Trade Deficits: Good or Bad?

By Walter E. Williams

Two recent articles ought to give pause to current political and journalistic ignorance, perhaps demagoguery, about our international trade deficit. In a December Wall Street Journal article titled "Embrace the Deficit," Bear Stearns' chief economist David Malpass lays additional waste to predictions of gloom and doom associated with our trade deficit.

Since 2001, our economy has created 9.3 million new jobs, compared with 360,000 in Japan and 1.1 million in the euro zone (European Union countries that have adopted the euro), excluding Spain. Japan and euro zone countries had trade surpluses, while we had large and increasing trade deficits. Mr. Malpass says that both Spain and the U.K., like the U.S., ran trade deficits, but they created 3.6 and 1.3 million new jobs, respectively. Moreover, wages rose in the U.S., Spain and the U.K.

Professor Don Boudreaux, chairman of George Mason University's Economics Department, wrote "If Trade Surpluses Are So Great, the 1930s Should Have Been a Booming Decade" (www.cafehayek.com). According to data he found at the National Bureau of Economic Research's "Macrohistory Database", it turns out that the U.S. ran a trade surplus in nine of the 10 years of the Great Depression, with 1936 being the lone exception.

During those 10 years, we had a significant trade surplus, with exports totaling $26.05 billion and imports totaling only $21.13 billion. So what do trade surpluses during a depression and trade deficits during an economic boom prove, considering we've had trade deficits for most of our history? Professor Boudreaux says they prove absolutely nothing. Economies are far too complex to draw simplistic causal connections between trade deficits and surpluses and economic welfare and growth.

Despite all the criticism from abroad and the doom-mongers at home, the world finds our economy attractive. Just as we've been chomping at the bit to buy foreign goods and services, foreigners have been chomping at the bit to invest trillions of dollars in the U.S. Mr. Malpass says our 10-year government bonds yield 4.6 percent per year compared with Japan's 1.6 percent; our government debt is 38 percent of GDP versus 86 percent in Japan; and while Europe's debt to GDP ratio is not as extreme as Japan's, it's not nearly as favorable as ours.

Here's a smell test. Pretend you're a man from Mars knowing absolutely nothing about Earth and you're looking for a nice place to land. You find out that there's one country, say, country A, where earthlings from other countries voluntarily invest and entrust trillions of dollars of their hard earnings. There are other countries where they're not nearly as willing to make the same investment. Which one of those countries would you deem the most prosperous and with the greatest growth prospects? You'd pick country A, which turns out to be the United States. As such, you'd be just like most of the world's population who, if free to do so, would invest and live in the U.S.

The late Professor Milton Friedman said, "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." Some people justify their calls for protectionism by claiming that they're for free trade but fair trade. That's nonsense. Think about it: When I purchased my Lexus from a Japanese producer, through an intermediary, I received what I wanted. The Japanese producer received what he wanted. In my book, that's a fair trade.

Of course, an American auto producer, from whom I didn't purchase my car, might whine that it was unfair. He would like Congress to impose import tariffs and quotas to make Japanese-produced cars less attractive and available in the hopes that I'd buy an American-produced car. In my book, that would be unfair.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.


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Bush's Historic Veto

He held the line against a Brave New World.

By Charles Krauthammer

When President Bush announced in August 2001 his restrictive funding decision for federal embryonic-stem-cell research, he was widely attacked for an unwarranted intrusion of religion into scientific research. His solicitousness for a 200-cell organism — the early embryo that Bush declared should not be destroyed to produce a harvest of stem cells — was roundly denounced as reactionary and anti-scientific.

And cruel to boot. It was preventing the cure for thousands of people with hopeless and terrible diseases, from diabetes to spinal-cord injury. As John Edwards put it most starkly and egregiously in 2004: If John Kerry becomes president, Christopher Reeve will walk again.

This kind of stem-cell advocacy did not just shamefully inflate its promise. It tended to misrepresent the basis for putting restrictions on embryonic research, insisting that it was nothing more than political enforcement of the religious fundamentalist belief that life begins at conception.

This has always been a tendentious characterization of the argument for restricting stem cell research that relies on the destruction of embryos. I have long supported legal abortion. And I don’t believe that life — meaning the attributes and protections of personhood — begins at conception. Yet many secularly inclined people like me have great trepidation about the inherent dangers of wanton and unrestricted manipulation — to the point of dismemberment — of human embryos.

You don’t need religion to tremble at the thought of unrestricted embryo research. You simply have to have a healthy respect for the human capacity for doing evil in pursuit of the good. Once we have taken the position of many stem-cell advocates that embryos are discardable tissue with no more intrinsic value than a hangnail or an appendix, then all barriers are down. What is to prevent us from producing not just tissues and organs, but human-like organisms for preservation as a source of future body parts on demand?

South Korea enthusiastically embraced unrestricted stem cell research. The subsequent greatly heralded breakthroughs — accompanied by lamentations that America was falling behind — were eventually exposed as a swamp of deception, fraud and coercion.

The slope is very slippery. Which is why, even though I disagreed with where the president drew the line — I would have permitted the use of fertility-clinic embryos that are discarded and going to die anyway — I applauded his insistence that some line must be drawn, that human embryos are not nothing, and that societal values, not just the scientific imperative, should determine how they are treated.

Congress will soon vote to erase Bush’s line. But future generations may nonetheless thank Bush for standing athwart history, if only for a few years. It gave technology enough time to catch up and rescue us from the moral dilemmas of embryonic destruction. It has just been demonstrated that stem cells with enormous potential can be harvested from amniotic fluid.

This is a revolutionary finding. Amniotic fluid surrounds the baby in the womb during pregnancy. It is routinely drawn out by needle in amniocentesis. The procedure carries little risk and is done for legitimate medical purposes that have nothing to do with stem cells. If it nonetheless yields a harvest of stem cells, we have just stumbled upon an endless supply.

And not just endless, but uncontroversial. No embryos are destroyed. The cells are just floating there, as if waiting for science to discover them.

Even better, amniotic fluid might prove to yield an ideal stem cell — not as primitive as embryonic stem cells and therefore less likely to grow uncontrollably into tumors, but also not as developed as adult stem cells and therefore more “pluripotential” in the kinds of tissues it can produce.

If it is proved that these are the Goldilocks of stem cells, history will record the amniotic breakthrough as the turning point in the evolution of stem cell research from a narrow, difficult, delicate and morally dubious enterprise into an uncontroversial one with raw material produced unproblematically every day.

It will have turned out that Bush’s unpopular policy held the line, however arbitrary and temporary, against the wanton trampling of the human embryo just long enough for a morally neutral alternative to emerge.

And it did force the country to at least ponder the moral cost of turning one potential human being into replacement parts for another. Who will be holding the line next time, when another Faustus promises medical nirvana if he is permitted to transgress just one moral boundary?


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Election/Playoff Fatigue

We've been silent for some time now, providing only an update or link in the past month. Grad school demands force the silence to continue. However, we continue to read widely and constantly and occasionally come across particularly good articles. In lieu of original writing, we'll tempt the intellectual property rights powers and post some of the better articles here for your review. Enjoy.

After Bush
Is conservatism finished?

By Wilfred M. McClay

Even before November's midterm elections and the Republican party's loss of its congressional majorities, there was widespread talk of the exhaustion, even death, of conservatism in America. Over the past year or so, indeed, every new day has seemed to bring another article or book on the subject. Gathering steam as the election approached, such inquests became as popular among conservatives themselves as among liberals. Each offered a distinctive thesis or complaint relating to a perceived malfeasance of the Bush administration, whether in foreign policy, social policy, homeland security, domestic spending, corruption, or any number of other areas.

One particularly notable gesture of disaffection appeared on the very eve of the election, when, in a symposium titled "Time for Us to Go," a group of seven self-identified conservative writers were moved to publish, in the liberal Washington Monthly, their reasons why the Republicans deserved to lose. While not exactly the "A" list of conservative minds, these writers, ranging from Christopher Buckley to Joe Scarborough (the former Florida Congressman turned talk-TV host), urged the defeat of their party for the sake, precisely, of the future health of conservatism itself. But their words contributed mightily to a growing general impression: that after a run of two decades or so, conservatism's day in the American political sun was drawing to a close.

For liberal Democrats, this was a termination devoutly to be wished. So intense, indeed, was the pent-up need of the Democratic party and its media allies for a victory dance in the end zone that the high-stepping began long before any touchdowns had actually been scored. The columnist Joe Klein's exultant observation in Time just prior to the elections--"2006 may be remembered as the year that the Reagan Revolution finally crested and began to recede"--was just one of hundreds of such gun-jumping predictions.

Yet it is now clear that the results of the vote, while a solid reversal not seen since the more epochal mid-term Republican victories of 1994, hardly justified this extravagance. In comparison with similar historical circumstances, the GOP's losses were quite modest, leaving the Democrats with only relatively thin majorities in both houses of Congress. This was all the more impressive given the pervasive national mood of discouragement over the war in Iraq. Nor did anything about the GOP losses justify the claim that conservatism lost, or that the slow movement of the American electorate to the center-Right of the political spectrum has stopped or even diminished, let alone reversed.

Some Republican defeats, for example, including that of the liberal Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, effected no change in the ideological balance and can hardly be seen as a setback for conservatism. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the remarkably easy triumph of the highly-targeted, much-reviled Senator Joseph Lieberman over his more liberal anti-war challenger was a bellwether. So too were the Senate victories of such relatively conservative Democrats as James Webb in Virginia and Robert Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania. There was also the surprisingly strong showing of Harold Ford, Jr., the Democratic Congressman who promised Tennesseans that if they elected him to the Senate, they would get "a gun-loving, Jesus-loving American who thinks that taxes ought to be lower and America ought to be stronger." In the event, most Tennesseans were not quite willing to buy that assertion, but there can be no doubt that they took Ford seriously in offering it.

In short, it is still unclear that the achievement of a majority of congressional members with the letter "D" after their names means a shift in the ideological balance of the nation. The internal Democratic fissures that opened up immediately after the election--as in the struggle between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer over leadership of the House, and the patent discomfiture within the party over certain likely appointments to key committee chairmanships--suggest that electoral victory has not automatically conferred a durable majority, let alone a governing vision.

As the liberal journalist Michael Tomasky observed in an acute analysis penned in April 2006: "What the Democrats still don't have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society." The Democratic party won its new majorities largely on the basis of general discontent. It will take a Democratic party that actually stands for something other than the obstruction and investigation of George W. Bush to achieve more than temporary electoral reversals.

_____

But what about the threnodies being sung by unhappy conservatives themselves? Joe Klein's judgment that the Reagan Revolution has crested and begun to recede is the theme of a wide shelf of angry conservative books, ranging from Bruce Bartlett's "Imposter" and Stephen Slivinski's "Buck Wild" to Patrick J. Buchanan's "State of Emergency," Jeffrey Hart's "The Making of the American Conservative Mind," and Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul." Not only that, but the authors of these tomes identify the chief enemy of the Reagan Revolution as none other than George W. Bush. With his wasteful spending, his lax immigration policies, his willingness to cater to influential lobbyists, his aggressively "utopian" foreign policy, and his exploitation of religion, Bush, in the summary judgment of the direct-mail maven Richard Viguerie, may have "talked like a conservative to win our votes, but never governed like a conservative." Viguerie's own recent book, "Conservatives Betrayed," bears the subtitle: "How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause."

It would be foolish to deny the importance, or the usefulness, of closely examining the performance of the Bush administration with regard to the entire range of government policy and actions. Precisely by having made such an act of reconsideration imperative, the 2006 election results may even turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Republicans in particular and conservatives in general. This is how democracies are supposed to operate. Moreover, the ability of conservatives to engage in self-criticism is surely a salutary thing--so long as the self-criticism is both honest and accurate.

Is that the case in this instance? Before turning to the substantive points raised by Bush's conservative critics, one is bound to note the startling weakness for hyperbole and the bitter invective in their writings, often the signs of unrealistic expectations and narrow or sectarian agendas. In addition, almost all of them judge Bush, and find him woefully wanting, by the standard of Ronald Reagan, thereby demonstrating a limited ability to recall what the now-sainted Reagan administration was actually like, let alone what sorts of criticisms it had to bear during its time--and where those criticisms came from. None seems to remember Reagan's famous embrace of an Eleventh Commandment--"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"--let alone the context in which it arose: namely, the bitter intra-party struggles of the early 1960s in which liberal Republicans sought to block the rising Goldwater movement in their midst.

Americans in general too easily forget such times of struggle and division, making them over into placid and uncomplicated memories. A bipartisan example of this creative amnesia occurred at the time of Reagan's death in June 2004 and spilled over into that year's presidential campaign. Television journalists and Democratic candidates alike repeatedly contrasted the idyllic spirit of unity at home and cooperation abroad that allegedly prevailed during the cold-war years under Reagan with the national disunity prevailing over the Iraq issue under Bush. Many Americans, even some old enough to know better, seem actually to have credited such ridiculous assertions.

We forget, too, that predictions like Joe Klein's have been made again and again since 1981. We forget that the current charges of "theocracy" were thoroughly rehearsed in the Reagan years, when Reagan's open support for the beliefs of evangelicals was passionately decried, and his affirmation of the veracity of the Bible was used against him (notably in the 1984 campaign) to suggest that he would recklessly seek to bring on Armageddon. And we forget that not only Reagan but every Republican President since Eisenhower has been solemnly adjudged a cretin by the national press during his time in office, only--even unto the supposedly irredeemable Richard Nixon--to be turned into a wise leader after his departure from power.

We also forget that the Reagan administration itself, far from being happily unified, was driven by internal battles between "pragmatists" and "ideologues," conflicts that prefigured many of the policy battles of the present. And we forget that, outside the administration, Reagan got plenty of grief from his own Right as well.

The querulous Richard Viguerie, for example, an influential but notably unhappy camper in those halcyon days, began hectoring the Reagan presidency almost from the beginning, complaining to the Associated Press in January 1981 that with his cabinet appointments Reagan had given conservatives "the back of his hand." A July 1981 op-ed by Viguerie in the Washington Post, entitled "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over," was thoughtfully timed less than four months after the President had nearly been killed by an assassin's bullet. By December 1987, Viguerie was declaring that Reagan had actually "changed sides" and was "now allied with his former adversaries, the liberals, the Democrats, and the Soviets." A year later, in the final months of his presidency, when it was clear to all that Reagan had fundamentally changed the terms of debate in American politics, Viguerie announced that, thanks to his tenure in office, "the conservative movement is directionless."

It is especially pertinent to recall such statements when one opens Viguerie's current book, a catalog of Bush-administration horrors whose pages are replete with inspirational Reagan quotations and the highest praise for Reagan and his appointees. For a movement that claims to rest upon long perspectives and deep cultural sources, American conservatism can be remarkably short-sighted, impatient, brittle, fractious, and downright petulant. Indeed, conservatism has been found by its adherents to have "cracked up" or "lost its soul" more times than are worth counting in the years since 1980 (at least as many times as America has "lost its innocence").

But these crack-ups have been mainly in the eyes of their beholders. The simple fact, to repeat, is that the American electorate has, by most measures, moved slowly but steadily in a conservative direction since 1968, in a pattern that the two moderate, Southern Democratic presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did more to confirm than to interrupt. The adjustments brought about by the 2006 midterm elections have done little to alter this pattern.

_____

Still, pointing to long-term political success does not necessarily answer the charge that the Bush administration represents an egregious departure from or even a betrayal of conservative ideals and principles. This is precisely the contention of Jeffrey Hart, a longtime senior editor of National Review. Near the conclusion of his "The Making of the American Conservative Mind," a relaxed, chatty, anecdotal account of the past half-century through the lens of National Review's reporting and editorials, Hart comes down hard on Bush, a "transformative" President who in Hart's judgment is emphatically not a conservative one.

Hart finds two principal and related failings in Bush. First, in the Iraq war, and in seeking to "cure" the problems of the Middle East by imposing a regime of "modernization and democratization," Bush has demonstrated that he is at heart a "hard Wilsonian"--that is, a utopian thinker who has wedded the use of "concerted military force" to Woodrow Wilson's very unconservative brand of "optimistic universalism." Second, Bush's determination to allow his own evangelical Christianity to influence his thinking and actions, particularly in his zeal for large-scale social and moral reform, departs from "the accepted convention in America . . . that religious beliefs are a private matter." It also runs counter to the strong conservative preference for "magisterial" and "traditional" forms of religion that, unlike evangelicalism, do not so much challenge a culture as stabilize it.

Hart's criticisms, stated relatively mildly in his book, took on much more strident expression in his contribution to the pre-electoral Washington Monthly symposium. There, Hart described Bush as "a man who has taken the positions of an unshakable ideologue" on issues ranging from the Terri Schiavo case to supply-side economics. If conservatism is a "politics of reality," this President, wrote Hart, lives sheltered in delusion. No longer is the adjective "Wilsonian" sufficient to describe his disconnectedness from reality. Indeed, Bush's naïve belief in the universality of the human preference for freedom over tyranny makes "Woodrow Wilson look like Machiavelli" by comparison.

In the end, Hart finds that "Bushism" has so subverted the principles of conservatism as to have "poisoned the very word." Others are of the same opinion. In particular, the vexed question of religion, and of religiosity, has given rise to its own avalanche of conservative anti-Bushians, including not only Hart but Kevin Phillips in his over-the-top "American Theocracy," Damon Linker in "The Theocons," and especially Andrew Sullivan in "The Conservative Soul."

Although all of these authors complain about the excessive influence of religious faith in present-day conservative politics, the specifics of their indictment vary. Where Hart focuses on the emotionalism of evangelical Protestants, Linker concentrates on the influence of a small cell of conservative Catholics around the journal First Things while Sullivan, who paints with a broad brush, denounces "Christianists" (his analogue to "Islamists") of all persuasions.

"The defining characteristic of the conservative," Sullivan asserts, "is that he knows what he doesn't know." This stance of systematic modesty, or principled unprincipledness, undergirds the way Sullivan himself, an avowed if unorthodox Catholic, proposes to understand politics, culture, society, and religion itself. His own, properly "conservative" perspective, he writes, stands as a bulwark between two antithetically dangerous forces: "fundamentalism," which fraudulently claims to be in full possession of the truth, and "nihilism," which fraudulently denies that truth exists. But, for Sullivan, the former is a much greater enemy than the latter. Fundamentalism, he asserts, turns religion into a "mechanism for social order" or "a regulatory scheme to keep human beings in line." By thus denying the essentially individual and mystical character of religious experience, it amounts to nothing less than a "profound blasphemy." Judged according to this standard, it would appear, George W. Bush is the blasphemer-in-chief.

_____

What are we to make of these various charges, each of which rests on some a-priori definition of what conservatism is and what it is not? Let us begin with the prudential character of conservatism as a philosophy of government. This is what Jeffrey Hart has in mind when he speaks of conservatism as a realistic and non-ideological approach to governance. But Hart seems blind to the significance of his own insight. For in American history there are examples aplenty of actions taken by prudential leaders that involved the transgression of a "conservative" principle for the sake of broadly conservative ends.

One such principle, according to some conservatives, is the limitation of executive power. But Thomas Jefferson, who himself held a strict-constructionist view of executive authority, violated that view in order to undertake the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and made it a continental power. Abraham Lincoln made extensive use of executive authority, including the suspension of basic civil liberties, in order to prosecute the Civil War and save the Union. During the Eisenhower administration, the exercise of federal authority to enforce basic civil rights for blacks in the Jim Crow South righted a historical wrong that seems unlikely to have been righted in any other way.

It is in fact a perfectly respectable conservative principle that leadership sometimes demands bold actions undertaken with the right ends in view. This, indeed, is the situation in which we find ourselves today, in what is likely to be a prolonged conflict with determined, well-organized, and well-funded transnational Islamic terrorists. It was one thing to assert, with John Quincy Adams in 1821, that the United States does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy; at the time, in any case, there was hardly much choice about the matter. It is quite another thing to stand on such a dictum in 2006, in the name of limited government, while remaining oblivious to the nature of the challenges before us.

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, along with the incapacity or unwillingness of international and multilateral organizations to contain or control them and our own growing vulnerability to their use by shadowy proxies or groups accountable to no one, leaves the United States no responsible choice but to act vigorously and even pre-emptively in ways that an older conservatism could never have envisioned and would not have approved. That fact does not make such action imprudent; on the contrary, a failure to act, because of prior ideological commitments to a particular understanding of conservatism, would represent a lapse of prudence, and a betrayal of the core conservative imperative to defend and protect what is one's own.

Nor is Bush's insistence on the universal appeal of free institutions out of line with a sensibility that since the American Revolution has envisioned the United States as a carrier of universal values and a beacon to the rest of the world. Hart decries this "Wilsonian" aspect of Bush's presidency as a form of Jacobinism, promising the forced conversion of the world to American values and practices. But what has Bush said that is not a restatement of what Ronald Reagan said so often and with such conviction? Consider Reagan's address to the British parliament on June 8, 1982, a self-conscious echo of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 36 years earlier:

We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings. . . . The objective I propose is quite simple to state: to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities, which allows a people to choose their own way to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means. This is not cultural imperialism, it is providing the means for genuine self-determination and protection for diversity. Democracy already flourishes in countries with very different cultures and historical experiences. It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.

If Bush has abandoned conservatism in saying such things and acting upon them, then what are we to make of Reagan?

As for the inherent tension between religion and conservatism in America, that is real enough, and we hardly need the latest tomes on the subject to tell us about it. As I have pointed out in Commentary, the evangelical Protestantism that gives American religion much of its distinctive form and energy, and that fuels George W. Bush's own commitments, is a faith of personal and social transformation, constantly seeking to challenge the status quo. Thus, although evangelicalism can be a force of moral conservatism, it can also be a force of moral radicalism, calling into question the justice and equity of the most basic structures of social life. As Hart recognizes, it does not share traditional conservatism's preference for stasis, prejudice, and custom.

This is no doubt why Bush's evangelicalism, itself as American as apple pie, makes him so unpopular among many conservatives. They see it, rightly enough, as the source of his involvement of the federal government in promoting educational reform, his faith-based initiative, his African AIDS initiative, and the like--in short, of that "compassionate conservatism" which to them reeks equally of do-goodism and unlimited government. And if that is the case with conservatives who, like Jeffrey Hart, prefer a gentlemanly privatization of faith, it is all the more the case with those who prefer their conservatism without any element of religious faith at all.

The intellectual historian Jerry Z. Muller has argued in the past that a distinction needs to be made between conservatism and religious orthodoxy of any kind, on the grounds that too much admixture of religion may interfere with the "epistemological modesty" and empiricism that Muller regards as essential to conservative thought. Such an idea seems to have taken up residence in the thinking of Andrew Sullivan, who places the principle of "doubt" in the center of his own understanding of conservatism and who regards deviations from it as blasphemous. By this standard, however, nearly all the religious activity of human history has been blasphemous.

A more honest account of that history, as well as of the history of American conservatism, would reflect instead the dictum of Russell Kirk that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." Religion, after all, is a social and not merely an individual institution--one presumably cannot be a Methodist or Baptist all by oneself--and in the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Conservatives revere tradition not merely because it is, in Sullivan's bland words, "where you start from," but because they regard what past generations have discovered and passed along to us as precious. No part of a culture's traditions is more central than its religious institutions, and none more inseparable from its political and social health.

Here, too, one turns with profit to Reagan. Consider, to pick just one among scores of examples, this portion of his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, a speech best known for his naming the Soviet Union as "the focus of evil in the modern world":

While America's military strength is important, let me add here that I've always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.

Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second-oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, "Ye shall be as gods."

I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that Communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last--last--pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: "He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increaseth strength. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary."

Much has been made of the fact that there are Bible studies and prayer meetings going on in the Bush White House. One wonders why this fact is more sinister in the eyes of Bush's detractors than what Reagan said to the nation and the world in his First Inaugural Address:

I am told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings are being held on this day, and for that I am deeply grateful. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. It would be fitting and good, I think, if on each Inauguration Day in future years it should be declared a day of prayer.

Evidently Reagan did not think this amounted to the proposing of a Christian theocracy, and neither need we.

Paradoxically, the profusion of books about the death-rattle of conservatism might be better understood as a sign of conservatism's continuing importance. It is no small matter when writers as diverse as Jeffrey Hart and Andrew Sullivan want to contend for the ownership of, or at least identification with, the label "conservative"--especially when the Democratic party's most promising younger candidates still run like the wind away from the label "liberal," or when those of us who teach in colleges and universities observe that our students are nearly always much more conservative than their professors.

_____

Of course, one should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that, like the immobilized hands of a broken clock, Richard Viguerie's observations may yet enjoy a moment of truth. Nothing human lasts forever, and some day conservatism will indeed crack up as an effective political movement or, more likely, be transformed into something else--just as Whiggery gave way to Republicanism, or as the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt gave way to the Democratic party of George McGovern and, finally, Nancy Pelosi. As those examples suggest, such evolutions are not always for the better, and bear close watching.

But the survival of a political idea depends upon its adaptability, and conservatism has the advantage of a certain flexibility built into its nature. In his great novel "The Leopard" (1958), Giuseppe de Lampedusa places this insight in the mouth of his protagonist Don Fabrizio, a proud and large-gestured Sicilian aristocrat who was fated to live through the abrupt transition from traditional society to the modern democratic order in the late 19th century. "Things must change," Don Fabrizio reflects, "if they are to remain the same," and the novel relates his agonizing efforts to accommodate a new world without becoming a slave to it. A similar task lay behind the conservatism of Alexis de Tocqueville, another aristocrat (and would-be statesman) who was fated to live on the cusp of vast historical change, and who sought to preserve what was best about the old order while accepting the inevitability of the new.

American conservatism has these features, too, but also some of its own. For Americans, as for others, a conservative sense of the past is expressed partly through shared stories and sufferings and customs, the mystic chords of memory. But that is only part of the story. In the United States, national identity is expressed as well through loyalty to the country's founding principles and propositions, and to quasi-scriptural documents, like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which seek to express them.

Many of these principles, including the "self-evident" assertion that "all men are created equal" and possess "inalienable rights," have always been put forward as statements of universal scope, and not merely particular or local values. Their universalistic implications have a tendency, indeed, to cut against the equally vital elements in the conservative tradition that argue for the primacy of the local, the settled, and the particular. The same is true of the culturally dominant Protestant emphasis on the primacy of the individual conscience, which also takes on a universalistic character, putting loyalty to principle above loyalty to settled traditions.

To revere America without honoring these principles would mean revering a different country from the one we actually inhabit. But it is true that the principles are not always themselves conservative, either in their applications or their effects. Hence the inherent tendency of American conservatism to show, as the political scientist Walter Berns has pointed out, a dual aspect, combining the customary and the propositional, the affective and the rational, the particular and the general. One should love one's country both for what it is and for what it stands for; both because it is one's own and because it embodies or aspires to the highest and finest ideals.

In the conservative view, love for America cannot mean merely a love for disembodied abstract ideals yet to be achieved, as Richard Rorty and other leftists would have it. But neither can it be merely a primal love for the "fatherland," a term that has never had much of a place in American discourse. It is in fact both, and the two are inseparable.

If conservatism as a philosophy, or an ideology, is a more various thing in the American context than Bush's conservative critics allow, conservatism in American politics is less an ideology than a coalition. It has many different flavors and strands, and there is no sense in pretending that they do not occasionally conflict with one another, or tug at the fabric of the whole. As in any coalition, not all of the pieces fit together coherently. Rather, they resemble in some respects the structure of a crossword puzzle, in which not all lines intersect, but all are nonetheless connected.

This is always frustrating to those who want their ideology neat and pure. But show me a political movement that has a clear, crisp, unambiguous, and systematic philosophy and I will show you a movement that will lose, and will deserve to lose. The most successful coalition in modern American political history, the New Deal coalition wrought by Franklin Roosevelt, lasted for nearly four decades. It was a political philosopher's nightmare but a political scientist's joy, a hodgepodge of conflicting political principles and starkly opposed regional coalitions, the most notable of which was the now nearly incomprehensible alliance of Northern liberals and Southern segregationists.

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Compared with such outright contradictions in terms, the conservative coalition that came to power with Reagan's election in 1980 has been a paragon of consistency, even with all its tensions between and among libertarians, traditionalists, businessmen, neoconservatives, and religious conservatives. The fact that, at the moment, its most serious candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination are the pro-choice Rudolph Giuliani, the Mormon Mitt Romney, and the religious Right-averse John McCain suggests a movement that is not in the slightest danger of succumbing to an evangelical Protestant or "Christianist" monoculture. If anything, the greater danger is that the constant drumbeat against religious faith will lead moderates to believe they cannot make common cause with religious conservatives--another belief that an examination of the success of the New Deal coalition, which combined liberal and secular elements with heavily Catholic and Protestant ones, ought to put to rest.

In any event, a coalition's strength is partly a function of the force and quality of its opposition. The fissures and conflicts within conservatism are getting so much attention now because conservatism is still, intellectually speaking, where the principal action remains. So long as the Democratic party continues down the road it has been following, led by its aging left-wing lions and lionesses, funded and directed by the most extreme and irresponsible elements in its ranks, and finding clarity only in discrediting George W. Bush and regaining office, conservatives will always have plenty to unify around. For their own part, so long as conservatives are able to remember Ronald Reagan as a leader who not only embodied the distinctive characteristics of American conservatism but who finessed its antinomies and persevered against the contempt and condescension of his own era--including among some of his allies--they can yet regain their bearings and prevail.

Mr. McClay, who holds the SunTrust Chair of Excellence in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will be spending the spring 2007 semester as senior Fulbright lecturer in American history at the University of Rome. His most recent book is Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Eerdmans).

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He's All Grown Up

Frequent contributor, commentist, and Friend of Lybberty--Morgan Habedank--recently created his own blog, Lost Boy. His first post is a highly entertaining Toyota commercial starring his friend, followed by a review of Maestro's Steakhouse, and finally, his thoughts on Apple's new iPhone.

We congratulate Mr. Habedank on his foray into the blog-iverse and wish him the best.


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Merry Christmas

In Hoc Anno Domini

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published in The Wall Street Journal annually since.

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression -- for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's.

And the voice from Galilee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with the leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in divers places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you, for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterward Paul of Tarsus, too, was sore afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets, might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets. Then might it come to pass that men would not look upward to see even a winter's star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.


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This Guy is a Genius

In the Core Course of our Masters program, we explore the question, "what's modern, about modern history?" It's broken up into 4 themes which are taught by 3 different professors. The first set of seminars explored the Historiography of Modern History and History in general and the second, current seminar, has explored history through Nationalism.

This week we gave a presentation based on an article by Prasenjit Duara entitled, "Transnationalism and the Challenge of National Histories." It is from Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender, editor. Among other things, he warns against the use of history to promote ultranationalism and encourages a study of history that does avoids using the current evolutionary borders as limits or guidelines to historical research ie. British History, American History, Modern Germany, etc. He cites several examples in China and the Mexican border that show how history cuts across borders and must, to be truly understood, be examined locally.

In his Chinese local example, he shows how two different regimes in China plus Japan all used a folk history to promote different ends. He argues that this is part of the tension that exists between modernity and tradition--a Marxist argument that has been passed as fact. The Fascist regime in Japan and the Marxist and Fascist regimes he refers to in China most assuredly bent the history to establish their legitimacy as governors of Japan and China respectively. This does not, however, necessarily mean that an either/or dichotomy exists between tradition and modernization.

The Unites States, unlike those Chinese and Japanese governments, does not suppress alternate histories. We have, collectively, been forced to come to terms with the ugliness of our history--treatment of native peoples, slavery, women, etc., have all been incorporated into our history and collective memory. Despite these scars of history, we continue to embrace the good traditions of our past while looking forward to continued modernization. Such is the case in democratic, pluralistic societies.

We've linked to One Cosmos a couple of times in the past, and do so again here because of the light he sheds on this tension between tradition and modernization.

How do you tie free trade, progressivism, the tradition of the religious right, and scientific revolution into one post? Like this:

But what to do about it? The paradox, or “complementarity” at the heart of the modern conservative movement is the tension between tradition, which preserves, and the free market, which relentlessly destroys in order to build. While individual conservatives may or may not contain this tension within themselves, the conservative coalition definitely does, with the “religious right” on one end and libertarians and free marketeers on the other. People wonder how these seeming opposites can coexist in the same tent, but the key may lie in their dynamic complementarity, for freedom only becomes operative, or "evolutionary," when it is bound by transcendent limitations -- which, by the way, is equally true for the individual.

The ironically named progressive left is an inverse image of this evolutionary complementarity. This is because it rejects both the creative destruction of capitalism and the restraints of tradition. Therefore, it is static where it should be dynamic, and dynamic where it should be static. It is as if they want to stop the world and “freeze frame” one version of capitalism, which is why, for example, they oppose free trade. While free trade is always beneficial in the long run, it is obviously going to displace some people and some occupations. It is as if the progressive is an “economic traditionalist,” transferring the resistance to change to the immament realm of economics instead of the spiritual realm of transcendent essences.

I know this is true, because it is what I used to believe when I was a liberal. For example, I grew up at a time when most people worked for large corporations that gave their employees generous pensions and health benefits. As such, it seemed "natural" or normative. In reality, this was just a brief phase of American capitalism, lasting from the mid-1950’s through the 1970’s. But backward looking progressives act as if this aberration was “in the nature of things.” They have a similar attitude toward factory jobs in heavy industry, as if we could somehow go back in time and preserve these high-wage, low-skill jobs.

But while the progressive is thoroughly backward looking with regard to economics, he is the opposite with regard to the spiritual realm. For him, mankind was basically worthless until the scientific revolution, mired as he was in myth, magic, and superstition. Rather, the only reliable way to understand the world is through the scientific method, which has the effect of throwing overboard centuries of truly priceless accumulated spiritual wisdom. It literally severs man from his deepest metaphysical roots and ruptures his vertical continuity. In reality, it destroys the very possibility of man in the archetypal sense -- i.e., actualizing his "spiritual blueprint."

A new kind of man is born out of this progressive spiritual inversion. Yesterday we spoke of castes and of “spiritual DNA.” Progressives, starting with Karl Marx, waged an assault on labor, eliminating its spiritual significance and reducing it to a mindless, collective “proletariat.” You might say that the left honors labor in the same way they honor the military: both are losers.

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Pearl Harbor Day

This was originally posted on 7 December 2005.

Before 9/11 became the most infamous date in American history, there was Pearl Harbor Day. Americans tend to like dates they can celebrate, more than the ones they memorialize, but this sentiment doesn't make them any less important.

The United States circa December 1941 was a country torn between a virtuous desire to aid the free, democratic countries of Europe, and its heritage of isolationism. Anyone with a basic knowledge of this history knows that it started early--George Washington's "Farewell Address." Historians, political scientists, and politicians of various ilk point to this speech as the genesis of whatever foreign policy position they want to endorse. Though historian Joe Ellis points out that the term "entangling alliances" didn't come from this speech, despite our subconscious association. Winston Churchill, though mourning with us for the loss of life, was famously relieved that America would be joining the war. He knew that from the moment the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that America would fight and win the war against fascism.

Historical minutiae aside, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor woke us from this internal debate--a debate that has been internally waged before, during and after every armed conflict in American history. Simply refer to the Op-Ed page of your local newspaper. The characters are different, but they are still isolationists. Historical interpretation of WWII teaches that this attack joined the two motivations--self interest, with the virtuous desire to liberate Europe. The combination of these two strong impulses, made the victory of WWII the perfect example of the marriage of these two ideals.

Maybe 9/11 was the Pearl Harbor that allowed us to fight terrorism and bring democracy to the Middle East. If, like us, you believe in the righteousness of the war against terror and the ongoing attempt to bring democracy to Iraq, then you see the parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The Japanese started out our enemies, but in the aftermath of WWII became our closest allies--aiding us today in Iraq and elsewhere. But the Japanese people were never our enemies and neither are the Iraqi people. They were both subject to religious fascists and once liberated, embraced democracy.

This is the path we are on in Iraq. Car bombs will continue, but they aren't set off by an Iraqi people angry at our "occupation" of Iraq. They are set by a radical minority, fanatics manipulated like so many pawns on a chess board by the Islamofascists who really are evil and do not care about the future of Iraq. The Iraqi people, the ones who care about their country, they are the ones who voted in overwhelming numbers in every election held in Iraq (women too!) and who, even now, hope we wont leave before stability has been established.

We believe our legacy in Iraq will end with the Iraqi people among our closest allies in the war on terror. A war that will not be won by ceding Iraq to the insurgents abroad or defeatists at home. The only similarity between Iraq and Vietnam is the fact that John Kerry lied about both.

Whether you agree with our position on Iraq or not, take a minute to remember the sacrifice of patriotic Americans who gave so much. Because that's what this day is about--memorializing those who in every generation have taken up arms in defense of their country. In case you need a little refresher, take a hard right at the rack full of Pearl Harbor (Ben Affleck is an idiot)DVDs at your local Blockbuster and check out Band of Brothers. It doesn't give you Pearl Harbor history, but it is WWII and, at least as far as we have read and studied, is historically accurate.


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Romney Watch II

An email from Fernando Mladineo and comment from our favorite rabble rouser, Voice of Raisin, prompted us to dig into our recently bookmarked pages and produce another Romney Watch. You can see the first one here.

First, a poll at MSNBC (hat tip: Fernando Mladineo) that asks, "Mormon for President in 2008?"
The caption under Mr. Romney's photo explains that Barack Obama will have to "overcome" his race in order to get elected while Mr. Romney will have to "overcome" his religion.

We look forward to the day when race and religion will not be things to be overcome.

Meanwhile over a townhall.com, Michael Medved argues that centrists Rudy Giuliani and John McCain will probably compete with each other for moderates, Mr. Romney will be left as "the most credible conservative candidate."

Under the catchy title, "there's something about Romney," Dean Barnett, also blogging at townhall.com, recounts a story from when he campaigned for then Senate hopeful Romney against "Chappaquiddick" Ted Kennedy. Predictably, the Kennedy smear team attempted to dig up dirt on Mr. Romney and found--employees who had been fired after Mr. Romney's company had purchased theirs. Chappaquiddick this was not.

Finally, last week an article in the Salt Lake Tribune that asks, "is Romney's religion a non-factor?"

When we first wrote about a potential Romney run back on the 13th of January, we thought that his candidacy would at best give future Mormon candidates a chance, we're beginning to think his chances are a little better than that.


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Arrested Development Watch

No allusion here, but something worthy of its own post.

Arrested Development, cheap.
(hat tip: Fernando Mladineo)

Now for a limited time at amazon.com, all three season of Arrested Development for about $30 including shipping. We wouldn't shill for these folks if Arrested Development weren't really that good.

And Fernando, we looked around but couldn't find our link to your blog. Email it to us and we'll include the link in the hat tip as we usually try to do. Thanks.


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Our Brother = Great BYU Fan

With a layoff until the Vegas Bowl--for which we have tickets--we figured we'd post a "hodge podge" of BYU Football links, including this fantastic picture of our brother after the game.

Thanks also to our friend at the University of Utah who provided this ticket.

In other news, reader and frequent contributor Morgan Habedank has provided us with a link to a quality version of BYU highlights from last week's game. Click here.

We've been searching for some great pictures we saw posted to Cougarboard by one Dan Ransom, but have been unable to relocate them. If any of you know where they can be found, please email us or post a link in the comments section and we'll repost the link as an update in the body of this post.

**Update: As you can see, we've located the picture and the website--danransom.com (hat tip: Morgan Habedank, again). His game photos are incredible as you can see from this example. Click on the link above and check them out.



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Bill Simmons: I heart Seattle

Because we love Seattle sports teams and all things Washington, we reproduce Bill Simmons bit from his Friday article about the NFL.

1. Loudest crowd I've ever heard. Seems like it's more due to the way the stadium is built than anything else -- for instance, Monday's crowd was 20 percent Packers fans and even they sounded abnormally loud.

2. We decided that Seattle can't be considered an underrated city because everyone always talks about how underrated it is, so now it's properly rated. But can you think of another city other than New York or Los Angeles that had a bigger cultural impact on this country over the past 16 years? Grunge music, Starbucks, microbrews, Microsoft, Amazon.com and even ESPN.com all started there. What other city can come up with six things to compare to those?

3. Highlight of the trip: Finding out that Seahawks tackle Walter Jones has a daughter named Waleria and a son named Walterius..

4. Seahawks fans really, really, REALLY don't like Jerramy Stevens. It's a palpable dislike. Don't think this won't be rearing its head in January.

5. If you can't get excited to attend a Monday Night Football game when it's snowing out, you need to stop following sports immediately.

And he didn't even mention Nordstrom, Boeing, Washington Mutual, or Costco. Seriously. How could he forget Costco? (Full Disclosure: We worked at Costco three summers in a row)


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Arrested Development Allusion Watch

"Loose seal!" "Lucille? Where?"
(hat tip: Matt Lybbert)

"A series of sea-lion attacks on people in recent months has led experts to warn that the animals are not as cute and cuddly as they appear."--Associated Press, Nov. 28

Beginning now, a tribute to what our friend WCSG calls not only the funniest show ever, but "as funny as a show can be." Arrested Development, RIP.


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Top 10 Christmas Movies of ALL-TIME

Christmas is the time for Christmas movies. The other day we had a conversation about Christmas movies with our British "flatmates" and discovered they had never seen National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or A Christmas Story or even Scrooged. How does that happen? This clearly called for a reprint of last year's "Top 10 Christmas Movies."

Originally posted on 20 December 2005.

1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
In the genre of Christmas films Cousin Eddie is possibly the best character ever. We also think he is a composite of several members of my extended family. If you've only ever watched this on tv, be prepared to fast-forward a couple parts

2. A Christmas Story
Red Rider BB guns, the neighbor's hounds, the smiling Christmas duck, chocolate ovaltine--this movie has it all. And you can't beat the tongue on the flagpole, you really can't--that's the type of humor that appeals to all ages.

3. Scrooged
We love watching the angel/ghost beat the snot out of Bill Murray's character. If you like Groundhogs Day or What About Bob? or Ghostbusters you'll love Bill Murray in this movie. Ditto on the self-edit, the tv version cuts out some of the unnecessary crass material.

4. It's a Wonderful Life
We're sometimes sentimental but never sappy. This is one you can watch with the whole family.

5. Elf
This movie is good, but not great. We particularly enjoy the scene where Will Ferrell tries to put the star on the tree. Also, answering his father's office phone, "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?" is classic and oft repeated. Speaking of oft repeated quotes from Will Ferrell, can we please be done with everything being "kind of a big deal?" Sure, we think more cowbell is just as funny as the next guy, and we know Ferrell is popular because even the dumb get his jokes, but still, can we let this one die, please? It's overused in the way "alrighty then" from Ace Ventura Pet Detective was abused. Apologies to those of you too young to remember that movie or the quote or, if you do, don't remember why it was funny. You probably don't remember because it wasn't that funny in the first place. But, in ten years when some little-read blog writes about Anchorman and how everyone used to wait around for the obligatory reference to something being "kind of a big deal," you'll wonder at the fact that you thought it was so frickin hilarious. And then, you'll know what we mean.

6. The Santa Clause
Our sister wanted us to include this one. And yes, we did watch Home Improvement growing up, and loved it.

7. Santa Claus The Movie
Before there was Elf there was this movie where an elf leaves the North Pole because he doesn't fit in. This movie has Dudley "need we say" Moore? Seriously. Need we?

8. White Christmas
We first watched this movie because Chevy Chase's character (Clark Griswold) referred to it in his famous rant near the end of Christmas Vacation. Watch this one with grandma.

9. Home Alone
What is it about pain that gets such big laughs? Suspend your hate of Macauley Culkin and watch this one with your younger cousins or neices and nephews--that way you can either laugh at the movie or their response.

10. A Muppet Christmas Carol
Our favorite version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. This one should also appeal to your friends of the Angry Left. We don't know why we wrote that, it just felt right (no pun intended).

And yes, Morgan, for those in the know, this was another backhanded jab at Bill Simmons.


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Weekly Sports Review

Yeah, there's really no set date for this thing to appear. We thought we'd write it every Wednesday, but then we realized BYU basketball had a game at Boise State (they lost) which we were probably going to want to mention and the Sonics had an important game (they also lost) against Orlando. But none of that matters, because...........

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BYU Football BEAT UTAH!

Yup, despite pre- and gametime fatalism, BYU found a way to beat Utah. We say "found a way" because this is hardly a gimme for BYU. Losses the four previous years had effectively given Utah the mental edge. Whatever they may say about BYU trash talking them before each game (see Curtis Brown's confident predictions of victory), those pronouncements were never meant for them to read. Heck, they really weren't even meant for public consumption. More than anything else, they were intended to bolster the confidence of a team that had been all but owned by the yewts for four years. Anyone who suggests otherwise is deluding themselves. Utah's mental advantage in this game was huge and probably had something to do with the overall "wanting it more" we referred to in last week's Sports Review.

The thing about the game is this: BYU came out focused and did to Utah what they have done to every other MWC team this season. They put up points early. Here's the difference: Utah didn't respond the same way every other MWC team has this season. That is to say, they didn't roll over and play dead. Of course they didn't, BYU is their rival. BYU shouldn't have expected them to and you can blame this on whatever you want--hubris, lack of focus, whatever--but it was plainly obvious that BYU didn't play the 2nd and the 3rd quarters the same way they did the 1st and 4th. What they need to understand is that they can't play that way against Oregon in the Vegas Bowl. BYU has to put together a complete game against a good team.

It's funny to read the yewts message boards because they universally believe that officials are biased in favor of BYU. If asked, we think BYU fans would say exactly the opposite--that there is a decided anti-BYU bias among officials. Considering that BYU is annually (and historically) one of the most penalized teams in the nation, BYU fans would seem to be right, but then again, it's a very difficult thing to detect a bias. We once heard one of our friends on the team comment that BYU had been flagged for three penalties one year that weren't called on another team in the whole of Division I. He knew, because when they were called he didn't believe they were real penalties/rules and proceeded to look them up in the rulebook. How he was able to find that they weren't called anywhere else is beyond us and is typical of such sports heresay. Take it, therefore, with a grain of salt.

All of this is to say, don't blame the refs because BYU won. It is true that Utah could have won if the refs didn't throw the flag, but so what? They could have won anyway. The same is true of our beloved Seahawks. Anyone who watched the Superbowl knows those were egregious (please cougarboarders, spell this word correctly) penalties. As the mtn. talking heads noted, if the defender doesn't look for the ball, and makes contact, they're going to flag you every time. In response, the yewts populating every message board then went to the rulebook and use that nifty copy and paste feature and proceeded to instruct us in the finer points of pass interference and how face guarding isn't a penalty in college. Fine. Whatever. What matters is how pass interference is interpreted by the officials and how it has always been interpreted. When has a defender ever not looked for the ball, made contact with the receiver, and not been called for pass interference? It gets called all the time, not just against Utah when they are playing BYU.

We wont go into the complex beauty of the last play because a Cougarboarder code named TheDash has done so perfectly. Click here. For video highlights of the game we thank Cougarboard and you can click here for those as well. We recommend the one put together by Cougarboarder TSN.

Looking ahead, the game against Oregon should provide plenty of drama. But it shouldn't be written as a Crowton vs. Cougars because the truth is, he isn't against the Cougars. We hope fans wont say, "now is the chance to kick Crowton for causing the four worst years in BYU Football history." As Coach Mendenhall notes, Mr. Crowton is still interested in BYU Football's success. Hopefully winning a bowl game for the first time since 1996 is enough to motivate the team and its fans. It's enough to motivate us, and yes, we'll see you at the game.

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BYU Basketball

With meetings to attend early (11am) this morning, we didn't stay up last night to listen to BYU play Boise St. on the radio. And it's just as well as they ended up losing 72-68. We will limit, as a result, our observations to just a couple of things. BYU lost to a lesser team on the road because they did not come out and play hard in the first half the way they did in the second to cut Boise State's huge lead. Whose fault is it that they start the game unfocused and uninspired? The Seniors? Coach Rose? After a promising showing against UCLA (promising despite the turnovers), BYU still hasn't won a game on the road. With an upcoming game against Michigan St., it would behoove BYU to get their act together so they can put on a good show for the tournament selection committee--that is, if they want to go to the NCAA Tournament in March.

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Gregg Easterbrook is stil a moron

In other news, Gregg Easterbrook aka TMQ, a writer for espn.com Page 2 gives us more of his blatant, basic-law-of-economics-defying-populism with his not-so-veiled attack on pharmaceutical companies.

"Placebon™ will be extremely expensive, thus increasing demand. Pharmaceutical companies will treat doctors to lavish dinners, send them on all-expense-paid cruises and hand out handsome 'consulting' fees to get them to prescribe Placebon™. Controlled clinical studies will fail to show that Placebon™ is any more effective than breathing, but the manufacturer will lobby the Food and Drug Administration not to report this. Celebrities will be hired to have public breakdowns, then make spectacular recoveries by taking Placebon™. A saccharine version, Diet Placebon™, will be marketed. Initially, many insurers will refuse to pay for Placebon™. But as senior citizens stream across the Canadian border to buy low-cost government-subsidized Placebon™, politicians will demand that insurers pay, and the health care share of the GDP will rise again. Eventually a generic will be available at discount, while the patent holder makes a tiny molecular change in order to maintain proprietary pricing of advanced Placebon 24", a longer-lasting version.

Placebon will be extremely expensive thus increasing demand? That's not what we learned in Econ 110: 'All together class, as price increases, demand goes down.' He's talking about a placebo but his critique of drug companies and the FDA is clear. Of course, he must think that pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop wonder drugs out of the goodness of their hearts. We shouldn't have a problem with this arrangement. Without the big dollars involved, drug companies wouldn't spend the big bucks and take risks to develop breakthroughs that make life better. Sure, some doctors are looking for the cure to cancer because it makes them feel warm inside, but a far greater number of them do so because of the financial incentive. Take that money away from drug companies and they will simply cease to gamble on research and development. Though we may get today's drugs cheaper, tomorrow's drugs will never be developed because there is simply no incentive to do so.

We've written about health care before at length. Rising health care costs are a result of another economics problem called the "tragedy of the commons." It holds that when something is shared by everyone, rather than being owned by someone, everyone will use it as much as possible without any regard to its future condition, because if they don't, someone else will. In government or business sponsored health groups, with a small or no co-pay, individuals have every incentive to go to the doctor all the time. They do so because if they don't someone else will. They do so because rather than increasing wages, companies increase health benefits (incidentally, companies increase health benefits because government taxes wages, but not the health care they provide), effectively paying their employees in health care. This has something to do with the lack of increase in real wages. And because they go to the doctor every time they have the slightest cold or back ache, and when they do go, they get every test and medicine allowable, health care costs go up for everyone.

Back to the sports part of this column

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Seattle Seahawks

First off, a little bit of business we neglected to take care of last week. Does anyone know if Sports Illustrated actually does any research for their articles? As part of their NFL Preview issue, SI listed the best local coverage for each team, be it a newspaper, blog, etc. For the Seahawks they listed the Seattle Post Intelligencer. We don't have a horse in this race, but anyone who knows anything about Seahawks coverage, knows that the best in the game is the Tacoma News-Tribune--specifically Mike Sando and his incredible blog. In the last two weeks extending from before the Seahawks-49ers game until today, the Seattle PI has had three entries. In that same time Mike Sando at TNT has posted literally dozens (we quit counting once we got into the 30s) of entries to his Seahawks Insider blog. Mr. Sando produces all sorts of sortable stats from passes dropped, to red-zone defense, to a 33 category roster--33 categories! He even makes audio from interviews available via podcast which you can subscribe to on iTunes. Seriously, this guy is the best--the best! In true Bill Simmons fashion, we wont even listen to argument about this point. It is not debatable. The only thing half-way hokey about his whole deal is how he picks teams each week but does not pick them against the spread. Anyone can pick straight winners and losers. Few people can pick successfully against the spread--just ask us. Including his wife in this competition seems like just a bit of a ESPN Page 2 Bill Simmons knockoff. Still, we read Sando constantly and our life is better for it.

The Seahawks beat the crummy Packers despite 4 turnovers. Any team that can beat another team despite four turnovers is doing pretty well. We stayed up late to watch this game on channel 5 over here in London. What an experience that was. Whenever the American broadcast would go to commercial, the British feed would go to these two guys sitting in some studio in London where one guy, who apparently last played organized football for Wesleyan back in 1969, proceeds to describe what just happened using every word imaginable except for the correct football term to describe the action. If he did use a correct term--like say, tackle--it was mis-used. At one point they went into a portion of the show where they read viewer emails and responded. One viewer asked for a birthday wish and the guy, we'll call him Mike, said happy birthday in this creepy voice and gave the camera a wink and a nod. Meanwhile back in America, Vince Lombardi rolled over in his grave. Michael Irvin would be a positive influence on this production.

But the Seahawks won. Seattle's offensive line started the gel, Shaun Alexander looked like the MVP, Matt Hasselbeck shook off the early rust and looked really good throwing a beautiful fade pass to D-Jack in the endzone that was even more amazing because of the adverse conditions (read: snow and ice). That's right, the first snow game in Seattle history. The defense shut down Green Bay's run and aside from playing in a field shortened by Hasselbeck's early turnovers, really played well. All three cornerbacks had picks (thank you Brett Favre).

2006 was never going to be 2005 for the Seahawks. But this is a team that looks like it's starting to put things together. The early difficulties on defense had a lot to do with an offense that regularly put them in tough spots. With Mr. Hasselbeck back and Mr. Alexander improving, the defense should respond as they feel less pressure to win the game on their own. Jerramy Stevens needs to get his head right. That's all we're going to say about him. The line needs to continue to improve their run and pass blocking. But with master-teacher/coach Mike Holmgren running the show, the Seahawks should make another run in the playoffs.

On Sunday the Seahawks play the Broncos in primetime (the night game). Having Jay Cutler start at QB for the Broncos will help, but this game will still be a good test for the Seahawks who have only played medium to weak teams thus far.

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Sonics

We've never understood the finer points of the mental game played between coaches and players, you know, the one supposedly perfected by the Sun Tzu of NBA coaches, Phil Jackson. But apparently that's what's been going on over the past couple of days as Seattle coach Bob Hill feuded with the three main players on his bench--Earl Watson, Dominique Wilkins, and Nick Collison. Mr. Hill at one point called out Mr. Wilkins saying that he was "pouting" because he wasn't getting the playing time he thought he should. After airing his grievances to the press, Mr. Hill met separately with Mr. Watson and Mr. Wilkins where they each expressed their loyalty and eternal affection and Mr. Watson made some vague reference to a Jay-Z song from Hard Knock Life Vol. 2 saying that he would "ride with" Mr. Hill.

We hope by "ride with" he means win a few games at home because the Sonics are 2-6 at home and it looks like the public relations blitz they needed to mount via a winning season to coax a fat tax subsidy from fans, is failing. Which really, really bugs us. We enjoy watching the Sonics--especially when they're good. They have talent and potential but they don't play defense and they, as Mr. Hill notes, are immature in how they play the game. Last week's game against San Antonio provides the perfect context. We know lots of people hate the Spurs. They aren't a glamorous team that wins by scoring lots of points like Phoenix. But they win a lot of games because they rebound, play defense, and take advantage of the other teams turnovers and weaknesses. The Sonics are young and inconsistent. They played their immature inconsistent game against the Spurs and San Antonio played theirs and the predictable happened. It really is as simple as that. Which leads us to conclude that it is on Mr. Hill to figure out a way to convince his players, teach them, Phil Jackson them, do whatever he has to in order to get them to win games.

Truth is, we'll probably lose them to Oklahoma either way.

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Seattle Mariners

No news is bad news. A pool of pitchers short on talent with teams long on demand means that a team like the Mariners who still haven't signed anyone, are rapidly running out of options. Our #1 guy, Barry Zito, is still on the market and we hope the Mariners will be sensible enough to break the bank to get this guy. They can fill in the other two open spots in the pitching rotation with Jake Woods and Cha Seung Baek. The Mariners could use another bat, but after signing Mr. Zito they wont have much cash left (because they haven't kept pace with inflation since the first budget jump in the Safeco Era). They should follow the A's example from last year and sign a Frank Thomas. Someone who is old and slow but who still gets on base and hits for power.

We wish they'd cowboy up and sign Manny Ramirez thereby proving to Red Sox nation that, despite his quirks, Ramirez is the most important hitter in their lineup, but we know that wont happen.

It would make too much sense.


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Matt Berry is a really good guy

We generally try to avoid out and out mention of our friends in our blog. This is a departure from past experience where our folksy attempts at a Top 10 list often included references to family and friends. In the recent case of Matt Berry, we simply can't help ourselves.

Consider first the "botched joke" of John Kerry. Everyone has heard about how Mr. Kerry essentially called the military dumb and poor. We wrote about it here. Congressman Charles Rangel has been making waves with his call for a draft and has been even more explicit in his contempt for the troops:

"If a young fellow has an option of having a decent career, or joining the Army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq," Mr. Rangel, a Democrat representing Manhattan and Queens, said on "Fox News Sunday."

"If there's anyone who believes these youngsters want to fight, as the Pentagon and some generals have said, you can just forget about it. No bright young individual wants to fight just because of a bonus and just because of educational benefits. And most all of them come from communities of very, very high unemployment," the congressman said.

Even our moronic hometown newspaper has picked up on the theme. The liberal elitist worldview reads that only poor, uneducated--mostly minorities--serve in the military. As recent reports about the overall intelligence of our military as compared to the general populace show, this isn't true. But even if it were true, when did it become bad that people surveyed their list of choices, and then decided to join the military? They see opportunities to get ahead--just the same as someone who attends community college. It is typical of liberal condescension that they look down on those who, without a trust fund, do what they can to get educated and get ahead.

Back to Berry.

Mr. Berry's experience, highlighted wonderfully in an article in the Salt Lake Tribune by Patrick Kinahan (hat tip: Matt Lybbert), shows perfectly that even the "advantaged" are joining the military--and for purely virtuous reasons. Just because some liberals don't include patriotism in their list of priorities, doesn't make those who volunteer irrational.

The recently deceased Milton Friedman made a passionate case for an all-volunteer army. He surmised, based on economic research, that an all volunteer army would most effectively and efficiently allocate the nation's manpower. Sure, many would join because it gave them economic opportunities. So what? Others like Mr. Berry join because they are patriots. Whatever the motivation, these young men and women are hardly stupid or ignorant for joining. They aren't being duped.

Mr. Berry lists among his many accomplishments being a former BYU QB who graduated with a degree in history. He even wrote for this blog(!). He was also a co-founder of Consource where he worked with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and others (Justice Scalia) to make primary source documents relating to the creation of the Constitution available online to everyone. After completing basic training and officer candidate's school, Mr. Berry intends to pursue a graduate degree.

And Mr. Berry is hardly an anomaly. There are others like him. When we spoke with him just before leaving for basic, he mentioned that there were several others in his induction group who had families, were older, and had degrees. These volunteers were established. They hardly fit the profile of young, ignorant, uneducated, minorities like Mr. Rangel would like you to believe.


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Happy Thanksgiving III

The Stuff of Democratic Life
By Allen Guelzo

On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the dedication remarks at the opening ceremonies of a cemetery for soldiers of the Civil War in Gettysburg, Pa. This "Gettysburg Address" -- a gem-like model of conciseness, passion and political eloquence -- quickly became a fixed feature of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers and triple-decker Fourth of July orations, even the soundtrack of the first "talking" motion picture in 1922. It was read once again to dedicate a block of burnt earth in Manhattan during the solemn first anniversary of 9/11 at Ground Zero.

Lincoln wrote a great many other memorable speeches, from his two inaugural addresses to the proclamation that, a week after the Gettysburg Address, made Thanksgiving a national holiday. Why was the Gettysburg speech so much more important? The answer would be easier if his words had not become so worn with familiarity. Time has done more than just heal the wounds of the Civil War. It has grown moss over prose that captured, in a shorter compass and with greater power than any others, the three fundamental challenges of the American experiment.

In 1863, the United States was the only significant democracy in the world. The French Revolution had drowned itself in blood; the democratic uprisings of the 1820s and 1840s had been easily and successfully repressed by kings and emperors; and everywhere, it was power and hierarchy rather than liberty and equality which seemed the best guarantee of peace and plenty. Americans remained the one people who defined themselves by a natural proposition, that all men are created equal, so that no one was born with a superior entitlement to command.

But this republic of equal citizens had two basic weaknesses. The first was its tolerance of slavery, which drew the line of race across the line of equality. The second weakness was the question of authority in a democracy. In a society where every citizen's opinion carried equal weight, decisions would have to be made by majority rule. But a citizen whose opinion carries such weight might find it difficult to submit to the countervailing vote of a majority which thinks differently, and the result is likely to be a simple truculent refusal to go along. Refusals make for resistance, and resistance makes for civil war. Is there, Lincoln asked in 1861, some deep flaw in popular government, some weird centripetal force, which inevitably condemns popular government to whirl itself into pieces "and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth"?

To that question, every king and autocrat in 1861 -- and every fuehrer, duce and president-for-life since -- has answered, smirkingly, yes. And the American Civil War looked like the chief evidence that this was so. Which is why, as Lincoln looked out across the thousands who had gathered on that November day, it seemed to him that what he was viewing was more than just another noteworthy battlefield. It had fallen to him to argue that the Civil War signaled not a failure, but a test, to determine once and for all whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We pass this test, Lincoln said, not by dedicating cemeteries, but by dedicating ourselves. That dedication lies first in seeing that equality is an imposition of self-restraint. It means refusing to lay upon the backs of others the burdens we do not wish laid on our own. Slavery was an outrage on the notion of equality, not just because it treated members of a different race as unequal, but because it allowed one race to exploit another without any restraint at all. "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master," Lincoln explained in 1858. "This expresses my idea of democracy." Popular government is not about what we want, or about our demands for ourselves, but what we should not want and not demand of others.

Dedication lies, second, in the enforcement of self-restraint. Democracy is a discipline. One cannot opt out on the plea of liberty whenever the political score goes against us. The Southern secessionists imagined that they were protecting their liberty by seceding from the Union, but they were in fact negating it. Secession, Lincoln argued, was the essence of anarchy, not liberty, since the only liberty the secessionists had in mind was the liberty to do what they pleased, without restraint, and to people whom they deemed unequal. Against that, a democracy must take up the sword, or cease to be a democracy at all.

But dedication also comes, third, in understanding how to sustain a fervor for democracy's defense. It was the complaint of Francis Fukuyama that the triumph of democracy had only managed to produce a "last man" who had no other reason for being free than the satisfaction of his own interests. It was Lincoln's words at Gettysburg which invested the triumph of democracy with a transcendent meaning, as a good based on natural law rather than on personal comfort. It was because these honored dead were witnesses to that kind of democracy that we could take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

The turn of the 9/11 ceremonies to the Gettysburg Address was instinctively correct. But Lincoln's words are more than just a tonic for crises. Self-restraint, self-enforcement and the recollection that democracy has a transcendent core arching far above our poor power to add or detract -- these are the stuff of democratic life, and the Gettysburg Address is the reminder of Lincoln's prescription for government of the people, by the people and for the people. If we forget it, it may be because we have forgotten all the other things that democracy demands.

Mr. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and the author, inter alia, of "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America" (Simon and Schuster, 2004).