by Jacob G. Hornberger,
As Barack Obama prepares to assume the presidency, it would be appropriate today to remember that the original Thanksgiving celebrated the demise of the “spread-the-wealth” economic system that the colonists at Plymouth Rock initially established.
The story of socialism at Plymouth Rock is one that few Americans are taught in their public (i.e., government) schools. On landing at Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims established an economic system in which all their crops would be owned in common and whose harvest would be distributed to each family in accordance with its needs. The colonists felt that such a socialist system would be consistent with their deep religious convictions.
There was one big problem, however, with this spread-the-wealth economic system: starvation. When everything was owned by everyone, people would look for excuses to avoid working in the fields and the harvests were not sufficient to keep everyone fed.
Finally, after repeated food shortages Plymouth Rock Governor William Bradford declared an end to socialism at Plymouth Rock. He announced that every family would be responsible for planting and harvesting its own crops and would be free to keep the bounty.
The result? No more starvation! Instead, a bountiful harvest and more than enough food for everyone.
And that’s what the first Thanksgiving was all about — to give thanks for the plentiful bounty that had been brought into existence through the “miracle of the market.”
While Barack Obama undoubtedly recognizes that socialism is a bad system, sadly he favors socialistic programs. While he would no doubt acknowledge that socialism brings impoverishment, as it did at Plymouth Rock, he thinks that by using coercion to “spread the wealth” from rich to poor and middle class, society will be better off.
How logical is that? Does it make any sense? If socialism brings starvation, why would socialistic programs bring anything but economic harm and lower standards of living?
Moreover, why would God create a system in which coveting and stealing the goods of the rich and spreading their wealth to others would bring positive results?
Today, let us not celebrate the socialistic, spread-the-wealth system that has plunged our nation into chaos, crisis, and destitution. Let us instead celebrate the system of economic liberty that the Pilgrims discovered at Plymouth Rock. They pointed the way to an economic system that brings prosperity and harmony and that is consistent with the laws of nature and the laws of God. Today, let us not only celebrate their achievement, let us also rededicate ourselves to restoring a free-market system to our land.
The Krugman Recipe for Depression
Massive government spending is no solution to unemployment.
AMITY SHLAES
Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been on the attack lately in regard to the New Deal. His new book "The Return of Depression Economics," emphasizes the importance of New Deal-style spending. He has said the trouble with the New Deal was that it didn't spend enough.
He's also arguing that some writers and economists have been misrepresenting the 1930s to make the effect of FDR's overall policy look worse than it was. I'm interested in part because Mr. Krugman has mentioned me by name. He recently said that I am the one "whose misleading statistics have been widely disseminated on the right."
Mr. Krugman is a new Nobel Laureate, teaches at Princeton University and writes a column for a nationally prominent newspaper. So what he says is believed to be objective by many people, even when it isn't. But the larger reason we should care about the 1930s employment record is that the cure Roosevelt offered, the New Deal, is on everyone else's mind as well. In a recent "60 Minutes" interview, President-elect Barack Obama said, "keep in mind that 1932, 1933, the unemployment rate was 25%, inching up to 30%."
The New Deal is Mr. Obama's context for the giant infrastructure plan his new team is developing. If he proposes FDR-style recovery programs, then it is useful to establish whether those original programs actually brought recovery. The answer is, they didn't. New Deal spending provided jobs but did not get the country back to where it was before.
This reality shows most clearly in the data -- everyone's data. During the Depression the federal government did not survey unemployment routinely as it does today. But a young economist named Stanley Lebergott helped the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington compile systematic unemployment data for that key period. He counted up what he called "regular work" such as a job as a school teacher or a job in the private sector. He intentionally did not include temporary jobs in emergency programs -- because to count a short-term, make-work project as a real job was to mask the anxiety of one who really didn't have regular work with long-term prospects.
The result is what we today call the Lebergott/Bureau of Labor Statistics series. They show one man in four was unemployed when Roosevelt took office. They show joblessness overall always above the 14% line from 1931 to 1940. Six years into the New Deal and its programs to create jobs or help organized labor, two in 10 men were unemployed. Mr. Lebergott went on to become one of America's premier economic historians at Wesleyan University. His data are what I cite. So do others, including our president-elect in the "60 Minutes" interview.
Later, Lee Ohanian of UCLA studied New Deal unemployment by the number of hours worked. His picture was similar to Mr. Lebergott's. Even late in 1939, total hours worked by the adult population was down by a fifth from the 1929 level. To be sure, Michael Darby of UCLA has argued that make-work jobs should be counted. Even so, his chart shows that from 1931 to 1940, New Deal joblessness ranges as high as 16% (1934) but never gets below 9%. Nine percent or above is hardly a jobless target to which the Obama administration would aspire.
What kept the picture so dark so long? Deflation for one, but also the notion that government could engineer economic recovery by favoring the public sector at the expense of the private sector. New Dealers raised taxes again and again to fund spending. The New Dealers also insisted on higher wages when businesses could ill afford them. Roosevelt, for example, signed into law first his National Recovery Administration, whose codes forced businesses to pay an above-market minimum wage, and then the Wagner Act, which gave union workers more power.
As a result of such policy, pay for workers in the later 1930s was well above trend. Mr. Ohanian's research documents this. High wages hurt corporate profits and therefore hiring. The unemployed stayed unemployed. "If you had a job you were all right" -- the phrase we all heard as children about the Depression -- really does capture the period.
Why does all this matter today? Because lawmakers are considering new labor legislation containing "card check," which would strengthen organized labor and so its wage demands. Because employees continue to pressure firms to spend on health care, without considering they may be making the company unable to hire an unemployed friend. Piling on public-sector jobs or raising wages may take away jobs in the private sector, directly or indirectly.
What the new administration decides about marginal tax rates also matters. Mr. Obama said in a Thanksgiving talk that he wanted to "create or save 2.5 million new jobs." People who talk about saving new jobs are usually talking about the private-sector's capacity to generate jobs in the future -- not about the public sector alone. We know that the new administration is going to spend. But how? It can try to figure out a way to do that without hurting the private sector. Or it can just spend, Krugman-wise, and risk repeating the very depression we seek to avoid.
Ms. Shlaes is senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperPerennial, 2008).
Adam Smith’s Return
After decades of American support for the free movement of goods, services and capital around the world, the tables appear to have turned. Nowhere has public backing for free trade been shrinking as rapidly as in the United States. According to this year’s Pew Global Attitudes survey, only 53 percent of Americans agree that trade is good for their country, down from 78 percent in 2002. Contrast those numbers to the ones from Europe, where support for trade runs at 87 percent among Germans, 77 percent among Britons and 82 percent among the French. In countries like India, Korea and Nigeria, support for trade is even higher. Among the 24 countries surveyed, Americans lag behind everyone else in their support for continued free trade.
Fears that international trade could be the next casualty of the economic crisis have some of America’s closest allies seriously worried. Already, canceled orders have sunk shipping rates to 21-year lows, and World Bank head Robert Zoellick says trade will contract next year for the first time since 1982. Now leaders are especially nervous over incoming U.S. President Barack Obama’s campaign suggestions that he would review the North American Free Trade Agreement and put America’s other trade deals back on the negotiating table. In November, Britain’s Gordon Brown warned Obama that he must reject a “beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism that has been a feature in transforming past crises into deep recessions.” Germany’s Angela Merkel, whose country depends on exports for more than one third of its economy, has repeatedly cautioned that a backlash against trade is the last thing anyone needs in a global downturn.
It might come as a surprise that Europe, with its long socialist and mercantilist traditions, is now championing free trade, while free-market America faces a clamor for new barriers. In part, that’s because Europe has much more to lose from shrinking exports, especially now that the crisis is hitting more and more parts of the global economy. Foreign trade accounts for an average of 51 percent of GDP in European Union countries, compared with 13 percent in the United States. What’s more, while Europe has rapidly globalized, the share of the U.S. economy derived from trade has risen only slightly since 1992. European labor unions—and the politicians they help elect—find it harder to campaign against trade because their members’ livelihoods so obviously depend on it. American workers may also worry more about trade because they have fewer protections and get less help if they lose their jobs.
On both continents, however, positive attitudes toward trade are unlikely to increase in economically harder times. “The last thing struggling workers and producers want is more intense world competition,” says Joe Guinan, a trade economist at the German Marshall Fund. Yet Brown and Merkel, along with Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and India’s Manmohan Singh, are all stepping up pressure to complete the Doha round of trade talks, which collapsed in Geneva in July. Most countries today place far fewer restrictions on trade than they are technically allowed under international agreements. Average tariffs, for example, can triple around the world without a single treaty violation or recourse by trading partners. That alone—which is not even close to the 1930s-style trade war Brown alluded to when he warned Obama—would shrink global trade by $1.8 trillion and slash global GDP by $448 billion, or 0.8 percent, according to a soon-to-be-published study by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Those numbers dwarf the estimated $79 billion in estimated GDP gains from the Doha round. It’s an “insurance policy” to bring certainty to markets and prevent “systemic risk” from a backlash against trade, says Jennifer Hillman, a World Trade Organization appeals adjudicator.
While still unlikely, the risk of a global crackdown on trade is growing. Earlier this year, more than 30 countries slapped taxes on food exports or banned them outright in response to rising prices. More recently—notwithstanding Lula’s declamations on Doha—Brazil, along with Argentina, has been working on plans to raise tariffs on industrial goods. These developments seem to have helped push leaders of the G20 group of nations, meeting in Washington in November, to commit to holding off on any new trade restrictions for the next 12 months, though it’s unclear if Obama and the incoming U.S. Congress will feel bound by that agreement. Despite the added risks to the global economy, they might just prefer to listen to worried American workers instead of worried American allies.
'Our Culture Is Better'
Champion of freedom or anti-Islamic provocateur? Both.
JAMES TARANTO
New York
By his own description, Geert Wilders is not a typical Dutch politician. "We are a country of consensus," he tells me on a recent Saturday morning at his midtown Manhattan hotel. "I hate consensus. I like confrontation. I am not a consensus politician. . . . This is something that is really very un-Dutch."
![[The Weekend Interview]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AI606_winter_DV_20081125164126.jpg)
Zina SaundersYet the 45-year-old Mr. Wilders says he is the most famous politician in the Netherlands: "Everybody knows me. . . . There is no other politician -- not even the prime minister -- who is as well-known. . . . People hate me, or they love me. There's nothing in between. There is no gray area."
To his admirers, Mr. Wilders is a champion of Western values on a continent that has lost confidence in them. To his detractors, he is an anti-Islamic provocateur. Both sides have a point.
In March, Mr. Wilders released a short film called "Fitna," a harsh treatment of Islam that begins by interspersing inflammatory Quran passages with newspaper and TV clips depicting threats and acts of violent jihad. The second half of the film, titled "The Netherlands Under the Spell of Islam," warns that Holland's growing Muslim population -- which more than doubled between 1990 and 2004, to 944,000, some 5.8% of the populace -- poses a threat to the country's traditional liberal values. Under the heading, "The Netherlands in the future?!" it shows brutal images from Muslim countries: men being hanged for homosexuality, a beheaded woman, another woman apparently undergoing genital mutilation.
Making such a film, Mr. Wilders knew, was a dangerous act. In November 2004, Theo van Gogh was assassinated on an Amsterdam street in retaliation for directing a film called "Submission" about Islam's treatment of women. The killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, left a letter on van Gogh's body threatening Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the film's writer and narrator.
Ms. Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, had renounced Islam and been elected to the Dutch Parliament, where she was an ally of Mr. Wilders. Both belonged to the center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy, known by the Dutch acronym VVD. Both took a hard line on what they saw as an overly accommodationist policy toward the Netherlands' Muslim minority. They argued that radical imams "should be stripped of their nationality," that their mosques should be closed, and that "we should be strong in defending the rights of women," Mr. Wilders tells me.
This made them dissenters within the VVD. "We got into trouble every week," Mr. Wilders recalls. "We were like children going to their parents if they did something wrong, because every week they hassled us. . . . We really didn't care what anybody said. If the factional leadership said, 'Well, you cannot go to this TV program,' for us it was an incentive to go, not not to go. So we were a little bit of two mavericks, rebels if you like."
Mr. Wilders finally quit the party over its support for opening negotiations to admit Turkey into the European Union. That was in September 2004. "Two months later, Theo van Gogh was killed, and the whole world changed," says Mr. Wilders. He and Ms. Hirsi Ali both went into hiding; he still travels with bodyguards. After a VVD rival threatened to strip Ms. Hirsi Ali's citizenship over misstatements on her 1992 asylum application, she left Parliament and took a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Mr. Wilders stayed on and formed the Party for Freedom, or PVV. In 2006 it became Parliament's fifth-largest party, with nine seats in the 150-member lower chamber.
Having his own party liberates Mr. Wilders to speak his mind. As he sees it, the West suffers from an excess of toleration for those who do not share its tradition of tolerance. "We believe that -- 'we' means the political elite -- that all cultures are equal," he says. "I believe this is the biggest disease today facing Europe. . . . We should wake up and tell ourselves: You're not a xenophobe, you're not a racist, you're not a crazy guy if you say, 'My culture is better than yours.' A culture based on Christianity, Judaism, humanism is better. Look at how we treat women, look at how we treat apostates, look at how we go with the separation of church and state. I can give you 500 examples why our culture is better."
He acknowledges that "the majority of Muslims in Europe and America are not terrorists or violent people." But he says "it really doesn't matter that much, because if you don't define your own culture as the best, dominant one, and you allow through immigration people from those countries to come in, at the end of the day you will lose your own identity and your own culture, and your society will change. And our freedom will change -- all the freedoms we have will change."
The murder of van Gogh lends credence to this warning, as does the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005 in Denmark. As for "Fitna," it has not occasioned a violent response, but its foes have made efforts to suppress it. A Dutch Muslim organization went to court seeking to enjoin its release on the ground that, in Mr. Wilders's words, "it's not in the interest of Dutch security." The plaintiffs also charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and inciting hatred. Mr. Wilders thought the argument frivolous, but decided to pre-empt it: "The day before the verdict, I broadcasted ['Fitna'] . . . not because I was not confident in the outcome, but I thought: I'm not taking any chance, I'm doing it. And it was legal, because there was not a verdict yet." The judge held that the national-security claim was moot and ruled in Mr. Wilders's favor on the issues of blasphemy and incitement.
Dutch television stations had balked at broadcasting the film, and satellite companies refused to carry it even for a fee. So Mr. Wilders released it online. The British video site LiveLeak.com soon pulled the film, citing "threats to our staff of a very serious nature," but put it back online a few days later. ("Fitna" is still available on LiveLeak, as well as on other sites such as YouTube and Google Video.)
An organization called The Netherlands Shows Its Colors filed a criminal complaint against Mr. Wilders for "inciting hatred." In June, Dutch prosecutors declined to pursue the charge, saying in a statement: "That comments are hurtful and offensive for a large number of Muslims does not mean that they are punishable." The group is appealing the prosecutors' decision.
In July, a Jordanian prosecutor, acting on a complaint from a pressure group there, charged Mr. Wilders with blasphemy and other crimes. The Netherlands has no extradition treaty with Jordan, but Mr. Wilders worries -- and the head of the group that filed the complaint has boasted -- that the indictment could restrict his ability to travel. Mr. Wilders says he does not visit a foreign country without receiving an assurance that he will not be arrested and extradited.
"The principle is not me -- it's not about Geert Wilders," he says. "If you look at the press and the rest of the political elite in the Netherlands, nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. This is the worst thing, maybe. . . . A nondemocratic country cannot use the international or domestic legal system to silence you. . . . If this starts, we can get rid of all parliaments, and we should close down every newspaper, and we should shut up and all pray to Mecca five times a day."
It is difficult to fault Mr. Wilders's impassioned defense of free speech. And although the efforts to silence him via legal harassment have proved far from successful, he rightly points out that they could have a chilling effect, deterring others from speaking out.
Mr. Wilders's views on Islam, though, are problematic. Since 9/11, American political leaders have struggled with the question of how to describe the ideology of the enemy without making enemies of the world's billion or so Muslims. The various terms they have tried -- "Islamic extremism," "Islamism," "Islamofascism" -- have fallen short of both clarity and melioration. Melioration is not Mr. Wilders's highest priority, and to him the truth couldn't be clearer: The problem is Islam itself. "I see Islam more as an ideology than as a religion," he explains.
His own view of Islam is a fundamentalist one: "According to the Quran, there are no moderate Muslims. It's not Geert Wilders who's saying that, it's the Quran . . . saying that. It's many imams in the world who decide that. It's the people themselves who speak about it and talk about the terrible things -- the genital mutilation, the honor killings. This is all not Geert Wilders, but those imams themselves who say this is the best way of Islam."
Yet he insists that his antagonism toward Islam reflects no antipathy toward Muslims: "I make a distinction between the ideology . . . and the people. . . . There are people who call themselves Muslims and don't subscribe to the full part of the Quran. And those people, of course, we should invest [in], we should talk to." He says he would end Muslim immigration to the Netherlands but work to assimilate those already there.
His idea of how to do so, however, seems unlikely to win many converts: "You have to give up this stupid, fascist book" -- the Quran. "This is what you have to do. You have to give up that book."
Mr. Wilders is right to call for a vigilant defense of liberal principles. A society has a right, indeed a duty, to require that religious minorities comply with secular rules of civilized behavior. But to demand that they renounce their religious identity and holy books is itself an affront to liberal principles.
Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
What Newcomers Know About Thanksgiving
Immigrant students learn what makes America great.
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Queens, N.Y.
Study after depressing study finds that public schools are failing in their civic duty to transmit to students an appreciation of American history and ideals. That may be so. But on this Thanksgiving weekend, allow me to recount a good news story from a New York City high school for recent immigrants. There, a group of teenagers, born in the four corners of the world, have a lot to teach a native-born visitor about Thanksgiving and what it means to choose to come to this country. For them, the Pilgrims' story mirrors their own stories.
![[Cross Country]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AI613_cckirk_DV_20081128163111.jpg)
Barbara KelleyNewcomers High School is located in the New York City borough of Queens, where, according to the 2000 Census, 46% of the population of 2.2 million are immigrants. It is one of the most ethnically diverse counties in the country. Some 850 students attend Newcomers, says Principal Mary Burke. They hail from 60 countries and speak 40-plus languages. For most, this past Thursday marked their first or second Thanksgiving celebration.
Sophia Zannis teaches ESL -- English as a Second Language -- at Newcomers. She uses the Thanksgiving story to get her students talking and writing about why they came to the U.S. History teacher Tim Becker includes a unit on the holiday even though Thanksgiving isn't part of the state-mandated curriculum for his 11th-grade class. It "reminds my students that they are not the first new Americans to have struggled to achieve their dreams," he says, "and that others before them have overcome the challenges of living in a new country."
Like the Pilgrims, most of the students at Newcomers say their families came here seeking better lives. The Pilgrims "were looking for something they didn't have in England," says a girl from Colombia. "When you come here it is the same. You have to face difficulties." An Ecuadorian girl sitting near her agrees, "When they [the Pilgrims] came here, they felt alone and didn't have friends. Me either."
Virtually every student I talk to has a similar story: "My dad came here to have a better life," says a girl from Ivory Coast. "He worked as a house boy. Now he works for the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority]." Or a boy from China: "My mother finished elementary school. Then there wasn't any money for middle school. . . . She wanted to come here to make a better life for her children." A Bangladeshi boy quotes the Declaration of Independence; his family came here for the purpose of "pursuiting the happiness."
In Ms. Zannis's class, we fall into a discussion of the virtues the Pilgrims exemplify and the personal characteristics they needed in order to survive the terrible winter of 1620-21, when half their number died. The words fly across the classroom: "Courage." "Hard-working." "Brave." "Frustrated." "Strong." "Don't give up."
That, in turn, segues into a discussion of poverty in America and how it's different from poverty in their home countries. The poor in this country seem "middle class," says a boy from Mexico. Another Mexican, this time in Mr. Becker's class, makes a similar observation. "In my country," he says, the poor are "skinny. . . . Here it is different. They are fat. Food is very cheap here. . . . They can get a dollar meal." The girl from Ivory Coast says it pains her to see Americans sleeping on the streets. The poor don't sleep outdoors in her country, she says. "They sleep with family or friends. We see more poor people" in this country.
Newcomers High School also has students who, like the Pilgrims, came to the U.S. seeking freedom of worship. A boy who says he's from Tibet notes that his family "couldn't practice the religion of the Dalai Lama" in China. An Indonesian girl, who is Christian, tells of being persecuted by Muslims in her neighborhood and fearing for her safety. An Egyptian, also a Christian, says she feared being kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam. "We wanted to close all the bad pages of memory . . . and start a new page."
The kids all seem familiar with Thanksgiving's food traditions and more than half of those I speak to say they plan to celebrate at home with the festive bird. There are nontraditional foods on the menu too. A Polish girl mentions pierogies. A Chinese boy says his family will eat rice. When I ask whether it really matters what you eat on Thanksgiving, I get a bunch of "you gotta be kidding" looks. "Yes! It's tradition!" shouts out one student." "Remember the history of the country," admonishes another.
The kids at Newcomers High School have an edge on their native-born peers: They know why they're here -- a knowledge that translates into an intense appreciation for their new country. I don't know how Newcomers' students would score if required to name the "Father of the Constitution" or to identify the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, as one test of general historical knowledge recently asked students elsewhere. Nor do I know whether the respect for different cultural traditions that the high school obviously fosters is accompanied by a curriculum that stresses American history, culture and heroes -- the store of knowledge that binds us together as a nation.
But the young newcomers I interviewed in Queens had an essential, and very personal, understanding of the earliest story at the heart of the American experience. They understood the hurdles the English settlers had to overcome before they celebrated the First Thanksgiving and why it was worth it. "My story and their story was very much alike," says a boy from Bangladesh. "Both groups suffered in their mother country . . . and arrived in the United States with a new hope in [their] heart, a new dream in [their] eyes."
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.
Singapore Strikes Again
The city-state resumes its campaign against the Journal.
Let us begin with an apology to our readers in Asia. Unless they are online, they will not see this editorial. For legal reasons, we are refraining from publishing it in The Wall Street Journal Asia, which circulates in Singapore.
![[Review & Outlook]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-CT136_oj_1co_DV_20081128212248.jpg)
APSingapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Our subject is free speech and the rule of law in the Southeast Asian city-state -- something on which the international press and Singapore's government have often clashed. We can't say which side would prevail if the Singapore public could hear an open debate, but the fact is that we know of no foreign publication that has ever won in a Singapore court of law. Virtually every Western publication that circulates in the city-state has faced a lawsuit, or the threat of one.
Which brings us to the ruling against us this week in Singapore's High Court. Dow Jones Publishing (Asia) was found guilty of contempt of court for two editorials and a letter to the editor published in The Wall Street Journal Asia in June and July. The Attorney General, who personally argued the contempt case against us, characterized the articles as "an attack on the courts and judiciary of Singapore inasmuch as they impugn the integrity, the impartiality and the independence of the Court."
In suing for contempt, Singapore chose to go after us for the most basic kind of journalism. The first editorial, "Democracy in Singapore," reported on a damages hearing in a defamation case brought (and won) by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew against opposition politician Chee Soon Juan. The second editorial, "Judging Singapore's Judiciary," informed readers what an international legal organization had said about Singapore's courts.
Background Reading
Regarding the first editorial, we'll note that court proceedings are privileged under Singapore law, which means they can be reported -- though Singapore's media rarely do the job. Mr. Chee wrote a letter in response to the first editorial, which we published and which is cited in the contempt charge. We also published two letters from Mr. Lee's spokeswoman.
In the second editorial, we reported on the International Bar Association's critical study of the rule of law in Singapore. This is the same outfit that held its annual conference in Singapore last year, a meeting that Mr. Lee himself touted as a sign of confidence in Singapore's courts. The Law Society of Singapore is a member of the IBA. If reporting on what such a body says is contemptuous of the judiciary, then Singapore is saying that its courts are above any public scrutiny.
Again, we published a letter from the Singapore government responding to the editorial. This one was from the Law Ministry, which blasted the IBA report and us for repeating its "vague allegations." The IBA then weighed in, in a posting on its Web site, saying it wished "to correct some inaccurate comments" in Singapore's letter. It invites readers to read the report and "see for themselves" that its views are "based on comprehensive examples and evidence." The IBA homepage is www.ibanet.org.
In his ruling, Justice Tay Young Kwang refers to us as a "repeat offender." He's right in the narrow sense that this isn't the first time Singapore has pursued the Journal Asia for contempt. In 1985, the newspaper and its editors were sued over an editorial about legal actions against opposition politician J.B. Jeyaretnam. The editors apologized.
In 1989, the paper was sued for contempt again, this time over a news story that quoted Dow Jones's then-president, Peter Kann. Mr. Kann had criticized a libel judgment won by Mr. Lee against the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Journal Asia's sister publication. The paper, its editor, publisher, local distributor and local printer were all named. They lost.
We are not eager to return to that fractious era, when the Journal Asia had its circulation severely restricted in Singapore and the paper's reporters were unwelcome. Since 1991, when the newspaper and Mr. Lee reached a settlement, our relationship with Singapore had been more or less stable until the latest contempt charge.
Meanwhile, in September, the Far Eastern Economic Review lost a defamation case brought by Mr. Lee and his son, current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, over an interview it published with opposition leader Mr. Chee. The elder Mr. Lee has long used defamation suits to silence his critics in the press and among the political opposition.
As for this week's contempt ruling, the first line of Justice Tay's decision is revealing as a standard for Singapore justice. "Words sometimes mean more than what they appear to say on the surface," he writes, going on to interpret the words as contemptuous because they had an "inherent tendency" to "scandalise the court." The fine he levied, S$25,000 ($16,500), is the largest ever meted out for such an offense. Justice Tay expressed the hope that it will deter "future transgressions."
We'll pay the fine. We'll also continue to express our views about politics, the courts and other subjects that we think our readers should know about. And we'll let readers decide what to make of the judiciary in Singapore.
Free Trade versus Protectionism
There's a growing anti-trade sentiment in our country. Much of the dialogue is grossly misinformed. Let's try to untangle it a bit with a few questions and observations. First, does the U.S. trade with Japan and England? Put another way, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament? An affirmative answer is pure nonsense. When I purchased my Lexus, I had nothing to do with either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress. Through an intermediary, a Lexus dealer, I dealt with Toyota Motor Corporation.
While it might be convenient to speak of one country trading with another, such aggregation can conceal a lot of evil, particularly when people call for trade barriers. For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corporation? Some might reason that since Japan places restrictions on U.S. products entering their country, an appropriate retaliatory measure is not to allow Japanese products to freely enter the U.S. By the way, Japanese protectionist restrictions on rice imports force Japanese consumers to pay three or four times the world price for rice. How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country screws its citizens we should retaliate by screwing our citizens?
Since there is no moral argument for preventing one person from trading with another, anti-traders shift their argument to a patriotic appeal such as suggesting that we're losing our manufacturing sector. That doesn't square with the facts. According to a report given by Dr. William Strauss, senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, titled "Is U.S. Losing Its Manufacturing Base?" the answer is no. In each of the past 60 years, U.S. manufacturing output growth has averaged 4 percent and productivity growth has averaged 3 percent. Manufacturing is going through the same process as agriculture. In 1900, 41 percent of American workers were employed in agriculture; today, only 2 percent are and agricultural output is greater. In 1940, 35 percent of workers were employed in manufacturing jobs; today, it's about 10 percent. Again, because of huge productivity gains, manufacturing output is greater.
The decline in manufacturing employment is not limited to the U.S. Since 2000, China has lost over 4.5 million manufacturing jobs. In fact, nine of the top 10 manufacturing countries, which produce 75 percent of the world's manufacturing output (the U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada, and Mexico), have lost manufacturing jobs but their manufacturing output has risen.
Despite the pretense of being a free trade nation, the U.S. has significant barriers to trade that come in the form of tariffs, quotas and steep regulatory barriers. Our restrictions are just not as onerous as many other countries but there's a push to make them so. It's simple politics. The people who face foreign competition, say management and workers in the auto industry, are well organized, have narrowly shared interests and the resources to have considerable clout in Washington to get Congress to enact trade barriers. Restricting foreign competition means higher prices for their products, and hence higher profits and fuller employment in their industry. The people who are benefited by foreign competition, say auto consumers, have widely dispersed interests; they are not organized at all and have little clout in Washington. You never see consumers descending on Washington complaining about cheap prices for foreign products; it's always domestic producers who do the complaining.
The relationship between prosperity and economic freedom, including free trade, is a no-brainer. But if you need hard evidence, check out the Heritage Foundation's "Index of Economic Freedom." You'll find that nations having the greatest measure of economic freedom are the most prosperous and peaceful.
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