Freedom Line Blog

As we profiled in last week’s Freedom Minute video, they’re currently doing a bit of housekeeping in the Obama White House, with key departures coming throughout the ranks of the senior staff. Thus far, the biggest change has been on the economic team, with the departures of Peter Orszag, Chrisina Romer, and Larry Summers. Last week’s announcement that General Jim Jones would step down as National Security Adviser, however, shows that the bloodletting is now spreading to the president’s foreign policy team.

Unfortunately, the upshot of this transitional period seems to be replacing plaques rather than policies. The new economic advisers promise more of the same. And on national security, we may actually be trading down.

While General Jones was known for keeping banker’s hours and not being a particularly influential member of Obama’s inner circle, his military credentials insulated him from being viewed as too dovish on foreign policy. Not so his replacement, Thomas Donilon, whose past successes include being in-house counsel at Fannie Mae (you can’t make this stuff up).

Writing in today’s New York Post, AEI’s Arthur Herman lays out the case for pessimism at Obama’s choice for the nation’s most powerful national security position:

Pity Peter Beinart. The former New Republic editor was once a voice of intellectual independence on the left — even going so far as to write a 2006 book arguing that it was incumbent upon liberals to aggressively prosecute the War on Terror.

A prophet is despised in his own country, however, and in the world of Washington punditry it’s more common for the prophet to change than the country. Thus, Beinart — after years of being labeled a Zionist warmonger by his colleagues on the left — has turned tail and run into the arms of his left-wing brethren. The source of his rebirth? A scathing rebuke to what he calls “the American Jewish Establishment” in the New York Review of Books and a decided retreat from his previous muscularity on foreign policy.

Having claimed sanctuary with the left, Beinart is now drifting into the realm of liberal self-parody. As his party stands on the precipice of what could be one of the largest midterm election refutations in history, he takes to the virtual pages of the Daily Beast today to confidently proclaim that Barack Obama is “a lock” for reelection in 2012. The only problem is that the self-styled intellectual’s data has been tortured until it confesses his preferred outcome. Consider:

Of course Barack Obama is likely to be reelected. For starters, American presidents usually get reelected. In the last 75 years, incumbents have lost a grand total of three times: in 1976, 1980, and 1992. And what did Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush all have in common? They had serious primary challenges within their own party (from Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy, and Pat Buchanan, respectively). The last president who lost reelection without a major primary challenge was Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Beinart’s historical invocation is deeply flawed. He seems to have chosen a period of 75 years only because it yields the most favorable outcome for his thesis. But should the 1936 election really be taken with equal weight as 1992 in understanding modern American politics? Look at it this way: the same data could be used to say that three of the last six presidents have failed to be elected to a second term — that 50 % failure rate provides no room for the confidence that Beinart is peddling.

As for primary challenges, this a more subtle, but still flawed, analysis. In all likelihood, Beinart has the causation wrong. Presidents don’t lose because they have primary challenges. They have primary challenges because of the weakness that ends up leading to their loss. Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 simply did a better job of managing their coalitions than Ford, Carter, or Bush 41. But had the latter three not been challenged for their party’s nomination, it’s still not safe to say they would have been on sure footing for reelection.

Were Beinart not imbibing Organizing for America soma, he could have produced a more thoughtful piece. The landscape for Obama in 2012 probably looks closer to that facing George W. Bush in 2004 than any of the earlier models he cites. Like Bush, Obama’s tenure has led to some (still relatively stifled) disquiet in his own party and has polarized public opinion at large — making a majority in the electoral college very tough sledding. But like Bush, he also has the benefits of incumbency and a known brand of leadership to take into an election where the opposition’s bullpen is  thus far a mile wide and an inch deep.

This is no time for triumphalism on the left. Obama certainly retains the prospects of being reelected in 2012. But if he does, it will be a street fight, not a coronation.

Not a good sign … but a nice moment of levity with the President:

The Los Angeles Times — that bastion of journalistic daring do — has discovered that recessions cause job losses. Don’t laugh — they will probably submit this to the Pulitzer people.

What really steams the Times’ clams, however, is that manual labor is being replaced by mechanical automation. Writing in this morning’s edition of the paper, reporter Alana Semuels notes:

Forced to cut costs during the recession, employers across the country are looking at ways to avoid hiring. They’ve accelerated use of computers and technology, replacing administrative assistants with software, cashiers with self-service kiosks and laborers with machines.

These structural changes mean some jobs that disappeared during the recession may never come back. Productivity gains are good for company profits and help the economy grow over the long run. But in the short term, the shift is exacerbating America’s jobless recovery.

Kudos to Semuels for at least noting the importance of productivity gains, but there’s a still something of a misdirect here. It’s probably an overstatement to say that employers “are looking at ways to avoid hiring” (my money is on the fact that most employers would love to be in a financial position to consider new employees). While there are many instances where shifting to automation is inherently superior to relying on labor, the scales are tilted by government intervention. Consider this passage from elsewhere in the article:

“Labor is so expensive,” said [farmer Mike] Young, whose great-grandfather started farming row crops in Kern County in 1910. “There’s their wages, truck, insurance, workers’ comp and the safety regulations. We went to a high-value crop that needed less labor input.”

Notice a trend? With the single exemption of trucks (and even that’s debatable given California’s automotive taxes), these are all factors created or exacerbated by government. California has one of the highest minimum wages in the nation, a heavily regulated insurance sector, and excessive workers’ comp and safety regulations. Technology may have an inherent economic appeal, but the challenge it presents to labor is only compounded by state government’s attempts to “help” the working man.

Apart from government distortions of the market, however, there is a bigger point to be made here. Technology’s displacements of the labor force may be jarring, but they lead to a stronger economy (the capital savings can be directed towards more productive investments) and an infinitely better life for all Americans. After all, we could have attempted to protect the horse-drawn carriage industry by suppressing the development of the automobile, subsidized makers of candlesticks and gas lamps by impeding the development of the light bulb, and employed many more bank tellers by standing athwart the ATM. But we’d live in a society that had made decisively less progress from 100 years ago than the one we currently inhabit.

This principle was captured brilliantly by the French political economist Frederic Bastiat in a satirical letter that he wrote to the French Parliament under the aegis of seeking “protection” for his nation’s candlestick makers:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

When you’re 150 years behind the French on economics, you know you’re in trouble. Or that you work for the Los Angeles Times.

While it keeps the entertainment industry’s wheels greased, that’s the conclusion that Reason has come to. And it’s hard to dispute their conclusion:

Today’s quote of the day comes from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who — in a remarkably dishonest attack on conservative economics at the Huffington Post — pulls out one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book, making a prediction he’ll never be held accountable for:

Look, I used to be a trustee of the Social Security trust fund. Believe me when I tell you Social Security is basically okay. It may need a little fine tuning but I guarantee you’ll receive your Social Security check by the time you retire even if that’s forty years from now.

Put aside that the substance of Reich’s argument is “trust me”. The 64-year old Reich is writing a check that his actuarial table can’t cash. May Secretary Reich live to be 104. That’s a good age for humility to kick in.

If America continues to be a sober nation, there will be a time a few decades from now when Paul Krugman’s economic hypochondria will be viewed with the same sneering contempt as Paul Ehrlich’s crazed claims that hundreds of millions would die from famine in the 1970s and 1980s or the fears of the rise of Japan that dominated public discourse in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the old empire’s economic lost decade intervened).

On his blog at the New York Times today, Krugman frets aloud (his muscle memory prevents him from doing otherwise) that Americans may tank the economy by attempting to pay down their unsustainable levels of debt (further proof that Keynesianism is the economist’s version of a drunken weekend in Vegas). But the big story here is buried in the complaint that undergirds his thesis:

So what will happen? In the end, I’d argue, what must happen is an effective default on a significant part of debt, one way or another. The default could be implicit, via a period of moderate inflation that reduces the real burden of debt; that’s how World War II cured the depression. Or, if not, we could see a gradual, painful process of individual defaults and bankruptcies, which ends up reducing overall debt.

Hang on a tick. World War II? Hasn’t Krugman spent the past two years using every inch of column space available to him to advocate that President Obama embrace aggressive neo-Rooseveltism? But now it’s the war — not the New Deal — that ended the Depression? We know that Krugman is a specialist in non-falsifiable theories (if only the stimulus had been bigger …), but if the eight years that FDR had set aside for “bold, persistent experimentation” prior to Pearl Harbor weren’t sufficient to heal the nation’s markets, maybe that was a sign that the problem was strategic and not tactical. Maybe the Sage of Hyde Park should have taken some pointers from the benighted Warren Harding.

This is all a bit shocking coming from a Nobel Laureate. After all, if Paul Krugman doesn’t speak with authority on economics … then maybe Barack Obama doesn’t speak with authority about peace.

Over the weekend, we pointed out how the nomination of Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell in Delaware isn’t enough to dash Republican hopes for a takeover of the Senate even if she goes down to defeat. The reason? The Senate races in Connecticut and West Virginia — under-reported by the mainstream media — are presenting unforeseen pickup opportunities for the GOP.

Only a few days later, Public Policy Polling is reporting that Republican John Raese enjoys a three-point lead (46-43) over popular Democratic Governor Joe Manchin in West Virginia. Check out these truly astonishing results:

Manchin is the second most popular Governor PPP has polled on all year, behind only Bobby Jindal, with a 59/32 approval spread. He breaks almost even with Republicans as 42% of them approve of the job he’s doing with just 44% disapproving. In a highly polarized political climate the list of politicians with that kind of crossover popularity is very short.

At the same time West Virginians couldn’t be much more down on national Democrats. Barack Obama’s approval rating in the state is just 30% with 64% of voters disapproving of him. Even within his own party barely half of voters, at 51%, like the job he’s doing. Support from Republicans (91% disapproval) and independents (73% disapproval) is pretty much nonexistent.

Given the President’s high degree of unpopularity it’s no surprise that 54% of voters in the state want Republicans to control the next Congress with just 37% wanting the Democrats to stay in charge. GOP voters (91-3) and independents (66-21) are pretty universal in their desire for a Republican majority and even 25% of Democrats say they’d like to see a change.

We’re only a few months away from the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday. And the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan is already beginning to celebrate. A touching tribute from the men and women of our armed forces — those who Reagan loved and who loved him in return:

From the Deck of the USS Ronald Reagan

It’s nearly a week later, but on this Sunday talk show-eve we can be guaranteed that tomorrow’s beltway chatter will be dominated by talk of Christine O’Donnell’s upset of Mike Castle in the GOP senate primary in Delaware. To save you the pain of sitting through Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, Fox News Sunday and CNN’s State of the Union, here are the basic talking points you’re going to hear all morning: O’Donnell’s win proves that Tea Party radicals are taking over the GOP, ruining their chances for a majority this year and imperiling the long-term existence of the party.

Put aside the obvious bias of these remarks (remember how two years ago the GOP was imperiled because it was losing? Now apparently it’s imperiled because it’s winning). The truth is a lot more complicated.

It’s undoubtedly true that O’Donnell’s nomination makes it much likelier that Democrats will retain the Delaware seat that used to be held by Joe Biden. Delaware is a solidly blue state and O’Donnell’s deep Republican red — regardless of her virtues or vices — is never going to play as well as Castle’s fuschia statewide.

The Tea Party’s stated goal, however — moving the Republican party closer to the principles of small government — is on track for success in most of its other contested senate races throughout the country. Ken Buck in Colorado, Mike Lee in Utah, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Rand Paul in Kentucky, Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio in Florida are among the Tea Party-backed candidates who appear on track for victory. Joe Miller in Alaska is a strong bet too, though Lisa Murkowski’s misbeggoten attempt at a write-in candidacy may tighten that race. Only Nevada’s Sharron Angle presents similar difficulties to O’Donnell, but on a far narrower basis. As of this writing, she’s polling essentially even with Harry Reid.

But there’s an even bigger misperception at work here. Since pundits only discovered a few weeks ago that Republicans had a shot at taking over the senate, they were able to put their Prozac back in the medicine cabinet with the O’Donnell win. This is a mistake. For while Delaware may have just slipped out of reach, two seats that were not previously part of the electoral calcuation are now in play.

The first is in Connecticut, where former WWE CEO Linda McMahon has pulled within five points of the supposedly invincible Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. The second is West Virginia, where the seat formerly held by Robert Byrd was expected to be an easy win for Democratic Governor Joe Manchin. However, industrial executive John Raese has closed the gap to within five points as well. Given the strong conservative turnout expected this year, these could both be sleepers come election night.

Don’t despair, conservative America. We’re just getting started.

Proving, even in the midst of election season, that there’s no depths to which Harry Reid won’t sink, CNN reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday he will add the DREAM Act, a controversial immigration measure, to a defense policy bill the Senate will take up next week.

The decision means the defense bill, which often passes with bipartisan support, will be home to two major, thorny political issues – the other being the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Reid called the DREAM Act “really important” and said it should be passed because it provides a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who go to college or serve in the military. DREAM is an acronym for Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors Act.

So, let’s get this straight: at a time when illegal immigration has become such an epidemic that portions of Arizona have basically ceded their sovereignty — and at a time when federal entitlements are hemorrhaging out of control — the Senate Majority Leader wants to prioritize honor roll amnesty and a new entitlement for those who are here illegally (the DREAM Act allows illegal immigrants in American colleges to receive student loans and work study money)? And he’s willing to hold funding the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan hostage to it? The DREAM Act may be “really important” to Reid. To the rest of us, it looks “really irrelevant” and “really destructive”.

Over at the Investigate Project on Terrorism, an extensive investigative study has revealed that a close associate of Imam Faizal Abdul Rauf (the Muslim leader spearheading the Ground Zero Mosque project) has openly and aggressively claimed that the United States secretly perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on its own people.

Faiz Kahn, who helped found the American Society for Muslim Advancement (one of the groups pushing the mosque), and lead prayers at Imam Rauf’s mosque at least as recently as December, is a radical even by the exalted standards of the 9/11 truthers:

On June 3, 2006, Khan spoke at a 9/11 truth summit called “Revealing the Truth/Reclaiming our Future” in Chicago. In his remarks, he acknowledged that there is a militant Islamist movement, but “the most logical explanation” for 9/11 is that the hijackers were “working for us” in furtherance of a corporate-controlled schemes involving gigantic stock trades, billions of dollars in heroin sales and interest in Caspian Sea resources.

See the website for video that includes some of the most despicable lies you’ve yet heard about what really happened nine years ago.

Remember how two years ago, Barack Obama was the most exciting, intellectually inventive president since John F. Kennedy? Maybe it’s time for 44 to compare his tax policies to 35:

That’s the breathtaking conclusion of our liberal friends over at The Nation, a publication that answers the question “What would Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book have been like with ad space?”

According to a report by Chris Moody at the Daily Caller, The Nation is revamping its Educators Program, which provides curriculum materials for schools who think that the three Rs should be redistribution, relativism, and radicalism. According to the report:

Regular readers may know that Time Magazine’s Joe Klein has become something of a white whale to your humble blogger. He is to me what Tom Friedman is to Jonah Goldberg.

When Klein isn’t busy singing in the Obama gospel choir (along with Jon Meacham, Ezra Klein, Eugene Robinson, and everyone else who thinks Obama is failing because Americans are too base to grasp his transcendence), he’s usually nursing exceptionally dumb ideas for political reform. You know, the type that would grind a sophomore political science seminar to a halt?

At the moment, Klein’s problem du jour is that the American system of government doesn’t work effectively — by which he means it doesn’t provide the outcomes he likes. What does Klein propose as a tonic? A system that blends the worst aspects of populism and progressivism and then marinates with a throwback to the ancient Greeks. Behold:

Could it be that even liberals are starting to recoil at Obamacare now that it’s reality instead of a gauzy fantasy? That’s at least the case for Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden, long a major advocate for the individual mandate (compelling citizens to buy health insurance under penalty of fine or imprisonment), has suddenly decided that the provision — which he voted for — is good enough for the rest of the country, but not for the Beaver State.

According to the Huffington Post, Wyden wrote a letter to the Oregon Health Authority that included the following passage:

In addition, Senate Finance Committee Counsel has stated that a state that can meet the general coverage requirements of the PPACA can obtain a Federal waiver under Section 1332 without a requirement that individuals purchase health insurance. Because you and I believe that the heart of real health reform is affordability and not mandates, I wanted to bring this feature of Section 1332 to the attention of you and the legislature.

Affordability and not mandates, huh? Sounds like a defensible outlook. Too bad Oregon’s senior senator couldn’t bring it to mind while casting his vote. Oh well. Not a big deal when only 49 other states have to suffer.

In a new interview with The Daily Caller, former U.N. Ambassador and one-time Disney Star John Bolton (up until now unnoticed by “The Great Mentioner“) curiously declines to shut the door on a presidential bid. Consider:

Not shy about his position on a wide range of issues, would this critic-in-chief consider a run for commander-in-chief in 2012? Bolton didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

“[I]t is a very great honor that anybody would even think of asking. I’m obviously not a politician. I’ve never run for any federal elective office at all and, you know, it is something that would obviously require a great deal of effort,” he said. “What I do think, though, and what concerns me, is the lack of focus generally in the national debate about national security issues. Now, I understand the economy is in a ditch and people are concerned about it, but our adversaries overseas are not going to wait for us to get our economic house in order.”

When pressed as to whether that means he would consider a run, Bolton seemed to suggest that he might do it, at the very least to help put national security issues at the top of the debate agenda.

“In the sense that I want to make sure that not only in the Republican Party, but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. “Whereas, some governor from some state in the middle of the country announces for president they get enormous coverage even if their views are utterly uninformed on major issues.”

When pressed a third time about running, he said that while “he is not going to do anything foolish,” he added, “you know, I see how the media works…you have to take that into account.”

Again, not a no.

This is a long way from the denials (or near-denials) that we’ve seen from the likes of David Petraeus, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie. And it could be fun just to see Bolton run circles around the rest of the field on foreign policy. Get ready for the 2012 fireworks to start soon.

As a longtime fan of the video work done by our friends over at Reason, I have to admit astonishment at a video that surpasses even their usually high standards.

Check out the latest from the West Coast libertarians on how an expansive judicial interpretation of the Commerce Clause has become a blank check to Congress (skeptics take note: Erwin Chemerinsky, the UC-Irvine Law School dean featured here is not a liberal straw man dug up for the purposes of this video. He’s a highly regarded intellectual on the legal left — which ought to make his closing comments even more disturbing).

That’s the way it looks after last night’s Republican senate primary in Alaska. Despite plenty of polling that showed him out of striking distance, attorney Joe Miller now looks poised to take down incumbent Lisa Murkowski once the final votes are tallied in the great untamed north.

Miller should be an interesting candidate to watch. He’s a true constitutionalist, calling for the abolition of the Department of Education and the phasing out of Medicare and Social Security.

Those positions, combined with his endorsement from Sarah Palin in the primaries, are going to lead the press to paint him as some sort of unhinged reactionary. That’s going to be tough, however, considering that Miller is a West Point grad with a master’s in economics and a law degree from Yale.

We noted last week that Tea Party activitsts are going to have to focus on ideas in addition to elections, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t savor victories when they can get them. Joe Miller could be a great addition to Washington — especially if he reverses the Senate’s longstanding hostility to unshaven legislators.

Unless they’ve got a job at a Washington think tank, it’s difficult for conservatives (a tribe best known for working hard and supporting their family) to find the time to rebut every piece of misinformation coming from the left and their allies in the mainstream media. Thus, when you hear about the wonders of socialized medicine in Canada or Great Britain, you may instinctively know that the claims are inaccurate but not immediately be able to rebut them. This is why God created Thomas Sowell.

In his newest column, the Sage of Palo Alto takes aim at some of the most pernicious health care fallacies. Consider for instance, his rebuke to misinformation on American life expectancy:

… the media spin is that various countries with government-run medical systems have life expectancies that are as long as ours, or longer. That is very clever as media spin, if you don’t bother to stop and think about it.

Author Sally Pipes did bother to stop and think about it in her book, “The Truth About ObamaCare.” She points out that medical care is just one of the factors in life expectancy.

She cites a study by Professors Ohsfeldt and Schneider at the University of Iowa, which shows that, if you leave out people who are victims of homicide or who die in automobile accidents, Americans live longer than people in any other Western country.

Doctors do not prevent homicides or car crashes. In the things that doctors can affect, such as the survival rates of cancer patients, the United States leads the world.

Sowell’s ability to pierce liberal shibboleths through sheer empiricism is second to none. Read the whole column and then consider picking up a copy of his “Economic Facts and Fallacies” to further build your arsenal for your next encounter with a liberal friend.