Intellectual And Policy Corruption. by Richard W. Rahn

Government corruption can take many forms. Last week, most of those forms could be seen in the actions of the Obama administration — everything from government officials taking simple bribes, to covering up wrongdoing, to using taxpayer money to pay off political supporters, to using government prosecutors to punish enemies, to failing to fulfill its fiduciary duty to citizens by not performing cost-benefit analyses before taking actions. Promulgating policies that knowingly hurt millions of people is far more serious than a government official requesting a cash bribe — as despicable as that may be. Pushing for tax increases without first getting rid of counterproductive or useless programs and cleaning up mismanagement is an example of policy corruption.

A Swiss Response to American Fiscal Imperialism. by Daniel J. Mitchell

Switzerland is in the unfortunate position of being bullied and harassed by the U.S. government. The crux of the problem is that the United States arguably has the world's worst tax system for international activity, and this creates conflict with other nations, particularly ones that have good tax laws that attract investment.

This has resulted in a number of different attacks against Swiss sovereignty. On the multilateral front, the Obama Administration is actively supporting the anti-tax competition project of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Mandating Contraception. by Doug Bandow

When the Obama administration effectively nationalized American health care, it took over medical decisions best left to individuals. The administration also subordinated religious liberty to politics. Today the Senate will vote on an amendment to protect people of faith.

Obamacare's chief characteristic is substituting a one-size fits all template for today's imperfect but decentralized system. Washington insists that it knows best for 313 million Americans and intends to impose its will on the recalcitrant. The latest manifestation of Uncle Sam's soft tyranny is the administrative diktat that abortifacients, sterilization, and contraceptives are forms of "preventive" care which must be provided "free" through health insurance.

Blind Ambition Is Not a Presidential Job Qualification. by Gene Healy

Are you depressed about the shape of the 2012 presidential race? Maybe you're not depressed enough.

Nobody who wants the presidency too badly ought to be trusted with it. George Washington struck the right note in his first inaugural: "No event could have filled me with greater anxieties" than learning of his election.
Yet, as the powers of the presidency have grown far beyond what Washington could have imagined, the selection process has changed in ways that make it vanishingly unlikely that a latter-day Washington will seek the job.

Sickening Regulation. by Michael D. Tanner

Never underestimate the brilliance of our federal bureaucracy.

The Department of Health and Human Services has announced that it must delay implementation of new reimbursement codes for Medicare. Those new regulations would have increased the total number of reimbursement codes from the current 18,000 to more than 140,000 separate codes. The delay will undoubtedly come as a relief for physicians who will have additional time to try to understand the bureaucratic complexity of rules that, for example, apply 36 different codes for treating a snake bite, depending on the type of snake, its geographical region, and whether the incident was accidental, intentional self-harm, assault, or undetermined. The new codes also thoroughly differentiate between nine different types of hang-gliding injuries, four different types of alligator attacks, and the important difference between injuries sustained by walking into a wall and those resulting from walking into a lamppost.

By Charles Krauthammer

It’s been a wild ride, but the story line of the Republican race remains remarkably simple and constant: It’s Mitt Romney and the perishable pretenders.
Five have come and gone, if you count the Donald’s aborted proto-candidacy. And now the sixth and most plausibly presidential challenger just had his moment — and blew it in Michigan.

It’s no use arguing that Rick Santorum won nearly as many Michigan delegates as Romney. He lost the state. Wasn’t Santorum claiming a great victory just three weeks ago when he shockingly swept Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado — without a single convention delegate being selected?

By Robert Samuelson

WASHINGTON -- If you believe the conventional wisdom, the presidential election is virtually finished. Barack Obama will win. Perhaps in a walk. Game over.
I don't say this as a preference one way or the other -- I have reached the stage in my journalistic career when I disapprove of most politicians -- but simply as a matter of fact and logic.

The conventional wisdom, as I read it, rests heavily on the following propositions.

The Breitbart Experience

By Robert Stacy McCain

Hanging out with the man who led a New Media revolution.

Last Friday, at 10:30 p.m., Andrew Breitbart sent me a two-word text message: "Where y'at?"
We were both in Troy, Michigan, that night. He was scheduled to speak at the next day's Americans for Prosperity forum. I was in town to cover the Republican presidential primary campaign. Knowing he would be in town, I'd called him earlier, to find out where he would be hanging out, and when he texted me, I called again and learned he was at Morton's steakhouse, down the road from the Marriott Hotel where the AFP conferees were staying. Soon I joined him at Morton's, where we talked a while. He said he had become bored with the GOP presidential race. Instead, he was focused on new angles of attack on the Left. We went over to the Marriott, where Breitbart joined a dozen or so people hanging out in the lobby bar.

Energy Will Be Obama's Waterloo

By William Tucker

And it will all be his doing -- blaming Bush won't cut it anymore.

When President Obama suggested last week that we might eventually be replacing oil with algae, Mark Whittington of Yahoo suggested that the President had reached his "lunar base moment." It was an apt analogy. Just as Newt Gingrich's musings about a moon colony finally made the public cock its head a little when listening to him, so the moment may have arrived when the environmentalism fantasies that inhabit the President's brain will finally be exposed to the light of day.

The Man Vladimir Putin Fears Most

Alexei Navalny, the rising star of Russia's opposition, on his political strategy and why the latest czar is 'trapped' by power.

By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

Moscow
The outcome is a foregone conclusion. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia's paramount ruler since 2000, will reclaim his old job as president in Sunday's elections. The drama comes in the aftermath.
Anticorruption blogger and activist Alexei Navalny will be in the middle of it—as he has been over the past three months of Russia's unexpected political awakening. By the tens of thousands, Russians shed their fear and apathy to protest December's fraud-ridden parliamentary elections and Mr. Putin's hold on power. From a crowded stage of opposition figures, Mr. Navalny has emerged as the charismatic and fresh face of the movement.

An empiricist with a moral sense—and he could write too.

One of our editors once made the mistake of referring to James Q. Wilson as a sociologist, and he was quickly rebuked with a note that, no, the professor was a political scientist. Jim Wilson liked to get things right, which as far as we can remember he always was.
Wilson was indeed a political scientist, and in the old-fashioned sense: He only concluded what the evidence allowed, and he applied this method to politics, broadly defined as the choices we make about how we govern ourselves. Over his career, as the modern university grew more and more obscurantist and irrelevant, Wilson's scholarship—on everything from poverty to crime to bureaucracy to morals—moved public policy and changed America for the better. He died yesterday, at 80, from leukemia.

By George F. Will

“The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. The next and most urgent counsel is to take stock of reality.”
— William F. Buckley,

On that evening 48 years ago — it was still summer, early in the presidential campaign — Buckley, whose National Review magazine had given vital assistance to Barry Goldwater’s improbable capture of the Republican nomination, addressed the national convention of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom. Buckley told his fervent acolytes that “when we permit ourselves to peek up over the euphoria” of Goldwater’s nomination, we see that it occurred “before we had time properly to prepare the ground.”

Once upon a time, American presidents unveiled their annual budgets to Congress with green-eyeshade seriousness and a certain degree of policy suspense.
But it has been quite a while since President Ford dragged members of his Cabinet with him into the State Department auditorium while he attempted to dazzle reporters with his budgetary know-how about block grants, Medicare reimbursements, and federal funding for ballistic missiles. Ford, running in 1976 for an office he inherited when Richard Nixon resigned, thought his commanding knowledge of the executive branch and of Congress could help him appeal to voters. It didn’t work out that way when a Georgia peanut farmer beat him.

How to Reverse Obama's "Soft Despotism". By Michael Barone

Many Republican House members, and the bloggers and tea partiers who cheered their victory in gaining a majority in November 2010, seem to be seething with discontent and eager for confrontation.
They believe, reasonably, that that victory represented a repudiation of the vast expansion of government by the Obama Democrats. They want to see those policies reversed, and pronto. And if the dilatory Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the all-campaign-no-governance President Obama want a confrontation, so much the better.

By Michael Gerson

WASHINGTON -- Before Barack Obama can defeat his opponents he must first be rescued from his friends.
Some of them are now suggesting that his contraceptive mandate on religious institutions was a skilled political stratagem. "I've found by observing this president closely for years," argues Andrew Sullivan, "that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it." Religious conservatives are now identified, he says, with "opposition to contraception." Republicans have achieved "fusion with the Vatican." Obama is evidently playing the very deep game.

By Larry Kudlow

Mitt Romney snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Michigan by unveiling a pro-growth, 20 percent tax-cut plan and by resetting his limited-government spending cuts and entitlement reforms. In other words, he delivered an economic-growth package. It served him well.
It may not have been the only factor in his victory last week, but it put him squarely in the voter zeitgeist. And it may be apocryphal on Super Tuesday in Ohio, where he has come back to dead even after being down double digits.

What Jim Wilson taught me

By William Bennett

March 2, 2012, 11:40 am

Jim Wilson defined the highest reach of social science and made it possible for all of us to grasp it. He was a man of great Irish charm, wit, and probity.
I will always remember two things he taught me: one, a poignant memory of his own; the other, a formative message for me.
First: “During my adult life I have been part of five institutions—the Catholic Church, the University of Redlands, the United States Navy, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. If I were required to rank them by the extent to which free and uninhibited discussion was possible within them, I am very much afraid that the Harvard of 1972 would not rank near the top.”
Second, a lesson he taught me early on when I became drug czar. He taught me the most important insight about drugs; it guided all my policies, and I still believe it: “Drug use is wrong because it is immoral and it is immoral because it enslaves the mind and destroys the soul.”
As to his humor, we were sitting together at a roast for Norman Podhoretz’s 80th birthday. I gave a bit more of an emotional talk than we were all used to and when I sat back down he said, “You are a good Irishman, you finished.” We shall miss him, but he leaves his life on the minds of the men and women he taught. May he rest in peace.
William J. Bennett is former Secretary of Education and Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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Categories: Politics and Public Opinion, Society and Culture, U.S. Politics | Tags: James Q. Wilson

A brokered convention would be a disaster for the GOP

By Peter J. Wallison

March 2, 2012, 11:09 am

Get a hold of yourselves, folks. You are not thinking this through. Every time Mitt Romney loses a state or a caucus in this topsy-turvy Republican race, the media starts talking about a boomlet for Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, or some other candidate who might enter the race now or be nominated at a “brokered convention.” And there is always a Republican pundit or two—someone not aligned with any of the campaigns—who’s available to stroke his chin and opine that yes, we’re getting closer to just that kind of scenario.
Now, no one should exclude the possibility of really weird events occurring in U.S. politics this year. The international economic, financial, military, political, diplomatic, and oil scene—quite apart from the economic, employment, and energy picture in the United States—could easily produce major changes in the political lineup before November. But these are what Donald Rumsfeld used to call “known unknowns,” and not something anyone can plan to exploit.
However, there’s one fact that everyone should know and keep in mind: this year, there are 67 days between the end of the convention and the election. No matter what might have been possible in 1924, 1932, or even 1952, it is simply impossible for a candidate chosen at a convention in 2012 to raise the funds and put together a credible campaign in a little over two months. Can’t be done.
Republicans who want to beat Obama should stop talking about the possibility of a brokered convention. It only encourages the losing candidates to stay in the race and savage one another, and—even more likely—it stimulates financing sources that are keeping these tigers in the ring. To have any chance of beating Obama, the Republican convention this year will have to nominate one of the four candidates now in the field. Any other idea is both unrealistic and ultimately destructive to Republican chances.
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Categories: Politics and Public Opinion, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2012 campaign

Why Obama might raise taxes on the middle class if he’s reelected

By James Pethokoukis

March 2, 2012, 7:50 am

All the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Gone.
It would have been the Mother of All Tax Hikes, a $3 trillion tax increase during shaky economic times. It would have broken a campaign promise not to raise taxes on middle-income Americans.
President Obama was shockingly close to embracing such a plan back in 2009. And if he’s reelected in 2012, Obama may well reconsider the idea and let all the Bush tax cuts expire as they are scheduled to do in 2013.
At least, that’s the story—and prediction—told by journalist Noam Scheiber in his new book, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery.
Short version: In the fall of 2009, Obama’s chief congressional lobbyist Phil Schiliro cooked up a plan to extend the middle-class Bush tax cuts for two years while letting the upper-income tax cuts expire on schedule. If Congress couldn’t devise a way to pay for the $2.3 trillion extension of the middle-class cuts, they would expire in 2015. Schiliro easily sold White House budget director Peter Orszag on the idea. “[Orszag] believed the only practical way to balance the budget was to repeal all the Bush tax cuts, not just the upper-income variety.”
Orszag then presented the plan to Obama:

… the administration’s chief wonk—Barack Obama—was intrigued. He asked a series of encouraging questions about how the proposal would work. According to two sources in the room, he was taken with both the political merits—that is, putting Republicans on the defensive—and the policy rationale of lopping trillions off the deficit. He gave no indication that he was troubled by the plan’s most explosive feature: that it would likely break a central campaign promise—not raising taxes on the middle class—one Republicans would surely wrap around his neck with populist glee.

The White House political team and Vice President Joe Biden eventually helped kill the idea. Intriguingly, however, Scheiber thinks that if Obama is reelected, letting all the Bush tax cuts expire—which will happen automatically if Congress does nothing—”may simply be too tempting to pass up.”
As Scheiber explains:

What is clear is that, having been tempted to end all of the Bush tax cuts in 2009, the president would only find the idea more attractive were he to win a second term. At that point, he will never again stand before the voters, at least not as a presidential candidate. There would be nothing to stop him from flouting a campaign promise, even one as sensitive as his tax pledge.
Perhaps most important of all, killing the entire zombie army of Bush tax breaks would be far, far easier than only slaying the upper-income portions. To pull off the former, Obama literally has to do nothing—the tax breaks are slated to expire on their own. To do the latter, he would have to pass legislation extending the middle-class elements. As a practical matter, that means rounding up majorities in the House and Senate, which seems unimaginable given the likely balance of power on Capitol Hill after the election. (There is a third option, which entails striking a deal with Republicans to junk the entire tax code and rebuild it from scratch, but it’s hard to envision this happening between Election Day and December 31.)

My take: Now we have even more evidence as to why Obama created a debt commission—and then rejected its recommendations. It didn’t tax or spend enough.
See, the Bowles-Simpson commission recommended a) cutting individual tax rates to as low as 23 percent, b) eliminating many if not all tax breaks, and c) capping federal spending and revenue at 21 percent of GDP. At that level, taxes as a share of the economy would be about 3 percentage points above the historical average, a massive tax hike.
But even that would not be enough taxpayer dough for many liberal economists, such as those that work in the Obama White House. They believe federal spending will need to be much, much higher in the future due to a combination of factors: an aging population, rising healthcare costs, the need for more public “investment,” and greater debt service costs when interest rates eventually rise. (Indeed, three liberal think tanks recently constructed long-term budget plans, and their average projection for federal spending by 2035 was 25 percent of GDP—with a bullet.)
Generating the tax revenue that Obama would need to finance all his spending would require sharply higher taxes on the wealthy—and everybody else. And according to Scheiber, Obama might well like to start the taxathon with a $3 trillion tax hike on all Americans. Of course, that still wouldn’t be enough, which is why the next step might be a value-added tax.
Obama has been boasting that he has “five more years” in office. To do what, exactly? Now we know.
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Categories: Economic Policy, Fiscal Policy and Taxes, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: Obamanomics, taxes

Why Ron Paul’s isolationism appeals to the young

By Henry Olsen

March 1, 2012, 1:03 pm

Many have noted how Ron Paul does extremely well among the 18- to 29-year-olds in primary and caucus states. In fact, it goes deeper than that. In virtually every state, Paul’s support is directly correlated with age—the older the voter is, the less likely she or he is to support Paul.
Looking closely at the exit poll data, Paul’s support normally drops off at two age cuts—30 and 40. A 40-year-old is someone born in 1971—she/he has no adult memory of the pre-Berlin Wall period. A 30-year-old was born in 1981—his or her primary adult memories of foreign affairs are in the post–9/11 era. Thus, Ron Paul’s support is directly correlated to a worldview in which the United States is an unchallenged superpower and the only question appears to be how we should use our unquestioned power.
Those of us who are older worry that this period of unquestioned security and global preeminence will not last without our vigilance. That argument and worldview seems incomprehensible to many younger than us because of their life experience. The challenge for those of us who favor a stronger international presence and maintaining the defense budget is how to explain our policy conclusions to a generation that doesn’t share our premises.
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Categories: Foreign and Defense, U.S. Politics | Tags: isolationism, ron paul, young voters

Recovery Winter: Is Obama’s economic ‘comeback’ starting to fade?

By James Pethokoukis

March 1, 2012, 11:42 am

It’s a long way from here to Election Day. At this point in 2011, Japan’s earthquake/tsunami/nuclear emergency, the Arab Spring, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the fall of Gaddafi, Occupy Wall Street, and the escalation of Europe’s debt crisis were still in the future.
Anyone know what’s going to happen with Greece? How about Israel and Iran? As I said, it’s a long way from here to there, and much can happen to rattle the fragile-but-anemic U.S. recovery—and the presidential election landscape.
But as The New York Times reports today, President Obama has begun to sound a “Morning in America” theme:

President Obama has a new message: America has gotten its groove back. In ways large and small, Mr. Obama has seized on a narrative of national optimism in recent weeks, offering a portrait of a country that, guided by him and powered by the American worker, is making a comeback. It is a narrative with strong echoes of President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign and one that is intended to provide a contrast with today’s less sunny Republican candidates.

But the Times also sounds a cautionary note:

Still, while Mr. Obama has enjoyed a strong few weeks with improving poll numbers and economic data, there is danger in the optimism strategy. Things could turn at any moment and make him seem out of touch, with oil prices rising and foreign policy crises looming in Iran and Afghanistan and with European debt. Some liberals argue that the optimistic tone is out of step with the country’s mood and that a campaign highlighting his differences with Republicans on economic issues has more promise.

“Things could turn around at any moment.” Is that moment already here? A string of economic reports today show Obama’s supposed mini-boom may already be losing strength:
1. Manufacturing cooling? The Institute for Supply Management said on Thursday that its index of national factory activity fell to 52.4 last month from 54.1 the month before. The reading was shy of expectations of 54.5.

2. Construction spending softening? Construction spending dropped 0.1 percent to an annual rate of $827 billion, “confounding analysts’ expectations for a 1 percent increase,” Reuters reports. It was the first drop since July 2011. Between the manufacturing and construction numbers, Goldman Sachs revised its Q1 GDP forecast downward to 1.9 percent.
3. Consumer spending weakening? Here is JPMorgan: “Real consumption came in flat in January, and past data were revised so consumption was flat in December (previously -0.1 percent) and November (previously +0.1 percent) as well. This soft trajectory for consumption adds downside risk to our GDP forecast for 1Q (currently 2.0 percent saar), and it looks like real spending will increase slightly below the 1.0 percent mark during the quarter. Despite improvement in the labor market in recent months, the consumption data have been lackluster—nominal spending increased only 1.3 percent saar over the three months through January while real consumption edged down 0.1 percent saar.”
And here is Barclays: “Directly plugging this in to our Q1 GDP tracking estimate has a significant effect – real GDP growth is now tracking 1.5 percent q/q (saar), down from 2.5 percent.”
And earlier this week there was a bum durable goods report which saw new orders for U.S. manufactured goods falling in January by the most in three years, according to Bloomberg.
I hope this isn’t the start of a trend. America is desperate for faster economic growth. As the always insightful Jed Graham of Investor’s Business Daily points out, “U.S. GDP hasn’t risen 4% or more in any quarter since the first quarter of 2006. That’s by far the longest such stretch on record going back to 1950. The only other sizable sub-par stretch was a three-year span from late 2000 to mid 2003 during the prior recession and sluggish recovery.”
We need a Recovery Winter … and Spring and Summer and Fall. So does the Obama campaign if it is going to sell Americans that the U.S. economy has finally turned a corner.
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Categories: U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2012 campaign, U.S. economy

Highlights from the Arizona and Michigan exit polls

By Karlyn Bowman and Andrew Rugg

February 29, 2012, 10:05 am

Arizona
In Arizona, Hispanics were 8 percent of the electorate. Thirty-eight percent voted for Romney, 23 percent for Santorum, and 20 percent for Gingrich. The top issue in the poll was the economy (49 percent), followed by the budget deficit (30 percent), illegal immigration (13 percent), and abortion (6 percent).
Attitudes in Arizona and elsewhere about illegal immigrants appear to be softening. Thirty-four percent of respondents said most illegal immigrants working in the United States should be offered a chance to apply for citizenship, 28 percent said they should be allowed to stay as temporary workers, and 34 percent said they should be deported. In 2008, those responses were 24, 29, and 44 percent respectively.
Forty-eight percent of working women in Arizona, a category the exit pollsters broke out for the first time, voted for Romney. Twenty-seven percent voted for Santorum.
Sixty-four percent of Arizonans supported the Tea Party. They supported Romney 43 percent to Santorum’s 31 percent.
Mormons were 14 percent of the electorate, and as expected, they voted overwhelmingly for Romney.
In Arizona, Santorum was voted the “true conservative.” Fifteen percent of voters said that was the most important candidate quality for them. Forty percent said beating Obama was their top quality. Fifty-six percent of those voters selected Romney. Fifty-seven percent in another question said Romney was most likely to defeat Obama.
Fifty-three percent had a favorable opinion of John McCain. Forty percent had an unfavorable opinion.
The Arizona electorate was more conservative than in 2008. Four years ago, 66 percent identified as conservative. Of those, 30 percent said they were very conservative. This year, 74 percent identified as conservative, with 38 percent identifying as very conservative.
Michigan
As he did in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Ron Paul won the vote of the youngest age group in the poll.
Union members (14 percent of Michigan primary voters) and union households (23 percent) voted for Santorum.
Thirty-one percent reported that someone in their household had been laid off in the last three years. They voted for Romney over Santorum by 42 to 36 percent.
Working women in the GOP primary were 21 percent of the electorate. They narrowly supported Romney over Santorum, 40 to 38 percent. Married voters narrowly and unmarried voters more widely supported Romney.
Santorum won the votes of the 30 percent of primary voters who said they were very conservative. Romney won the crucial somewhat conservative vote and the moderate to liberal vote.
Tea Party support was more tepid in Michigan than Arizona. Fifty-two percent supported the movement. Santorum won voters who strongly supported the Tea Party movement (28 percent of the electorate) and those who strongly opposed the movement (12 percent of the electorate).
Catholics supported Romney over Santorum, 44 to 37 percent.
Santorum won the votes of the 16 percent of voters who said being a true conservative was the most important quality to them (58 to 18 percent for Romney). Romney won the vote of those who said being able to defeat Obama was the most important quality (32 percent of voters).
Only 35 percent of the electorate said the recent debate was the most important factor in their vote. Romney won this group by five points over Santorum. Sixty percent said the debate was not the most important factor and they narrowly supported Santorum, 40 percent to Romney’s 38 percent. In general, Santorum won among voters who said they decided how they were going to vote in the past few days. Those who had decided earlier supported Romney.

A toast to James Q. Wilson by Charles Murray

By The Editors

Charles Murray gave the following remarks at a Dec. 7, 2011, American Enterprise Institute dinner honoring the life and work of James Q. Wilson.
Back in 1975, I came across an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “Lock ‘em up and other thoughts on crime.” I loved it even before I read a word. What a title, at a time when crime was soaring but academicians were still saying prison was barbaric and counterproductive. I loved the article even more after I read it. The mastery of the literature, the calm, wry voice of the author, the effortless prose. James Q. Wilson instantly became my hero.

By Arnold Kling

There are now so many versions of ‘what's wrong with the economics profession’ that, with apologies to V.S. Naipaul, I could describe the state of economics as one of a million mutinies.

In August of 2008, Olivier Blanchard, a dean of establishment economics (now serving as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund), produced a working paper that surveyed the field of macroeconomics. He described what he saw as a stable consensus, concluding with the pronouncement, “The state of macro is good.”¹
A month later, the financial crisis took a turn for the worse, the economy fell into its worst slump since the Great Depression, and economists are not so smug any more. There are now so many versions of “what's wrong with the economics profession” that, with apologies to V.S. Naipaul, I could describe the state of economics as one of a million mutinies.

By Ambassador Richard S. Williamson

Russia is yet another example of President Obama's naïve foreign policy, which has left American interests weakened and our values compromised.

President Obama’s much-touted reset policy with Russia has failed. Instead of democratic reform, Vladimir Putin has led an authoritarian drift that is crowding civil society, repressing a free press, and denying free and fair elections to the Russian people. Meanwhile, on missile defense, Iran, Syria, and other issues, Russia is consistently taking positions in opposition to U.S. interests.

By Tino Sanandaji

The American Left is far more interested in northern Europe than it is in southern Europe, despite the fact that southern Europe constitutes the majority of the population of the core 15 European Union members. Why?

A century or so ago, German sociologist Max Weber observed that Protestant countries in northern Europe tended to outperform the Catholic and Orthodox countries in the south of the continent. Weber believed that the northerners had a stronger work ethic, were thriftier, and possessed more of what is today called “social capital.” Though Weber attributed these differences to Protestantism itself, we should note that countries did not randomly convert to Protestantism. The roots for the cultural differences might very well go even deeper.

By Peter Wehner

Professor Jim Wilson was, for many of us, a strong beacon light. He dispelled darkness with nearly every word he wrote.

With the death of James Q. Wilson earlier today, America has lost a towering intellectual figure. The mind reels when thinking about the issues Professor Wilson wrote about with such precision, intelligence, originality, and elegance: crime and human nature; drug legalization, science, and addiction; moral character; benevolence; free will; families and communities; race; business ethics and capitalism; American government; democracy and the Islamic world; and much more.
James Q. Wilson was not only America’s pre-eminent political and social scientist, he was one of our leading moral philosophers. There was no subject, it seemed, on which he couldn’t deepen our understanding.

By Lara Crouch

Cutting through the myths and mischaracterizations of the U.S.-China relationship.

American leaders are overhyping the China threat, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently argued. Is he right?
Unfortunately, Chapman mischaracterizes American concerns on both the security and economic fronts. In the process, he is dismissive of very valid issues and perpetuates two age-old myths about the U.S.-China relationship.

By Tevi Troy

It is a shame that future presidents will not be able to benefit from James Q. Wilson’s personal wisdom and guidance, as so many of them did for the past four decades.

James Q. Wilson is no more, and the conservative intellectual establishment has suffered a terrible loss. While Professor Wilson is and will continue to be justly remembered and celebrated for his impressive and important body of scholarship, he has also served another key role over the last four decades—as an adviser to every Republican president since Richard Nixon.

How to end panics and impose market discipline

By William Isaac and Richard Kovacevich

The US has suffered three severe financial crises in the past 40 years, each driven by excessive risk taking, particularly in real estate. Regulators had plenty of authority to rein in the abuses but failed to do so. This is partly because the US regulatory system is fragmented and politicised and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law made it worse. But even if we had the ideal regulatory structure, we could not rely on regulation alone to control excesses in the financial industry that too often lead to crises.
To end the boom-bust cycles and accompanying panics, we do need smarter, more effective and less politicised regulation – but it is also critically important to impose stronger marketplace discipline on financial institutions, particularly the largest that were previously regarded as too big to fail.

Saturday, March 3, 2012