by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers
Angry Reader #5 wrote:
Don’t mean to troll here, but for the nth time, what is it about Obama or his agenda that wasn’t conservative mainstream thought even a few years ago?? He’s lowered taxes, been tough on defense, adopted a healthcare plan proposed by the Heritage Foundation Continue reading “Angry Reader #5”
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner
If the UN now has the right and duty to intervene, in a morally relative manner, in territorial disputes between various groups and grant de factosovereignty, then the sky is the limit. Why go through the motions of two-party discussions at all? Continue reading “The All-Knowing, All-Powerful UN”
by Bruce Thornton
Defining Ideas
In Fisher vs. University of Texas, the Supreme Court heard legal challenges to the University of Texas’s admissions policies, which allow consideration of an applicant’s race in order to promote “diversity” among the school’s students. Such racial preferences are widespread in university admissions. In 80 percent of elite schools, they amount to the equivalent of a 100-point boost in SAT scores, according to research by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor. Continue reading “The Rise of Faux Diversity”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Over the last three weeks, I think I have read most of the post-election op-eds written on the Latino vote. I have studied exit polling, read sophisticated demographic analyses, and talked to as many Latinos in my hometown as I could. The result is that I would not advise Republicans to go down the identity-politics route. Continue reading “Winning the Latino Vote”
by Victor Davis Hanson
PJ Media
The Rich
I confess I never admired John Edwards — and used to argue with the late Christopher Hitchens[1] about the blow-dried lawyer’s suitability for president. I didn’t think much of Al Gore or John Kerry, well before the “he lied!” vein-bulging fits and the wind-surfing spoofs. I was not surprised when Susan Rice just disclosed that she is worth considerably over $30 million[2] — and has money in Keystone[3] no less. Are they all part of the “one percent”? Did they pay “their fair share”? Do they “spread the wealth”? At what point in his life did Al Gore know that he had made enough money (before barreling ahead and making more)? Continue reading “The Confessions of a Confused Misfit”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
Classical explanations of conventional wars run something like this: An aggressor state seeks political advantage through military force. It has a hunch that the threatened target will likely either make concessions to avoid losing a war, or, if war breaks out, the resulting political gains will be worth the military costs to achieve victory. Continue reading “T-Ball War in the Middle East”
by Bruce Thronton
Frontpage Magazine
In a story describing President Obama’s six conversations with Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi that led to the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the New York Times summarized Obama’s estimation of Morsi. Obama told his aides “he was impressed with the Egyptian leader’s pragmatic confidence. Continue reading “The Ghosts of 1938 Still Haunt Our Foreign Policy”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services
After his party’s devastating setback in the 2010 midterm elections, Barack Obama was re-elected earlier this month by painting his Republican opponents as heartless in favoring lower taxes for the rich. They were portrayed as nativists for opposing the Dream Act amnesty for illegal immigrants, and as callous in battling the federal takeover of healthcare. Continue reading “Let Obama Be Obama”
by Victor Davis Hanson
Private Papers
Angry Reader #4 wrote:
You know, I remember, before Pajamas media, when I respected some of the writers that are now here (such as VDH) — but they’ve all turned into crazy cranks. Continue reading “Angry Reader #4”
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Paul Krugman weaves a fantasy tale of how high taxes, big unions, and government regulations created a booming 1950s economy — the implication being that in reactionary fashion we can now in a second term return to our heyday under Obama’s envisioned union support, growth in government, tax hikes, and greater regulations. Krugman takes little note of history — that his redistributionist Fifties followed the near-complete destruction of what was then the industrialized world — a devastated Germany and Japan were still emerging from ruin; Russia and China were all but destroyed and suffered 50 to 70 million dead; there was no Taiwan or South Korean economic miracle yet; France, Italy, and most of Western Europe were still reeling from war, ruin, and occupation — all leaving an intact and untouched United States in a unique position in the 1940s and 1950s as the supplier for pent-up demand, and restorer of the world economy — all at a time when America was still almost self-sufficient in cheaply priced gas-and-oil production and cutthroat globalization was still a pipe dream.
In such a landscape of postwar monopoly, the United States, which had not recovered before the war despite eight years of statist policies, could sustain, for a brief time, Krugman’s dream tonics of a top income tax rate of 91 percent (with plenty of loopholes) — or almost any tonics within the broad parameters of free-market capitalism. Yet soon by the mid-1960s and 1970s, America reentered a competitive global economy, became increasingly dependent on soon-to-become-costly imported oil, and found its high-cost unionized labor, high taxes, and highly regulated 1950s economy inflexible and hardly able to adjust to the rise of dynamic competitors like Germany, Japan, South Korea, and later China. That is why the fossilized 1950s paradigm, which Krugman is nostalgic about, by the time of the Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations had stalled and was plagued with periodic bouts of high inflation, high unemployment, high interest rates, stagnant inner cities, a growing rust belt, and a generally stagflating economy. If Obama succeeds in taking us back to Krugman’s 1950s dreams, then he likewise better hope that horizontal drilling and fracking, and in large part on federally leased lands, can return the US to energy independence, that technological breakthroughs increase productivity even more, and that rivals such as Japan, China, and Germany recede either because of demographic ossification or a desire to go backward and command and control their economies even more than we do.
©2012 Victor Davis Hanson