Don’t Know Much About Immigration

July 3rd, 2006

What explains the open borders view of many economists? Soft-headed sentiments for grandma and grandpa rather than sound understanding of the world we actually live in suggest Steve Sailer. Quotable:

Recently, an “open letter” to the President and Congress on immigration was penned by George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution blog. It was signed by over 500 economists even though it consisted of the usual sentimental flapdoodle and duplicitous double-dealing, such as citing data on legal immigrants to argue for amnesty for illegal immigrants ..

[In fact] few economists know much about immigration. Those 500 economists [who signed an open letter] would likely average worse on a test of factual knowledge about the subject than the typical VDARE.COM reader.

But they don’t care. One apparent side effect of a Ph.D. in economics is the assumption that you can extrapolate from general principles without knowing enough facts to understand which principles apply to this particular situation ..

These economists obviously feel that the most important purpose of future American immigration policy is to validate the admission of their own grandparents at Ellis Island a century ago. Apparently, they haven’t been educated to understand the strong emotions driving their preferences. Their individualist perspective seems to be too limited to comprehend many human motivations, especially political ones.

Read the whole thing — and don’t miss a boat full of useful links.

Mishkin to the Fed

July 1st, 2006

Frederic Mishkin learned MIT macroeconomics at the same time the current Fed chair Ben Bernanke learned his macroeconomics at MIT — now both will serve together on the Fed. board.

Excluding Hayek

June 30th, 2006

It’s Horowitz vs. Steinberg debating the institutional foundations of the anti-Hayekian mono-culture of the Universities. Quotable:

Steinberger: I also do not agree that philosophically-based differences – e.g., between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, or between Hayek and Foucault – “create a chasm that no argument can bridge.” Thus, your claim that [leftists] and conservatives are so different that “there are whole dimensions to any given problem” that one or the other “will not see,” and that this explains why differences between leftists and conservatives are “as profound as they are,” seems to me just wrong. Certainly the last claim is fallacious. It is utterly plain and obvious that liberals and conservatives can understand one another very well indeed and still disagree vehemently. Your entire approach here – involving what might be called “psychological blinkers” – suggests a kind of extreme epistemological skepticism or relativism that seems both dubious and dangerous, and that also puts you, ironically, inth close company with some of the very same post-structuralists whose work you often ridicule.

Horowitz: I think this discussion is conclusive evidence that such a chasm exists and that is very hard for [leftists] like yourself to see the problems that confront conservatives. You have just identified commitment “to notions of evidence and rational thought” with the liberal point of view, and also with academic thinking. Yet you deny that conservatives are discriminated against in academic hiring. How can you say there is no chasm? Let alone that there is no exclusionary process which keeps conservatives from being represented on university faculties in reasonable numbers?

You have described academics as “innately hostile to claims based primarily on mere faith,” which you identify with conservatism. Does it not occur to you assomeone disposed to look at the evidence, and as an expert in political theory that conservatives regard Marxists and feminists as essentially religious types, whose ideologies are matters not of evidence but of faith? Are you unaware that entire academic fields are based on mythical ideas that only leftists believe – for example, the existence of race, gender and class hierarchies in market democracies which outlaw discrimination based on race, gender and social class? Do you not think the mere existence of academic studies of “institutional racism” (e.g., the text Racism Without Racists ­­– which is required in many sociology courses) in a society which has a constitutionally-based equal protections clause is evidence of faith-based thinking in the present leftwing academy?

What you have demonstrated unwittingly is the impossibility of conservatives receiving a fair hearing from academics like yourself and — since you are among the more reasonable academics who have argued these issues — the professoriate as it is currently constituted.

Majority Wants Illegals Treated as Felons

June 30th, 2006

and then deported — this from a Hotel lobby poll trumpeted by the Bush administration. It looks like the White House forgot to actually read the poll they were touting.

Botching the Iraq War

June 30th, 2006

An on the ground report from a recently retired American military officer.

via ParaPundit, a war critict who points out, “For the cost of the Iraq Debacle we could buy every driver in the United States a Prius (really, do the math). We could fund construction of hundreds of nuclear power plants .. ”

My position is that the first Iraq War under Bush I necessitated the second Iraq war under Bush II. I opposed the first Gulf War, and only in the retrospective light of the past 14 years of war am I thinking that perhaps I was right after all.

When we think about these wars we have to think about how today’s America will fight the war — and we can’t pretend that a long lost FDR America will be taking care of business.

Treason at the NY Times

June 30th, 2006

Hugh Hewitt discusses the matter with Mark Steyn. Quotable:

I think when we listen to terrorists talking about the new caliphate, and there are a bunch of guys sitting in the cave, we think they’re nuts. When a guy is sitting in the cave listening to Bill Keller explain proudly why he betrayed America’s national security interests, that guy in the cave would rightly conclude that we’re the ones that are nuts. And it’s hard to disagree with him.

Best Gitmo Decision Analysis Yet

June 30th, 2006

This analysis gets to the guts of the Hamdan decision better than any other I’ve read so far. The upshot?

It’s the old debate about approaching terrorism as war or as law enforcement, played out within the High Court. And the law-enforcement approach carried a majority.

“The lawlessness of the Court’s action is manifest.”

June 30th, 2006

A symposium on the Supreme Court’s Gitmo decision. Quotable:

This is not the first time in our history when Congress has sought to revoke the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court in a certain class of war-related cases. As Justice Scalia correctly noted in dissent, the Civil-War-era Court confronted the issue in Ex Parte McCardle, which involved an act of Congress removing the Court’s appellate jurisdiction over the habeas claim of a convicted war deserter. As here, that case was also pending at the time Congress acted. Indeed, the Supreme Court had already heard oral argument in the case and was already drafting an opinion. Yet that Court, unlike the current one, recognized the constitutional limits on its authority, noting:

Without jurisdiction the Court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause.

In a case which has been reported as the Court’s rebuke to the nation’s commander-in-chief for acting “above the law,” the Court’s own lawlessness should not go unnoticed.

Why Leftist Billionaires Make Us Gag

June 29th, 2006

The death tax — “good for thee but not for me” — Warren Buffett speaks loud and clear with his actual behavior. Quotable:

Warren Buffett has famously campaigned to keep the federal estate tax, but he apparently will avoid the tax himself, despite owning the world’s second largest personal fortune.

That’s because he’s giving most of it away to charities, with the biggest chunk going to the foundation run by Bill Gates, the only guy on the planet with more money than Buffett.

Buffett’s children won’t exactly be out in the cold. They will get to spend many billions of their father’s fortune, but as directors of charitable foundations, not as individuals.

So Buffett has simply found the most effective means to sustain his position of power beyond the grave — though tax avoidance and the enlargement of the non-profit sector, a sector without accountability to either owners or voters.

Mark Levin on the Hamdan Decision

June 29th, 2006

Quotable:

Today the Supreme Court’s majority trashed the Geneva Conventions, trashed Supreme Court precedent, and trashed the Constitution. But it did succeed in expanding its own authority and the ability of the enemy to conduct its war against us.

Thomas vs. Court Majority on Gitmo

June 29th, 2006

Stuart Benjamin at Volokh has the guts of the issue. Quoting Thomas:

The President’s interpretation of Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Conventions] is reasonable and should be sustained. The conflict with al Qaeda is international in character in the sense that it is occurring in various nations around the globe. Thus, it is also “occurring in the territory of” more than “one of the High Contracting Parties.” The Court does not dispute the President’s judgments respecting the nature of our conflict with al Qaeda, nor does it suggest that the President’s interpretation of Common Article 3 is implausible or foreclosed by the text of the treaty. Indeed, the Court concedes that Common Article 3 is principally concerned with “furnish[ing] minimal protection to rebels involved in. . . a civil war,” ante, at 68, precisely the type of conflict the President’s interpretation envisions to be subject to Common Article 3. Instead, the Court, without acknowledging its duty to defer to the President, adopts its own, admittedly plausible, reading of Common Article 3. But where, as here, an ambiguous treaty provision (“not of an international character”) is susceptible of two plausible, and reasonable, interpretations, our precedents require us to defer to the Executive’s interpretation.

In other words the Supreme Court has overturned its own precident in order to wrench control of policy concerning the detention and adjudication of non-state terrorists way from the President.

Benjamin left out this rebuke from Thomas :

The plurality’s willingness to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous.

More outakes from Thomas here:

Another Hero Dies

June 28th, 2006

RIP, MARINE SSGT RAYMOND PLOUHAR.

Steyn on the U.S. Immigration System

June 28th, 2006

Mark Steyn’s wife loses her green card, and other stories of American immigration madness.

Also, Steyn on Coulter. Quotable:

the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left’s pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say “Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?” or “Wow! The global warming peaked in 1998 and it’s been getting cooler for almost a decade. Isn’t that great?” and then look at the faces. As with all millenarian doomsday cults, good news is a bummer.

The Estonian Economic Miracle

June 27th, 2006

A short conversation with Friedman prize winner Mart Laar. Quotable:

when you grow up in Communism, you know books on economics are not really on economics. They are Communist political propaganda. It is very hard to believe in Karl Marx when you see what is happening around you. Ronald Reagan once said, “What is the difference between a Marxist and an anti-Marxist? A Marxist reads the books of Karl Marx. An anti-Marxist understands them.”

The first time I heard the name Milton Friedman, it was in propaganda newsletters that said there is one very bad and very dangerous economist, and his name is Milton Friedman. I was quite sure, when he is so dangerous for the Communists to be telling me this, he must be a good man.

Free to Choose was one of the first Western books translated into Estonian at the end of the 1980s. That is how I had the chance to look at these ideas, which, when they were introduced in Estonia, looked quite crazy to many Western people but which to me looked quite logical, I must say.

Roger Garrison on Greespan’s Fed

June 27th, 2006

The world’s best macroeconomist explains what happened during the Greenspan years — “The Greenspan Fed in Perspective”. [pdf file]

The President Needs to Enforce the Law

June 26th, 2006

If the NY Times and the LA Times are communicating classified information in violation of the law, then the President needs the courage to enforce that law. What the country needs is more rule of law, and less rule of politics. Non-enforcement of the law is pure craven politics if the President refuses to uphold U.S. law. Congressman Peter King is right — the answer to life threatening violations of U.S. security laws is prosecution.

More from Hugh Hewitt. Quotable:

It seems increasingly clar that Keller/McManus et al are close to ignorant of the constitutional rules at work here. They have confused the deep suspicion of prior restraint in our constitutional framework with an exemption from the laws governing the disclosure of secrets.

PP says never underestimate the mediocrity of a newspaperman.