Month: April 2009

It used to be that government simply took more and more of people's money as they succeeded (that's ll teach 'em to work hard!). Now, government is actually planning to directly transfer the wealth of specific business successes to the bottom line of specific business failures. Inevitable, I suppose.

Dreher, Linker, and Poulos are butting heads over moralistic therapeutic deism. Here's Linker:

Rod Dreher doesn't like this post at all. And why? Because if it weren't for traditionalist Christians like Dreher and Martin Luther King, Jr., there would have been no civil rights movement. Because apparently you need to be a traditionalist Christian to stand up for social justice and human rights. Gee, that's a pretty confusing way of using the term "traditionalist Christian." Let's see if I follow. All those devout Christian racists (and slave owners) in the American North and South over much of the past 400 years — they weren't traditionalists. But the abolitionists  — they were traditionalists. And so were Christians who protested for civil rights. But not the bigots beating those protesters to a pulp in the name of Christian tradition and authority. They weren't traditionalists. And yet, those who at this very moment proudly oppose the expansion of civil rights to gay men and women in the name of Christian tradition and authority — they're traditionalists. As I said, this is pretty confusing. And ridiculous.

There is something repellent about the way in which the successors of those who defended slavery and segregation on Biblical grounds now seek to align themselves with Martin Luther King Jr, and the black churches that resisted Jim Crow. Repellent, but not surprising. The self-righteousness of these people is matched only by their imperviousness to reality.

Ezra Klein argues that they don't:

When you look at percentage of total tax liabilities, the rich do in fact bear a heavier burden. But it's because they have so much more money. They are not bearing a heavier burden as a percentage of their incomes. They're bearing it in relation to everyone else's incomes. Indeed, it's only because the sheer levels of income inequality in this country are frankly unintuitive that Fleischer can even write this sort of dreck. People hear that the top 20 percent pay almost 70 percent of the country's income taxes and nod their head. That's unfair! But it mainly seems unfair because people don't know the top 20 percent accounts for almost 60 percent of the national income.

As always, the less educated:

The overall unemployment rate for the more educated is only 4.3 percent. Individuals with a high school degree, but no college, have a 10 percent unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted). The unemployment rate for high school dropouts is 15.5 percent. Moreover, the unemployment rate gap between the most- and least-skilled is widening, not narrowing. Between February and March, the unemployment rate for college graduates increased by one-tenth of a percentage point. Among high school dropouts, the unemployment rate increased by four-tenths of a point.

Charles Murray was onto something, wasn’t he?

Arnold Kling isn't so sure:

I think that our cultural attitudes about medical services are such that attempts to bring rational cost-effectiveness to the system may not be so easy to implement.

Ross is underwhelmed:

In the wake of two consecutive bubble economies, it takes an inordinate fear of culture war, I think, to immerse yourself in the literature of Oprahfied religion – from nominal Christians like Joel Osteen to New Age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne – and come away convinced that this theological turn has been "salutary" for the country overall.

Brussels, Belgium, 8 am.

Rules and guidelines for submitting window views can be found here. A book is in the works.

Johann Hari's long profile of me for Intelligent Life is now online. His piece on Dubai is a real eye-opener to the ghastly undertow of the Arab world's alleged model modern experiment.

And you thought Iran was scary. Ignatius:

"We are all Taliban," one young man said – meaning that people in his region support the cause, if not the terrorist tactics. He explained that the insurgency is spreading in Pakistan, not because of proselytizing by leaders such as Baitullah Mehsud, but because of popular anger. For every militant killed by a US Predator drone, he says, 10 more will join the insurgent cause. "You can't come see the people because they hate you," he warned. Listening to them speaking through a translator, you realize that "drone attack" has become a vernacular phrase in Urdu.

You lose by restraint; you lose by attack:

"We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we're calling the war on terror now," said David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer who was a specialist adviser for the Bush administration and is now a consultant to the Obama White House. "You just can't say that you're not going to worry about al-Qaeda taking control of Pakistan and its nukes," he said.