|
Media Infiltrations: Republicans and the Populist Temptation  Wall Street Journal February 9, 2010 Why Taxing Stock Trades Is a Really Bad Idea Wall Street Journal January 6, 2010
"What has been your worst blogging experience? "That's a guy who actually stalks me on the Web and once stalked me personally." "I'm saying this...guy's a jerk."
 The Happy Body Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek What I'm listening to:  Langley Schools Music Project What I'm watching:  Star Trek What I'm playing:  Speed Racer Order these from Amazon.com at Amazon's normal low prices... and a fraction of your order goes to help support this site. Thanks!
Thanks to Irwin Chusid, public editor.
|
Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Saturday, October 29, 2005
FIVE MUST-READS Michael Crichton, our leader truth-teller about the cult of environmentalism -- the crazed creed of the Religious Left -- lists his five favorite books for fellow skeptics:Playing God in Yellowstone by Alston Chase (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)The Culture Cult by Roger Sandall (Westview, 2001)
Man and the Natural World by Keith Thomas (Oxford, 1984)
The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dörner (Perseus, 1998)
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:01 PM |
link 
Friday, October 28, 2005
IT'S REALLY ALL SO SIMPLE Cato's Roger Pilon in Senate testimony this week:We come, then, to the nub of the matter. Search the Constitution as you will, you will find no authority for Congress to appropriate and spend federal funds on education, agriculture, disaster relief, retirement programs, housing, health care, day care, the arts, public broadcasting—the list is endless. That is what I meant at the outset when I said that most of what the federal government is doing today is unconstitutional because done without constitutional authority. Reducing that point to its essence, the Constitution says, in effect, that everything that is not authorized—to the government, by the people, through the Constitution—is forbidden. Progressives turned that on its head: Everything that is not forbidden is authorized.Thanks to reader Corey Snow for the link.
Update... and while we're on the subject, did you notice in Paul Krugman's column this morning how he praised Ben Bernanke by saying, "Nor is he a laissez-faire purist who believes that government governs best when it governs least." So now there's something wrong with agreeing with Thomas Paine?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:28 PM |
link
GIVE SNOW SOME CREDIT! Chiefbrief notes an element of Paul Krugman's column on Ben Bernanke today that I had missed in my own analysis. It's Krugman's off-handed dismissal of Treasury Secretary John Snow as "a businessman whose only qualification is loyalty." Check out Snow's actual credentials. He
earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia where he studied under two Nobel Prize winners. Snow graduated with a law degree from the George Washington University in 1967 and then taught economics at the University of Maryland , University of Virginia , as well as law at George Washington. He also served as a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in 1977 and a Distinguished Fellow at the Yale School of Management from 1978 until 1980.Does Krugman believe that only liberals get to brag about their academic achievements? Or is it that being a businessman somehow taints and invalidates those achievements?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:26 AM |
link
JIB-JAB DOES WAL-MART Our friend (and freelance "public editor") Irwin Chusid points to the latest Flash-movie effort by Jib-Jab -- "Big Box Mart," a satire on Wal-Mart. It's a protectionist parable about how individual economic choice -- to insist on the lowest price -- leads to collective economic collapse, as domestic labor is displaced. It's not necessarily an entirely false model of the world, as far as it goes. Its error is in what it leaves out -- the "what if" of the collapse that would ensue anyway if America closed its borders to trade, and gradually became the least competitive nation in the world. And more important, it leaves out the fact that people displaced from one job have every opportunity to use that liberation from toil in order to better themselves in superior work. In the end, this movie is protectionist tripe. But like all Jib-Jab's stuff, it's very clever, punchy and fun.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:11 AM |
link
GREAT INTERNET OPTICAL ILLUSION Check this one out! Thanks to reader John Grauel for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:04 AM |
link
THE NARCISSISM OF THE LEFT Take a look at this "critique" by Media Matters. This self-styled media watchdog of the left is now so used to preaching to its own choir that it no longer needs to offer even the slightest explanation to its devotees of what, exactly, is wrong with the right-wing media statements that it highlights. It simply reproduces the statements themselves, as though they were entirely self-evidently evil, self-fisking as it were. Lazy? Narcissistic? Who knows. I hope George Soros thinks he's getting his money's worth on these losers. Here's one from yesterday:
In a discussion on his nationally syndicated radio show, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed that The New York Times "is basically a quasi-socialistic outfit" and that Times columnist Paul Krugman "is just to the right of Fidel Castro." O'Reilly was discussing an October 24 New York Times editorial that advocated an increase in the federal gasoline tax. After quoting the article, O'Reilly described the paper's suggestion that the added revenue could be funneled back to lower-income households as "income redistribution."And your point is.... ?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:08 AM |
link
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT We know that Ford and General Motors are dogged by extraordinarily high health care expenses for employees. But why do employees make so many medical claims? Here's the answer, thanks to Josh Hendrickson.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:06 AM |
link
THE ART OF THE FEASIBLE Don't say that spending reduction in the federal government can't be achieved. It can, and here's our friend Brian Riedl with a Heritage Foundation paper that proves is, talking about the straightforward proposals of Senators John Ensign, Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn, Jim DeMint, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Sununu. Among that group there's a lot of variation in terms of level-headedness on pro-growth issues. But one thing's for sure -- they've got the nation's attention now, like never before, on spending restraint. Their core proposals:
1) Reduce Non-Defense/Homeland Discretionary Spending by Five Percent Across the Board2) Delay the Medicare Drug Entitlement for Two Years
3) Accelerate the Medicare Part B Means Test
4) Rescind All 6,400 Highway Bill Pork Projects
5) Freeze Salaries for Members of Congress and Federal Civilian Employees for One Year
6) Create a Government Waste Commission
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:49 AM |
link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
In Krugman's New York Times column today, he crows that "there's not a hint in his [Bernanke's] work of support for the right-wing supply-side doctrine." So how come Arthur Laffer, the celebrated economist who invented right-wing supply-side doctrine, declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week that "Ben Bernanke is the right person at the right time"?
That's simple. It's because Krugman is lying. Again.
Krugman tries to portray Bernanke as a New Deal liberal by saying, "a few years back Mr. Bernanke called on Japan to show 'Rooseveltian resolve' in fighting its long slump." But take a look at what Bernanke actually said, in a 2000 paper for the Institute for International Economics in which he uses that phrase. He wasn't talking about Keynesian big-government public spending. Bernanke wrote that Roosevelt's "most effective actions were the same ones that Japan needs to take -- namely, rehabilitation of the banking system and devaluation of the currency." That's pretty much exactly what my colleague David Gitlitz -- a right-wing supply-side economist -- had recommended in a Wall Street Journal op-ed written five years earlier.
Krugman brags that Bernanke "supported a proposal by yours truly that the Bank of Japan try to get Japan's economy moving by, among other things, announcing its intention to push inflation up to 3 or 4 percent per year." But take a look at what Bernanke actually said, in a 2003 speech. Krugman left out the part where Bernanke recommended that Japan undertake right-wing supply-side tax cuts. Bernanke said, "Isn't it irresponsible to recommend a tax cut, given the poor state of Japanese public finances? To the contrary... nothing would help reduce Japan's fiscal woes more than healthy growth in nominal GDP and hence in tax revenues."
And no mention by Krugman of Bernanke's speech this year in which he lauded Latin America's right-wing supply side policies of "significant privatization" and "the reduction of marginal tax rates." And utter silence about Bernanke's 2004 speech in which he offered a right-wing supply side interpretation of how Bush's pro-growth tax cuts "passed in 2001 and 2003 lower the effective cost of investing in new equipment."
Bernanke made those statements when still a politically independent member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. In a speech last month as the right-wing supply-side head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, he went even further:
Beginning with the President's 2001 tax cuts, multiple rounds of tax relief increased disposable income for all taxpayers, supporting consumer confidence and spending while increasing incentives for work and entrepreneurship. Additional tax legislation passed in 2002 and 2003 provided incentives for businesses to expand their capital investments and reduced the cost of capital by lowering tax rates on dividends and capital gains.
Now that Bernanke's been nominated to be the most powerful economic official in the world, Krugman simply ignores all that. But in a Times column last January he slimed Bernanke by suggesting that, at the CEA, he would be "expected to prove his loyalty by defending the indefensible and saying things he knows aren't true." Right-wing supply-side things, presumably.
According to Krugman, "it might well make Mr. Bernanke damaged goods from the point of view of the markets." Wrong again. As economist Steve Antler pointed out on his Econopundit blog, the day Bernanke's nomination was announced by the president, markets soared. Some headlines: "US stocks jump after Bernanke nomination" (Reuters); "Stocks Rise on Bernanke Pick" (Bloomberg); "Wall Street hails Fed's new chief" (Times Online); "Bernanke Nomination Sparks Wall Street Rally" (Time); and "A Bernanke Bounce?" (Forbes). By the way, on the day in 1987 when Alan Greenspan's nomination was announced by Ronald Reagan, stock markets fell.
Maybe what Krugman had in mind when he was talking about "damaged goods" was his own experience at the CEA in the 1980s. Economists are still laughing at a 1982 paper he wrote at the CEA in which he warned of "The Inflation Time Bomb" -- precisely when inflation in the US had peaked.
But Krugman never learns. He concludes his column today by warning that Bernanke will "face a day of reckoning soon after Mr. Bernanke takes office" -- when the economic catastrophe that Krugman has been incorrectly predicting for years finally materializes. Krugman says he's confident that Bernanke will cut interest rates to save the world -- and Krugman appeals to a mutual fund pop-star to prove it. He says, "Bill Gross of the giant bond fund Pimco has already predicted that next year Mr. Bernanke will start cutting interest rates." So what? Last June Gross said the Fed would cut interest rates this year. Fat chance.
So should we be worried that Krugman loves Bernanke -- at least this week? No -- no more than we should worry about any of Krugman's lies.
Well, there is one little thing. Krugman points out correctly that "Mr. Bernanke was chairman of the Princeton economics department before moving to Washington, and he made the job offer that brought me to Princeton." So maybe we should be more than a little skeptical about Bernanke's personnel choices.
Or perhaps we should take note that the Times
didn't give Bernanke an opportunity to go on the record about how he feels about
having hired Krugman. We'll use our imagination on that one.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:30 AM |
link
Thursday, October 27, 2005
CLEAN POLITICS? Possible White House indictments. General Motors being investigated by the SEC. Senate hearings on oil profits. So what does today's market-wrap from the Wall Street Journal mean when it quotes one of the usual "experts" --There's "a lot of news coming out of washing these days, and none of it seems to be good news," said Stephen Sachs, director of trading at Rydex Investments.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:42 PM |
link
ECONOMIC IDIOT OF THE YEAR Republican (sort of) senator Lincoln Chafee was the swing vote in deadlocking a committee vote to permit streamlining expansion of much-needed oil refining capacity in the United States. Chafee explained his vote thus:
"We should be addressing our consumption, not just demand."No wonder he votes with the Democrats.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:17 AM |
link
MIERS WITHDRAWS At the last moment, Tradesports had her confirmation probability at 30%. The implied "nomination withdrawal" contract went out at about 54%.
At this time this "prediction market" has it as an 80% probability that Scooter Libby will be indicted by year-end, and 63% for Karl Rove.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:11 AM |
link
SIGH... This is what happens when an administration is distracted and scared. Principles are the first thing thrown off the life-raft. From this morning's Wall Street Journal editorial page:
George W. Bush compares favorably with his father when it comes to his commitment to free-market economics. But the elder President Bush at least had the good policy judgment to suspend an expensive and cumbersome law called the Davis-Bacon Act to facilitate reconstruction after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 -- only to see President Clinton reinstate it as a pay-off to organized labor in one of his first acts in office.Now, less than two months after doing the same in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this Bush White House has reversed itself on the issue. We're told yesterday's decision to reinstate Davis-Bacon in the affected Gulf states on November 8 came after a meeting last week between Chief of Staff Andrew Card and about 20 Republican Congressmen from union-heavy districts. The move can only increase the cost and slow the pace of reconstruction. And as an act of unprincipled political calculation it ranks right up there with the decision to impose tariffs on imported steel during Mr. Bush's first term.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:08 AM |
link
WHAT'S GOVERNMENT WORTH? Not much, in my opinion. But this paper in the Cato Institute's Regulation suggests that it's about 5% of asset values. At least that's when the authors look at so-called "private governments" in the form of home-owners associations, and the assets in question are private homes. Worth a read, if for no other reason than it reminds us that government-like arrangements can be entirely voluntary, and can be controlled by means other than strict one-man-one-vote democracy.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:58 AM |
link
AMAZING WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH PHOTOSHOP Condi Rice isn't the only one whose picture gets doctored in the press. Check out this one on the New York Times web site today. I don't know who the guy with the crutches is, but I'll tell you -- that Karl Rove is some kind of babe!
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:12 AM |
link
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
OUR FREEDOMS ERODE ONE MORE STEP But never mind. These are only economic freedoms we're talking about.Without debate or dissent, the United States Senate passed legislation yesterday that would allow the Justice Department to obtain wiretaps in antitrust investigations. The bill, entitled the “Antitrust Criminal Investigative Improvements Act of 2005,” (ACIIA) will now be considered by the House of Representatives...We have Senators Patick Leahy and Mike DeWine to thank for this monstrosity.Skip Oliva, president of the Voluntary Trade Council, said ACIIA would subject every business in America to unrestricted government spying. “The antitrust laws can be used to criminalize any business decision, even something as routine as rejecting a contract proposal or updating a software product. Under ACIIA, the Justice Department could wiretap any business meeting whose purpose may be construed as 'attempted monoplization' by prosecutors. This will potentially chill innovation throughout the private sector, as every workplace conversation may be monitored and condemned as criminal conspiracy.”
Oliva said that he expected the House to pass ACIIA and for President Bush to sign the bill into law: “The Bush administration has never said no to any expansion of prosecutorial power, and ACIIA will prove to be no exception.”
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:38 PM |
link
ENVIRONMENTALISM'S CREATION MYTHS We'll run out of farmland between 1980 and 1990. Food production can't possibly double and then redouble by 2100. Farming will be abandoned in Texas. Metals depleted by 2005. Society will collapse.
These were all the claims made in serious environmentalist publications in the early 1970s, and formed the basis of the birth of the religion of environmentalism. EU Rota looks at the source materials word for word -- and refutes them with the present-day realities that have proven each and every one of them wrong.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:16 AM |
link
MAN OF STEELE Another stunningly insightful commentary from Shelby Steele, who never fails to hit exactly the right note in interpreting racial dynamics in America. Here, his take on the racial dimensions of Hurricane Katrina:
Probably the single greatest problem between blacks and whites in America is that we are forever witness to each other's great shames. This occurred to me in the immediate aftermath of Katrina... In the people traversing waist-deep water and languishing on rooftops were the markers of a deep and static poverty. The despair over the storm that was so evident in people's faces seemed to come out of an older despair, one that had always been there. Here -- 40 years after the great civil rights victories and 50 years after Rosa Parks's great refusal -- was a poverty that oppression could no longer entirely explain. Here was poverty with an element of surrender in it that seemed to confirm the worst charges against blacks: that we are inferior, that nothing really helps us, that the modern world is beyond our reach.Update... Reader John Seater responds:I strongly disagree with your glowing opinion of Shelby Steele's views on race relations. Steele has been pushing for some time his view that "whites" bear shame for oppression of blacks. In this column he makes sweeping statements about "whites" with no distinctions among them. In another opinion piece a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, he declared that the great terror among "whites" was their guilt over past oppression of blacks. All garbage. I am classified as white by the US Government. Nonetheless, I feel no shame at all for what some whites did in the past. I am not responsible for their evil behavior, any more than all blacks today are responsible for the behavior of *some* blacks such as Louis Farrakan or that recent idiot, whatever his name was, who declared a few days ago that white people should be exterminated from the face of the earth. I am responsible for my own conduct, not that of others, especially others who died before my ancestors even got to this country. I have nothing to be ashamed of in my history of relations with blacks. I deeply resent Steele or anybody else telling me that I am guilty of something simply because I am white and lumping all white people together and then making wild generalizations about their supposed guilt and so forth, simply because they are white. That kind of thinking is called racism. Somebody needs to tell Steele to shape up or shut up....No doubt it is easier to overcome racism than an inferiority of development grounded in centuries of racial persecution. Nevertheless, if New Orleans is a wake-up call to government, it is also a wake-up call to black America. If we want to finally erase the inferiority that oppression left us with, we have to first of all acknowledge it to ourselves, as whites did with their racism. Our scrupulous witness of whites helped them become more and more responsible for resisting the shame of racism.
And our open acknowledgment of our underdevelopment will clearly give whites a power of witness over us. It will mean that whites can hold us accountable for overcoming inferiority as we hold them accountable for overcoming racism. They will be able to openly shame us when we are not fully at war with our underdevelopment, just as Bill Bennett was shamed for no more than giving a false impression of racism. If this prospect feels terrifying to many blacks, we have to remember that whites witness and judge us anyway, just as we have witnessed and judged their shame for so long. Mutual witness will go on no matter what balances of power we strike. It is best to be open, and allow the "other's" witness to inspire rather than shame.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:51 AM |
link
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
NOT-A-JOKE OF THE DAY It can't be a joke, because it's so utterly unfunny -- this promotional film for Al Franken's new book, made jointly with Amazon.com. Can you imagine the uproar if this same "joke" were employed by a conservative author? Thanks to Perry Eidelbus of Eidelblog for the link.Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:55 PM |
link
BERNANKE Should we buy gold, bury it in the back yard and run for the hills now that Ben Bernanke has been nominated to succeed Alan Greenspan? Of course not. He's hardly an ideal supply-side hero, but neither is he the embodiment of Keynesian evil that his competitor for the appointment, Donald Kohn, is. But you have to worry when the New York Times editorial page sings his praises, calling it a "White House Shocker" that "he is as close to the perfect choice as Mr. Bush could have made." But thankfully, we don't have to worry about it anyway. It was all a mistake. Here's the real candidate selected to replace Greenspan. Thanks to reader Gerald Hanner for uncovering the truth.
Update [10/26/2005]... well, maybe I'm wrong about Bernanke not being a supply-side hero. Here's Arthur Laffer (the man who invented supply-side economics) writing on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (which popularize supply-side economics from the very beginning) saying, "Mr. Bernanke was my first choice for the Fed chair and has all the traits needed to be great... Ben Bernanke is the right person at the right time."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:55 AM |
link
UTILITY OF THE PRODUCT The New York Times is all for free enterprise and against the plaintiffs' bar when it comes to local strip-joints ripping off drunken red-staters (without that, after all, New York City couldn't survive):
IT'S happened again. Another innocent man who just wanted a few lap dances claims to have been victimized by an exclusive New York strip club, Scores.Thanks to reader E. M. Schulze for the link.This time it's an executive from Missouri named Robert McCormick, who, treating himself and friends, ran up a $241,000 bill at Scores on his corporate American Express card two years ago. American Express is now suing him for refusing to pay up. Several other unhappy customers have also sued Scores over large bills. ...you've got to be kidding - there's no such thing as "overcharging" in this industry.
Does Christian Dior "overcharge" when it sells a handbag for $13,000? That depends on how you look at it. If you see the handbag as a few pieces of stitched leather, the price is grossly inflated. If you see it as a source of heady self-worth - a passport to an exclusive club - then it's hard to say what price would be too high.
This is the economic logic relied on by purveyors of luxury goods. It's not about the utility of the product.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:52 AM |
link
Monday, October 24, 2005
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"The last name one often hears is Ben Bernanke, currently a member of the Fed's Board of Governors."
Then Krugman frets,
Today it's even more crucial than usual that the Fed chairman have the markets' trust... [Bernanke] may soon move to the Council of Economic Advisers. ...he will be expected to prove his loyalty by defending the indefensible and saying things he knows aren't true. That might seem a tolerable price to pay for the Fed chairmanship -- but a year of it might well make Mr. Bernanke damaged goods from the point of view of the markets.
"Damaged goods from the point of view of the markets"? Check out these headlines:
- US stocks jump after Bernanke nomination (Reuters)
- Stocks Rise on Bernanke Pick (Bloomberg)
- Wall Street hails Fed's new chief (Times Online)
- Bernanke Nomination Sparks Wall Street Rally (Time)
- A Bernanke Bounce? (Forbes)
And how about this little stroll down reality lane, comparing the market's reaction to Bernanke to the way it greeted Alan Greenspan's nomination on June 2, 1987?
|
|
Greenspan |
Bernanke |
|
Dow Industrials |
Down 0.43% |
Up 1.66% |
|
S&P 500 |
Down 0.47% |
Up 1.68% |
Yep. Wrong, again. I'd say Bernanke has "the markets' trust."
Update [10/25/2005]... Reader Sylvain Galineau adds:
Well, Mr. Bernanke used to be head of Princeton's economics department. If that experience didn't make him damage goods, there is little chance anything else will.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:36 PM |
link
HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN? When I posted earlier to gripe about the rhetorical abuse of the expression "mathematical certainty," I failed to recall an especially salient recent example (an alert reader reminded me). Remember "Kinsley's Proof" that "privatized" Social Security couldn't work? Michael Kinsley wrote:
My contention: Social Security privatization is not just unlikely to succeed, for various reasons that are subject to discussion. It is mathematically certain to fail. Discussion is pointless.At the moment he appears right that the political initiative for "privatized" Social Security didn't work. But that's not what he was talking about here. He was talking about the actual thing itself, "privatized" Social Security as a mechanism of public finance. There's no "mathematical certainty" that it won't work. Kinsley was right the first time: his skepticism is simply a "contention."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 6:34 PM |
link
JOKE OF THE DAY
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 2:24 PM |
link
WORLDS IN COLLISION Reader Joe Veranth draws our attention to a beautiful zinger in Holman Jenkins' Wall Street Journal column last week:
Never mind, too, the dirges for the middle class that followed Delphi's bankruptcy. No "middle class" worth the name aspires to economic benefits without bothering to acquire the skills to produce the wealth to make those benefits sustainable.Compare that to Paul Krugman's analysis (his "dirge"):
If we had a Canadian-style system -- which is enthusiastically supported by the Canadian subsidiaries of U.S. auto companies -- the big squeeze might be averted, at least for a while.So here's your choice of world-views. Jenkins says you can develop the human capital that will serve you for a lifetime. Krugman says we can nationalize 15% of our economy because it "might" help "at least for a while." Your call.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:15 AM |
link
MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY? CERTAINLY! Nobel economics laureate Thomas Schelling begins an excellent Wall Street Journal op-ed with a terrific example of the journalistic abuse of the expression "mathematical certainty" -- what writers say when they want to make it seem as though their personal predictions are absolutely sure to come true (and when they don't want to really explain why). Bonus: Schelling's example is from the New York Times.
The most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed 60 years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.What a stunning achievement -- or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune. In 1960, the British novelist C.P. Snow said on the front page of the New York Times that unless the nuclear powers drastically reduced their armaments, thermonuclear warfare within the decade was a "mathematical certainty." Nobody appeared to think Snow's statement extravagant.
We now have that "mathematical certainty" compounded more than four times, and no nuclear war.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:04 AM |
link
MEDIA BIAS AT YOUR FINGERTIPS Techie John Dvorak, writing as Steve Jobs beams at us from the cover of Time Magazine:
As big and as important as Microsoft is, the coverage of the company is quite mediocre. This is particularly true in the mainstream press. The reason for this is that today's newspaper and magazine tech writers know little about computers and are all Mac users. It's a fact.Thanks to Chris Masse for the link.This is why when Microsoft actually does have a good idea, people look to trash it out of hand. With 90 percent of the mainstream writers being Mac users, what would you expect? The top columnists in the news and business magazines fit this model too. The technology writers fit this model. The tech writers and tech columnists for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Fortune are all Mac users. I could list them by name, but I'd hate to leave one out. Maybe I'll blog them by name. I could list 50. Readers should thus not be surprised by the overcoverage of Apple Computer. Every time Steve Jobs sneezes there is a collective chorus of "Gesundheit" from tech writers pounding away on their Macs.
Update [10/25/2005]... Reader Michael Pollard has his doubts:
I wouldn't be so quick to take John Dvorak's word as gospel. This is a guy who, back in 11/03, dismissed blogging thusly: "Another so-called revolution bites the dust. Big surprise." He prefers bloviation to observation.When he says "90 percent of the mainstream [tech] writers [are] Mac users," I call bullshit. There probably are a lot of Mac users in that field, but the "90%" figure sounds like typical Dvorak hyperbole.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 8:00 AM |
link
NUMBER SIX WITH A BULLET Prospect Magazine has named the top ten world public intellectuals, according to an online poll from among a field of 100 pre-selected candidates. Paul Krugman came in number six. To give you some context, Noam Chomsky came in number one. So it's clear what Krugman will have to do to move up in the ranks -- tack even further to the Left, and go even crazier. No problem. Just a matter of time. Astonishingly (and wonderfully), though, Milton Friedman scored highest among the write-in votes (it so happens he was my choice).
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 7:46 AM |
link
Sunday, October 23, 2005
ONLY TEN? The Ace of Spades has the "Top Ten Proposals Being Considered To Boost NYT's Falling Profits". Missing one, though: report the news. Thank to Perry Eidelbus of Eidelblog for the link.Update... a reader notes,
Good point, but in defense of Ace, he was listing the Top Ten Proposal Being Considered. There's no evidence that the NYT is remotely considering this (although Calame is a refreshing addition, wonder how long he'll last?).
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:32 PM |
link
THE THREE I'S Unless you've paid your $50 you probably don't know that David Brooks began his New York Times op-ed column today with the breathless line,
The economist Bruce Bartlett is a man of immense intellectual integrity.Bruce is a friend, so I hate to say this. But this is crap, and besides, David Brooks wouldn't recognize immense intellectual integrity if he woke up in bed with it. This is simply the next inevitable step in the seduction of Bruce Bartlett, who has learned that he can get favorable mentions in the mainstream media if he indulges in Bush-bashing. Consider the title of his forthcoming book: Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. Is that exercise in sensationalism the work of someone with immense intellectual integrity? Is it an act of immense intellectual integrity to pretend that George W. Bush ever posed as a "movement" conservative -- regardless of how much nostalgiasts like Bartlett wished he had? Nope. Bush was a truth-in-labeling compassionate conservative and an electable conservative from the very beginning. So let's show a little intellectual integrity here, Bruce -- then maybe we can work our way up to immense. Let's stop throwing scare-words like "bankrupted" around, and let's admit that Bush is exactly as advertised, whether you happen to like that or not.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:49 PM |
link
WALTER DURANTY STILL WORKS AT THE TIMES Nicholas Kristof reviews Mao: The Unknown Story in today's Times Book Review. 20 million innocent people slaughtered? No problem. It all worked out fine in the end. After all, he writes, "The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea." There's more at BizzyBlog.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:35 AM |
link
AND THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE "THE EDUCATION PRESIDENT"? Then how come President Bush selfishly kept L.A. school kids from seeing "The Wizard of Oz" when his motorcade shut down traffic? The LA Daily News carps,
They never got to see the wizard.The heart can only bleed at the thought of the educational opportunities foregone in Malibu that day. For me, I can remember the many times during the Clinton years when access via public roads to my home in Northern California was blocked because there was a "friend of Bill" in my neighborhood whom the then-president used to like to visit every few months. Since I couldn't get home, usually I'd go see "The Wizard of Oz" to kill time. It worked out fine. And I'm sure it did in Malibu, too.President George W. Bush, his Marine One helicopter grounded by fog, brought morning rush hour to a standstill while his motorcade proceeded from West Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley for the dedication of the Air Force One Pavilion.
"We had buses all loaded up - but by the time they got to school it was too late," said Julie Fahn, a volunteer mom at Kenter Canyon Elementary in Brentwood, where girls had dressed as Dorothy to see the play performed in Malibu.
Thanks to reader Josh Hendrickson for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:00 AM |
link
PAUL KRUGMAN SURE GETS AROUND Thanks to reader Jill Olson for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:26 AM |
link