Daily Links UPDATED

Francis Fukuyama thinks President Obama should promote democracy in Iran.

Daniel Henninger crystallizes the current national debate about the size & scope of government and the importance of private entities.

Holman Jenkins thinks Apple may turn into Microsoft (in a bad way).

Newt Gingrich gives us 10 GOP ideas/solutions to our health care problem.

This is an old one, but: Michael Lewis looks at AIG.

Dean of Columbia Business School, R. Glenn Hubbard, looks into his fiscal crystal ball and doesn't like at least one thing that he sees: higher taxes.

Bret Stephens dispels 7 myths about Iran.

Fouad Ajami thinks the Obama spell (wherein people think he is the harbinger of liberal utopia) has been broken.

UPDATE 2:26pm BST: The Global Warming "consensus" (fraud) is falling apart, opines the Washington Times. (h/t Scott L.)

UPDATe 2:52pm BST: A friend of a Friend of Lybberty recently started a blog and his first post critiques Barbara Boxer's so-called Taxpayer Fairness Act.

Finally, a little more than just a link, I'll leave you with a little knowledge. We already learned from Heather Mac Donald that poverty ≠ crime. Now, James Kirchick informs us that poverty also ≠ terror.

Of the 30-odd attempted terrorist plots against the United States or American installations abroad that have been foiled since 9/11, roughly a third have been uncovered in the past year alone. What is new, and particularly frightening, about these recent attempts is that the budding perpetrators were initially indoctrinated inside the United States, with help from extremist websites or Islamic preachers. It was only after they had been brought some ways along the road to holy war that at least some of these would-be jihadists sought training and logistical support from al-Qaeda and others overseas. . . .

While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.

This kind of rains on the parade of people who, wherever they look, see class warfare and jealousy-caused conflict between the "haves" and the "have nots."

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Holman Jenkins: 'Unable To Do Anything About Global Warming, Policy Defaults To Satisfying Demands Of Organized Interests For Climate Pork'

Compare and contrast the very able in-house editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal and any other given daily newspaper--take the New York Times if you like. I guarantee you any objective analysis of the writing, to say nothing of the actual merit of the ideas expressed, will come out in favor of the WSJ's Daniel Henninger, Holman Jenkins, Bret Stephens and the rest.

Here's Jenkins on Al Gore's for-profit climate change machine:

All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn't that where Al Gore is today?

Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren't these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?

The truth is, evidence of man's impact on climate remains maddeningly elusive, in part because man's impact on climate is so small as to be hard to disentangle from natural variability. This is not Mr. Gore's position, of course. If anything, however, the case for action has become less closed since he pronounced it closed in 1989, if only because of the huge sums and manpower poured into the subject to little avail.

In retrospect, a significant moment was the falling apart or debunking of two key attempts seemingly well-suited to clinch matters for a scientifically literate public. One, the famous hockey stick graph, which suggested the temperature rise of the past 100 years was unprecedentedly steep, was convincingly challenged. The other, a mining of the geological record to show past episodes of warming were sharply coupled with rising CO2 levels, fell victim to a closer look that revealed that past warmings had preceded rather than followed higher CO2 levels.

These episodes from a decade ago testified to one important thing: Even climate activists recognized a need for evidence from the real world. The endless invocation of computer models wasn't cutting it. Yet today the same circles are more dependent than ever on predictions made by models, whose forecasts lie far enough in the future that those who rely on them to make policy prescriptions are in no danger of being held accountable for their reliability.

For a while the media could patch over the scientific shortfall by reporting evidence of warming as if it were evidence of what causes warming. Inconveniently, however, just as temperature-measuring has become more standardized and disciplined and less reliant on flaky records from the past (massaged to the Nth degree), the warming trend seems to have faded from the recent record.

It seems to me that the climate of opinion surrounding climate change is beginning to change.

As in, people aren't willing to give up Western Civilization in the vague and vain hope that it may forestall some far off future, unproven, and ridiculous prophecy of doom.

(h/t Scott L.)

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

From The Facebook Thread: Detente, Liberty, Healthcare &c.

[ed. note: This is for those who do not follow the lively discussion on Facebook]

Ryan D. writes:

What's the difference between the moral imperative for using US resources to spread freedom, and the moral imperative to provide affordable healthcare for the poor? IMO, it's just team politics. I'm interested in seeing how [you] distinguish between using the moral imperative in foreign policy (and, for that matter, social policy), and health care.

And my response:

IIRC, I did not argue that spreading freedom ought to trump national interests full-stop, but that at a minimum, we should err on the side of freedom & democracy when in doing so we were not clearly acting against our own best interest. I think that our own best interest in the long term ought not be subordinated to unclear, debatable, potential gains to be made in the short term.

Historically speaking, the failure of detante in the middle Cold War is a pretty strong critique of realpolitik. And I'm not advancing a strictly neoconservative view of this history. This is coming from the godfather of Cold War history himself--John Lewis Gaddis.

I did not say that I felt no moral obligation or desire to help those w/o health care. I just don't translate that into wanting to tax other people to fund a government program that assuages my guilt & makes me feel better about myself.

I'm a natural rights guy.

My moral impulse to spread the "unalienable rights" is the same at home as it is abroad. I reject the cult of rights that has become progressive morality. As Folsom argues, these ever-expanding rights impose an obligation on society--an obligation which infringes on individual liberty by using the coercive power of government.

I firmly believe in the ability of market reform to drive down costs (of procedures & meds, etc. see Lasik surgery for a prime example of this), increase access, and continue medical technology innovation.

Eliminating the de facto government subsidy of employer provided healthcare & giving everyone a flat tax credit would go a long way towards accomplishing what I envision. Hell, I don't make a sufficiently compelling/persuasive argument in favor of market-based reforms, but Holman Jenkins does.

A collectivist response with fairness/equality as its main goal will not innovate. It will not drive down costs. And rather than using the amoral price mechanism allocate healthcare resources, will employ some arbitrary bureaucracy to ration care.

It may well be called "universal," but tell that to the queues of people who die waiting for cancer treatment & heart surgery. Tell that to the seniors who do not get hip replacement surgery. Tell it also to people waiting to get a friggin' MRI or colonoscopy. And don't forget about one other unintended (I'm sure) consequence of going socialist, the decline in future med tech innovation & pharmaceutical development.

Sure, Americans pay a lot of money on healthcare. So what? They are self optimizers who do so largely because they value the extension in life they believe they are receiving as a result of that care.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Holman Jenkins: 'Our President Is An Object Of Craving Utterly Independent Of The Policies He Pursues'

From his column in today's WSJ:

Mr. Obama, therefore, has an unlikely degree of freedom to throw overboard his agenda and go for growth without fear of his public abandoning him.

From the start, he has seemed uniquely detached and noncommittal about his own policy positions, as if he was entertaining them only to see if they might be useful to him. Let's not underestimate this advantage over lesser politicians, who get trapped by their rhetoric. Let's also hope Mr. Obama takes advantage, becoming the "growth" president and saving the big initiatives for his second term. Otherwise, with the AIG disaster before him, he may be remembered as the president who nonetheless blundered into similar disasters trying to manage Citibank et al.

Don't bet on Obama becoming the "growth" president.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

What Market Reform To Health Care Could Look Like Vs. Obama's DMVification Of Healthcare

Two of my three favorite columnists at the WSJ Op-Ed page--Holman Jenkins & Daniel Henninger with Bret Stephens writing about Iran--wrote about healthcare this week and their columns were fantastic.

In his column, Jenkins "reflects," in 2070, about the effects of market reform on healthcare in the United States. This is what we could get, if only Eric Paul, Ryan Cantor, and Kemp Newtley were in charge rather than the Democrats.

And, lo, it proved true, as 100 million intelligent, well-educated employees of Corporate America were allowed to see for the first time what "tax free" health insurance was really costing them. They saw how it distorted their behavior and caused them to allocate far more of their incomes to the medical-industrial complex than they would have chosen for themselves.

Eyes newly opened, they demanded cheaper insurance options, covering fewer services (cancer wigs, family counseling, in-vitro fertilization), and opted for plans with higher deductibles and co-pays in return for much lower monthly rates.

Because consumers were now spending their "own" money on health care, doctors and hospitals found it necessary to publish and even advertise their prices. A hospital that specialized in heart surgery, performing thousands of procedures a year, found it had both the highest quality and lowest cost -- and now marketed itself as such. Ditto specialists in cancer, diabetes and other conditions.

For the first time, Americans spent less and got more. Spending fell overnight by 13%, which happened to be exactly what economists had predicted if the price tags were restored to health care and consumers were allowed to see clearly what they were getting (or not getting) for their money. As predicted, too, spending thereafter rose only in line with incomes.

What's more, many fewer people remained voluntarily uninsured now that health insurance was no longer a gold-plated extravagance affordable only by those in the top brackets who could slough off 40% of the cost on other taxpayers. Existing programs for the needy, in turn, could be downsized and revamped into voucher programs. The federal budget benefited twice over -- from fewer claimants and from medical care that was less costly. Fiscal wreck was avoided.

Bookending this imagined optimism, Henninger reminds us that government always over-promises and under-delivers. He uses the "fearmongering scare tactics" of reviewing the history of Medicaid. The faint of heart would do well to ignore historic reality and read the fawning reviews of the President's healthcare plan written by his fellow travelers in the MSM. Henninger just might persuade them that Obama isn't right all the time.

Whatever Medicaid's merits, this federal health-care program more than any other factor has put California and New York on the brink of fiscal catastrophe. I'd even call it scary.

Spending on health and welfare, largely under Medicaid, makes up one-third of California's budget of some $100 billion. In New York Gov. David Paterson's budget message, he notes that "New York spends more per capital ($2,283) on Medicaid than any other state in the country."

After 45 years, the health-care reform called Medicaid has crushed state budgets. A study by the National Governors Association said a decade ago that because of "new requirements" imposed by federal law -- meaning Congress -- "Medicaid has evolved into a program whose size, cost and significance are far beyond the original vision of its creators."

In his speeches, Mr. Obama makes the original vision of his "public option" insurance plan sound about as simple as driving through toll booths with an electronic pass on your windshield. It's going to be all about "best practices" with patients "reimbursed in a thoughtful way," as if the federal government is about to become just another big Google.

Medicaid is a morass. Since the program's inception, Congress has loaded it up every few years with more notions of what to cover, shifting about 43% of the ever-upward cost onto someone else's tab, mainly the states. A 1988 congressional mandate requires local schools to pay for schooling and related services for disabled children, but because Congress underfunds its mandates, the states pay the rest through Medicaid.

The list of add-ons is endless, and there's little about it that is thoughtful. Why shouldn't one think that, as with Medicare and Medicaid, the Obama Public Option in time will become an impossible fog for patients to navigate? But unto eternity the program's administrative complexity will provide work for bureaucrats, Members of Congress, their staffs, lobbyist spouses and the "health-care" establishment of foundations and economists.

The President's "public option" will cost more in taxes, provide poorer overall medical care and will infringe on individual liberty. These are the facts.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Paul Krugman & His Nobel (UPDATED)

So Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize. So what? So did global warming alarmist/profiteer Al Gore. And terrorist Yasser Arafat. The Nobel Prize really no longer confers anything in the way of prestige.

Instead of reading all the articles singing his praises, read this article by Michael Lynch at Reason on why Krugman may be a good economist, but a lousy columnist.

As the Western media exposed our Saudi Arabian allies as double-dealing despots, attention turned to the obvious question: Can the United States live without Saudi Arabian oil, which, at 1.6 million barrels a day, accounts for 14 percent of our imports? The answers are mixed. The Wall Street Journal's Susan Lee says sure we can, since other countries will simply sell more oil. Newsweek reached a similar conclusion. "Not a chance," says Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer, in The Weekly Standard.

The most useless contribution to the oil debate, albeit not directly addressing the narrow question of Saudi Arabia, comes from The New York Times' top economic pontificator, Paul Krugman. "Intelligent policies could break [the oil price surge and bust cycle]," says Krugman, a chaired professor of economics at Princeton.

Krugman spent much of his recent column explaining two obvious points. First, that producer cartels face difficulties in maintaining artificially low production levels. Second, he helpfully pointed out that as prices for a commodity drop people consume more of the commodity. What upsets Krugman about low prices for oil? He fears low prices are destabilizing for Saudi Arabia and, worse yet, causing people to purchase sport-utility vehicles.

Considering the stakes, it is shocking to find that the man who says "all we need is leadership" to break the "oil-hog cycle," has but one policy suggestion: increase mileage standards on SUVs to the equivalent of automobiles. Currently, SUVs are classified as light trucks for mileage standards and, on average, have to get 20.7 miles per gallon. Cars must meet a standard of 27.5 mpg.

So what of his solution? Is a government-mandated increase in mileage for SUVs the answer to our Middle East oil problem?

Not even close. Here's how the issue breaks down, according to Howard Gruenspecht, who specializes in Energy and Natural Resources for the think tank Resources for the Future. The United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil each day, almost 9 million in the form of gasoline. Currently, Americans own 200 million vehicles--125 million cars, and 75 million light trucks, which meet the lower mileage standards. Recently, Americans have been purchasing roughly 16 million vehicles a year, half of them classified as light trucks, including SUVs. So over time, light trucks and SUVs constitute an increasing presence on the road.

It is immediately obvious that there are two significant time lags inherent in any effort to increase fuel economy: The time it takes the regulations to phase in and the time it takes Americans to purchase new cars and trucks. If the administration made the regulatory change tomorrow, and made it effective in five years, it would be over a decade before half of the truck miles driven come from vehicles that meet the new standards.

What sort of savings does this give us? Not much. The effected cars' fuel efficiency is increased by a third, which provides a 25 percent reduction in fuel use for those vehicles. In a decade, half of the light truck vehicle miles traveled would be affected, resulting in a 12.5 percent reduction of fuel use by light trucks. In all likelihood, by then light trucks will account for a little more half of all fuel use, so the total reduction in fuel use is between 6 and 7 percent. So a decade out, Krugman's big idea promises to save a mere 600,000 barrels of oil a day, less than 3 percent of current domestic consumption.

It gets worse. Krugman proposes to "close the loophole that exempts S.U.V.'s from mileage standards." Yet SUVs constitute only half of the light truck category that qualifies for lower standards. (It also includes pickups and small and large vans.) Therefore, Krugman's brainchild, read literally, would save Americans from purchasing roughly 300,000 barrels a day a decade out.

That might be worth doing. 300,000 barrels is, after all, a bunch of oil. But one ought to judge a proposal against the relative merits of others designed to achieve similar goals. Krugman concludes his piece by advising the Bush administration to "drop its fixation on drilling in the arctic--which would produce too little oil, too late to make any difference." So how much oil will the proposed Arctic National Wildlife Refuge site produce? According to the Energy Information Administration, a decade after development, ANWR could produce between 600,000 and 900,000 barrels of oil a day.

It may not be much, but it's as much as three times more than Krugman's plan for energy stability. Perhaps he should examine his own "fixations."

Drill here, drill now.

Holman Jenkins in the WSJ's Political diary yesterday about Krugman (h/t Scott L.):

Princeton economist Paul Krugman's Nobel yesterday was earned with some clever analysis of international trade. Among other insights, he showed that governments could, if unusually adept and disciplined, profitably game the international trade system with subsidies to capture high-paying manufacturing jobs. Airbus is the archetypal case in point.

Mr. Krugman's other job is his regular column in the New York Times. His economic insights are always interesting -- right up to the point where it all just proves the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction. Yesterday's installment was a model -- a tribute to the incompetence of the Bush administration because the British beat Washington to the idea of addressing the credit crunch by injecting government capital in banks.

Um. A) Did they? B) Who cares? It takes two nanoseconds to recall the Bush administration used equity injections in the bailouts of Fannie and Freddie and AIG. As for British non-ideological competence, the less said about the Northern Rock fiasco the better, not to mention Britain's role in the Iceland meltdown. What really happened is events have outrun every magic bullet, and are outrunning the capital injection bullet too. A bigger oomph in the British plan, adopted elsewhere, is already the sweeping guarantee of bank liabilities and crypto-regulatory forbearance on capital standards, which make new capital partially redundant.

But never mind. Mr. Krugman has solved the fundamental problem of a columnist -- what to write week after week. The answer: The Same Thing. Just write it over and over. Whether the subject is health care, the banking crisis, global warming or whatever, it all just proves the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction.

Priceless.

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