LAWRENCE SUMMERS: ... The political debates take place within a universe that is shaped by the development of new ideas. Of those new ideas, none is more important than the rediscovery of Adam Smith and the idea that a decentralized system relying on price signals collects information and provides much more insurance than any kind of centrally planned or directed type of system.
INTERVIEWER: Talk about your own intellectual involvement as a young graduate student. What did you think of [Hayek] and Friedman?
LAWRENCE SUMMERS: ... That's a respect that is born of the power of his arguments as one considers them more and more deeply. But it's a respect that's also born of the lessons of the experience of the success of decentralization in a place like Silicon Valley and of the failures of centralization in places like Central Europe and Russia. ... If you think about it, it cannot be an accident that it is the same 15-year period when communism fell, when command-and-control corporations like General Motors and IBM had to be drastically restructured, when planning ministries throughout the developing world were closed down, and when the Japanese model of industrial policy proved to be a complete failure. There is something about this epoch in history that really puts a premium on incentives, on decentralization, on allowing small economic energy to bubble up rather than a more top-down, more directed approach, that may have been a more fruitful approach in earlier years.
BIG SNIP
INTERVIEWER: Let me just back up on Friedman before we carry on with that. Why was he such a devil figure in your youth?
LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Because he seemed, with his emphasis on individualism, freedom, and markets, to be so unconcerned with fairness and with the needs of the collective. I think what people came to appreciate is that there is a kind of ethic of "finders keepers" which says the people are entitled to what they produce, which also enters into concepts of fairness. Many of the ideas that were put forward in the name of redistribution and fairness seemed to do far more to hurt those who were well-off than to help those who were poorly off. And it was those losses, those attempts to be fair and redistribute, that led to some greater skepticism about the scope for government to direct and plan economic activity.
INTERVIEWER: So have those concerns gone away? And if you admire some of what Friedman's done, what's happened to those concerns? How do you reconcile those concerns about Friedman's lack of concern?
LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I think we've come to find that market-oriented mechanisms can do things to increase equity. The availability of private insurance provides tremendous insulation for millions of individuals. But I think we've also come to see that an excessive emphasis on equity can result in a leveling down rather than a leveling up, and what's important is to find ways of leveling up our income distribution. That's probably led to much more emphasis on the importance of education relative to the importance of income transfers than would have been the case a decade ago, and I think that's welcome.
BIG SNIP
At the same time we came to an increasing awareness of the dangers of stifling private initiative, because you can't know what form it will take and therefore if you stifle it there's the risk that you're going to have very large losses from stifling something very promising.
"I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of our Constitution. I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing."Senator Nunn felt the same way and attempted three times to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment which he called the "Jefferson Amendment". It required that Congress balance expenses with revenues.
The super-high efficiency minicar has become the Holy Grail for many environmentalists. But on Tuesday, a new study on minicar safety tossed some cold water on the dream. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) reported that in a series of test crashes between minicars and midsize models, minis such as the Smart car provided significantly less protection for their passengers.
"As a responsible American citizen, I couldn't just ignore the fact that there are a lot of Christian college students out there," said Roose, 21, now a Brown senior. "If I wanted my education to be well-rounded, I had to branch out and include these people that I just really had no exposure to."And ends with
Roose said his Liberty experience transformed him in surprising ways.Imagine what would happen if he stayed longer than a semester.
When he first returned to Brown, he'd be shocked by the sight of a gay couple holding hands — then be shocked at his own reaction. He remains stridently opposed to Falwell's worldview, but he also came to understand Falwell's appeal.
Once ambivalent about faith, Roose now prays to God regularly — for his own well-being and on behalf of others. He said he owns several translations of the Bible and has recently been rereading meditations from the letters of John on using love and compassion to solve cultural conflicts.
He's even considering joining a church.
Touchy, Touchy, Touchy [Jay Nordlinger]
Mention Southeast Asia, and liberals get very jumpy — as well they should. Here is a note from Worcester, Mass., re my column yesterday:What America should be ashamed of is their cowardly bombing of South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam for 12 years. Nixon and Johnson were terrorists who murdered millions of people in Indo-China. Three million Vietnamese are still suffering from the Agent Orange and have not received one cent in compensation from the US or Dow Chemical. Conservatives should be ashamed for their revisionist lies about the holocaust in Vietnam.Yep. Very touchy. Keep talking about Dow Chemical. Keep talking. One of the most amazing things George W. Bush did during his eight years as president was cite one of the most infamous headlines of the 20th century. Do you know it by heart? It appeared in the New York Times on April 13, 1975: “Indochina without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” This was just as the Khmer Rouge was coming to power.
They murdered between one-quarter and one-third of the Cambodian population.
“For most a better life”? You mean the afterlife?
Let me give you some of Bush’s speech from August 2007 — it was delivered to the VFW:. . . many argued that if we pulled out [of Vietnam] there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.And here Bush lays it out:
In 1972, one anti-war senator put it this way: “What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince, or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never have heard of?” A columnist for the New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the Communists. “It’s difficult to imagine,” he said, “how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” A headline on that story, datelined Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: “Indochina without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.And Bush is not just picking at old sores. He mentions all this for a present-day purpose:
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people rose against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”Holy-moly, what a speech. Did an American president really talk that way — less than two years ago? Seems impossible.
His number-two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al-Qaeda’s chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to “the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents.”
Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.” Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility — but the terrorists see it differently.
Sidwell’s Not for Just Anyone, You Know [Jay Nordlinger]
A reader points me to an extraordinary Washington Post editorial, published on March 2. You know the D.C. school-choice program the Democrats are killing? Two of the children who will have to go back to the public schools — with their violence and no learning — presently go to school with the Obamas’ children: at the famous Sidwell Friends. Their mother is Deborah Parker, who told the Post, “The mere thought of [the kids’] returning to public school frightens me.” “Tell her,” says the Post, “that vouchers don’t work, and she’ll list her children’s improved test scores, feeling of safety and improved motivation.” More from the editorial:But the debate unfolding on Capitol Hill isn’t about facts. It’s about politics and the stranglehold the teachers unions have on the Democratic Party. Why else has so much time and effort gone into trying to kill off what, in the grand scheme of government spending, is a tiny program? Why wouldn’t Congress want to get the results of a carefully calibrated scientific study before pulling the plug on a program that has proved to be enormously popular? Could the real fear be that school vouchers might actually be shown to be effective in leveling the academic playing field?
I will repeat: The problem with school choice — the problem with getting it enacted or kept — is that it involves caring about other people’s children. And that is very, very hard for many people to do.
One more thing: The killing of the D.C. program strikes me as mean — just plain mean. According to all we have been taught, isn’t that supposed to be the Republicans’ role?
Politicians and School Choice [Jay Nordlinger]
A reader writes,Jay,
Never mentioned: George W. Bush’s daughters graduated from a public high school in Austin, Texas.
Never mentioned: Sarah Palin’s school-age children attend public schools.
Never mentioned: Laura Bush was a public-school teacher.
Why are they not granted credibility when they advocate school choice?
Well . . .
"If I was willing to give up my life for Satchi, why would I not be willing to risk my happiness for her?"As a parent, I will do anything and everything to defend my children. It scares me how fiercely I feel for them. I have no doubt that 99% of all parents feel that way. And yet, and yet, we have a devastating divorce rate.
Reproduced without comment, an exchange from yesterday's energy hearing:
REP. CLIFF STEARNS, R-Fla.: Last September you made a statement that somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe, which at the time exceeded $8 a gallon. As Secretary of Energy, will you speak for or against any measures that would raise the price of gasoline?
SEC. CHU: As Secretary of Energy, I think especially now in today’s economic climate it would be completely unwise to want to increase the price of gasoline. And so we are looking forward to reducing the price of transportation in the American family. And this is done by encouraging fuel-efficient cars; this is done by developing alternative forms of fuel like biofuels that can lead to a separate source, an independent source of transportation fuel.
REP. STEARNS: But you can’t honestly believe that you want the American people to pay for gasoline at the prices, the level in Europe?
SEC. CHU: No, we don’t.
REP. STEARNS: No. But somehow, your statement, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” doesn’t that sound a little bit silly in retrospect for you to say that?
SEC. CHU: Yes.
More gems here.
I'm celebrating Earth Day for once just as my detractors would expect me to, flying across the country. As a result, I am unable to attend the Congressional hearings on the new cap-and-trade bill that it has now been confirmed will cost each household over $3000 (unless you believe that your taxes paying bureaucrats' salaries provides dollar-for-dollar benefit). Thankfully, my colleague Myron Ebell's testimony is available here. He doesn't mince words, our Myron.
Today is also the anniversary of the publication of my book The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About — Because They Helped Cause Them, still available on Amazon. Thanks to everyone who has already bought it. Unfortunately, with the small exception of some reverse direction on biofuel mandates, most of those catastrophes are still ongoing a year later.
What Will Cap-n-Trade Cost You? [David Freddoso from NRO]
Republicans have been arguing for some months that it will cost an average of $3,128 per household, based on an MIT study. The professor who did the study later disagreed, however, offering a much smaller figure of $215 (which he now says should really be $800). Republicans have subsequently been called "liars" and "pants on fire" by people with very loud voices for using the $3,128 figure.
But now, John McCormack writes, the MIT profesor admits that he wasn't counting as a "cost" the higher energy taxes that Obama's cap-n-trade will make consumers pay. On average, those higher taxes, based on the MIT study, will come to . . . $3,128 per American household. Whatever the federal government decides to do with the money after that (it could be redistributed or it could be used for more "green energy" projects), it is still taking that amount from the consumer up front.
If you live in the real world, your tax bill is an expense, not an asset as the professor has been reckoning it. So yes, cap-n-trade costs at least $3,128 to the average household.
Your text for Earth Day is provided in advance by John Tierney. No granola bars in sight.
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