Hillary Clinton and the "basic bargain"

Hillary Clinton explained her vision for America in a guest commentary she co-authored for the Denver Post last Thursday.

Senator Clinton said the promise of American life rests on what she calls a "basic bargain." The "basic bargain," she contends, is that "all of us should have the opportunity to live up to our God-given potential, and the responsibility to make the most of it."

She didn't explain exactly who made this bargain, or exactly when, or exactly who is supposed to deliver the goods, but she gives the "basic bargain" a lot of credit. "In the twentieth century," the senator wrote, "that basic bargain built the greatest middle class the world has ever known."

The "basic bargain" concept may be the most revealing thing Hillary Clinton has ever put forward about herself.

Hillary Clinton contrasts her "basic bargain" with what she calls the "different direction" of the Bush administration, "the mistaken belief that when the wealthy do even better, the middle class will eventually get their share."

In fact, what she describes as a "different direction" is only a difference of degree, not of kind.

Both the "basic bargain" and the "different direction" start from the premise that wealth is immoral unless it is providing assistance to people who had nothing to do with earning it.

What if that's not true?

Wealthy people in America are not exactly living on land grants from the king of England, collecting tribute from powerless peasants under their control.

People get wealthy in America by inventing something the rest of us want to buy, or by putting in long years of study and training for fields like medicine and law, or by working insane hours in a business they built themselves, or by risking their money in a promising business built by someone else, or by being the descendant of someone who earned a lot of money and chose to take care of his or her family, which is everyone's right in a free country.

Wealthy people in America don't owe anybody an explanation. Unless they've taken money by force or by fraud, their wealth has been created by providing something of value, something that people will pay to acquire.

In contrast, let's look closely at Hillary Clinton's "basic bargain."

"All of us should have the opportunity to live up to our God-given potential, and the responsibility to make the most of it," the senator wrote.

If you are sitting at the counter at Denny's over a Grand Slam Breakfast, you can say things like that and sound perfectly reasonable. But if you're a member of the United States Senate who is running for President of the United States, you had better explain what you mean by "should."

"Should" is the language of government compulsion. "All of us should have the opportunity" means the government is going to take money out of people's paychecks and use it for the benefit of someone else. It means the government will give the money you earned to someone who has yet to realize his or her "God-given potential," a rather open-ended target which can be expected to line up with the wish-list of reliably Democratic voting blocs.

Senator Clinton apparently recognizes that the longer you think about this idea, the less you will care for it. In the time it takes to type a comma, she rushes to add that those who receive this opportunity should have "the responsibility to make the most of it."

What a statement. It contains the hidden assumption that people on government assistance have acted irresponsibly and blown their opportunities. It's either an admission that the Great Society programs were a complete waste of money or it is a craven pander to the voters who think, shall we say, not highly of welfare recipients.

The second part of the "basic bargain" carries the implied "should" but there is no hint of how government compulsion would be used to force people to carry out their "responsibility." America is not a Dickens novel and government assistance is not a workhouse. People who accept government assistance and fail to get their lives together just carry their problems into the next election cycle, where they are hauled before cameras to justify more efforts to provide "opportunity."

Hillary Clinton's scrambled economic theory credits her "basic bargain" with creating the middle class in America and blames the Bush administration's "different direction" for stagnating wages and higher living costs.

Might there be another explanation?

One explanation for stagnating wages in America might be the population growth driven by illegal immigration. More workers competing for the same jobs certainly prevents upward pressure on labor costs. At the same time, population growth drives up the price of housing as more families circle the musical chairs of a housing supply limited by environmental policies that discourage real estate development and tax policies that no longer favor the construction of rental units.

Another explanation might be the "free trade" agreements that allow American companies to move their manufacturing operations to low-wage countries and ship their finished goods back to the American market without tariffs or penalties. Senator Clinton says in her commentary that she would pay for some of her "opportunity" program by eliminating "wasteful business subsidies." She might rethink that when she finds out (or when you find out) that some of those subsidies were put in place to keep job-creating businesses from moving all the jobs to India.

These are problems that cannot be fixed by raising the tax rate on high-income Americans, even if you spent every dime of the money on the senator's God-given-potential project.

The more interesting part of the "basic bargain" statement is Senator Clinton's unwitting revelation of her core beliefs, which turn out to be quite different than the picture she has always chosen to present to the world.

The "basic bargain" boils down to this: behave yourself, and you will be taken care of. Do what you're supposed to do, and you will be provided with the essential necessities of life.

And she said she didn't want to bake cookies and have teas.

Hillary Clinton is a 1950s housewife in an Armani pantsuit.

She's a good little girl at her mommy's kitchen table.

She's a Victorian woman with her eyes closed, thinking of England.

Good God.

The first female president of the United States is not going to be a woman who believes that good behavior gives everyone the right to be supported by someone else. The first female president of the United States will be a woman who understands that government does not create wealth, someone who understands that freedom does not permit government-dictated economic outcomes, someone who treats all Americans with respect and does not divide the nation into those who should feel guilty and those who should feel entitled.

The first female president of the United States will not be a woman who presents herself as the world's leading feminist while basing her career and her policies on the parasitic manipulations of a pre-feminist, victimized, second-class citizen.

She's no bargain.


Copyright 2006

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President Bush's "moral line"

President George W. Bush explained his policy on sacrifice today.

He does not believe it is moral to advance the interests of mankind by sacrificing life in its embryonic stage.

He believes we should wait until it has been through basic training.

How many times has President Bush stood in front of a camera and told us that more Americans must die in Iraq because so many Americans have already died in Iraq, and to change the policy now would be to dishonor the dead?

Why is it moral to sacrifice the lives of young Americans in order to avoid the acknowledgment that the Iraq policy has failed?

Why is it moral to withhold federal funding from science in the name of religion?

With any luck, scientific advances in embryonic stem cell research will proceed despite the denial of federal funding and we will live to see cures for grim diseases like juvenile diabetes and Parkinson's.

One day, far in the future, President George W. Bush's obituary will note in the first paragraph that he used his first veto to stand in the way of that progress.

Copyright 2006

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Why the Arab-Israeli peace process didn't/doesn't/can't work

If you found a beehive hanging a foot from your front door, how much time would you spend tip-toeing in and out of your house before you called somebody to remove it?

Would you wait to see if the bees were going to be aggressive?

Would you wait until you'd been stung a few times?

Would you wait until your children had been stung a few times?

Would you let the U.S. State Department persuade you to give the bees more time to learn to co-exist peacefully with you?

Israel did. But today it appears that the years of one-sided war -- of "intifada" and suicide bombings and quietly state-sponsored rocket attacks -- have finally come to an end.

For years, apologists for Palestinian violence stared dewy-eyed into TV cameras and explained that Palestinian youths throw stones and blow themselves up on buses because these are the only weapons they have to resist "occupation."

For years, apologists for Palestinian violence finessed the question of exactly how much land they consider "occupied."

Today we have the answer from the elected Hamas-led government: all of it.

Today we have the answer from the government of Iran, sponsor of Hezbollah terrorists: all of it.

In order to believe the Middle East peace process can succeed, you must believe they don't really mean it. You must think the people who openly call for the destruction of Israel are not telling the truth about their goal.

But they do mean it. They are telling the truth. They want to destroy Israel, and ever since the last time Israel defeated them in an all-out shooting war, they have lived by the Russian saying, patience will crack a rock.

The Gaza Strip and the West Bank and southern Lebanon are now in the hands of terrorists who control governments.

The terrorists were better off without the governments. Now their stateless acts of terror are official acts of war.

And if it's war, both sides get to fight.

There is nothing further to be gained by pretending that a dispute over existence can be compromised away. Delaying the war will only give Iran the months or years it needs to finish its nuclear weapon.

The time for wishing is over. Some wars just have to be fought.

Copyright 2006

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Major League Baseball's secret spying

Major League Baseball sources told the New York Daily News that baseball launched a secret investigation of Barry Bonds a year before Commissioner Bud Selig appointed former senator George Mitchell to lead an investigation into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

Of course, you already suspected as much if you read the earlier post, "Jose Canseco's interesting threat," where we pointed out that "the former Senate Majority Leader is not the guy you call if you want to know what happened. He's the guy you call if you know what happened and you don't want anybody else to find out."

Sure enough, the Daily News reports today that Major League Baseball officials "found plenty of damning information about Bonds" in their secret investigation and fully expect that he will be indicted next week on charges of perjury and tax evasion.

Meanwhile in Pittsburgh, the All-Star Game is going on without the presence of the only active player to hit more career home runs than Babe Ruth. Barry Bonds wasn't invited, and nobody at the game wants to talk about it.

If they think it's awkward now, wait until they try to stop Barry Bonds from going after Henry Aaron's record.

Judging from his past comments, we can expect Barry Bonds to issue a flat denial and vow to be fully exonerated in a court of law. We can expect sophisticated and expensive lawyering to stall the trial for quite a long time. We can expect Barry Bonds to continue playing as long as he's healthy enough to make it into the batter's box without a walker.

What will Major League Baseball do then? Suspend him without waiting for the jury's verdict? That won't look good. Pressure the team owners to refuse to sign him? That won't work as long as he sells tickets, and he does sell tickets.

We'll have to wait and see if the court of public opinion even cares about charges of perjury and tax evasion. Baseball fans may not be willing to cast the first stone at Barry Bonds over a little fibbing about drugs and some unreported cash income.

There's only one thing Major League Baseball can do if it wants to save the integrity of the career home run record. Sadly for baseball, Tonya Harding and her boyfriend don't do that kind of work anymore.


Copyright 2006

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Atlas Shrugged, Now Playing in Zimbabwe

If you haven't read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and you're waiting for a movie version, here's something faster. Read this first-person account of what's going on in Zimbabwe by Zimbabwean-born journalist Douglas Rogers in today's Los Angeles Times.

Ayn Rand's 1957 masterpiece illustrates with murder-mystery-style suspense what happens to a society that abuses and bleeds its productive people in order to support its unproductive people.

If you haven't read the book, click here to get a copy. Don't ask anybody. Don't tell anybody. Don't take anybody's word for it. Think for yourself.

In Atlas Shrugged, the society's leading industrialists and best minds are disappearing. One day they are hard at work in their factories and at their desks, the next they have vanished. No one knows why or where they have gone. But as they are replaced by people who lack their genius, their work ethic, and their vision, the companies they ran so profitably gradually collapse.

The government officials tighten their chokehold on the productive people who remain.

And then more of them vanish. And more industries collapse.

At the end of the book, the lights go out in New York City.

Now, read this excerpt from Douglas Rogers' account in today's paper:

It is the gradual collapse of Zimbabwe's once-sound infrastructure, however, that shocked me most since my last visit 18 months ago. There have been fuel shortages since 2001, but now electricity cuts leave many parts of the country without power several hours a day. The government and state press routinely blame this on "international sanctions" and Western "sabotage." The charge is laughable. There are no international sanctions - only travel bans on leading members of the ruling party, known as the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front.

What's really happened is that many of the country's power turbines have broken down, and the state has neither the foreign currency to buy the spare parts nor the technicians to fix them. (An estimated 4 million Zimbabweans, including a huge number of the country's most skilled workers, have left.) Zimbabwe also imports 40% of its energy from South Africa, Mozambique and Congo, and it cannot afford to pay its bills, hence the blackouts. "What did we do before candles?" goes the local joke. "Electricity!"

Rogers reports that the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is over 70 percent and the currency is so eaten away by inflation that a beer costs $150,000:

How did Zimbabwe get to this point? It began in the late 1990s when, in order to pay for a costly military incursion into civil war-torn Congo, President Robert Mugabe ordered the printing of vast amounts of money, and inflation climbed steeply.

But it has reached today's levels only since the commercial farm invasions, in which 4,000 out of 4,500 white commercial farmers were kicked off their land, beginning in 2000. White farmers accounted for an estimated 60% of the country's foreign currency earnings through the export of tobacco and other crops. The invasions not only crippled domestic production, they scared away foreign investment. To dig itself out of debt and pay its bills, the government has simply printed more money.

Meanwhile, production by "new farmers" - landless peasants who moved in to occupy the white farms - is pitifully low. Part of the reason is that although the government offers fuel and maize-seed subsidies to new farmers, many have discovered that it's more profitable to sell the maize seed and fuel on the black market for inflated prices than to use them on the farm. Millions of acres of once-productive commercial farmland lie fallow. Of course, the government then blames drought, even though the rains have been good.

The lesson here is that Sir William Blackstone, 18th century legal scholar and a major influence on the framers of the U.S. Constitution, was right when he said the fundamental rights are life, liberty and property. Private property is the foundation of freedom. If everything you have can be seized by the government and given to people who need it more, you are not free. You are enslaved to the needs of people you can't control and you are subject to financial destruction at the whim of government officials.

A free country protects private property. That's how it stays a free country.

Does it seem unfair that some have much and others have little?

What's the alternative?

In those places where the government owns everything and hands it out, there is a bloody struggle for control of the government amid gradually declining production.

In Iraq, where the government owns the oil and the oil industry, where the government owns all the important industries and effectively hands out all the jobs, the Iraqi Shiites are at war with the Iraqi Sunnis.

In the Palestinian territories, there are 140,000 people on the government payroll and the Palestinians affiliated with Hamas are at war with the Palestinians affiliated with Fatah.

In Venezuela, where leftist Hugo Chavez is threatening to establish a "popular economy" that amounts to Soviet-style socialism, an industrial leader told the Los Angeles Times "that the business climate was abysmal, and that factory production, industrial jobs and private investment had plummeted since Chavez took power in 1999."

In Zimbabwe, where knowledgeable farmers were thrown off their land, the government supporters who were handed the farms are selling their government-subsidized seed for cash as the economy craters.

You might call this the myth of benevolent government: the idea that a government can somehow find it in its heart to take care of people, either by "asking" productive people to "pay their fair share" or by telling productive people that the fruits of their labor belong to all the people.

Government is not rhetoric, George Washington reportedly said, government is force.

Limit the power of government and protect private property -- it is history's lesson for those who wish to live in freedom and prosperity. If we want to succeed in Iraq, we should pressure the Iraqi government to privatize the state-owned enterprises. That's the answer.

Copyright 2006

Editor's note: You might be interested to read "A Plan to Get Out of Iraq: Blackstone's Fundamental Rights and the Power of Property" at www.SusanShelley.com. For more information about Ayn Rand, visit the Ayn Rand Institute (and buy out their bookstore) at www.AynRand.org.


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Solving the mystery of who leaked the tunnel plot

The Los Angeles Times was openly skeptical in its front-page story today of the FBI's claim that a network of terrorists on three continents was plotting to blow up tunnels under the Hudson River.

"Plot on N.Y. Tunnels Alleged" the one-column headline said. It was dwarfed on the page by a color photograph of a Marine honor guard carrying the casket of Corporal Jason Morrow, accompanied by a heart-tearing story of the day Corporal Morrow proposed to his girlfriend, Evelyn Flores, on the field at Angels Stadium, where manager Mike Scioscia invited him to stand next to the dugout for the national anthem.

The story on the terror plot refers to "the alleged plan" and is full of quotes that sound like the answer to the question, "Was this a real plot or just a bunch of idiots in a chat room?"

It was "the real deal," FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon said.

"It's certainly possible" to cause a flood by blowing up the tunnels, said an anonymous federal law enforcement official.

The alleged co-conspirators "were just talking to one another" when authorities intervened, New York Senator Charles Schumer said.

"There is not one shred of evidence that the plan continued beyond the planning stage," said New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

"These guys were going to do this," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Richard Kolko in Washington.

The Times pointed out that civil libertarians have criticized the FBI's arrest of seven men in Miami two weeks ago when there is "little evidence" that the men did more than talk about blowing up targets including Chicago's Sears Tower. "Although the suspects in the New York terror case apparently had not conducted reconnaissance or acquired weapons, federal officials said authorities were convinced that the suspects were preparing to act and that they were far more of a threat than the Miami men."

In other words, the authorities don't have much on these suspects and they really have nothing on those guys in Miami.

Let's ascribe good motives to the FBI and even let Assistant Director Mark Mershon off the hook for accusing the New York Daily News of causing "upsetment" in delicate international relations.

Who leaked this story?

The FBI has no motive.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg jumped in front of the cameras to complain that New York has not received an adequate amount of anti-terror funding from the federal government. Could he have leaked the story in order to make that point before Congress adjourns for the summer and the fall campaign season?

He's a suspect. But Lieutenant Columbo wouldn't spend too much time on him.

Judging from the front-page layout, the editors of the Los Angeles Times seem to think the administration is over-hyping alleged terror plots to distract from the deaths of Americans in Iraq.

That's possible. The president has said many times that the more-than-2,500 American deaths in Iraq are sacrifices necessary to secure America from terrorist attack. Did someone working for the president leak the story to the New York Daily News in order to shore up public support for the president's policy?

Lieutenant Columbo doesn't think so.

The lieutenant takes note of an AP story on page 16 of today's Los Angeles Times, just to the right of where the tunnel plot story continues from page one.

"More White House Visits Disclosed," the headline reads.

The story says the Secret Service on Friday revealed four additional visits to the White House in 2001 by Jack Abramoff. The former super-lobbyist has pleaded guilty in an influence-peddling scandal and is now cooperating with the Justice Department in an investigation into "alleged corruption on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch."

On April 20, 2001, the Associated Press report says, Jack Abramoff visited Cesar Conda, who was then Vice President Dick Cheney's assistant for domestic policy. Five days after Abramoff and Conda met, "one of Abramoff's former lobbying colleagues, Patrick Pizzella, was nominated by the president to be assistant secretary of labor. Pizzella was confirmed."

Now we're getting somewhere.

If you have followed Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity, you know that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, is presently facing charges stemming from a concerted effort, reportedly authorized by the vice president, to leak confidential information to the press in order to shape news coverage of pre-war intelligence.

This is the point at which Lieutenant Columbo drops in to see Vice President Cheney.

Is it possible that the vice president's office spilled the secret of the tunnel plot investigation in order to stir up a distraction from the story that implicates his office in an influence-peddling scandal?

What do we know about Cesar Conda and Patrick Pizzella?

Lieutenant Columbo has just one more question. What does Dick Cheney know about Cesar Conda and Patrick Pizzella?


Copyright 2006


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NASA: King of the Daredevils

Today the History Channel ran a special on the career of motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel. By coincidence, CSPAN2 happened to be replaying a NASA press conference at the same time.

If you flipped back and forth between the two channels, the resemblance was startling.

There was Evel Knievel in the 1970s, battling technical problems as he prepared to jump Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a flashy rocket, surrounded by cameras and cheering crowds.

That particular jump didn't go very well.

So there was Evel Knievel, talking to the press, explaining what went wrong.

And there was Evel Knievel, jumping his Harley-Davidson over thirteen Greyhound buses, over fourteen Greyhound buses, over fifty-two cars, as the crowds screamed and cheered and held their breath and jumped to their feet.

Of course, there's no point at all to jumping a motorcycle over an impossible distance just to see if you can do it without being killed.

Just like there's no point at all to launching the space shuttle.

NASA says the shuttle Discovery is on "a rather pedestrian mission" to bring supplies to the half-completed space station, where a crew of two is about to increase to a crew of three.

USA Today says the shuttle is on a mission to pick up the trash. The space station is so crammed, the paper reported, that the astronauts can't even find their big-screen television.

If the shuttle is a motorcycle stunt on a rocket, the space station is a flagpole-sitting contest.

What is the point? Just to see if we can keep people on a flying Winnebago for months at a time without killing them?

Don't take my word for it. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told USA Today last fall that it is now commonly accepted that the space shuttle and the space station were mistakes. They never leave the Earth's orbit, he explained, so they don't accomplish anything in the way of space exploration.

The NASA officials at Tuesday's press conference said the crew of the shuttle Discovery is presently examining the orbiter's exterior for signs of damage from the six pieces of insulating foam that flew off the external fuel tank during launch. If there's damage to the heat shield, the astronauts will live at the space station until NASA can get the shuttle Atlantis off the ground to go and rescue them. Discovery will be flown home by remote control so that if it burns up on re-entry, it won't kill anybody.

So Discovery's mission is this: get off the ground safely, carry enough supplies so the crew members don't starve to death during an emergency stay on the space station, and fly home without exploding in a fireball.

If NASA is going to do Evel Knievel's act, the least they could do is get the astronauts some better looking jumpsuits.


Copyright 2006

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Burning the Constitution in order to save it

Last week, in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court repudiated President Bush's claim that he has inherent authority as commander-in-chief to do whatever is necessary to win the war on terror. At issue was the president's decision to hold terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay prison and eventually try them in front of military commissions, which would operate under rules he made up himself.

No, the court said, the president doesn't have the power to make it up as he goes along. Some kind of law must apply to the Guantanamo Bay detainees, either U.S. military law or the Third Geneva Convention or something written by Congress especially for the occasion. "The whim of the Executive," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, will not do.

Three justices dissented from the majority decision, making the excellent point that Congress passed a law withdrawing the federal courts' jurisdiction in matters regarding the Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, Justice Scalia pointed out, says "no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

That means Congress has exercised its power under the U.S. Constitution -- Article III, Section 2 -- to make an exception to the courts' appellate jurisdiction. The Supreme Court may not like it, but the Framers gave Congress the power to exclude some things from the courts' oversight.

Justice Stevens wiggled around the limitation by contending that Congress didn't really mean it. He cited draft versions of the bill to support his interpretation.

This is another one of those cases where, if you like the result, you don't want to look too closely at the method used to reach it. If the Supreme Court disregards the Constitution in order to stop a president who is disregarding the Constitution, the Constitution has probably come out ahead.

The core problem here is that the war on terror is not really a war. Wars are fought between states with governments that control their militaries, governments that can sign peace treaties and make enforceable agreements. Prisoners of war picked up on the battlefield are returned to their countries when the war is over. Terrorists, on the other hand, are a threat for as long as they live.

Terror is not a state with a government. Terror is a tactic, not an enemy. A war on terror is like a war on ambushes -- we're trying to guess the intentions of individuals who haven't yet done anything. Even if we guess right, it's not possible under any rational system of justice to put people on trial for something they haven't yet done.

The goal of pre-empting terror carries its own dangers. We are embroiled in a military action in Iraq, with no clear enemy and no clear military goal, because we believed -- wrongly -- that there were weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a government that might give them to terrorists. We are watching as the president assembles a vast, secret database of the bank transactions and telephone contacts of innocent American citizens in the hope that some computer program will be able to pick out suspicious patterns. We are witnessing a crass effort to intimidate the New York Times and all journalists into censoring themselves in a way the First Amendment bars the government from censoring them.

And these things are not risks. They have already happened.

The president says the terror suspects at Guantanamo are dangerous people who will hurt Americans if given the freedom to do so. He's probably right.

Probably.

This is the point at which you have to decide for yourself how willing you are to tolerate mistakes. Are you comfortable with the idea that, in the name of the people of the United States, our government is picking up terror suspects and detaining them without charges or trial for a period of years, perhaps forever?

Or do you think the government must at some point show evidence -- to all of us -- that the person detained is, in fact, a danger to the United States?

Nobody wants to be wrong, either way.

Still, there can't be any doubt that for all the people around the world who think they hate the United States and everything it stands for, something stunning happened last week. The U.S. Supreme Court said every person in the custody of the United States government is entitled to due process of law, even the close associate of the man who planned the September 11th attacks. And the President of the United States said he will abide by the Supreme Court's ruling.

The war on terror may not be a real war, but that is a real victory.


Copyright 2006

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