The Ahistorical Krugman

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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

Learning from the Election

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by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

1. Populism

The Republicans have only won the popular vote since Ronald Reagan’s presidency on two occasions: 1988 and 2004. In both instances, even the patrician Bushes were able to paint their liberal opponents as out-of-touch Massachusetts magnificoes. Lee Atwater turned Michael Dukakis, the helmeted tank driver, into a bumbling Harvard Square naïf. Karl Rove reminded the country that John Kerry, the wind surfer, was a spandex-wearing, wetsuit-outfitted yuppie who lived in several of his rich wife’s mansions, as he jetted around in her plane and sailed on her boat. Continue reading “Learning from the Election” →

The Absurdity of Treating a Terrorist Gang Like a State

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by Bruce Thornton

Frontpage Magazine

The currently suspended missile duel between Israel and Hamas exposes yet again the surreal absurdity of the way the international community handles this conflict between a democratic state and a terrorist gang. Yesterday’s cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas is another example of the folly of treating a bunch of murderers like a legitimate government. Continue reading “The Absurdity of Treating a Terrorist Gang Like a State” →

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You . . .

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by Victor Davis Hanson

Tribune Media Services

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina. Continue reading “Oh, We Forgot to Tell You . . .” →

Oh What a Tangled Web

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by Victor Davis Hanson

National Review Online

Supporters of President Obama have dubbed those who question administration statements about Libya as either partisans or conspiracy theorists, on the premise that the administration had no reason to dissimulate. But in fact, it had plenty of political reasons not to be candid, as the following questions make clear. Continue reading “Oh What a Tangled Web” →

Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims

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by Victor Davis Hanson

PJ Media

Since the election, some fatalistic Washington conservative elites have accepted — and Obama operatives have rejoiced in — a supposedly new and non-white-male ethnic electorate: Americans will be categorized, and collectively so, on the basis of largely how they look and, to a lesser extent, how they sound. Republicans, then, better get with the new tribalism and remarket themselves to address the new minority monolith. Continue reading “Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims” →

Down from Olympus

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by Victor Davis Hanson

NRO’s The Corner

David Petraeus’s resignation marks the end of one of the great postwar military and government careers — his successful surge in Iraq being analogous to and as impressive as Matthew Ridgway’s salvation of Korea or Sherman’s sudden taking of Atlanta that saved Lincoln’s and the Union cause before the 1864 elections. In a book due out in late spring, The Savior Generals, I argue that his achievements were comparable to those of the best of history’s maverick commanders who were asked to save wars deemed lost — and did. But for now, the explanation of Petraeus’s resignation unfortunately raises more questions than it answers, in a number of significant ways: Continue reading “Down from Olympus” →

Too Many Narratives to Get Straight?

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by Victor Davis Hanson

NRO’s The Corner

At some point the prurient angle of the Petraeus story that alone enticed a reluctant media into becoming tangentially interested in Benghazi-gate — in the way the deaths of four Americans never did — will die down. Then we are left with largely three unanswered questions of far greater importance that will probably not be answered. Continue reading “Too Many Narratives to Get Straight?” →

Explaining the Democrats’ Success

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by Bruce Thornton

Frontpage Magazine

The election postmortem has identified all manner of causes for the Republicans’ defeat, from the “woman problem” and the “Hispanic problem,” as Peggy Noonan put it, to Romney’s fatcat persona and his inept campaign. But there’s a simpler reason, one consistent with the critics of democracy starting in ancient Athens — Obama and the Democrats promised voters more free stuff. Continue reading “Explaining the Democrats’ Success” →

The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism

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by Bruce Thornton

FrontPage Magazine

The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior — whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad — is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Continue reading “The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism” →