A Must Read Piece About America’s Future, Ctd

Jim Manzi's long article in National Affairs on the international economic order and America's past and future place in it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves (besides a pair of posts by Friedersdorf). Here's a good-sized chunk that begins by criticizing the stimulus:

Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social ­spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment ­benefits; various direct and special-­purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for ­renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial ­assistance, housing ­assistance, and other direct benefits. The objective effect of the bill is to shift the balance of U.S. government spending away from defense and public safety, and toward social-welfare ­programs. Because the amount of spending involved is so enormous, this will be a dramatic material shift — not a merely symbolic gesture.

Meanwhile, the federal government has also intervened aggressively in both the financial and industrial sectors of the economy in order to produce specific desired outcomes for particular corporations. It has nationalized America's largest auto company (General Motors) and intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings of the third-largest auto company (Chrysler), privileging labor unions at the expense of bondholders. It has, in effect, nationalized what was America's largest insurance company (American International Group) and largest bank (Citigroup), and appears to have exerted extra-legal financial pressure on what was the second-largest bank (Bank of America) to get it to purchase the ­country's largest securities company (Merrill Lynch). The implicit government guarantees provided to home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been called in, and the federal government is now the largest de facto lender in the residential real-estate market. The government has selected the CEOs and is setting compensation at major automotive and financial companies across the country.

On top of these interventions in finance and commerce, the administration and congressional Democrats are also pursuing both a new climate and energy strategy and large-scale health-care reform. Their agenda would place the government at the center of these two huge sectors of the economy, sacrificing some economic vitality for public ­control. The latter program would also create an enormous new federal entitlement.

All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life.

Manzi defends the article repeatedly in the comments at the Scene.

Mental Health Break Of The Year: Honorable Mentions

Selecting ten finalists for the best MHB was perhaps the most difficult of the award categories, given the nearly 365 entries to choose from across a variety of themes and sensibilities. So, to keep the fun going, we picked out another ten to watch again. Enjoy:

Trippy Mary Poppins

Shifting Faces

Sleepyhead

Time-Lapse Haircuts

Two-Legged Dog

Reggie Watts

Movie Titles

Beat-Boxing Harmonica

Worst Music Video

Dancing Mom Remix

The View From Your Recession: Checking Back In

This update is from the actor in New York with a young family and variety of sporadic jobs. Original post here. The reader writes:

Earlier this year I was an out of work actor living in New York. Now I'm an out of work actor living in Los Angeles. My wife and I had been planning the move before the recession hit, and I must admit that the financial crisis gave us pause. Others might very sensibly have decided to hunker down and weather the storm, putting off the move to some hypothetical future. But we decided that the move was always going to have an element of risk, and we might as well subject ourselves to that turmoil in a year when turmoil would seek us out anyway. Never waste a crisis, so to speak.

We've received mixed reactions to this decision.

One very nice but alarmed career counselor at the Actors Work Program in LA looked at me white faced and goggle-eyed, saying, "Why would you move to California?" and told us to prepare for nine months of unemployment. (He also nearly passed out from worry when I told him I was getting a scooter to save on gas, so take that into account.) Other friends of ours think we've made a great decision. But then a lot of them are actors themselves, and used to risk. They know us, and they know we'll figure it out one way or another. Here's a short list of how our lives have improved after living here for one month:

1) We are paying less for a better apartment than we had in New York, and we even got a month's rent free. It's a renters market in LA right now.
2) We can wear short sleeves and go bike riding and in December, rather than hiding out from the cold in a cramped apartment with our 2 year old son.
3) We live closer to some very old friends and their kids.
4) There is five times as much paid acting and voiceover work here as there is in NY, and some recent meetings have been very encouraging on that front.
5) Despite the career counselor's worries, we're already finding some part-time work. Not a lot yet, but enough to make our savings last longer.
6) We landed in a fantastic school district. Not to be taken for granted in LA.

I don't know if I'd recommend this move to everyone, but this is the third major city I've come to with no job (my wife's fourth). After a while, you just have to believe in your own ability to find and create opportunities. It helps if your partner shares those beliefs, and mine does. The future looks very sunny for us here.

The Fightin’ Neocons! Ctd

Hitch got there first:

The neo-conservative movement is really a mentality, a mentality of refined pessimism about politics and rancid pessimism about human nature. As such, it is more or less impervious to new evidence or new experience, and increasingly obsessed with refighting battles of the past… It has also been centrally preoccupied with power and more explicitly concerned with its cultivation and exercise than any comparable intellectual movement…

At last November’s gathering for the Committee for the Free World, when things were already beginning to look a bit too bright for holders of the neocon worldview, Frank Gaffney, a Richard Perle acolyte, announced that he and a few hard-liners were setting up a Center for Security Policy to resist appeasement tendencies in the weapons business. Seymour Weiss, one-time Reagan adviser, denounced Helmut Kohl as a dupe for lending money to the East Germans. You would not have guessed that the Berlin Wall was within hours of its fall. But if you had listened to the contribution of Bruce Weinrod, head Heritage Foundation military-industrial acolyte for much of the 1980s, you would have known why the idea was an unwelcome one:

The first thing [Bush] ought to do is call Margaret Thatcher and try to talk some sense into her. She was recently quoted as saying the Cold War is over. That really is a problem if you have somebody who is tough-minded saying that. She may not understand that, at least with the American public, you have to create a sense of some urgency about what we are doing; otherwise, the course resistance is followed and funding shifts to social programs. [Empasis added.]

There went the feline, screeching from the bag. In case of misunderstanding, Weinrod added:

The Soviets have stated that one of their major objectives is to remove what they call the ‘enemy image’ Unless something comes up that forces them to act in an overt way, making it clear that they have not changed, it is going to be a very difficult challenge to maintain our military expenditures.

In Case You Were Getting Too Cheerful

Andrew Sprung gets a case of the Christmas willies about the future of health insurance reform:

It worries me that the health care exchanges won't power up until 2014 (if HCR passes) — while cuts to Medicare Advantage start right away.  Couple this with Democrats' flirtation with weakening the filibuster, and that leaves me chewing a few cuticles about a worst-case scenario: Democrats lose lots of seats and maybe a chamber of Congress in 2010, and the Obama administration goes into a Clintonian holding pattern. The asset bubble bursts in China, or there's some other second wave economic tsunami, or a successful terrorist attack, and the Republicans win the presidency in 2012.  With the filibuster weakened — and the precedent set for weakening it further — Republicans repeal health care reform before the exchanges ever get started.

He thinks the filibuster will then become the Democrats' best friend.

Meep Meep: Readers Respond

A reader writes:

Your views aren't part of the minority, they're part of the Silent Majority.  The Vocal Minority may win the news cycle (i.e. fantasy world), but out here in the real world, we can see the progress.

Another:

It is disgusting to see the far left complaining about Obama as much as the right wing does. Hope the sane Center holds.

Another:

There is actually a pretty simple reason for the unhappiness with Obama of many on the left.  Many on the left decry the consumerist behavior of some Americans — spending on anything that happens to catch their fancy, whether they really need it, or can afford it, or

not.  But much of the left is infected with exactly the same flaw: the

demand for instant gratification.

They want all of the things that they want (albeit not material goods, mostly), and they want them NOW!  And those who are not merely unhappy, but furious at not getting all the wonderful things that they expected from an Obama administration, simply have a more severe case.

Real life doesn't work that way.  But the spoiled baby boomers (and their children who were raised on the same philosophy) never accept that — and I know, that's my generation.  So they will never be satisfied with the performance of anyone, simply because instant gratification is impossible.  It would be impossible even in an absolute dictatorship, and it is many times more impossible in a democracy.  Sorry folks, but you can't have all of what you want; and even the things you can have, you won't get instantly.  Deal with it.

Of course, i complained loudly about the foot-dragging on gay issues. But I understand the logic from Obama's point of view. My main beef was with the HRC which failed yet again to stand up for the gays on the core issues. I think the marriage fight is largely won but fear that a loss of Democratic majorities in 2010 could prevent the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Yes, Negligence Is A War Crime Too

Richard Norton-Taylor notes the moral and legal consequences of the recklessness of the Iraq invasion:

Under the fourth Geneva convention, adopted in 1949, occupying powers are obliged to protect the civilian population of the country they are occupying. No wonder the British and American governments backed away from the description of "occupying power" – as evidence to Chilcot has heard – even though that was their formal status established by the UN.

Some well-placed former public figures involved have said privately that prominent policy-makers in London and Washington at the time could be tried more easily for war crimes for breaching the fourth Geneva convention than for other acts or omissions.