Reflections  

We suck young blood — One of the terrors of writing on the depredations of government is that of seeing one's metaphors become flesh. When Lysander Spooner wrote of the government being "like a highwayman," surely he did not picture federal agents blockading the road and seizing money from American citizens; yet, money laundering laws now allow them to do just that. Likewise, one doubts that the thousands of pundits and frustrated taxpayers who have referred to their elected rulers as "bloodsuckers" never imagined that the enforcers of the legislative will would accost them in order to forcibly extract blood.

Yet, in a number of states, this is now the case: the Wisconsin Supreme Court recently ruled that police officers could force suspected drunk drivers to give blood, in order to bolster evidence collected through notoriously unreliable breathalyzers. The New Jersey Supreme Court went further, ruling that officers who used "extreme force" (inflicting permanent physical damage) on a DUI suspect were authorized to do so, and thus immune from prosecution.

Combine this with, as Reason's Radley Balko reminds us, the U.S. Supreme Court decision from a while back that sobriety checkpoints are constitutional, and it is conceivable that those checkpoints will soon include the extraction of blood from every motorist passing that way — with, if one is unwilling or unlucky, a bit of extreme force to boot. Which brings to mind another old image, in danger of incarnation: "a boot, stomping on a human face — forever." — Andrew Ferguson

Nanny state and mother love — The parade of televised U.S. presidential debates is ridiculously long, especially so early in the process — before even the first primaries. With so many candidates on one stage, style inevitably trumps substance. But I watch a lot of these things — as a kind of civic penance, for not making complete textual analyses of every Cato and Brookings Institute policy paper as I should. I'm sure you're the same.

Anyway, as I was slogging through the Nov. 15 Democratic candidates' debate from Las Vegas, something different occurred. One segment involved supposedly undecided voters asking the candidates questions directly. (This was the integration of a favorite post-debate TV ritual: sticking a microphone in front of ordinary people and asking their impressions.) Cynical political professionals call the segments "peasants under glass" — they also sometimes feed the peasants scripted questions.

At least three of the supposedly undecided voters were women in late middle age who were concerned about their adult or near-adult male children. One babushka wanted a promise that none of the candidates would ever draft her precious boy into the military and send him into harm's way. Another was angry that her son was poor and wanted to know what the candidates would do about it.

One such woman would have been unremarkable; but several suggested design. Either CNN or the Democratic Party was making a point to showcase aging soccer moms expressing mother love.

That wasn't the final effect. Instead, it sounded like the women were overprotective and their grown-up sons were — as a result? — morons. — Jim Walsh

Mailer's Ghost — Norman Mailer is dead at 84. Demosthenes, when told of the death of Alexander the Great, said it could not be — for else the world would stink of the corpse. One might say something similar about Mailer and the world of letters. If egos rather than flesh stank, then surely we would have smelled Norman's departure before it made the news. The man's astounding self-regard was on parade for the near six decades of his public life.

He was probably the greatest killer of trees in our time, except for Isaac Asimov. His product, generally, was both prolix and second-rate. And most of the exceptions were third- or fourth-rate. That he was so lionized bespeaks the lionizers' poor taste, nothing more.

Then there is the matter of Jack Henry Abbott and the long-forgotten waiter he killed, thanks to Norman's getting Abbott sprung from prison. That should have been the last we heard of Norman. Alas, he carried on for another 25-plus years.

It has been a long-held belief of mine that even the worst poseurs will express a deep truth once in their lives. This was so of Norman. "A man must drink until he finds the truth," he told Playboy magazine an eon or so ago. Then, recently, he came up with another: "I think the novel is on the way out," he said at a National Book Awards ceremony in 2005. On the other hand, perhaps this latter observation is too obvious to be rated profound.

Mailer's humor and his willingness to flout convention were sometimes admirable. His opposition to the war in Vietnam was rooted in a feeling for his fellow human beings that I certainly would not deny. But his reputation stands or falls as man of letters, an artist. He was already unread; in ten years he will be completely forgotten. — Jon Harrison

Fidel Castro: Requiescat in Limbo — Reports of Castro's timely demise are only partially exaggerated. The Miami rumor mill has been so flooded with reports of his death kept secret by an elaborate conspiracy that El Maximo Lider himself had to come out of convalescence and grant a rambling public interview. The Economist even weighed in with a short piece about how such conspiracies are virtually impossible to carry through, in part because the perpetrators would be the beneficiaries of his demise.

But he has actually — perhaps — politically died (somewhat). The Aug. 4 issue of the British journal declared that the post-Fidel era has already begun. Raul Castro, second fiddle and heir apparent, has now been in charge for over a year, without his brother's intrusive micromanagement. Raul has made some considerable procedural alterations. He has announced "structural and institutional changes" to the economy, and he has called for an "open debate" on economic liberalization — though the "pure poison" of "neo-liberal formulae" is off the table. Fidel, recovering slowly and making a few public appearances (but not at the July 26 celebration of the birthday of the Cuban Revolution), is allowing his brother full rein, though he still hovers in the background like a prickly conscience.

Not only do the Cuban cadres sense a change; even internal dissidents believe "a turning point has been reached." The Economist cautiously concludes that "Raul, not Fidel, is the man making every important decision" now. But only a trained pearl diver should hold his breath. — Robert H. Miller

Click, read, learn — I have waxed lyrical before about independent thinktanks. Given the increasing uniformity of opinion on campuses, where humanities and social science faculty are now typically 95% liberal or leftist in orientation, having venues for classical liberal, libertarian, and conservative scholars is vital in keeping some semblance of intellectual debate alive.

Several recent scholarly contributions illustrate this. All the reports I will mention here are downloadable from the respective institutional websites.

First, from the Fraser Institute of Canada comes a report by the distinguished economists Nadeem Esmail and Michael Walker on the increasing problem of wait times in the Canadian National Health System, the inspiration for so many contemporary liberal nostrums for the problem of the uninsured in the U.S.

The report, entitled "Waiting Your Turn: Hospital Waiting Lists in Canada," is the 17th annual report that the Fraser Institute has produced on the subject. It shows that, despite a massive recent infusion of money into the system by the Canadian government, wait times for medical treatment are longer than ever. For example, the time between seeing a GP and then seeing a relevant specialist increased from 8.8 weeks last year to 9.2 weeks now. And the time between being referred by a specialist for a hospital procedure and finally receiving the hospital treatment increased from 17.8 weeks last year to 18.3 weeks now.

The nearly 90-page report documents the problem in meticulous detail, graphing the widening disparity between reasonable and actual waits, both by province and for the country as a whole. Naturally, not a peep about these wait times has been mentioned in American mainstream news media — but then, the mainstream media are as dominated by leftist orthodoxy as the academy itself.

I found especially useful the authors' discussion of the inferiority of non-price rationing to price rationing as a way of allocating scarce resources. They make the point I wish were made in business ethics texts — that pricing has the merit of conveying information. In a free-market system, if the price of a drug or medical procedure is high, it informs both the consumer and the producer that they need to modify their behavior. The consumer learns to buy less of this technology, or work more to afford the price, or consume less of something else. The producer learns to increase production. Others learn to make the same or similar products. All this is negated by government imposed rationing.

Moreover, non-price rationing often results in consumers who want or need a product less than others actually getting it, to the exclusion of those who need it more. And it can result in other sorts of unfairness, such as people with political pull or people in a lucky geographic location getting medical care before others do. One thinks here of the Canadian minister who, diagnosed with cancer, promptly flew to the U.S. for care. As the authors so nicely put it, "This evidence indicates that rationing by waiting is often a facade for a system of personal privilege, and perhaps even greater inequality than rationing by price."

I turn now to the Heritage Foundation. Two of its recent reports make good reading. First is a study by Robert Rector, called "How Poor are America's Poor? Examining the 'Plague' of Poverty in America." Rector looks at the living standards of America's poor, the 37 million that Sen. John Edwards keeps telling us live with chronic hunger, lack of shelter, and inadequate clothing. While not denying that real hardship exists, Rector surveys the data on the poor provided by the Census Bureau, and finds the picture quite different from the one that Edwards and his ilk have painted.

It turns out that 43% of the poor own their own homes, with the average having three bedrooms and one-and-a-half baths. Eighty percent of them have air-conditioning. Only 6% of them live in overcrowded homes; 66% have two rooms or more per person. Indeed, the average poor American has more living space than the average citizen of Paris, London, or Vienna. Moreover, 75% of America's poor own at least one car, and 31% own two or more. Ninety-seven out of 100 own at least one color TV, with over 50% owning two or more, and 62% have cable or satellite TV.

Also from Heritage is a report by economists William Beach and Guinevere Nell on the likely consequences of the new tax plan offered by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) in the name of middle-class tax relief. The report, "The End of Pro-Growth Tax Policy: How the Rangel Tax Bill Could Affect the U.S. Economy," estimated that the proposed Rangel tax hikes by themselves would cost 100,000 new jobs per year and lower household disposable income by $30 billion per year. Add in the repeal of the Bush tax cuts, and you are looking at losing 600,000 new jobs per year, with a loss of $200 billion per year in household disposable income. Rangel himself calls his bill (which the leading Democrats all seem to favor) "the mother of all tax bills." He has the "mother" part right.

Central to Rangel's plan is the imposition of a surtax and other new taxes on higher income earners, who (in the view of Rangel, Edwards, Obama, Clinton, and other such luminaries) are not paying their "fair" share of income taxes. Here a very recent report from the estimable Tax Foundation is pertinent.

This foundation, which has kept the country informed on tax policy at all levels of government since 1937, surveyed the IRS data released in October, and finds (again!) that the rich are indeed not paying their fair share — they are paying more than their fair share. The figures (for 2005) show an even greater contribution from the prior year. The top 1% earn 21% of national income but pay 39% of all income taxes; the top 5% earn 36% of all income but pay 60% of all income taxes; the top 10% earn 46% of income but pay 70% of all income taxes; the top 25% earn 68% of all income but pay 86% of all income taxes; and the top 50% earn 87% of all income but pay 97% of all income taxes.

In view of the fact that to make the top 5% of income earners one need only be earning about $145,000 in total household income, it's obvious that hammering the upper income earners with more punitive taxes is outrageous.

The case for smaller government has to be continuously made, on the basis of data. Absent the contributions of the counter-academy, we wouldn't have it. — Gary Jason

Hey, get that out of your mouth! — Aqua Dot toys have been pulled off retailers' shelves nationwide, after news reports claimed that the toys contained gamma hydroxy butyrate — also known as GHB or the "date rape drug." (Actually, the toys contained a different chemical that, when eaten and metabolized, converts into GHB.) These reports put regulators and parents in a tizzy.

I've always been suspicious of the media label "Date Rape Drug." It's like calling duct tape "Abduction Wrap."

Also, I don't want to dismiss the scare felt by the parents of the two children who were hospitalized after eating Aqua Dots — but, when I grew up, you were taught not to eat your toys.

There has to be some recognition that it's dangerous for children to put non-food items in their mouths and start chewing.

Perhaps we need more data. We can outsource the research — set up a laboratory in a developing country where we feed kids toys to make certain they're edible. "Poor Wang Phat. Last week, he was testing army men. Not so bad eating them — but the next day, ouch! Especially the guy lying down with the bayonet." — Tim Slagle

Thought of the Dane — I was in a meeting with European journalists on a foundation-sponsored tour of the United States. It was a generally placid group until the subject of Turkey came up — mostly Muslim and mostly in Asia — petitioning to join the European Union. Of the journalists in the group, the Dane was vocally in favor of this and the Frenchman, against.

The Dane argued that if Turkey came in, it would become a friendly state and — he didn't quite use this term — a more civilized neighbor. If it were blackballed, it could become a rogue state like Iran.

The Frenchman shook his head. If that was the argument, he said, "then Turkey is not fit to become a European state." And anyway, he said, Turks are not Europeans.

They let their army dominate their government, the Greek said.

We should let them in, the Dane said.

If you're going to let in the Turks, the Frenchman replied: "What about the Moroccans? The Tunisians?"

The Dane, not answering that question, asserted that it was better to bring the Turks "onto the boat."

They're in NATO, the Frenchman said. That's enough. Admitting them to the EU would be inviting them to join a future European state. "There are 80 million Turks — almost as many as there are Germans," he said. He seemed to cringe at the thought of the French being outnumbered by another nationality. The Dane did not worry about it. Danes expect to be outnumbered.

The Italian was not worrying, either. Only 20% of Europeans want the Turks in. Sarkozy, the new French premier, is against it. Won't happen.

The subject shifted to Europe's birthrate. The Italian, whose countrymen have one of the lowest birthrates on earth, said, "I'm 30 years old, and I have no kids. Many of my friends have no kids."

But why? "Wealth," the Dane said, but he was really talking about a kind of tiredness. "We have procreational fatigue. Big companies closing down. Old art. That's Europe for you."

The news reports say Europe is doing well — at least, better than it was in the `90s. But this group — except for the Czech, who was as upbeat as a dot-com prince — was notably glum. Italy was in "a deep crisis of confidence," he said, worried that Italy was not well-positioned to compete in the global economy. France had unemployment of 9%. The Frenchman said that was not such a bad figure, "for us," though he was clearly not proud of it. The Hungarian said the unemployment rate in her country was at 9% to 10%, with 10% inflation, and heavy taxes for all the social programs. Half of her income went to taxes, she said.

The Dane sniffed. Sixty-four percent of his income went to taxes. There was a moment of silence. Nobody could top that. — Bruce Ramsey

Word Watch by Stephen Cox I know it's a movie-house cliche, but it's scary nonetheless — the story of the demon twin, the entity that seems identical to some nice, normal person but is actually a Satanic monster, determined to suck the life out of its charming and pious host, and probably all the neighbors, too. There is an ornithological equivalent: the cowbird, a parasite that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. Of the cowbird, Wikipedia, the Miraculous Oracle, opines: "The cowbird eggs do not look much different from the hosts' eggs, and the host will normally incubate the eggs. The cowbird chicks grow quickly, and may consume most of the food the host brings. If starvation does not kill the other birds, in some species the cowbird will use its large size to push the other chicks out of the nest." Some words are like the cowbird and the demon twin. They look like other words; they appear to be well reared, well behaved, with useful roles to play in our society; but their real role is to destroy those other words, to seize their nests, annihilate their young, and permanently usurp their place. Many of these demon words were launched into the world by the genius of political obscurantism, the devil that keeps transforming himself into an angel of light. An obvious example is peace, as in the Nobel Peace Prize, fight for peace, or peace out, man! Such phrases may sound better than "the Nobel Prize for Political Activism," or "fight for nation building," or "stay with the gang or else, man"; but when you find out more about the specific activities being celebrated, you see that the cowbird or the demon twin has triumphed. There's a difference between "peace" and peace, and when "peace" predominates, peace is very much the loser. Another kind of triumph occurs when the television or the newspaper reports on trouble in an inner-city or a downtown school. Those words appear to be about geography. They're not. They convey something very different from the innocent message that Malcolm X Middle School doesn't happen to be in the suburbs. Their purpose is to whisper secrets of racial identity, to communicate the information that the students who attend that school are black or Hispanic, and are therefore (supposedly) condemned to lives of violence. So why not just say "black" or "Hispanic" instead of inner-city? Oh, that would be racist! The trick is to use racial code words to assure your audience that you are antiracist, to use the terms of racial consciousness while asserting your own racial sensitivity. It's a fixation on race, disguising itself as a respectful avoidance of any thought that race exists. It's the strategy of the cowbird and the evil twin. We've seen worse. The term that was formerly used in these circumstances, as adjective as well as noun, was ghetto. That word is now nearly extinct, ethnic politics having grown much more sophisticated than it was in 1965. Ghetto, which flourished in the badlands of the Great Society, was even more ravenously determined than inner-city to eliminate its rival, plain description. Before its territory was destroyed by gentrification, ghetto managed to exterminate a number of useful species, including slum and bad neighborhood, which formerly had been in daily and accurate use by every resident of the ghetto. Those terms, apparently so similar to ghetto, were too objective and specific to compete with the politicized metaphor. They didn't come down on one side or the other on the question of who was to blame for crime and poor housing. They left open the possibility that there might be certain conditions for which no one was to blame, or if someone was, perhaps it was a lot of different people. The goal of ghetto was to kill that thought, substituting the idea that poor people in 20th-Century America are treated in the same way that Jews were treated in Nazi Europe. The whole thing was infamous — but please observe that this is not an adjective that can be allowed to wander loose, impersonating other adjectives. Infamous has its proper function (as, I am sure, or almost sure, the cowbird has), but when it escapes from proximity to a lighted dictionary, it immediately becomes a demon twin. Infamous means "evil, wicked, of evil fame." It does not — as popularly supposed — mean "very famous." If you read an email that says, "We went to the church social today and enjoyed Aunt Sally's infamous fruit cobbler," you are witnessing a dread manifestation of the evil twin. God help Aunt Sally, and her cobbler. When Franklin Roosevelt said that Dec. 7, 1941, was "a date which will live in infamy," he did not mean that it had become, like, really famous and sort of, well, admirable, you know. He meant that it was an evil date. What happens to the Aunt Sallies of this world is as nothing compared to what happens to political discourse, once the cowbirds land on it. Then divisive becomes a replacement term for dissenting (at least in regard to dissents that we don't like), while the weird, strange, and downright nutty people who have somehow arrived at our own conclusions become controversial and provocative. But no matter what the news writers and the editorialists (groups increasingly hard to distinguish) choose to call someone, there really is a difference between a raving lunatic and an eccentric person who stirs up a little controversy. Maybe the controversy is helpful and interesting; maybe it's just sort of dull, after all. But controversial has been used so frequently to mean he's a nut, but he's our kind of nut as virtually to annihilate the idea of the truly controversial. As for divisive: it is entirely possible to cause debate and division — it is entirely possible to speak as a minority of one, and try to attract a second person to your side — without becoming unhinged or socially destructive. The constant reiteration of divisive has almost obliterated that distinction. It's a cowbird word. One common function of cowbird words is to fog up political and moral debate, so that people have trouble thinking beyond the most superficial, commonplace conceptions. But these words do other things. Consider the word issues. As I observed in a previous Word Watch column, issues has a political history and is often used for politically obscurantist purposes. If I say I have issues about something and am agitating for a law to resolve those issues, the implication is that I should be respected for engaging the issues — as opposed, for instance, to merely stating an opinion, sounding off, griping, grousing, or being a stupid nag. This goes a long way toward demanding that other people just surrender to the issues I advocate. But now the issues bird is raiding other nests. A recent news report asserts that Reggie Bush, the football player, needs to "clean up his issues." Once again, of course, the "issues" aren't subjects that are up for free debate, as in: "The issue is, should the U.S. get out of the UN?" That's the old sense of the word "issues." But neither are they political causes or even personal feelings about political causes. This time, they're just some alleged infractions of footballish rules. Issues has become a cowbird word for personal problems or mistakes of any kind. I could also comment on the ludicrous image of cleaning an issue, a job that must be about as hard as cleaning a cowbird — but I won't. That would be piling on. In aesthetic terms, one of the worst of the cowbird words is squash. It's a good enough word, when it stays in its own nest; but it just can't seem to do so. What it wants is to confuse itself with quash, as in "The governor quashed the highway tax" or "The teacher quashed the students' proposal." And it succeeds, apparently because even intelligent people are too illiterate to know that these are two different words, or that one of them exists. My favorite political talk show, "John and Ken," now describes judges as squashing referenda. Friends complain that their bosses often squash their ideas. I even hear of marriages being squashed by unsympathetic parents. Now, picture a tomato. What do you do when you want to destroy it? You squash it. You put your foot on the thing and flatten it. Its insides spurt out, and there's a mess on the sidewalk. End of tomato. Fine. That's how squash ought to be used. But is that what happens when you reject a law, turn down a proposal, suppress a debate, irritate your children? Do the insides of the law spurt out? Does the debate leave a stain on your shoe? The answer is No, it doesn't; but that's what you're saying when you use the word squash. The fact that so few people notice this kind of thing is a bad omen. It means that they feel at home with the evil twin. It means that they're content with the cowbird's kids. And it means that worse will follow.

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