August 2009 – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

Democrats Continue Earmarks for Those Who Donated to Their Campaigns

(p. A5) WASHINGTON — A House panel approved a big Pentagon spending bill this week that included nearly 150 items tucked in by lawmakers on behalf of companies and other entities whose employees donated to their campaigns.

The Democratic Congress and President Barack Obama swept into power on a promise to reform the process of lawmakers trying to dictate in detail how funds are spent, known as “earmarks.” When Mr. Obama signed a spending bill for the current fiscal year in March, he said the earmark-laden legislation should be an “end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability.”
But as lawmakers work their way through spending bills for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, earmarks appear alive and well — including those written for companies, foundations, and universities whose employees and political-action committees gave money to the campaigns of congressmen doing the earmarking.
The $636.3 billion 2010 defense-spending bill passed Wednesday by the House Appropriations Committee includes more than 1,100 earmarks, totaling more than $2.7 billion.
Members of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee — the 18 members of Congress who wrote the bill — secured a total of 148 earmarks worth $461 million for entities whose employees have given $822,765 in campaign donations to those lawmakers since 2007. The data were compiled by the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense, which analyzed nearly 400 earmarks.

For the full story, see:
JAKE SHERMAN. “Bill Shows Earmarks Are Alive and Well.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., JULY 25, 2009): A5.

Experiments Suggest We Can Live Longer

“Rhesus monkeys, 27-year-old Canto, left, and Owen, 29, are among the oldest surviving subjects in a study of the links between diet and aging.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) A study published Wednesday found that rapamycin, a drug used in organ transplants, increased the life span of mice by 9% to 14%, the first definitive case in which a chemical has been shown to extend the life span of normal mammals.

Anti-aging researchers also expect a second study, to be released this week, will show that sharply cutting the calorie intake of monkeys extends their lives substantially. The experiment is said to be the first technique shown to retard aging in primates.
The prospect of a reliable human longevity pill is still distant. A commentary released with the rapamycin study strongly cautioned against taking the drug to prolong life because of potentially deadly side effects. Rapamycin suppresses the immune system and carries strong warnings about the resulting risk of infections and death.
But the mouse and monkey findings appear to mark the most substantial scientific progress yet in the search for ways to extend human life spans — once viewed as a fringe area of study.
“It’s time to break out of our denial about aging,” said Aubrey de Grey, a British gerontologist who has drawn controversy for his suggestions on how to forestall death. “Aging is, unequivocally, the major cause of death in the industrialized world and a perfectly legitimate target of medical intervention.”

For the full story, see:
KEITH J. WINSTEIN. “”Two Mammals’ Longevity Boosted; Transplant Drug Lengthens Lives of Mice, and Fewer Calories Benefit Monkeys.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., JULY 10, 2009): A3.

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“The Single Most Important Question for the Future of America Is How We Treat Our Entrepreneurs”

(p. 13) The single most important question for the future of America is how we treat our entrepreneurs. If we smear, harass, overtax, and overregulate them, our liberal politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production collapse into so much corroded wire, eroding concrete, scrap metal, and jungle rot.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.

“The Most Remarkable Period of Practical Inventiveness in World History”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. W8) There are technologies and then there are technologies. Some are trivial, such as Ziploc plastic bags. They’re handy, to be sure, but they don’t change the world. Some are extraordinarily simple but profound, such as the stirrup, which came along only after men had been riding horses for well over a thousand years. Nothing more than a ring of metal hung from a leather strap, the stirrup made cavalry the dominant force on the European battlefield and therefore made the mounted knight the dominant force in European society for several hundred years.

As Gavin Weightman’s “The Industrial Revolutionaries” reminds us, inventions on the level of the stirrup’s importance seemed to come every other month during the late 18th and 19th centuries — what Mr. Weightman calls “the most remarkable period of practical inventiveness in world history.”
When Thomas Hobbes famously wrote in the 17th century that the great majority of the population led lives that were “nasty, brutish and short,” he was describing an agrarian society that was, in its essence, unchanged since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years earlier. Ownership of land was the basis of wealth. Hobbes had no reason to think that the situation would change any time soon. But it did: A rapidly accelerating development of world-transforming technologies, subsumed under the rubric of “the Industrial Revolution,” began in Britain and within 100 years had molded the modern world.
. . .

The Industrial Revolution revolutionized more than just the global economy: It transformed politics and society. A world divided between a handful of aristocrats and millions of peasants was transformed into a world dominated by the middle class, where wealth is widely distributed and the franchise universal.

For the full review, see:
JOHN STEELE GORDON. “Books; Inventing a New World; The men who engineered the astonishing emergence of the modern age.” Wall Street Journal (Sat., April 11, 2009): W8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914. New York: Grove Press, 2009.

Property Rights Would Allow American Indians to Prosper

(p. A19) President Barack Obama courted the Indian vote. During the campaign, he visited Montana’s Crow Reservation last May and was adopted into the tribe under the Crow name “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land.” There he said, “Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans,” and vowed to improve their economic opportunities, health care and education.

Two vital steps in this direction are to strengthen property rights and the rule of law on reservations. Virtually every study of international development shows that both of these are crucial to prosperity. Indian country is no different. The effect of insecure property rights is evident on a drive through any western reservation. When you see 160 acres overgrazed and a house unfit for occupancy, you can be sure the title to the land is held by the federal government bureaucracy.
. . .

My own research, published in the Journal of Law and Economics, shows that for tribes with state jurisdiction, per capita income grew 20% faster between 1969 and 1999 than for their counterparts under tribal court jurisdiction. All Indians are less likely than whites to get home loans, but the likelihood of a loan rejection falls by 50% on reservations under state jurisdiction.
. . .

Mr. Obama’s rallying cry was “change,” and that is exactly what he needs to bring about in Indian policy. The first Americans deserve to be freed from the bureaucratic shackles that have made them victims, and allowed to establish property rights and legal systems that can make them victors.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY L. ANDERSON. “OPINION; Native Americans Need the Rule of Law.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., MARCH 16, 2009): A19.
(Note: ellipses in original.)

“It Is No Time to Concede”

Gary Becker. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ interview quoted and cited below.

(p. A9) “What can we do that would be beneficial? [One thing] is lower corporate taxes and businesses taxes and maybe taxes in general. Particularly, you want to lower the tax on capital so you raise the after-tax return to investing and get more investing going on.”
. . .
What Mr. Becker has seen over a career spanning more than five decades is that free markets are good for human progress. And at a time when increasing government intervention in the economy is all the rage, he insists that economic liberals must not withdraw from the debate simply because their cause, for now, appears quixotic.
As a young academic in 1956, Mr. Becker wrote an important paper against conscription. He was discouraged from publishing it because, at the time, the popular view was that the military draft could never be abolished. Of course it was, and looking back, he says, “that taught me a lesson.” Today as Washington appears unstoppable in its quest for more power and lovers of liberty are accused of tilting at windmills, he says it is no time to concede.

For the full interview, see:
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY. “OPINION: THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Now Is No Time to Give Up on Markets.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 21, 2009): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Gary Becker. Source of photo: http://larryevansphotography.com/Gary%20Becker_2.jpg

People Do Not Appreciate the Entrepreneur’s Accomplishment

(p. A17) Bertrand de Jouvenel, writing in 1951 about popular attitudes toward income inequality in “The Ethics of Redistribution”:

The film-star or the crooner is not grudged the income that is grudged to the oil magnate, because the people appreciate the entertainer’s accomplishment and not the entrepreneur’s, and because the former’s personality is liked and the latter’s is not. They feel that consumption of the entertainer’s income is itself an entertainment, while the capitalist’s is not, and somehow think that what the entertainer enjoys is deliberately given by them while the capitalist’s income is somehow filched from them.

Source:
“Notable & Quotable.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., MARCH 5, 2009): A17.
(Note: italics in original.)

Original source of de Jouvenel quote:
Jouvenel, Bertrand de. The Ethics of Redistribution. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc., 1990 (originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1951).

“Eminent Domain as an Instrument Against the Weak”

Source of book image: http://www.dichosbooks.com/images/33353510.jpg

(p. A13) Roughly 70% of Americans own their own homes, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2005 in Kelo v. City of New London was so widely reviled. Before Kelo, most Americans probably took it for granted that their home was their castle, protected by the Constitution from arbitrary seizure by government. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause says: ” . . . nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

In Kelo, a majority of five justices came up with an extremely broad interpretation of “public use.” The high court’s four liberal members, joined by the ever-changeable Anthony Kennedy, ruled that government has the right to seize a private home for virtually any purpose — including handing it over to private developers.
. . .
“Little Pink House” is a modern morality tale. It shows how the politically powerful can use eminent domain as an instrument against the weak. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said it best in her dissent in Kelo: “The fallout from this decision will not be random.” She predicted that “the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more.” The beneficiaries, she wrote, are likely to be those citizens “with disproportionate influence and power in the political process.”
Owning property is one of Americans’ most basic constitutional rights. It’s too bad Susette Kelo didn’t get to exercise hers.

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “Bookshelf; Evicted, But Not Without a Fight; The government took her home. The Supreme Court approved.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., Jan. 26, 2009): A13.
(Note: ellipsis in first paragraph quote was in original; ellipsis between paragraphs was added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Benedict, Jeff. Little Pink House. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.

Leading Entrepreneurs “Are Chosen for Performance Alone”

(p. 5) Far from being greedy, America’s leading entrepreneurs– with some unrepresentative exceptions–display discipline and self-control, hard work and austerity that excel that in any college of social work, Washington think tank, or congregation of bishops. They are a strange riffraff, to be sure, because they are chosen not according to blood, credentials, education, or services rendered to the establishment. They are chosen for performance alone, for service to the people as consumers.

Source:
Gilder, George. Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise: Updated for the 1990s. updated ed. New York: ICS Press, 1992.