who she is. There must be thousands of Lynn-Maries in rural western Idaho.
Where's Captain Planet When You Need Him?
• "Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator."--NASA Web site, May 23
'Sounds Like a Groovy Mission, Man'
"Mars Lander Prepares for Digging Mission"--headline, Associated Press, May 26
We're Calling in Sick Tod . . . Oh, Look! A Squirrel!
"ADHD Can Cost Adults 20 or More Workdays a Year"--headline, Associated Press, May 26
Save the Tongues!
• "Tribes Strive to Save Native Tongues"--headline, Christian Science Monitor, May 23
He Knew Where the Bodies Were Buried
"Man Charged With Stealing Thousands From Funeral Parlor"--headline, Associated Press, May 24
Help Wanted
"Armed Shoplifters Sought"--headline, Greenville (S.C.) News, May 24
Someone Set Up Us the Bomb
• "Auction Failure Damages Face Burden of Proof Eluding Lawyers"--headline, Bloomberg, May 27
News of the Tautological
"Affordable Housing, at a Price"--headline, New York Times, May 26
News You Can Use
• "Experts Urge People to Avoid Bees"--headline, Arizona Republic, May 26
• "Erectile Dysfunction May Signal a Broken Heart"--headline, American College of Cardiology press release, May 19
Bottom Stories of the Day
• "Jessica Lange Bashes Iraq War in Graduation Speech"--headline, Associated Press, May 24
• "Woman Wants Shrub Trimmed at Anderson County Intersection"--headline, Anderson (S.C.) Independent-Mail, May 24
• "China, Russia Condemn US Missile Defense Plans"--headline, Associated Press, May 23
• "Canadian Short Film Wins Prize at Cannes"--headline, CBC.ca, May 26
I Now Pronounce You Chimp and Croc
"Animal rights advocates are appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to declare a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Matthew to be a legal person," the Catholic News Agency reports:
British teacher Paula Stibbe and activists with the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories want to declare Matthew a person so that Stibbe may be appointed his legal guardian if the bankrupt animal sanctuary where Matthew lives in Vienna shuts down, the Evening Standard says.
Coming on the heels of the California Supreme Court decision mandating same-sex marriage, this raises some alarming possibilities. The rationale for same-sex marriage is that any person should be allowed to marry any other person, regardless of sex. Surely that would apply to nonhuman persons as well, so that Matthew would be able to marry another chimp--or a human.
Wait, it gets worse. Others have raised the specter of polygamy. What about interspecies polygamy? The CNA report reveals:
Matthew lives with another chimpanzee and a crocodile in an animal shelter.
As the definition of marriage and the definition of person both become more and more elastic, all sorts of impossible problems will arise. Example: If you marry an amoeba and he splits, are you on your own, or are you suddenly a polygamist against your will? This is a can of worms humanity would be better off not opening.
Dividend Dummies?
Holman Jenkins
Vikram Pandit, who runs Citigroup, is a dope. So is Kenneth Lewis, who runs Bank of America. The CEOs of other banks are also dopes because they continue to pay shareholders sizeable dividends even as they seek new capital from other investors to cover their subprime losses.
Those of us who sit at a keyboard know how easy it is to penetrate the fog of ignorance that beclouds experts and managers in other fields. We can do it in five minutes. But let us dissent this one time from the know-it-allism that is our profession's stock in trade.
In an inapt metaphor, various commentators accuse these banks of pouring water in the top of a bucket even as it runs out holes in the bottom. Metaphors can be aids to thought, or aids to confusion, as here.
All financial institutions, all businesses, are pipes through which money both enters and exits, continuously. That's a more accurate metaphor, but let's be done with metaphors.
1) Money is money. Whether banks are wiser to replenish their depleted capital by retaining income now used to pay dividends, or wiser to raise the capital from outside and keep paying the dividend, depends on which is a cheaper source of capital.
2) Money is money. Whether a company retains its earnings or pays them out, shareholders are still the beneficiaries of its cash, and shareholders are not so dumb they can't figure this out. They are not so dumb, in other words, as to prefer receiving a dividend if it would be more advantageous for their company to deploy its cash elsewhere.
Citigroup is the most spectacular case in point, continuing to allocate nearly $7 billion a year to shareholders even as it was forced to dilute existing shareholders by raising billions in new equity mostly from sovereign investors overseas.
Would it have been more advantageous to shareholders to curtail the dividend (as, in fact, Citi partly did) than seek outside money? That depends partly on the terms. Remember, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Kuwait and various muckety-mucks just put more than $44 billion into Citi on terms that lock them in, while normal shareholders can come and go as they please.
More important, Citi talks to its shareholders and also to the investors among whom it prospects for new capital. For years, Citi's shareholders have been concerned about a porky cost structure compared to its peers. A dividend is a form of discipline, imposing on management a need to be careful about costs so as not to be seen cannibalizing the company's long-term value to pay the dividend.
From the outside, after all, shareholders can't readily tell which of Citi's costs are well-spent and which aren't. A dividend commitment forces management to make better use of the information at its disposal to differentiate the good costs from less remunerative ones.
Managers do miscalculate. They do misread the market. But several of the contributors to Citi's capital replenishment were already large shareholders and thus not short of incentive to optimize Citi's capital structure.
What's more, every sign indicates that what's dragging down Citi's share price now isn't subprime losses but doubts about whether management will ever get its hands around its sprawling business. The company (so far) has had no trouble raising new capital – its offerings have even been oversubscribed – but another dividend cut might damage this appeal. It might instead be seen as management throwing in the towel on rationalizing Citi's costs and simply using Citi's cash flow to entrench itself. In which case, cutting the dividend could prove a very costly means of raising capital indeed.
But journalism somehow lends itself to spurious categorizing. We're told that banks like Citi should cut their dividends to show proper contrition for their subprime follies, or to punish shareholders for their lax oversight.
These categories are false. The dividend is not "found" money that shareholders can be deprived of, whether it's paid out or retained. And paying a dividend is not the equivalent of a Wall Streeter blowing his paycheck on cocaine and lobster when he should be saving for grandma's operation.
Shareholders require their banks to be properly capitalized. They require them to be properly disciplined with their cash flows. They also require them to assume a level of risk suitable to their well-diversified shareholder base (however that might trouble regulators). There simply is no automatic case that maintaining a dividend is not the best way to manage these interests for investors.
Welcome to Nixonland
I recall being surprised, way back in 1996, to see a candidate for Congress in south Chicago berated by his opponent for a vague association with hippies, specifically with hippies of the hated California variety.
The Democrat in the race was a struggling, organized-labor type, and as far as I could tell was neither hip nor in any way cool. Still, a pamphlet attacking him included an image of Ken Kesey's merrily painted bus, "Furthur," which had no connection to the candidate at all, but which still possessed the power to enrage. I was surprised because it was such an obvious anachronism: However much you might have hated it, the Summer of Love was then almost 30 years behind us.
![[Welcome to Nixonland]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BN173_oj_fra_20080527172904.jpg) |
| Corbis |
Well, now the main events of the '60s are 40 years behind us, and still we can't shake them. In the last national election, we redebated the Vietnam War. In the one coming up, we will be forced to debate Barack Obama's not-even-tenuous connection to the Weathermen. (We will probably not be asked to judge the poisonous legacy of the Young Americans for Freedom, although McCain adviser Charlie Black was actually a leader of that group.)
We can also be fairly sure of the word that will be used as the demon decade is again wheeled out: elitism. In the '60s-as-remembered, the conflict that overlays all the others from that period was between ordinary, hard-working Americans and the privileged kids who went to fancy schools where they learned to disrespect the American flag and call the police names. Like the ghost of Archie Bunker, this peculiar class war has appeared over the years whenever some well-polished liberal is in need of a comeuppance.
The politician who fashioned a permanent Republican parable out of the decade's antagonisms was Richard Nixon. The man was born for the backlash. In "Nixonland," a brilliant and engrossing study of the politician and the period, Rick Perlstein uses, as a motif for the future president's career, the society of outsiders Nixon started at college in opposition to the establishment club.
"The Orthogonians" was a made-up name that might well have meant, "the squares." Orthogonians weren't working-class, exactly, but nevertheless there was a real authenticity to their revolt against the glamorous ones – the "Franklins" – who lorded it over them. Recruiting like-minded Orthogonians and fueling their grievances, Mr. Perlstein writes, became the signature maneuver of Nixon's career, from the days of Alger Hiss all the way to the White House. (Mr. Perlstein is a friend who has said kind things about my work in the past.)
"There were new currents to surf in the soaring sixties, based in the same kind of old resentments," Mr. Perlstein writes, "new kinds of common people being put upon by new kinds of insolent and condescending Franklins – the new kind of liberal who seemed to be saying that . . . college kids who spat on the flag were oh-so-much more with-it than you."
Nixon is gone today, along with the rioters and the radicals who riled his Silent Majority. Most of the culture-war issues of those unhappy days are forgotten too; even the culture-war issues of 2004 have already lost some of their potency.
Yet the strange class war that defined Nixonland renews itself endlessly, with different leaders and different symbols, but always with the same dynamic: the striving squares revenging themselves upon the hip and the snooty.
Backlash is a chronic condition now, and one of the reasons is that hipness is chronic, too. The '60s culture that infuriated Nixon and his followers is everywhere today, because hipness and "revolution" have become a default mode of corporate speech. Youth had nothing to do with it: It happened thanks to the need for ever-accelerating novelty, reverence for a supposedly enlightened cyber-vanguard, and the great god "creativity."
Typical example: Six years ago, when Business Week wanted to report that the South Korean economy was doing well, it ran a cover story proclaiming not that Korea was "Prosperous," or "Recovering," but that the country was "Cool," a concept it illustrated with a pair of young hipsters hanging out on the main drag of their university neighborhood.
Yes, this culture is elitist. Just walk down the aisles of your local, union-free organic grocery, unutterably cool but way beyond your price range. Or stroll through the most upscale shopping district of your city, where you might notice the fake-shattered windows favored by one national retailer, evidently trying for that '60s look while not losing any stock to actual looters.
Yes, it's offensive, too. It's meant to be that way, to remind you always that you are not hot; that you've bought the wrong brand; that the vanguard is way ahead of you; that, with your organization-man craving for health benefits or job security, you probably need to be fired.
And when you take offense at all this, as you inevitably will, why, welcome to Nixonland.
Our Collectivist Candidates
On Sunday Barack Obama urged graduates of Connecticut's Wesleyan University to devote themselves to "collective service." This is not an unusual theme for a commencement address. But it was interesting how long he went on discussing various kinds of nonprofit activism without ever mentioning the virtues of commerce or of individual achievement.
He also did not cite the military as an example of service to one's country. This is a surprising omission in a Memorial Day weekend speech to college-age students by a man seeking to be entrusted with the defense of the U.S.
Sen. Obama told the students that "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation." He disparaged students who want to "take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should buy."
The people Mr. Obama is sneering at are the ones who built America – the traders and entrepreneurs and manufacturers who gave us railroads and airplanes, housing and appliances, steam engines, electricity, telephones, computers and Starbucks. Ignored here is the work most Americans do, the work that gives us food, clothing, shelter and increasing comfort. It's an attitude you would expect from a Democrat.
Or this year's Republican nominee. John McCain also denounces "self-indulgence" and insists that Americans serve "a national purpose that is greater than our individual interests." During a Republican debate at the Reagan Library on May 3, 2007, Sen. McCain derided Mitt Romney's leadership ability, saying, "I led . . . out of patriotism, not for profit." Challenged on his statement, Mr. McCain elaborated that Mr. Romney "managed companies, and he bought, and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs. That's the nature of that business." He could have been channeling Barack Obama.
"A greater cause," "community service" – to many of us, these gauzy phrases sound warm and comforting. But their purpose is to disparage and denigrate our own lives, to belittle our own pursuit of happiness. They're concepts better suited to a more collectivist country than to one founded in libertarian revolution – a revolution intended to defend our rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
One gets the sense that Mr. McCain would like to see us all in the armed forces. In a Washington Monthly essay published in October 2001, his vision of national service sounded militaristic. He wrote with enthusiasm for programs whose participants "not only wear uniforms and work in teams . . . but actually live together in barracks on former military bases, and are deployed to service projects far from their home base," and who would "gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall."
Mr. Obama wouldn't send us into the military. All he wants is our souls. As his wife Michelle said at UCLA on February 3, two days before the California primary, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. . . . That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
There is a whiff of hypocrisy here. Mr. Obama, who made $4.2 million last year and lives in a $1.65 million house bought with the help of the indicted Tony Rezko – and whose "elegant suits" and "impeccable ties" made him one of Esquire's Best-Dressed Men in the World – disdains college students who might want to "chase after the big house and the nice suits." Mr. McCain, who with his wife earned more than $6 million last year and who owns at least seven homes, ridicules Mr. Romney for having built businesses.
But hypocrisy is not the biggest issue. The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."
They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.
Mr. Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of "The Politics of Freedom" (Cato, 2008).
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