Sunday, August 03, 2008 :::
A few items of interest:
- Last week, Speaker Pelosi managed to adjourn the House of Representatives by a one-vote margin. A few dozen Republicans refused to leave the House floor, demanding action on gas prices. There's a good summary here. The Speaker shut off the cameras, microphones, and the lights, and then the police were called in to remove anyone still watching.
- David Brooks at the New York Times writes that the dispersal of power in a multipolar world makes it difficult to build consensus:
But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.
The results are familiar. We get United Nations resolutions that go unenforced. We get high-minded vows to police rogue regimes, but little is done. We get the failure of the Doha round and the gradual weakening of the international economic order. A few years ago, the U.S. tried to break through this global passivity. It tried to enforce U.N. resolutions and put the mantle of authority on its own shoulders. The results of that enterprise, the Iraq war, suggest that this approach will not be tried again anytime soon. And so the globosclerosis continues, and people around the world lose faith in their leaders. It’s worth remembering that George W. Bush is actually more popular than many of his peers. His approval ratings hover around 29 percent. Gordon Brown’s are about 17 percent. Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda’s are about 26 percent. Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Silvio Berlusconi have ratings that are a bit higher, but still pathetically low.
Brooks endorses a League of Democracies as the best current idea.
- I was a little ticked to see this Associated Press hit piece on Senator McCain. It notes that he objects to the way Social Security is run but still cashes his Social Security checks, even though it would be legal for him to refuse them. AP even checked with the Social Security Administration to make sure McCain could, if he wanted to, refuse benefits. The implied accusation is hypocrisy.
Now, if a mugger assaults you in the street, steals your wallet, and, taking pity on you, offers you bus fare to get back home, is it hypocritical to accept the money? Does that make you complicit in the mugging? No, and no. Similarly, if the government forces you and your employer, upon pain of imprisonment, to contribute to Social Security your whole life, and then offers you some of that money back (but less, probably, than you would have earned if you had invested it), is it hypocritical to take the money while objecting to the system in the first place? Certainly not.
I have some sympathy for the Senator here. Just last week, someone called me a hypocrite for opposing government bank guarantees and yet keeping my savings in an FDIC-insured back. Well, my tax money is ultimately guaranteeing those banks, isn't it? And I have no choice in the matter, so I might as well take the benefit.
- In case you missed it, Dick Heller, the man who sued the District of Columbia over its gun laws, took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and won, was denied an application for his gun permit. So, back to court for him. Details at Volokh.
- Finally, a bit of humor. This link has been going around: the dangers of relying on machine translation in critical situations.
Labels: energy, media distortion, social security
::: posted by Eric at 8:03 PM
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