The Claremont Conservative

College Jeopardy: The Final Wait

2009-11-08T18:14:00.000-08:00

Riley and I auditioned for College Jeopardy today. This is the final hurdle and we hear back in December.

The process was pretty grueling. We got breakfast at the Radisson Hostel in Culver City, which incidentally, is the same hotel where Ken Jennings became a contestant. We then went and walked around Culver City and took a few photos of us in front of Sony Pictures Studios.

I'm not allowed to talk about the test, but it was a lot harder than I imagined it would be and I got quite a few pop culture questions wrong. But hey, you can't win them all.

I want to thank Dan Pawson '03 for the advice he gave me (and by extension, Riley). Following his advice, I think we appeared well spoken and polite, and so we represented Claremont McKenna well. I think that came across best in the interview portion.

The contestant scouts asked what we would do with the $100,000 were we to win. They counseled against saying we'd pay for tuition or student loans.

Everyone came up with some pretty funny answers and took some of my best options. Spending a hundred thousand dollars in Vegas would be a great time indeed, but traveling for the sake of traveling doesn't stike me as the most efficacous use of money.

November 20th is Kick a Ginger Day, so I thought I would create a defense fund for gingers that were beat up. You know, to help pay for medical bills. (But wait, isn't health care free now?)

I also told them that I'd be buying a motorcycle. They told me that I should buy a helmet in addition, to which I replied, not to worry because I'd be an organ donor. Everyone laughed.

Riley, for his part, told everyone that he'd like to complete the Seven Summit mountain challenge (as opposed to the Five C challenge) and that he'd use some of the money to do that. Also, that he wants to be a professional rapper and rapped about the big party he would throw at CMC were he to win the money.

I'll have some photos up once I figure out how to extact them from my camera.

My Defense of Craigslist in The Student Life

2009-11-07T06:01:00.000-08:00

If you want to read my defense of Craigslist and how you can find anything you want on it, head on over to The Student Life's op-ed page.

The Forum, under Emily Meinhardt, didn't want to publish it, so I went elsewhere. And hey, The Student Life is actually paying me.

Let's hope The Forum changes its policy of not paying me, as I'd rather like dealing with them and my college.

We Won Hub Quiz by Four Points

2009-11-07T02:03:00.000-08:00

Bryce Gerard CMC'11, Riley Lewis CMC '11, Alex Berman CMC '12, and I won Hub Quiz tonight. Our team name was Team Ramrod and we won $40 each. We were down and nearly out in the third round, but Bryce got all 16 Disney characters on the identification round, putting us up by four. It took him 15 seconds to get all of them. It was incredible.

Here are some of the questions we missed. No Googling and finding out!

For how many years did the owners of the Guiness beer company sign their lease?
What was the name of Maine's ballot initiative banning homosexual marriage? (They're looking for a number, not a name.)
Who is A.Rod currently dating? (I wanted to put Derek Jeter, but it turns out
he dates women...)
What country is Arch Bishop Oscar Romero from? (I knew this, but we
changed our answer at the last minute to Mexico. Whoops!)
What country is this flag from? (Careful, it's not what you'd think.)

Riley and I have College Jeopardy Live auditions Sunday. Wish us luck!

Classical Liberalism, Free Speech Found in The Student Life!

2009-11-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

There's a fantastic article by Brendan Rowan PO '11 in this past issue of The Student Life. The title pretty much says it all: "Something Offensive is Found on the Internet, Determined to be "Bias-Related." Good on The Student Life for publishing it. Here's a sample from the article:

A recent event, which involved “inappropriately tagged posted photos found on KGI students’ Facebook pages,” may serve as a good example. As per standard operating procedure, the e-mail ends with an invitation to “any student in need of support concerning this incident” to contact the appropriate organization (AAMP, OBSA, etc.), and an invitation to any student who “perceives a racist or sexist incident on campus” to report it to the appropriate authorities as soon as possible. First and foremost, we might ask ourselves whether it is the college’s responsibility (or right, for that matter) to monitor the goings-on of a web site such as Facebook. Even though social networking sites occupy a dubious position somewhere between public and private space, it is a tad frightening that a purported institution of higher learning finds it incumbent upon itself to police its students’ non-academic lives (and we’re not talking about Bob Jones here, this is a liberal institution). Remember that everyone, even chauvinists, have the right to free speech. If a student is offended by some remarks or incidents, then they should contact their local law enforcement agency, or in this case the Facebook administrators. If getting the law involved seems like an overreaction, then maybe the involved parties should reconsider how deeply they have been offended.

Go To This: PSU Events Are Seriously Good Now

2009-11-06T00:12:00.000-08:00

Governing with the Gavel?

The Role of the Courts in a Democratic Society

Thursday, November 12^th, 2009

8pm, Edmunds Ballroom

As this summer's confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor showed, the country remains deeply divided on questions of judicial temperament and the role of the judiciary. As the Supreme Court prepares to debate and rule on issues ranging from national security policy to campaign finance law, these fundamental questions will continue to define the terms of the debate.

With that in mind, the Pomona Student Union proudly presents a discussion between Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Stephen Reinhardt ’51, Judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Michael Teter ’99 will moderate the discussion. As the title suggests, the discussion will revolve around the proper role of judges and courts in a democratic society. The discussion will address some of the following questions: Are judges merely calling “balls and strikes” when they decide cases or is the interpretation of the law a more complicated, potentially subjective, process? Is there a place for empathy in the interpretation of the law? Does the Senate confirmation for judicial nominees provide a meaningful check on the executive branch?

Alex Kozinski is currently Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and an essayist and judicial commentator. Kozinski graduated from University of California, Los Angeles, receiving an A.B. degree in 1972, and from UCLA School of Law, receiving a J.D. degree in 1975. He went on to clerk for then-Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Kozinski's first judicial appointment was as chief judge at the newly formed United States Court of Federal Claims in 1982. Then, at the age of 35, Reagan appointed him to the Ninth Circuit, making him the youngest federal appeals court judge in the country.

Kozinski’s writings have appeared in mainstream publications such as Forbes and Slate.

Stephen Reinhardt ’51 is a circuit judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in Los Angeles. He graduated from Pomona College with an A.B. in Government in 1951. In 1954, he received an LL.B. from Yale Law School. After law school, Reinhardt worked at the legal counsel’s office in Washington, D.C. for the United States Air Force as a lieutenant. Two years later, he clerked for district judge Luther Youngdahl, a former governor of Minnesota, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

Reinhardt served as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, California Advisory Committee from 1962 to 1974 and was its Vice Chairman from 1969 to 1974. He also served as member of the Democratic National Committee and as an unpaid advisor to former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and former California governor Jerry Brown. In 1975 he was appointed to the Los Angeles Police Commission, which he chaired from 1978 until his judicial confirmation in 1980.

Tibor Machan CMC '65 on Ayn Rand for Reason.TV

2009-11-05T11:11:00.000-08:00

It's no understatement to say that the work of Ayn Rand changed my life. It must have left an impression: I went to an Ayn Rand conference for my 17th birthday. Have a look at what Tibor Machan CMC '65 has to say about it. The run time is five minutes.

Andrew Bluebond Doesn't Get Humor About HIs Global Warming Religion

2009-11-05T10:57:00.001-08:00

Careful where you point that finger, Bluebond

After I wrote a my little missive on Charlie Sprague's silly environmentalist suggestion, I wrote something saying that if the college were serious about banning emissions, it should ban East Coast and international students and only admit Riley Lewis, who lives in Claremont.

Andrew Bluebond, over at The Claremont Port Side, fires back with this humorless blog post supposedly attacking my logic, without recognizing that the whole point was to ridicule the kind of logic expressed in Sprague's post.

The college's job to "reduce its carbon emissions." Its mission is to promote education, something he concedes in the post.

Andrew didn't get the joke, probably because I was criticizing his religion. And he didn't see the obvious point I was making by silently comparing it to the tray ban, which never considered the trade offs between trays or no trays. So now I have to spoil the joke by explaining...

But hey, I did appreciate being lectured to about trade offs by a gender studies major. That was funny enough in its own right.

Travel to and From School: The Next Thing To Be Banned?

2009-11-05T00:48:00.001-08:00

Riley Lewis: CMC's one future student?

In his usually incoherent column for The Forum, Charlie Sprague writes about how we should "End Fall Break," and leaves this silly one-liner.

For the environmentalist, ending fall break would probably reduce the college’s carbon footprint as many students would travel back home one less time.

Let's extend that to its logical conclusion, Charlie.

While we're at it and to keep our school green, green, green, let's ban all international students and East Coast students from campus. We just can't have them pumping all that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In fact, anyone that doesn't bike here is suspect. No students, no students at all! (Except Riley Lewis CMC '11, who can bike here from his house in Claremont.)

An Irreverent Look At All the Gay Rights Speakers Coming to Claremont

2009-11-05T00:08:00.000-08:00

Having just turned 21, I sympathize with the gentlemen that got raided by the police at the Stonewall Inn some forty years ago. I rather like having a brewsky (or two or several) at the local pub and would prefer to enjoy the company of my fellows or frauleins without the long arm of the law coming crashing in. (Indeed, if the officers were inclined to come in peacefully, I might even be inclined to buy them a drink.)

What I don’t understand is why an event many years ago encourages the Athenaeum to spend money for three speakers to come and discuss so-called homosexual rights.

I’m inclined to let anyone who wants to serve openly in the military do so, especially as our allies do so too. Call me old fashioned, but I subscribe to the Chris Rock school when it comes to gays in the military.

But, as best as I can tell, no one has died in recent years for being gay and those gays that have been the victim of thuggery, pale in comparison to the millions that have died under leftist regimes. As President George W. Bush put it,

The sacrifices of these individuals haunt history -- and beind them are millions more who were killed in anonymity by Communism's brutal hand. They include innocent Ukrainians starved to death in Stalin's Great Famine; or Russians killed in Stalin's purges; Lithuanians and Latvians and Estonians loaded onto cattle cars and deported to Arctic death camps of Soviet Communism. They include Chinese killed in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Cambodians slain in Pol Pot's Killing Fields; East Germans shot attempting to scale the Berlin Wall in order to make it to freedom; Poles massacred in the Katyn Forest; and Ethiopians slaughtered in the "Red Terror"; Miskito Indians murdered by Nicaragua's Sandinista dictatorship; and Cuban balseros who drowned escaping tyranny.

So why don't we have a speaker to talk about the cold war on the 20th anniversary?

Pitney, Pestritto, and Voegeli on Year One in the Age of Obama

2009-11-05T00:03:00.000-08:00

First, here's R. J. Pestritto [quoted in part] in National Review:

Democrats said something else during the campaign that we should have listened to. With remarkable consistency, they identified themselves with progressivism and made clear that they aimed to revive the principles and policies of the Progressive Movement from the turn of the 20th century. Many assumed this to be mere rhetoric — “progressive” was simply thought to be a nicer way of saying “liberal,” which had become dirty word in American politics. But the Democrats clearly had more in mind, and have now pursued the main planks of the progressive agenda originally laid out by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.

That agenda was as clear as it was radical: Wilson and Roosevelt loathed the Constitution’s limits on federal authority and sought various ways to undermine them, sometimes through a direct frontal assault but more often through a creative or “living” interpretation of the Constitution’s language (think of how today’s Democratic leaders dismiss the slightest questioning of Obamacare’s constitutionality). They also planned for the national government to take on a much-expanded role in regulating society and private wealth by delegating significant discretionary authority to expert bureaucracies (think of our present TARP program and its progeny — and thank the Bush administration for helping to give the Democrats a running start).

Second, here is Professor John J. Pitney, talking about Andrew Sullivan, the ultimate birther, and how dirty Obama's style politics is.

In a way, President Obama does match up to Candidate Obama. For anyone willing to look carefully, the 2008 campaign showed that he would speak of civility and unity while his crew engaged in hard-edged, polarizing tactics. After Bristol Palin’s pregnancy became public, for instance, he won praise for saying that candidates’ family lives were off-limits and that he would fire anyone in his campaign who spread rumors about the Palin children’s parentage. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, of course, was busy at the time doing just that, which didn’t prompt Obama’s staff to remove the samples of Sullivan’s writing it had re-posted to the official campaign site or prevent the president from quoting him in speeches. A week before his inauguration, Obama met with a group of center-left journalists that included Sullivan.

And family certainly wasn’t off-limits for Howard Gutman, a member of Obama’s national finance committee, who criticized Sarah Palin’s parenting. After the election, Obama made Gutman a trustee of his inauguration committee and then appointed him to be ambassador to Belgium.

Petty political warfare has continued. Earlier this year, the Obama White House directed an effort to demonize Rush Limbaugh. More recently, the staff has been waging a campaign against Fox News. In the beginning, some Republicans may actually have believed the president’s rhetoric about setting aside “the smallness of our politics.” Now they know that he didn’t really mean it.

Here is William Voegeli, talking about the luck that Obama's had and how it will run out.

It’s as hard to get a fix on the president’s political beliefs as it is to get a fix on his political skills. The Zelig-like Barack Obama fit into Jeremiah Wright’s congregation when establishing himself in a black district. Once his political ascent there was blocked, he acclimated to the Hyde Park ethos that regarded Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn as having picaresque but morally unproblematic pasts. He fit in with ethically flexible Chicago pols like Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich when he needed to build a political network for a statewide campaign. And, despite signals in 2008 that his time at the University of Chicago had left him conversant with and tolerant of arguments about what government couldn’t and shouldn’t do, he now fits in in Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman’s Washington. He has spent the last twelve months as their enabler, which is looking more and more like a role that will hasten the day that his luck runs out.

Conor Friedersdorf PO '02 Open Letter to Jonah Goldberg

2009-11-04T18:18:00.000-08:00

Over at True Slant, Conor Friedersdorf PO '2002 writes an open letter to Jonah Goldberg, in which he mentioned his time at Pomona College:

It is actually surprising that the gulf separating our attitudes is so deep. As a native of Orange County, California, the people I most respect in this world – my parents and two sets of grandparents – are all self-described conservative Republicans. My involvement in politics began in response to what I regarded as grave flaws in leftist campus politics at Pomona College, and the dubious actions of Democrats during the Gray Davis era in California, when I witnessed giveaways to public employee unions that were arguably the most fiscally irresponsible measures in state history. The political writers I’ve read whose work most resonates are Burke, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The bulk of President Obama’s domestic agenda strikes me as ill conceived at best—I worry about the unabated growth of the federal government, America’s perilous fiscal situation, and an approach to governance that relies on the enduring wisdom of elected and appointed officials.

Elsewhere, Friedersdorf wrote an interesting take on a NextGen conference that I attended earlier last year with Bryce Gerard and Sam Corcos. I pretty much agree with his assessment about how the right needs to get over its fears of marginalization and do its thing, regardless of the naysayers.

I'm all for ideological diversity on the right, but it seems just as there have been a lot of right leaning gents who make a career of the victimization mentality of the right, there have been a bunch that have made a career over calling these guys out. At the end of the day, what the right needs isn't some kind of post-modern critique of itself, but some serious, conservative ideas that address the challenges of the day and that move the debate, however incrementally, in the proper direction of maximizing the promises of the Declaration of Independence.

Against Don't Ask, Don't Tell

2009-11-04T17:58:00.000-08:00

Let me surprise a few people here: I'm in favor of repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

First off, let me just say that I think Dan Choi is a patriot and I can't believe that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is still a serious policy in America.

Let's think about this: We allow the Australians, the Austrians, the Belgians, the Canadians, the Czechs, the Danes, the Estonians, the Finns, the French, the Irish, the Israelis, the Italians, the Lithuanians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Slovenians, the South Africans, the Spanish, the Swedish, and the Brits to serve alongside our troops. They all allow homosexuals to serve openly.

The same kinds of "scientific" studies that purportedly find something wrong with homosexuals serving openly are the same kinds of studies that stupidly affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson in Brown v. Board in that bunk doll test. The court should simply have affirmed Harlan's dissent in Plessy. These studies are the same kinds of studies that essentialize race on our campuses. They are not worth the paper upon which they are printed.

But seriously, why is the Athenaeum bringing yet another speaker to talk about an issue that few on campus find at all controversial? This will be the third speaker to talk about gay issues this semester.

Neo-Liberalism and Latin America

2009-11-02T11:07:00.000-08:00

I've been asked to write something regarding neo-liberalism in Latin America for a friend. It's a paying gig, so I'm naturally excited, but what to say, what to say and what was so wrong with the classical liberalism, anyways?

Have a look at how awesome liberalism in immigration has been for the world's poor. I have a suspicion that it has been much better for the poor than any foreign aid scheme designed.

Matt Spaulding's New Book Profiled in National Review

2009-11-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Matthew Spaulding, CMC alum, wrote a new book, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future that is the subject of a profile in National Review.

I've been reading Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader by Jonathan Bean about how it's really been these classically liberal thinkers, grounded in natural law, that have been able to offer a compelling alternative to the statism and de facto racism of progressives like FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

A Few Short Links

2009-11-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

From the Claremont blogosphere:

The Forum's laughablly vague "Rules of Conduct." It really is ridiculous. Good thing it is almost never enforced. But I really don't think anyone should have this kind of power...
Amy Jasper suggests that CMC is male-dominated. It isn't. 52 percent of the freshman class is female, but even if we suspect that it is, so what? What's wrong with masculinity?
William Voegeli, a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna's Salvatori Center and sometime government professor, has two great City Journal essays on California's growing and incompetent public sector. They remind me of what Fareed Zakaria said, that while Californians like to brag that we would be the 7th largest economy in the world, we'd also be under IMF receivership.

From the rest of the blogosphere

The Institute for Justice is suing to open up bone marrow to economic competition. They say that a law regulating it is unconstitutional. I agree, but why stop at bone marrow? Why not make the case for blood as well? (As I did in The American.) The empirical case has been building: my friend and co-worker, Dane Stangler, sent me someting earlier about blood donation compensation via Robin Hanson.
Riley Lewis (CMC 2011) and I are preparing for Jeopardy auditions on November 8th. I sure hope the categories I get are as easy as this one about economic history and that my opponents know as little as these folks do!

Cuss (And Veto) Away, Ahnold!

2009-10-31T03:51:00.001-07:00

I don't like cussing myself. I find it one of the vices least tolerable in others and least commendable in me, but I have to disagree with Professor John J. Pitney Jr.'s post on The Corner regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto message.

Professor Pitney dislikes it because,

It probably took his staff a good deal of effort to devise the acrostic. So think about it: Amid a fiscal crisis requiring severe cutbacks, a public employee had to use government time and resources to carry out the governor’s potty-mouth prank. This incident sends the message that he does not take the crisis very seriously. And one hopes that he did not assign a female aide to the task: Such is the stuff of sexual-harassment lawsuits.

Nobody should expect elected officials to be perfect in their private lives. But we can expect them to behave like adults in their public lives. By pulling a stunt that would land a junior-high-school kid in detention, the governor has flunked this standard.

Say what you want, but the more time the government wastes sending cryptic or not so cryptic notes to one another is time they don't spend spending money or figuring out ways to waste it. I hope he sends veto messages to nearly all of the Democratic legislature.

Goldwater at 100

2009-10-29T18:43:00.000-07:00

While we're on the topic of conservatism and the 1964 election, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Visting history Professor at Claremont McKenna, will be a panelist at a two-day conference, entitled, "Goldwater at 100: His Politics, Ideology, and Legacy."

Dr. Shermer wrote an article for The Journal of American History. Its title? "Origins of the Conservative Ascendancy: Goldwater's Early Senate Career and the De-legitimization of Organized Labor."

Of course, the article (gated) doesn't examine whether or not organized labor de-legitimized itself, as it should have, and I have to wonder why it is that Professor Andrew E. Busch wasn't invited to speak after he wrote a really excellent piece for The Claremont Review of Books, titled, "The Goldwater Myth." Could it be because he criticized the Goldwater Institute for a mistaken interpretation of Barry Goldwater? If you read the piece, it's pretty clear that even Barry Goldwater would't be a Barry Goldwater conservative!

Rush Limbaugh Comments on Reagan's Classic "Rendezvous with Destiny -- A Time For Choosing" Speech

2009-10-29T17:10:00.000-07:00

I've already pointed out the Claremont connection to launching the career of Ronald Reagan, but what I haven't really talked that much about is how important Ronald Reagan's historic "Time for Choosing" Speech.

Rush Limbaugh mentions the importance of the speech today.

Here's the full Ronald Reagan speech. Thank you, Henry Salvatori for giving us, Ronald Reagan. He wasn't necessarily a huge Ronald Reagan fan, but he did say that he could run his business and he did work on Reagan's Kitchen cabinet team. Have a look at that speech in its entirety in 1964.

My Enemy, The Stark Elevator, Wins This Round...

2009-10-29T16:22:00.000-07:00

You win now, but I promise when you operational again, I will use you more often than I need to.

I really, really, really wish I didn't live on the 7th floor, but hey, you live in the penthouse suite, as I do, and this is what can happen.

Residents of Stark:

I’m sorry to inform you that the Stark Hall elevator was not able to be fully repaired today and will be out of service over night. Amtech technicians worked all day on it and will continue Friday morning. As of now, they are hoping / expecting to have it running again by mid-day Friday.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for inconvenience

Rob

Robert Lawrence

Maintenance Supervisor

Facilities & Campus Services

742 N Amherst Ave.

Now where's Tony Stark to fix it when we need him?

Lay Off, Dean Hess!

2009-10-29T14:57:00.001-07:00

There's a bit of hubbub in the comment section over at The Forum and at the Freakonomics blog regarding whether or not Dean Hess was prepared to help Steven Levitt get a student into Claremont McKenna. The full details are captured here.

Here's one comment that pretty much sums up the dislike.

On another note, shouldn't we be concerned that our Dean showed at least mild interest in aiding a woman gain admission to CMC due to her connections to Levitt?

It's important to dispel these rumors before they get out of hand. First off, we don't know that it is Dean Hess, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is.

So what?

All it demonstrates is that Hess is active in looking into the requests on behalf of students. He didn't say he would get the fictitious girl in question in, only that he wanted to know if she had applied early-action or was going through the January admissions process.

For all we know, Hess could have been sticking a file or something saying that this prospective girl -- again, there's no girl, it was a misunderstanding -- was recommended by Levitt. Or he could have just been looking into who the girl in question was.

It's no different from when famous people send letters of recommendation to colleges on behalf of students that they know or for whom they have worked. In fact, I'd wager that it's better to accept letters on behalf of students from academics, who tend to be somewhat insular and hang around other academics, than for the school to admit people based, say, upon race or who their parents happen to be. You're more likely to get a serious student that way.

Still, I have to wonder about the stupidity of Steven Levitt. You generally don't blog about these things! Doesn't he know that? Or does he disrespect the blogger code?

Fareed Zakaria Was A Reaganite, Now A Centrist?

2009-10-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

At Claremont McKenna College's Athenaeum, Fareed Zakaria gave his take on the future of the G.O.P and why he thinks it'll continue to lose elections until it moves to the center.

Here's the full, direct quotation from Fareed Zakaria on a question Tuesday night related to the future of conservatism and related to an article he wrote in February 2008 about where the party is going.

"There will either be a kind of reinvention of conservatism, or they will continue to lose elections. I still continue to believe that.

"Look at what has happened in Europe. In the height of what is economic depression since the great depression, who has been elected? The enter right in Germany, the center right in France, the center right rules in Italy and the left wing governments in Britain and Spain are unpopular and will probably lose office. Why? Because in each of these cases, the enter right has adopted the policies of the center. If you listen to Sarkozy, Sarkozy wants to regulate the bankers and their pay, Sarkozy wants to regulate more than any leader in the Western world -- whether left wing or right wing. If you listen to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, he is more green and more left wing on the issues that I am talking about then Gordon Brown, the Labour Prime Minister.

I believe that the political geniuses of the post Cold War world were Bill Clinton and Tony Blair who both understood that for the survival of their political movements, they had to move them and fast to the center. In a way, what the right wing parties that are doing well in Europe have done is adopt Blairism as their solution to find some areas where they can possibly continue to be conservative, but for the main part they have moved very dramatically to the center. If you look at Sarkozy or Merkel -- the Germany chancellor's platforms -- can you find for me any sense in which they would be conservative by traditional American views? It's very hard to find. So the vital space is clearly in this centrist, market friendly place.

Now could you find that the Republican Party goes there? Absolutely. Mitt Romney in his first and second incarnation was much more that person. There are still others like that. BUt the heart and soul of the Republican party, at this point, has become a Southern and Western party with roots in a kind of nationalism, nativism, and xenophobia. It will have to find some way to deal with that problem. I don't mean to say that that's true of all Republicans, when you need foot soldiers in elections, when you need to knock on doors, the people that come out for the Republican party tend to ome from that world and it is no accident that the Republican primary debate -- seven people were there, but I think it was only two that raised their hands and said that they believed in evolution. That's what I mean. You're going to have a problem in modern America, in modern young America if you believe that the world was created 45,000 years ago. That's a problem they'll have to solve. Can they solve it? Of course they can. Every large political movement has wings within it and Sarah Palin is a Republican, but so is Newt Gingrich, who is very forward looking and very modern in all those senses.”

The question isn't what is "centrist" relative to a global community, but what is centrist relative to the countries in question. By that determination, Sarkozy is very right leaning -- he wants to do away with the 35 hour work week, for instance and have a more sensible policy vis a vis crime. Similarly, Germany's Angela Merkel's new government is more of a move to the libertarian right, than the center, as it is all but eliminating the progressivity of its income tax.

At one point, he described himself as a Reaganite -- a political philosophy that certainly has its share of people calling it "extreme." No one, I know, for instance, has ever called it "centrist."

Here is Zakaria quoted in 2005 in New York Magazine.

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

I don't believe that the world has changed enough in barely three and a half years to account for this kind of transformation in someone's world views.

Could it be that his national exposure has led him to give more, well, conventional views and might the Republican Party suffer from the same kind of problem?

From where I'm looking, the problem with the Republican Party is that it has so few leaders that can capitalize on the conservatism of the American electorate. Fully 40 percent of Americans described themselves as conservative in a recent poll. The problem with the Republican Party under Bush was that for many it represented a kind of "me too" conservatism -- the very kind of conservatism that was so unpopular and that Zakaria would have us become.

And If You Want to Read What A Nut Thinks About Super Freakonomics...

2009-10-28T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sahil Kapur '09 has written a purely inflammatory blog post for Campus Progress attacking Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics fame for their chapter on global warming in their newest book, Super Freakonomics.

Along the way, he's compared them to creationists and said that they are climate change deniers. (Both Levitt and Dubner believe in global warming, they just disagree with some of the utterly costly attempts to "solve" it.)

I met him when he was fawning over a photo of Obama in The New York Times for a good ten minutes. (He worked at Keck; I work at Salvatori.)

For someone who says very critical and oftentimes downright nasty things about religion, Sahil is sure one to talk.

But maybe, then, again, Sahil's projecting?

Greg Hess on Super Freakonomics

2009-10-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

Professor Greg Hess has a great review of Super Freakonomics in The Los Angeles Times. I'm about half the way through -- the book, not the review -- and recommend it thoroughly. Here are the good graffs from the review:

The concepts of "good" and "bad" are also investigated, and both come up short. We learn that TV is neither good nor bad -- in India, there is evidence that it has actually led to social change that has improved women's lives, while in the U.S. there is evidence that increased TV exposure is associated with increases in higher levels of property and violent crime. They also present ample studies that suggest, "People aren't 'good' or 'bad.' People are people and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated -- for good or ill -- if only you find the right levers." Hmm. Perhaps this explains why economists are not too popular at dinner parties.

There are a few things, however, that the Steves could have presented better. The opening chapter on the economics of gender delves pretty hard into the costs of being a woman (the economics of prostitution, for example, and the pervasiveness of the male-female wage gap) and does not give much airtime to the benefits. I presume there are some. For example, they could have considered research on the effect that the Pill had on society, and its corresponding impact on women's economic and social opportunities.

"Super Freakonomics" also tiptoes around important public policy debates such as healthcare and doesn't dare venture into any sort of policy prescriptions using the political vernacular of the day. To be fair, however, the book's mantra is applicable to all policy discussions. Namely, unless you understand the individual and market incentives created by policy, the law of unintended consequences will eventually doom all reforms. Take note, Congress as we redraw the map on healthcare and financial regulation (not, I fear, for the last time).

No Question Quotas, Please

2009-10-28T02:02:00.000-07:00

Fareed Zakaria asked to hear from a woman in the audience -- after several of the questions came from men. Not only is this a stupid policy -- more women go to college now than men and its increasing -- but it's really against the spirit of the Athenaeum, notwithstanding the "diversity questioning" that Gann did a few years ago at Clinton where every question was asked by someone of a different race.

That this response from Zakaria encouraged audience applause strikes me as disappointing, to say the least.

Fareed Zakaria At the Ath: A Few Quick Remarks

2009-10-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

A few quick remarks:

On the whole, I enjoyed Fareed Zakaria’s talk at the Ath.

It was good to hear him talk about the role of economics in the policy making decisions and how it limits people like the Jim Carvilles of the world who want larger and larger government and how abstract things like the bond market stop them from coming to pass.

Global capital flows must mean better governance and he’s right to point out that inflation has largely been tamed to the benefit of a global middle class. Today, there is only one country suffering from a hyperinflation, compared to thirty-five some few decades ago.

But maybe that lowered inflation has led to the very overspending that Zakaria decries. (The supposed average 13 credit cards a person comes to mind. If credit is cheap, people will consume more of it and there's a lot of evidence that the supposedly indebted Americans haven't gotten that indebted after all, but just that the composition of that debt has shifted.)

Although Zakaria didn't talk about this, I wonder if the same thing is happening to today with global tax competition and what that means for those who believe, like Zakaria does, that most of the world's problems require government. You can't pay for the global welfare state and invest in infrastructure, government, etc. when tax competition drives down revenue. (Which, by the way, is a good thing, for the reasons outlined here.)

One of the things that Dr. Zakaria mentioned over dinner was strategic use of tariffs with respect to the China-Taiwan conflict and how the Chinese co-opted the Taiwanese nationalist sentiment among Taiwanese by reducing tariffs so that they would have incentive in continuing the status quo that will benefit China in the long run, as it is growing at a faster rate than Taiwan.

This strategic use of free trade reminds me of some of the genius of the Bush foreign policy of working to build trade with the Koreans, the Colombians, the Peruvians, the Indians, the Central Americans, etc. Trade makes for a more peaceful world and it is to Zakaria's credit that he suggested a much better policy than the lavish amounts we waste on foreign aid would be better spent if we simply abolished tariffs on agricultural goods.

If the world has become a more peaceful place, I don't think a discussion can take place without mentioning the role of the U.S. military and particularly Navy in securing that Pax Americana.

Zakaria makes the common intellectual error of looking at the picture of the world and trying to reason back as to what were the colors used. He ignores the brush -- American military hegemony. Put simply, when the world has a problem, be it tsunamis off the coast of Indonesia or pirates plundering cargo vessels near Somali, it doesn't call up the Chinese, the Dutch, or whomever, it calls America.

For the reasons why, you need only read this piece by Guy Sorman over at City Journal. We are, to put, it bluntly, subsidizing a global public good -- the U.S. Navy and we're doing it on our dime. The question is then, not when will the rest of the world take advantage of that and build their own economies, but when they will stop free riding.