Bill Clinton, vapid celebrity

Former president and tabloid superstar Bill Clinton told the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Saturday that the world's three biggest problems are, in order, global warming, global inequality, and the "apparently irreconcilable" religious and cultural differences behind terrorism.

His solution for the three problems? Clean energy, an effort to find "the way to promote economic and political integration in a manner that benefits the vast majority of the people in all societies and makes them feel that they are benefited by it," and dialogue with Hamas.

All right, just for a moment, let's treat the man like a serious thinker and not like Arkansas's answer to Angelina Jolie.

He's wrong.

First, there is no reason to believe that global warming can be affected by the small changes it is possible for us to make (read "The awkward truth about global warming"). Regardless, the world thinks it's a great idea to force U.S. companies to pay crippling sums of money for new equipment that will make only a marginal difference in emissions. The world thinks it's a great idea to set up an international regime of penalties that acts as a wealth-transfer tax between the United States and everybody else. The U.S. Senate doesn't think it's a great idea, something Bill Clinton recognized when he boldly embraced the Kyoto Treaty and then never submitted it to the Senate for ratification.

There may be a deeper reason to pursue limits on U.S. industry in the name of climate change, and that brings us to the former president's second-ranked world problem, "global inequality."

The premise of Mr. Clinton's view is that wealth is distributed around the world in a random and inexplicable way, therefore fairness demands that those who have it, like the United States, give some of it to those who do not have it, like the African nations or perhaps China.

The premise is wrong because wealth is not distributed randomly around the world. The United States is wealthy because it has a free economy and a political system that protects individual rights and private property. People in the United States can farm, invest, build and create with the assurance that if their work brings a return, it will belong to them and not be seized (not entirely seized, anyway) in the name of "the people."

This system will work in any country, in any climate, in any era. To see the process in reverse, study the recent history of Zimbabwe. The country was a breadbasket for the region when its farms were private property, and when the land was seized by tyrant leader Robert Mugabe and handed off to cronies, the country descended into poverty and now pleads for food aid.

When a free country sends money and aid to a country that does not recognize or protect individual rights and private property, nothing changes. Three hours later, they're hungry again. And people like Bill Clinton are right there to shake a finger and tell you it's your fault for not sending more. Sometimes they throw in a threat that worldwide insurrection is around the corner unless you sign the check right now.

That brings us to the former president's third-ranked world problem, the irreconcilable religious and cultural differences that lead to terrorism.

The falsehood of this premise can be seen in the Palestinian territories right now. The Palestinian Muslims of Hamas and the Palestinian Muslims of Fatah's "armed wing," the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, are threatening to kill each other.

Why?

Here's how Knight Ridder explained it:

Hamas' overwhelming victory - it won at least 76 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian legislature - has created widespread anxiety among Fatah members who have relied on their political connections for secure paychecks that are now in jeopardy.

They have "relied on their political connections." Where there is no freedom in the economy, where all the jobs are handed out by the people who control the government, there will be a bloody struggle for control of the government. There's no other course open. It doesn't matter if the groups are divided along ethnic, religious, cultural, geographic or made-up gang lines. The fight stems from the fact that an individual's only path to economic security is through membership in the group. Loyalty is rewarded. Dissent is not a good career choice. This is the context in which grieving mothers of suicide bombers tell news cameras they are happy their sons are dead.

These so-called irreconcilable cultural and religious differences are always about money. A close look at the fight between the Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq reveals that they're arguing over control of the country's oil revenue. In Iraq, where "the oil belongs to the Iraqi people," the group that controls the government controls all the wealth of the country and the economic future of everybody in it. You bet they're fighting.

The only way to stop the fighting is to minimize the stakes. The state-owned enterprises must be privatized. Once the Iraqis can get high-paying jobs with private companies, jobs that can't be taken away by the government, they will be as bored with politics as we are.

People think high voter turn-out and a high level of political involvement are signs of a healthy democracy. Actually they're signs that the government has the power to kill you (think about draft protests during the Vietnam war) and is right on the edge of doing it.

You'd think Bill Clinton would know that.

Well, then, let's stop treating him like a serious thinker and recognize him for the superb performer that he is. The man knows how to read an audience:

Clinton won frequent enthusiastic applause -- not a common situation at the annual gathering in the Swiss Alps -- for articulating a global vision more conciliatory and inclusive than the one many of the assembled tend to associate with U.S. politics.

Conciliatory and inclusive. That's what the confused corporate titans in Davos think they should be. They should spend a little time reading Ayn Rand and maybe then they'd understand that it's not philanthropy but profit-hungry enterprise that is their greatest contribution to mankind.


Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property and the source notes that accompany it.

Death by unintended consequences

Hamas is in a pickle.

Look at it from their point of view: There they were, happily plotting their future as the minority party in the new Palestinian government, drawing up plans to divert international aid into their terror-funding bank accounts, thinking up new and ever-more-devastating terrorist acts to embarrass and castrate the majority government of Mahmoud Abbas and his corrupt, double-talking Fatah party. Ah, bliss.

And then, just when everything looked perfect, they won the elections outright.

Whoops.

Western governments are trying as hard as they can to explain that the Palestinians voted for jobs and health care, not for the destruction of Israel. But Hamas is unable to take the hint and play along with the fiction that would permit continued international financial aid. These people are nothing if not honest. They said they stand for the total destruction of Israel, and they mean it, and they're not going to stage the old Yasser Arafat tap-dance -- a conciliatory speech for the English-speaking world, and nuclear rhetoric for the home folks. It's nuclear rhetoric for everybody. They stand for the destruction of Israel, they're in an alliance with the almost-nuclear Iran, which also stands for the destruction of Israel and is funded by sixty-dollar-a-barrel oil, and they're ready to rumble.

What a headache for the Western governments. Now they have to do something.

Fortunately for the Western governments, Hamas now has a state, or something very close to it. That means their trademark bombing of Israeli civilians, once considered a stateless act of terrorism that can't be helped, could now be considered an official act of war that must be answered.

Oh, posh. Just when things were going so well for them.

Israel has already said it is thinking of withholding all the tax revenue that funds the Palestinian government, and the U.S. Congress certainly isn't going to be signing any checks made payable to Hamas, not in an election year. Imagine telling Americans who are waiting in line at the airport with their shoes in their hands that you're taking money out of their paychecks to help Hamas form an independent state. Last one out of the Capitol, turn out the lights -- oil is going to $100 a barrel and we have to save where we can.

So here's the choice for Hamas: double-talk or die. Either they have to pretend they don't favor the destruction of Israel, or they have to form a military alliance with Iran and take on Israel, the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and maybe even France. Russia and China may side with the Palestinians, but there's nothing in history to suggest they will spend a nickel to help them, let alone participate in a Third World War to save their sorry Hamases.

So maybe the news is good. Maybe the end of illusion is a useful starting point for a real solution.


Copyright 2006


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What's at stake in New Orleans

A new study from Brown University says New Orleans may lose 80 percent of its black population as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

Mayor Ray Nagin memorably promised that New Orleans will again be a "chocolate city," and politicians everywhere are ripping their garments in angst over the loss of what they like to call the "unique character" of the city.

Maybe everyone is insincere and these statements will vanish harmlessly into the atmosphere. But if they're serious, if this kind of thinking prevails and influences the recovery plans for New Orleans, here is what will happen.

Thirty years from now, the destroyed sections of New Orleans will still be fenced-off vacant lots covered in rubble.

The reason has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with freedom.

Freedom has three essential components, if you take the word of the 18th-century English legal scholars who influenced the U.S. Constitution. The fundamental rights of man are life, liberty and property.

Life, Sir William Blackstone wrote, means the right to personal security, the right to the legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of your life and limbs.

Liberty means the right to move freely from place to place.

Property means the right to the free use, enjoyment and disposal of all your acquisitions, "without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land."

It is possible that the laws of the land will be used to restrict property owners in New Orleans so that they cannot sell their devastated properties until everyone in the community approves of the plans for what is to be built there. It is possible that the fear of gentrification will utterly paralyze the rebuilding effort. Elected officials could attempt to pass laws requiring property owners to rebuild low-rent housing units in order to bring back renters who have fled the city.

In order to understand what's wrong with this idea, just do this one simple thing.

Imagine that it's your piece of property.

Suppose that before the storm, the property had small houses or an apartment building on it and you rented those housing units for whatever the market would bear, which wasn't much given the age and condition of the structures. But now, although you have to make a huge new investment in the property, you have the opportunity to build something new and perhaps to see much greater revenue.

Opposing your effort is a group of government officials elected by the majority of people who don't own a property like yours. They see the situation differently. They see a greedy landowner who is happy to take the government's aid grants and low-interest loans and tax breaks and then use them to build something well out of the price range of all the former residents.

Stand-off.

That's how you spend thirty years arguing about fenced-off rubble.

The solution -- good thing you're reading this blog because you won't hear it anywhere else -- is for landowners to assert their rights as property owners, to demand that the government get out of the way, to refuse to accept the government's money, to get private financing, and to start building. Put pressure on government officials to approve the projects, force them to play catch-up. It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

That's how you rebuild.


Copyright 2006

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Cut 'em off and let 'em starve

The Palestinian people have spoken. Overwhelmingly they favor the destruction of Israel.

At least we're not suffering from a failure to communicate. Or are we? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wishfully stated on Thursday that although the Palestinian people have "apparently voted for change," the U.S. government believes "their aspirations for peace and a peaceful life remain unchanged."

Oh, for God's sake.

How much money is the U.S. government providing to the Palestinian government? Why is there any reason to believe that the money will not be spent funding terrorism, now that Hamas, an open and admitted terrorist group, is the new Palestinian government?

Not one dollar more. Let them live off the product of the value system they just voted into power. Let them eat bullets.


Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read the earlier post, Ayn Rand's advice and the Gaza Strip pullout.

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The painful confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito

Columnist Robert Novak reports today that Democratic senators are being pressured by interest groups to filibuster the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, even though the lawmakers don't want to do it.

This sad and painful episode is brought to you by the Incorporation Doctrine, the Supreme Court's eighty-year-long workaround for the annoying problem that the Constitution has never been amended to ban race and gender discrimination, to protect privacy rights, or to make the Bill of Rights apply to state governments.

Interest groups are not wrong to believe that a judicially conservative Supreme Court could erode the civil rights of minorities and women, because those rights have no historical foundation in the text of the Constitution. They were called into being by the fevered imaginations of well-intentioned judges.

It's an unhappy fact of history that Plessy v. Ferguson, the 19th-century Supreme Court decision which declared that "separate, but equal" is all the Constitution requires in the area of racial equality, is an accurate expression of the intentions of the framers of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment.

If you're African-American or female, those guys were not your friends.

This is not to say that judicially conservative Supreme Court justices would try to overturn Brown v. Board of Education and allow the resegregation of the public schools. But, technically, they could.

And, technically, they could overturn Roe v. Wade, another well-intentioned product of fevered judicial imagination, along with a long list of cases from the 1960s that expanded the rights of criminal defendants by declaring that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments applied in state courts.

For example, it was 1961 before evidence seized illegally had to be excluded from trial in a state court. It was 1964 before Americans had the "right to remain silent" in a state criminal trial and 1966 before they had it in a police station. Up until 1968 the states were free to have a judge determine guilt or innocence in a criminal trial, because defendants had no constitutional right to be tried by a jury.

The Supreme Court giveth and the Supreme Court could taketh away.

The remedy for this precarious situation is a series of constitutional amendments that secure the rights we want and erroneously believe we already have. Beating up on scholarly, serious people like Samuel Alito accomplishes nothing.

Read more about it in The Secret Life of the Bill of Rights, just posted at www.SusanShelley.com, and also in A Retirement Plan for Sandra Day O'Connor.


Copyright 2006

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Osama's book club

I wish Osama bin Laden would recommend my book.

Osama bin Laden's disembodied voice on tape recommended Thursday that all Americans read William Blum's book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower. By the end of the day, the book (Third Edition, paperback, from Common Courage Press) had jumped in the Amazon.com sales rankings from 506,526 to 2,208.

The good news is, the CIA can stop trying to kill Osama. Within a week he'll be drowned in submissions.


Copyright 2006


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Did Miss America take our advice?

USA Today reported on Wednesday that the Miss America Pageant has decided to drop the games and gimmicks and return to being a traditional beauty pageant.

Did they take the free advice we posted last August? You be the judge. Read the post, "Exit Stage Left: Miss America Goes South," and read the USA Today story, "Viva Miss America: Back and in Vegas."


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Democrats go through the motions

One thing is striking about the first day of questioning, so far, in the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito.

The Democrats apparently have decided not to lay a glove on him.

Missing from today's hearing: follow-up questions, challenges, any interest at all in pinning the nominee down past the sweeping generalizations he has so far offered.

If you've missed the hearings to this point, catch up: precedent deserves respect, except when it doesn't; no one is above the law, except when the president operates in his "twilight zone" of extra powers; Congress has the power to legislate under the Commerce Clause, except when the Supreme Court thinks it's gone too far; and in the past when Judge Alito said he disagreed with the Warren Court's decisions and Roe v. Wade, he was just under the influence of other people and it has nothing to do with what he will do as a justice.

(By the way, one of the people whose influence he was under, Professor Alexander Bickel, is liberally cited in the appendix to "The 37th Amendment," the essay titled "How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing." If you're interested in the viewpoints that Judge Alito says influenced him to go into constitutional law, save yourself a lot of time and effort. Click here or here and take advantage of the six years of research that went into this ninety-or-so-page history. Footnotes and bibliography included.)

The interesting thing about the Democrats' passive pleasantries is the totally coincidental relationship to the latest opinion polls showing an increasing number of Americans willing to put the Democrats in charge of Congress again.

Then again, there are no coincidences.

Maybe the Democrats have decided to let the Republicans have their all-Scalia Supreme Court. It's really win-win for them. They look polite and responsible and unthreatening. And if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the Democrats can enjoy a cruise to victory in every contested House and Senate race.

Silence is the most volcanic thing in politics. If Roe is overturned, the pro-life politicians may find themselves swamped by a tide of previously uninvolved voters, exactly like the members of the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board, who put Intelligent Design into the science curriculum and are still sore where the door hit them.


Copyright 2006

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The boys of Article I

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said Sunday he will hold public hearings into the National Security Agency's secret warrantless wiretapping program and he has asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to testify.

Asked by CBS News if the attorney general had agreed to testify, the chairman said, "Well, I didn't ask him if he had agreed. I told him we were holding the hearings and he didn't object. I don't think he has a whole lot of choice on testifying."

Nice to see the United States Senate (U.S. Constitution, Article I) assert its constitutional authority to oversee the executive branch (U.S. Constitution, Article II).

Nice to see somebody stand up to the baseless assertions of unlimited presidential power in time of war.

Arlen Specter, freedom fighter. If he sticks to his guns, this will be a great show.

Copyright 2006

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The awkward truth about global warming

The British Journal Nature reported this week that scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California have pinpointed a surge of global warming so severe that it actually reversed the Earth's pattern of ocean currents.

It occurred 55 million years ago.

Scientists Flavia Nunes and Richard Norris say the planet's surface temperature rose between nine and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit over a period of a few thousand years, and it took about a hundred thousand years for the planet to recover before the ocean currents returned to their previous state.

The scientists said they are not certain what caused the global warming event.

Try to remember, did you drive a lot that day?

The scientists offered two guesses as to what triggered the temperature rise. They think it was likely caused by volcanic eruptions spewing out carbon dioxide, or possibly by coastal reservoirs of methane gas which were released from beneath icy soil when the seas receded.

The scientists went on to warn that their research proves that global warming is a terribly serious problem and we must do something to reduce our CO2 emissions before something terribly serious happens.

That's one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it is this: No matter what we do, it isn't going to amount to spit in the ocean.

We could shut down American industry, junk our cars, cork up our flatulent cattle herds, move into caves and stop exhaling, and global warming could very well go right on without us.

This is the point at which serious people make a disapproving face and say, "Well. We have to do something."

But do we?

Before we go off and approve some half-baked policy of half-wit half-measures, we ought to consider the possibility that nothing we do is going to make any difference at all and we might as well stop worrying about it and watch football. The playoffs are on.


Copyright 2006


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Judge Alito's dingbat handlers

The New York Times reports today that participants in the rehearsals for Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation hearings are very pleased with his performance. Wait until you hear why.

"He will have a couple hairs out of place," one participant said. "I am not sure his glasses fit his facial features. He might not wear the right color tie. He won't be tanned. He will look like he is from New Jersey, because he is. That is a very useful look, because it is a natural look. He's able to go toe-to-toe with senators, and at the same time he could be your son's Little League coach."

Wait, it gets worse.

In two weeks of murder boards organized last month by Rachel Brand of the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department, Judge Alito spoke confidently without notes, just as Chief Justice Roberts did before the committee. Like the chief justice, Judge Alito displayed an encyclopedic mastery of Supreme Court rulings. And again like the chief justice, he spoke at length without drinking from the pitcher of water or sampling the cookies on the table before him, participants said.

What a picture.

Pale, mussed-up, eyeglasses askew. Refusing to drink the water or eat the cookies.

First they roughed him up and then they tried to poison him.

He must have told them the president can't wiretap without a warrant.


Copyright 2006

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