ARNOLD KLING ON THE DANGEROUS NEW TACTICS OF THE LEFT

The Left's tactical weapons: "The last 25 years have seen an intellectual victory by the Right over the Left on the topic of central planning. ... Thus, conservatives might be lulled into thinking that we have beaten back the argument for big government. However, the Left has not gone away. It has mutated, and as Sebastian Mallaby suggests, those of us who advocate small government may very well be losing...

The left uses the Corruption weapon to attack the legitimacy of business enterprises, conservatives, and Republicans... Faced with the Corruption charge, the Right faces a dilemma. Nobody wants to defend mistakes or adverse results. However, if the Right caves in to every demand, then the corporate profits that do not disappear under a mountain of regulation will be extracted via shakedowns (called "settlements"). If business and war had to be conducted perfectly to be conducted at all, then we would have not have any private enterprise in our economy and we would not have won a single war in our history.... In order to reduce the abuse of the Corruption weapon, we need to make a habit of always pointing out cases where it is used to attack rather than to strengthen our society. Our goal should be to help sensitize the public to the difference between constructive criticism on the one hand and efforts to undermine our economy and our foreign policy on the other... We also need to emphasize to the public the large costs of Nader-esque crusades. Hasty legislation, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, tends to penalize decent, well-run corporations a great deal, for very little benefit in constraining the future behavior of unscrupulous individuals.

The other banner under which the Left marches is Compassion. If you favor more market-oriented approaches to health care, education, or Social Security, you will be accused of a lack of compassion -- of throwing grandma out of her wheelchair.... Instead of trying to placate the Left on Compassion, I believe that we ought to emphasize the ways in which government compassion is an oxymoron. In particular: The taxes to fund government compassion create new groups of needy people. For example, many of the young families without health insurance pay thousands of dollars a year in Social Security taxes.... Government compassion does not target the needy, but instead leads to state control of everyone's education, health care, and retirement security. In Thomas Sowell's phrase, "The left uses the poor as human shields".. For reducing the population of the needy, economic growth works better than government aid. As Robert Lucas (Nobel, 1995) put it recently, "of the vast increase in the well-being of hundreds of millions of people that has occurred in the 200-year course of the industrial revolution to date, virtually none of it can be attributed to the direct redistribution of resources from rich to poor. The potential for improving the lives of poor people by finding different ways of distributing current production is nothing compared to the apparently limitless potential of increasing production."

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ELSEWHERE

A touching memoir by Father John, a former Anglican who grew so disgusted with the secularism of his church that he left it and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. "Our decision to leave was difficult, and not made easily. But, by the mercy of God, we had found the Orthodox Church, and faith, and way of life; and what had started as a way of fleeing from the coming apostasy of ECUSA became an increasingly powerful desire to embrace the faith of the Church that has existed since the day of Pentecost, her continuity unbroken, her faith unchanged. We started out as refugees; and found ourselves coming home. There are not words, nor time enough, to adequately say "thank you" to God for His mercy and favor in bringing us home. If any Anglicans happen to stray across this page, let me say again to you that the faith you desire is safe, and secure, and found today where it has always resided: in the Orthodox Church."

BRAVO for Michelle Malkin!: I thought that what the WSJ says about immigration -- it champions open borders -- was pretty strange but Michelle really gives it to them.

Job-stealers almost all American: "Quite often we see headlines about U.S. jobs being "lost" overseas or even "stolen" abroad. Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a report that said that just a small fraction of U.S. jobs lost were lost to overseas workers. "Of the 239,361 private sector nonfarm workers who were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days in the first quarter of 2004, the separations of 4,633 workers were associated with the movement of work outside of the country""

But what about the farm vote! "Eliminating global trade tariffs and other protective barriers would lift at least 500 million people out of poverty over 15 years, according to a new study released on Thursday.... In the study, titled "Trade Policy and Global Poverty," Cline also argues that lifting trade barriers would enable rich industrial nations to convey about twice as much gain to developing countries as they currently provide through foreign aid -- at a benefit rather than cost to their own consumers"

I guess it is worth something that "Britain fought a successful rearguard battle to preserve national vetoes on key policy areas such as taxation, social security, foreign and defense policy and criminal law" in the EU constitution negotiations.

Norm Weatherby points out that we COULD stop terrorist kidnappings and beheadings in their tracks if we really wanted to.

Bureaucracy at work: The Minnesota Commerce Department, believing that discount gasoline is worse for consumers than ridiculously inflated gasoline prices, hit Arkansas-based Murphy Oil with a $70,000 fine, and Kwik Trip Inc. with a $5,000 fine, for not making sufficient profit on their gasoline, i.e., for charging too little for their gasoline.

Reagan the racist: "So, how did blacks fare under Ronald Reagan? From the end of 1982 to 1989, black unemployment dropped 9 percentage points (from 20.4 percent to 11.4 percent), while white unemployment dropped by only 4 percentage points. Black household income went up 84 percent from 1980 to 1990, versus a white household income increase of 68 percent. The number of black-owned businesses increased from 308,000 in 1982 to 424,000 in 1987, a 38 percent rise versus a 14 percent increase in the total number of firms in the United States"

Gipper? A reader explains: "George Gipp was a famous and very successful football player. Reagan played him in "Knute Rockne, All American". Rockne was the coach at Notre Dame college, played in this case by Pat O'Brein, a pro Irishman. When Gipp, known as the Gipper, was dying from pneumonia and a strep infection he is supposed to have said as encouragement to Notre Dame against Army - "win one for the Gipper." This is a high note in the movie, of course.

Another communist absurdity: Mongolians lost their surnames under Communism and are only now getting them back

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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