Archive for the 'Democracy' Category

Census Bureau — typical government incompetence

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/1/2008
in Democracy
. 0 Comments

…At a recent Senate Commerce hearing, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn put this in perspective: “So we’re still going to pay $600, four times what the American [tax]payer should be paying, for something that can be done on a $150 BlackBerry.” He added: “A $400 iPhone can do twice as much as the $600 handheld. You could buy iPhones and do all of this.”

We would add that FedEx and UPS use handheld computers to track more than 22 million packages, all over the world, each and every day. Their computers work because their business depends on it. So you can know, up to the minute, when your Amazon shipment left Memphis, when it touched down in Parsippany and when it got loaded on the truck for delivery to your house. And yet the Census Bureau, with a decade to plan for it and hundreds of millions of dollars to spend, could not come up with a handheld computer to record the ages, races and addresses of those who don’t respond to the mailed census survey.

We wish we could be shocked by this fiasco. But no one who’s followed the IRS’s decades-long failure to upgrade a computer system built in the 1960s, or the Federal Aviation Administration’s reliance on vacuum tubes in the age of global positioning systems, can really pretend to be surprised.

At the Senate hearings last month, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez was all apologies. But in the end, the Census will get the extra $3 billion it now “needs” to make up for a decade-long failure to perform. As happens all too often in Washington, failure will be “punished” with more money to fix what could have been done right the first, or even second, time.

Even Harris Corp., which was given the original $600 million contract for the Census computers, will now rake in at least $1.3 billion for providing one-third as many handhelds, which will do only one-half the work originally intended. Everyone seems to agree that Harris is not to blame, but we can’t imagine the company would prosper in the private sector with a similar result.

We keep hearing that the era of big government is back, and all of the presidential candidates are promising that Uncle Sam can and should do so much more for us. Here’s a radical idea: Before it takes on more obligations, maybe the government should first have to show that it is capable of doing in remotely competent fashion what the Constitution has obliged it to do for some 220 years.

Read and weep… Not mentioned were thousands of examples of equally shocking incompetence. E.g., after 25 years of flagrant waste the FBI’s computer systems are not up to the minimum standards required by a profitable used car dealer.

Christopher Hitchens

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 4/26/2008
in Democracy , Economics and Politics
. 0 Comments

His own loss of faith came in slow degrees. “If someone had asked me my political alignment, well into the 1990s, I would have said that I was a socialist and a Marxist.” Then he found himself writing to students of his and this process developed into the 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. As he surveyed the 30 years since the catalysing effect of 1968, he says he was forced to admit that there was no longer a socialist international movement, nor even a socialist critique that might help to revive one.


“So what are you doing calling yourself a socialist?” he asks. “All you’re doing is making sure that people don’t confuse you with a liberal—which I’d always considered a position of lily-livered weakness. But that makes it an affectation. So I felt it fall away. I didn’t repudiate it, I didn’t get poisoned by it, I didn’t hate it and I didn’t have a Damascene moment about it. But I did notice that those who do think they’ve got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they’re pre-capitalists. Marxism at least has a theory of development and innovation. And global capitalism now seems to be the only thing that is revolutionary. That’s my Marxist way of looking at it.”

Many of Hitchens’s critics conclude that this is his way of saying he’s a neoconservative. His reply is that he doesn’t consider himself to be “any kind of conservative.” He would rather just be called a human rights hawk. “There should be a word for people who believe US power can and should be used to oppose totalitarianism,” he says. With no faith left in the French and Russian revolutions, or the proletariat, all that now remains is his idea of America as “the last revolution in town”—its spirit of liberty revived by the struggle to transform the middle east.

Alexander Linklater has researched and written an excellent mini-biography of Christoper Hitchens — the cover article for the latest Prospect — the result of three days of interviews in Washington DC.

His main business, he claims, has been to ally himself with what was originally an underground movement of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds—all working towards the overthrow of a latter-day Stalinist monster. “I have felt like I used to in the 1960s,” he says, “working with revolutionaries. That reminds me of my better days.”

When Qubad Talabani arrives at the apartment, the discussion is close and intimate. They discuss his father’s weight, before moving on to the problem of Turkish incursions into northern Iraq. A Washington lobbyist for the Kurdish regional government, the young Talabani is formidably smart. They discuss L Paul Bremer’s big mistake—not the disbanding of the army, Qubad argues, which was in fact his main achievement, but the failure to provide payoffs and pensions. Hitchens talks about the evidence, some of it apparently furnished by Qubad’s brother, that Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda preceded the invasion. Qubad discusses the need to create a federal Iraq. It’s not hard to see in the young Talabani the kind of secular and cosmopolitan vision of Iraq that Hitchens has tried to cling on to as the threat of Sunni-Shia civil war has darkened. Hitchens claims allies among several Iraqi factions, but his first real contact came in the early 1990s, when “trudging around northern Iraq” researching an article for National Geographic on Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. And it was their struggle with which he originally identified.

Highly recommended

Venezuelan student leader wins the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 4/26/2008
in Democracy and Venezuela
. 0 Comments

The Milton Friedman Prize Goes to a Hero:

The 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty has been awarded to Yon Goicoechea. Goicoechea was a key leader of the Venezuelan student movement that ralled the country to vote down Hugo Chavez’s referendum on a constitutional change that would have turned Venezuela into a socialist dictatorship. More on Yon here, as well as information on the gala May 15 dinner in New York at which the Prize will be presented.

It’s interesting to reflect on the diversity of the first four recipients of the Prize. The first Prize in 2002 went to Peter Bauer, presumably in recognition of his lifelong scholarship on development economics and the sources of wealth. (I say “presumably” because the Selection Committee doesn’t formally explain its decisions. But the announcement of the award referred to “his pioneering work in the field of development economics, where he stood virtually alone for many years as a critic of state-led development policy with its emphasis on central planning and external foreign aid.”)

The second Prize went to Hernando de Soto, an author of two books on economics but more importantly a tireless crusader and activist on behalf of poor people and their need for property rights.

The third Prize, in 2006, went to Mart Laar, the youngest prime minister in the history of Estonia, who led his country out of the Soviet Union and into the European mainstream. He slashed taxes and transfer payments, privatized state agencies, liberalized international trade, and created one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, dubbed the “Baltic Tiger.”

And this year the Prize goes to a young man who is not–not yet, at least–a scholar, an author, or an elected official. He’s just a law student who stood up when others wouldn’t and helped to create a movement that prevented a strongman from becoming a dictator.

I think the diversity of the recipients reflects the many ways in which liberty must be defended and advanced. People can play a role in the struggle for freedom as scholars, writers, activists, organizers, elected officials, and many other ways. Some may be surprised that a Prize named for a great scholar, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, might go to a political official or a student activist. But Milton Friedman was not just a world-class scholar. He was also a world-class communicator and someone who worked for liberty in issues ranging from monetary policy to conscription to drug prohibition to school choice. When he discussed the creation of the Prize with Cato president Ed Crane, he said that he didn’t want it to go just to great scholars. The Prize is awarded every other year “to an individual who has made a significant contribution to advance human freedom.” Friedman specifically cited the man who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square as someone who would qualify for the Prize by striking a blow for liberty. Yon Goicoechea not only stood in front of the tank, he stopped it. Milton Friedman would be proud.

I notice that the Prize has gone each time to someone almost a generation younger than the previous recipient. I’d guess that trend won’t continue, unless President Obama’s daughter convinces him to privatize Social Security.

Imagine a government that works like an iPhone

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 1/15/2008
in Democracy and Economics
. 0 Comments

or like highly polished software. In the latest Econtalk Russ Roberts and Edward Castronova, of Indiana University and author of Exodus to the Virtual World, discuss the implications of virtual worlds. Highly polished government is just one of the topics that two economists find illuminated by the virtual reality massively multiplayer games.

The products we love to use are invariably developed around a tightly controlled core set of features, giving the developers the time necessary to test and polish each feature until it either works really well — or is eliminated. Testing is the only way to reach reliability and customer satisfaction.

Conversely, the customers of government usually are on the receiving end of a 0.1 release. The party in power had an idea, which got codified into law. If we are very lucky, after a generation or two this new law gets “reformed” to fix some of the bugs. Bad law is almost never just killed.

There’s more — such as what we can learn from the games industry about human motivations. Enjoy…

Inquisitions in Canada

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 1/15/2008
in Democracy
. 0 Comments
Human Rights in Canada, attacked and defended. It is a link to videos showing a publisher being interrogated by the Canadian Human Rights Commission for publishing the “Mohammed Cartoons”. They said inquisitions couldn’t happen in North American. Certainly not in the 21st century. But they have. Whether or not Ezra Levant is declared “innocent” or “guilty” by the Canadian Human Rights Commission…

<more video>

“Look” a new film on surveillance

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 11/28/2007
in Democracy
. 0 Comments

Americans are captured on surveillance cameras at least 170 times a day mostly without their knowledge. This produces millions of hours of footage revealing the nature of those hidden secrets.

Holman Jenkins comments on what looks to be a fairly sane new film Look [IMDB].

…Barry Schuler, its co-producer, says he began thinking about the subject (surveillance, not sex) in a previous job, as chief executive of AOL, when subpoenas began arriving for access to member emails. Adam Rifkin, the film’s director and screenwriter (previous projects include “Mousehunt” and “Small Soldiers”), had a similar epiphany: He was nailed by a traffic camera for running a red light.

They were, frankly, lucky to get an R rating for their film, a loose-hanging collection of intersecting plotlines portrayed by an ensemble of little-known but interesting actors, whose stories are seen entirely from the perspective of surveillance cameras in ATM machines, high-school parking lots, a department store stockroom, etc.

The characters are mostly unaware their behavior and misbehavior is being recorded. The audience isn’t. Hence the film’s ingenious charm.

American cultural collapse?

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 11/21/2007
in Democracy
. 0 Comments

Fifteen years ago, a deep pessimism seemed to be stalking the American landscape. It arose from diverse quarters, took different forms, and cited a congeries of different symptoms—military, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual—in support of its dark diagnosis.

Fortunately, the widely predicted cultural decline didn’t happen. E.g., welfare:

…Since the high-water mark of 1994, the national welfare caseload has declined by over 60 percent. Virtually every state in the union has reduced its caseload by at least a third, and some have achieved reductions of over 90 percent. Not only have the numbers of people on welfare plunged, but, in the wake of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, overall poverty, child poverty, black child poverty, and child hunger have all decreased, while employment figures for single mothers have risen.

…

The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family. The progress we have witnessed over the last 15 years is impressive, undeniable, and beyond what most people thought possible. There was, it is fair to say, essentially no one in the early 1990’s who predicted it. How, then, did it happen?

Obviously, no single explanation will suffice. Instead, long-overdue changes in government policy appear to have combined with a more or less simultaneous shift in public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. We may begin with the change in policy, for if the last fifteen years demonstrate anything, it is the enduring power of policy, properly understood, to influence culture.

The 1996 welfare-reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy that had long since grown not just useless but positively counterproductive. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring a large percentage of current recipients to seek and obtain work.

Dissident

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 11/3/2007
in Democracy
. 0 Comments

Under totalitarianism the challenge is to fight evil …, and in free societies it is to see evil.

Natan Sharansky’s passion for democracy isn’t always welcome in the West.

…They say the Arabs are not capable of this–such a strong racist statement.” He pauses. “That’s interesting. It’s politically uncorrect [sic] to be a racist, but it’s so politically correct now to say that promoting democracy is a bad idea.”

…In response to the line that “democracy can’t be imposed from outside,” Mr. Sharansky shoots back that the Soviets improved their human-rights record after the 1975 Helsinki Accords put the spotlight on it. The U.S. and Europe have far greater economic and political leverage in Arab countries than with Moscow then to force through reforms of their economies, politics and schools. They choose not to use it.

Australia a pawn?

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 9/6/2007
in Democracy and Economics
. 1 Comment

It was a virtuoso performance, all the more impressive because the arguments advanced were fundamentally wrong. Or rather they were mixtures of right and wrong that ultimately led to flawed conclusions. The key to understanding why events in the Middle East and Central Asia are not irrelevant to Australia’s security needs lies in this graph of Chinese oil imports.
I really like Richard’s analysis.

Whither the anti-totalitarian left?

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 9/2/2007
in Democracy
. 1 Comment

Via Glenn, a thoughtful piece by Andrew Sullivan. E.g., referring to the Nick Cohen - Johann Hari squabble over Nick Cohen’s new book “What’s Left”:

…Michael Weiss has a good summary of this brouhaha, and brings us back to the original point:

Cohen’s most chilling prophecy, brought to reality by his cheapest heckler, is that once the mainstream left runs out of banner enemies, what then? Tony Blair is gone. George W. Bush is on his way out. With fewer and fewer bugbears to assail, the left will have to face real monsters sooner or later, and when it does, it will find that all of its old casuistries and excuses have come to dust.

Indeed, Tony Blair is gone and his evil puppeteer George W. Bush will soon be out as well. We may very well have a Democratic president. But what will inform their foreign policy values now that the Democratic Party is not animated by the anti-totalitarianism of old, but rather a mere hatred for the president and a serious lack of faith in even the potential role America can play in the world? If they were alive today, I’d like to think that Bayard Rustin, Lane Kirkland and Al Shanker would be enthusiastic signatories of the Euston Manifesto. Perhaps the Democrats can look to these 20th century liberal giants for a start.

And don’t miss the related arguments of Oliver Kamm of the Times, nor Nick Cohen’s reply to Hari’s review.

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