John Ingraham

John Ingraham writes from Bouquet, New York.

Chapter Thirteen of The Life of Colonel David Crockett by Edward Ellis, published in 1884, is taken up with an account by an observer (not the author) of Davy Crockett when he was a congressman from Tennessee. One day he witnessed a speech by Crockett against an appropriation for the widow of a naval officer, arguing that Congress has no right so to give away public money. He advocated private charity, and offered to give her a week's pay if others would (no one took him up). The bill was defeated, and the observer, incensed, went the next day to remonstrate with him, whereupon Crockett tells him this story. Some years earlier there was a fire in Georgetown and Crockett was there, helping. Next morning a bill was passed appropriating $20,000 for the victims' relief, and Crockett voted for it. A few months later, he was back home electioneering when he encountered a forceful character, Horatio Bunce, plowing a field beside the road. The scene is quickly limned: Bunce wants to go on plowing, and Crockett wants to detain him so he can talk himself up. Bunce cuts him short, saying he voted for him the last time, but he's not going to do it again. Taken aback, Crockett asks for his reason and is told that he doesn't understand the Constitution or lacks the honesty and firmness to follow it.

. . . an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is more dangerous the more honest he is. . .

Of course, it is the vote to appropriate money for the Georgetown fire victims Bunce is referring to.

Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity? . . .

The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man . . .

If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all . . . you will easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other . . .

And further:

. . . you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people.

Nuf sed. *

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." --Article II, Section 1, U.S. Constitution

The following is a summary of the August 2010 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In "Rush Limbaugh" Barry MacDonald describes the power and reach of the number one talk-radio broadcaster, and cost of becoming the most hated man in America.

In a Letter to the Editor Don Lee responds to the June editorial by writing that voters must share the blame for the nation's fiscal mess, and that politicians are mostly "misguided and gullible."

Herbert London, in "The Coming Crisis in the Middle East," believes war is inevitable, with Iran becoming the "strong" and the U.S. the "weak" horse; in "Austrian Complacency and the Movement for Sharia," he reports how anti-Western Islamic influence is growing; in "Doctors Who Compromise With Islam," he shows how American medical authorities are compromising with Islamic brutality of women -- Americans won't speak out against female genital mutilation; in "The E.U. and Its Likely Breakup," he writes that the high costs of bailouts will explode cooperation; in "The Search for Equality," he sees healthcare reform as redistribution of wealth, a system destined to fail, as it always does.

Allan Brownfeld, in "America's Ethical Decline Is Accompanied by Growing Ignorance of Our Religious Traditions," sees unethical behavior in politicians, Wall Street investors, and schoolchildren, and believes the nation's religious institutions are failing; and other court cases; in "To Move Africa Forward, It Is Essential to Understand the Real Causes of Poverty," he shows how the absence of property rights has crippled the economies of Africa, and he points out the exceptional example of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who spurns foreign aid, but seeks instead private enterprise, free markets, and competition.

Mark Hendrickson, in "Reflections on the Deepwater Horizon Disaster," makes many points, including whether we should be drilling in such deep waters, and the role environmentalists have played; in "Christian Charity: Social Justice and the Good Samaritan," he considers how the conduct of the Religious Left compares with the parable of the good Samaritan; in "Tragedy in Amish Country: Living Levi's Example," he tells a story about the importance of forgiveness and being kind to each other; in "Reservations About a Balanced Budget Amendment," he writes that laws and the plain words of the Constitution are already being ignored, so a new amendment wouldn't help. The Constitution simply needs to be read, understood, and followed. In "America Needs Union Competition," he advocates an end to union monopoly and forced dues, and believes that new unions could emerge that would compete to serve members' best interests.

In "The Forgotten Battle of World War II: Remembering the Aleutian Campaign," Paul Kengor lays out the story, with attention given to two soldiers; in "Helen Thomas Angers Her Media Colleagues -- Finally," he reviews some of her exchanges with Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, and he remarks on the reasons for her forced retirement; in "With Father, Through the Valley of Death," he relates the experience of happening upon the Vietnam War Memorial, and its powerful presence.

In "International Business Faces A Challenging Global Marketplace," Murray Weidenbaum writes that although the American business system remains the largest and most successful in the world, current trends suggests that China's economy will surpass ours in coming decades. He makes forecasts about the development of trade into regional markets, research and development, American productivity, education, high technology, immigration, and the good points of multinational companies and globalization for the prosperity of the world's people.

In "The New New Deal," Charles R. Kesler compares President Obama's brand of liberalism with that of FDR and notes striking differences: Obama and his fellows no longer believe in objective truth, and thus they can no longer defend their purported principles as true -- they are left with amoral pragmatism that is increasingly difficult to justify, and with a barely concealed dislike of traditional America.

In "Progressing Backwards," Jarrett Skorup shows that the solutions climate-change alarmists propose -- wind, solar, biodiesel, and light rail -- have already been tried and have proven to be failures.

John A. Howard tells one soldier's story in "Some Remembrances of World War II."

In "Devices of Belief," Jigs Gardner discusses the art of making the reader believe and enjoy a created world by using two authors who set their novels in upper-class Europe during the 1920s and 1930s.

John A. Howard

John A. Howard is a Senior Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society.

On December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Air Force attacked Pearl Harbor, our huge navy base in Hawaii, and tore up the shipyards, and sank many of our warships, it was a thunderbolt that exploded in every living room in America. You can't imagine the terrible shock. The battles and bombings in Europe which we had been reading about for two years were suddenly no longer just tragic news stories, but a real and terrible thing. We, too, were in a war.

At that time and in the months that followed many Americans volunteered for military service and millions were drafted by the U.S. Government for military duty, soldiering in whatever armed service to which they were assigned. In those days, the American people loved their country. And they were very proud of it.

The people in our battalion were farmers, factory workers, accountants, dishwashers, grocers, truck drivers, athletes, couch potatoes, college graduates, and high-school drop-outs -- a whole united nations of people whose families had come from many different countries.

It was the army's task to transform this variety of talents and experiences and attitudes into a physically fit, alert fighting force skilled in the use of various weapons, vehicles, and many other areas of critically important knowledge. Just think about the requirement of training millions of Americans to be able to perform in work they knew nothing about. And yet the American military forces carried it out. A modern miracle!

I entered the U.S. Army in August of 1942 and was sent with a couple of hundred men all from Illinois to Camp Grant here in Rockford. Until they decided where we were going, they put us through a tough program of physical fitness training, with exercises, long marches, and obstacle courses. They also taught us how to take apart, clean, care for, and shoot the basic army rifle.

In October, we boarded trains to Camp Bowie in a desert area of central Texas to become a tank battalion. We learned how to load and fire and maintain the tank's big cannon and the large machine gun on top of the turret and the small machine gun in the front of the tank. We learned how to drive it and store the ammunition inside. After ten months of training we were sent to New York to board the Queen Elizabeth, one of the earliest very large ocean liners. Fifteen thousand of us! Forty-five soldiers were assigned to every bedroom. There were five banks of three beds, one above another around the walls. We had eight hours for sleeping and then had to get out for the next group and its eight-hour sleep time. And then the next group also assigned to our bedroom, so the beds were in constant use. When we left the bedroom, we went to the dining rooms, where meals were served continually. We ate twice more before returning to the bedroom, and the rest of the time we were on the decks or in the lounges.

As the ship left the New York harbor we looked for the navy ships that would be our escort across the Atlantic to keep us safe from the German navy. There was no escort. Gulp! Then we learned the Queen Elizabeth traveled faster than German submarines and other war ships. After five days of good weather, we arrived in Scotland. We were welcomed with cheers and applause and bagpipe music and by hundreds of women serving us tea and cakes and tearful thanks to us for joining in the war against Hitler.

From Scotland we took a long train ride to a camp near Swindon in south central England. It was a night trip and the blackout curtains were closed but we could see around the edges bombs bursting on the horizon as the German air force continued their nighttime destruction of targets in England they had been attacking for almost two years. Already we were experiencing war.

In England, from our arrival at the end of August until the Normandy invasion ten months later, we had various kinds of special training.

One of the skills we had to learn was map reading. Just how important that was I suddenly learned when I was assigned to be the lead vehicle in taking the entire battalion from south central England all the way to Land's End at the Western tip of the country. When you are leading a column of thirty-six tanks and probably seventy other vehicles, you don't want to take a wrong turn. That would be the worst nightmare.

Well, hour after hour, things went along pretty well and then, suddenly, we came to an impasse. We were going through a small town and the road, which was very narrow, took a sharp right turn. There was no way we could get the tanks around that corner. With the whole column stopped, I radioed headquarters and asked, "What are we to do now?" The colonel said the reconnaissance people who had planned our route said we probably couldn't get through. There was no alternate route. Just beyond the town was the only bridge over a river that could stand the weight of a tank. We had to get to Land's End to take special training in recognizing enemy aircraft. I would simply have to use my tank to take out the corner of the house. Our tanks weighed thirty-two tons, sixty-four thousand pounds, so it could go through the walls of a house. When the Colonel told me that, I exclaimed "You've got to be kidding!" "I am not!" said the Colonel. "Go do it."

So I knocked on the door of the house. An old man opened it and was terrified at the size and the noise and the number of the tanks. I explained why we had to get through and what we had to do. He said "You can't do that! This house was built in 1686!" I told him the United States Government would pay him well for the trouble we caused and he had ten minutes to clear the furniture. Guess what? Three weeks later when we returned, he was just finishing the house repairs. That man and his family through the generations will hate America forever.

The last few months we were in England, we became a training center for new recruits fresh from the United States to teach them how to be tankers. We graduated 3,000 students in this program who would be sent as replacements for war casualties. When American officers were killed or wounded, the army sometimes selected able and combat-experienced soldiers and commissioned them as officers. I received one of those battlefield commissions during the war.

Our battalion landed in Normandy on D-Day. It involved more than 4,000 invasion ships, 600 warships, 10,000 airplanes and 176,000 Allied troops. More than 1,000 soldiers were killed on Omaha Beach where our battalion and others landed. God was looking out for me on D-Day. Our platoon had never received the large Sherman tanks equipped with assault guns that we had been promised. We had been operating in light tanks for the nine months we had been in England. We got word that our real tanks had finally arrived, so I took our three drivers down to the railroad station to get them. Shortly after we left, the invasion camp where we had assembled was closed for the D-Day assault and nobody could get in or out. As a result the three drivers and I landed in France with our new tanks three days after D-Day when the fighting on the beaches was over.

After the invasion we were under enemy fire much of the time for the eleven months until the German surrender in May. Each of our companies, mostly with about fifty men, had its own traveling kitchen and cooking staff. When possible they would set up a buffet. When we were scattered as fighters, we had waterproof meals in our vehicles, and drinking water. We were fortunate in that we could sleep under the tanks and other vehicles, as shelters from snow and rain and pretty good protection from incoming German shells. We had waterproof sleeping bags and used our steel helmets as washbasins when we had time for a shave or a sponge bath.

In September the Allied forces had reached the Rhine River, a very large river, almost as wide as the Mississippi. It was the border between Germany and France. The Germans had blown up the Rhine River bridges to stall the Allies' advance. However, most of the dynamite charges placed under the Remagen Bridge had failed to explode but the ones that did go off had weakened the bridge and the Allied commanders wanted to rush as many troops as possible across while it was still standing.

Our battalion was one of the first to cross but only after I had received our battle instructions at a temporary headquarters in a lovely house on the French side of the Rhine. When I entered the house, I had to wait. There was a very large, elegant piano in the living room and I started to play it. A woman came down the elegant stairway and said, "Madame does not allow the Americans to play her piano." I said "Oh!" Very soon a majestic lady, very beautifully dressed, came down the stairs and said:

I must apologize for the rudeness of my companion. It is a joy we forget about in wartime that all people share a love of good music. That Chopin waltz you were playing is one of my favorites.

I asked her if she would play it for me. She smiled and sat down and did. It turned out she was Madame Hilda Gummersbach, a retired and famous opera singer.

We crossed the bridge and immediately encountered the Siegfried Line, an imposing military fortification the Germans had built along the Rhine River. It included very large concrete triangular blocks that they called Dragon's Teeth. They were placed close enough together so that tanks couldn't get between them. If a tank tried to go over them, it would get hung up on them. During the war Americans invented new ways to deal with new problems. They had welded bulldozer blades on the front of some tanks and bulldozers were available to move the dragon's teeth. We started up the steep hill along the river and suddenly a swarm of Germans came down the hill in a major attack. I had to make a quick decision. We couldn't use our big cannons against them even though we had ammunition that would explode in the air covering a large area, because the shells would go over their heads.

However, the shells for our assault gun cannons had two-parts, the explosive part on the front and a removable back chamber containing five powder bags to propel the explosive missile toward the target. The more bags you used the farther the missile went. We had instructions not to use less than two bags. I thought we were goners anyway, so I radioed the three tank commanders to start firing with just one powder bag. That decision worked. The shells exploded where the enemy was and ended the attack. I received an award for that success, but my gamble could have been a disaster if the shells had exploded while still in the cannons.

In December Hitler's troops mounted a large and very powerful attack in an effort to try to break through the Allied front and capture the ammunition dumps and supply depots of the harbor cities north of us from which came all our food, gasoline, replacement vehicles, and ammunition to carry on the war. That attack became known as the Battle of the Bulge. If it had been successful, Hitler might have won the war. A heavy fog for some days had prevented any American airplane support. The Americans had no idea of the very large build-up in preparation for this breakthrough. The Germans spearheaded their attack with two divisions of the huge, heavily armored Tiger tanks and Panther tanks with bigger and more powerful cannons than ours and they overwhelmed the Americans on the front line. During the five weeks of that fiercely fought struggle, there were 77,000 American casualties, killed, wounded, or captured.

On Christmas day, our outfit was in position on the north flank of the German advance. Up in the turret of our tank, the gunner and I were standing trying to see through the fog when the gunner jabbed me in the ribs with his elbow and said, "Look at that." I whirled around. A girl, nine or ten years old was walking toward our tank. She told us that when the fighting came back toward her town all the people left. But her grandfather was an invalid and couldn't travel. She had stayed behind to take care of him. She said they had no food left and wondered if we had any to spare. We immediately gave her all the rations we had in the tank. She made sort of a basket out of her apron to put them in. She looked up at us, as she turned to leave, and said, "Oh! It's a wonderful, wonderful Christmas after all!" The marvelous thing is that all of us in the tank agreed with her. It had become a wonderful Christmas for us too. Providing help to that girl was a happy thing for us.

When Germany surrendered, there was no wild rejoicing -- just a stunned shock. I said I was going over to a nearby barn to offer a prayer of thanks to God and invited anyone who wished to, to join me. The whole platoon did. This is that prayer:

Dear God, we pause to offer up our simple thanks that this day for which the world has waited is at hand. God help our leaders and statesmen to build a world of harmony and brotherhood that these last years of cruelty and agony may not be repeated. God help our leaders, and God, help us too, to be worthy of the fact that we were chosen to survive the war. Let us not forget our friends who gave their lives that we might see this day. In their memory may we be better men, may we have the courage to stand for what we know to be right, and, if necessary, may we have the courage to carry out whatever tasks are assigned to us if we are sent to the Japanese war. God, keep our loved ones safe until we return to them. Amen.

After the war ended, a whole German army surrendered to our First Infantry Division. Our platoon happened to be at the crossroads where they came by for three days and nights being directed to temporary prison camps, an unending parade of military and civilian vehicles, horse-drawn carts, and, of course, hundreds and hundreds on foot. A large number of the soldiers were old men and boys who had been casualty replacements.

All the officers in our battalion were assigned to take the Germans back to their hometowns. I led a group of trucks taking men back to Nuremberg, a beautiful old city that had been the center of the German Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century. I went to the trucks and asked for someone who spoke English. I took the volunteer to the lead jeep with me. I asked him if he knew where the city hall was, the place where I was to bring the convoy of trucks. He said, "Of course."

As we approached the city, there were more and more buildings that had been demolished by airplane bombs. In the midst of this rubble, with tears streaming down his cheeks he said, "This was the city hall."

After the war, the United States undertook the Marshall Plan, a massive program to help European nations rebuild their buildings and economies and address the needs of their societies. It is a fitting conclusion to this report on the death and destruction of World War II to remind ourselves that our nation is in a class by itself as the kindest and most generous and helpful country the world has ever seen. *

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson

Jarrett Skorup

Jarrett Skorup is a 2009 graduate of Grove City College and former student fellow at The Center for Vision & Values. He is the research associate for online engagement for Michigan Capitol Confidential at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan. This article first appeared through the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values.

Some high-profile "climate-change" alarmists have been backtracking following recent revelations of significant errors and outright fraud involving the so-called scientific global-warming "consensus." The latest comes from Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, who is now encouraging the faithful to replace "global warming" with the more ambiguous "global weirding." In addition to the crumbling scientific case, Freidman and fellow warmists are bucking the headwinds of public opinion: Pew Research found that people ranked global warming dead last among their top national priorities.

Notwithstanding the increasing levels of scientific doubt, Friedman himself is still quite convinced that "the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic," and urges policymakers to:

. . . buy some insurance -- by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit -- because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure.

Of course, by "investment" Friedman actually means government spending. Yet, if the opportunities are so manifest, why wouldn't private citizens and businesses invest their own capital? Perhaps because Friedman's nostrums actually involve outdated technologies that have been tried repeatedly and found to make us the opposite of "richer and more secure."

Most notably, in the late 1970s President Jimmy Carter poured billions into wind, solar, and biodiesel, offering massive subsidies for "clean energy" and vowing that America would never import more oil than it did then.

A decade earlier, enthusiasts believed that electric cars and high-tech batteries were on the threshold of revolutionizing our transportation system. Columnist James Kilpatrick of the Detroit Free Press wrote in 1967 that:

Companies are searching for a billion-dollar breakthrough in battery design. General Dynamics is working on a zinc-air cell battery. Ford is actively interested in a sodium-sulfur cell. Gulton Industries and General Motors are tinkering with lithium. . . . All the activity is bound to pay off probably within the next five years.

More recently, the big push has been for mass transit (or "light rail") as a "new" form of transportation. But as the economist Thomas Sowell explains in his latest book, Intellectuals and Society, this is a fantasy as well:

"Light rail" has become the fashionable term used by mass transit advocates for things that are very much like what were once called trolleys or street cars, and which were once common in hundreds of American cities. Trolleys were replaced by buses in almost all those cities -- for a reason. But now the inconveniences and inefficiencies of trolleys vanish into thin air when they are presented as that new-sounding thing called "light rail," whose prospective wonders can be described in glowing terms by city planners and other advocates, secure against experience rearing its ugly head through memories or histories of the decline and fall of the trolley car.

Likewise, there's nothing new or groundbreaking in the stimulus-driven spending on mass transit, light rail, and other "new" forms of transportation. As with the new/old alternative energy fads, if an investment case could be had for public transportation, then it wouldn't be necessary for taxpayers to subsidize more than 80 percent of its operating expenses.

At some point, we may well replace coal and oil with some cheaper and easier technology, but in the meantime, oil is still much cheaper than bottled water and coal still provides half of our domestic energy. On the other hand, if one really does believe that man-made climate change is an impending disaster worthy of dismantling our economy, then it may be rational to argue for a shutdown of oil, coal, and other industries.

But don't make the case that these are profitable investments; the only direction we're progressing is backwards. *

"The people alone have an incontestable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government and to reform, alter, or totally change the same when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it." --John Adams

Charles R. Kesler

Charles R. Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. This article is reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

In President Obama, conservatives face the most formidable liberal politician in at least a generation. In 2008, he won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote -- something a Democrat had not done since Jimmy Carter's squeaker in 1976 -- and handily increased the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress. Measured against roughly two centuries worth of presidential victories by Democratic non-incumbents, his win as a percentage of the popular vote comes in third behind FDR's in 1932 and Andrew Jackson's in 1828.

More importantly, Obama won election not as a status quo liberal, but as an ambitious reformer. Far from being content with incremental gains, he set his sights on major systemic change in healthcare, energy and environmental policy, taxation, financial regulation, education, and even immigration, all pursued as elements of a grand strategy to "remake America." In other words, he longs to be another FDR, building a New New Deal for the 21st century, dictating the politics of his age, and enshrining the Democrats as the new majority party for several decades to come. Suddenly, the era of big government being over is over; and tax-and-spend liberalism is back with a vengeance. We face a $1.4 trillion federal deficit this fiscal year alone and $10-12 trillion in total debt over the coming decade. If the ongoing expansion of government succeeds, there will also be very real costs to American freedom and to the American character. The Reagan Revolution is in danger of being swamped by the Obama Revolution.

To unsuspecting conservatives who had forgotten or never known what full-throated liberalism looked like before the Age of Reagan, Obama's eruption onto the scene came as a shock. And in some respects, obviously, he is a new political phenomenon. But in most respects, Obama does not represent something new under the sun. On the contrary, he embodies a rejuvenated and a repackaged version of something older than our grandmothers -- namely the intellectual and social impulses behind modern liberalism. Yet even as President Obama stands victorious on healthcare and sets his sights on other issues, his popularity and that of his measures has tumbled. His legislative victories have been eked out on repeated party line votes of a sort never seen in the contests over Social Security, Medicare, and previous liberal policy successes, which were broadly popular and bipartisan. In short, a strange thing is happening on the way to liberal renewal. The closer liberalism comes to triumphing, the less popular it becomes. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans now describe themselves as conservative, 35 percent as moderates, and only 21 percent call themselves liberal. After one of its greatest triumphs in several generations, liberalism finds itself in an unexpected crisis -- and a crisis that is not merely, as we shall see, a crisis of public confidence.

To try to understand better the difficulties in which the New New Deal finds itself, it might be useful to compare it to the original. The term itself, New Deal, was an amalgam of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Teddy Roosevelt's Square Deal, and was deliberately ambiguous as to its meaning. It could mean the same game but with a new deal of the cards; or it could mean a wholly new game with new rules, i.e., a new social contract for all of America. In effect, I think, the term's meaning was somewhere in between. But FDR liked to use the more conservative or modest sense of the term to disguise the more radical and ambitious ends that he was pursuing.

In its own time, the New Deal was extremely popular. Among its novel elements was a new kind of economic rights. The Progressives at the turn of the century had grown nervous over the closing of the American frontier and the rise of large corporations -- developments they thought threatened the common man's equality of opportunity. Aside from anti-trust efforts and wartime taxation, however, the Progressives did not get very far toward a redistributive agenda, and were actually wary of proclaiming new-fangled rights. They were more comfortable with duties than rights, and disapproved of the selfish penumbras cast by the natural rights doctrines of old. Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt preached moral uplift -- doing your duty in a more socialized or socialistic era. They tended to associate rights talk with individualism of the backward-looking sort. It took the cleverness of FDR and his advisors to figure out how rights could be adapted to promote bigger government and to roll back the old regime of individualism and limited government.

What was this new concept of rights? Instead of rights springing from the individual -- as God-given aspects of our nature -- FDR and the New Dealers conceived of individualism as springing from a kind of rights created by the state. These were social and economic rights, which FDR first proclaimed in his campaign speeches in 1932, kept talking about throughout the New Deal, and summed up toward the end of his life in his annual message to Congress in 1944. These were the kinds of rights that the New Deal especially promoted: the right to a job, the right to a decent home, the right to sell your agricultural products at a price that would allow you to keep your farm, the right to medical care, the right to vacations from work, and so on. FDR elevated these rights to be parts of what he called "our new constitutional order."

Of course, not all of these rights were enshrined in law. After all, President Obama has only just now enshrined a dubious right to healthcare into law. And not one of these rights was actually added to the Constitution, despite Roosevelt's pitching them as what he called a "second Bill of Rights." And the fact that none of them was ever formulated into a constitutional amendment is entirely consistent with FDR's and modern liberals' belief in a living constitution -- that is, a constitution that is changeable, Darwinian, not frozen in time, but rather creative and continually growing. Once upon a time, the growth and the conduct of government were severely restricted because a lot of liberal policies were thought to be unconstitutional. In fact, many New Deal measures proposed by FDR were struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1930s. But nowadays it's hard to think of a measure expanding government power over private property and enterprise that the Court, much less Congress, would dismiss out of hand as simply unconstitutional.

If you consider the financial bailouts or the re-writing of bankruptcy law involved in the GM and Chrysler deals, these are the kinds of things that politicians in sounder times would have screamed bloody murder about as totally unconstitutional and illegal. But hardly a peep was heard. After all, once we have a living constitution, we shouldn't be surprised to find we have a living bankruptcy law, too. The meaning of the law can change overnight as circumstances dictate -- or as the political reading of circumstances dictates.

Despite not being formally enshrined in the Constitution, most of these new rights -- what we've come to call entitlement rights -- did get added to the small "c" constitution of American politics anyway, either during the New Deal or during its sequel, the Great Society. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and kindred welfare state programs moved to the center of our political life, dominating the domestic agenda and eventually usurping the majority of federal spending, now delicately termed "uncontrollable."

The social and economic rights inherent in these entitlements purported to make Americans secure, or at least to make them feel secure. "Necessitous men are not free men," FDR liked to say -- which meant that freedom required government to take care of a person's necessities so that he might live comfortably, fearlessly, beyond necessity. The long-term problem with this was that the reasons given to justify the relatively modest initial welfare rights pointed far beyond themselves. No one ever doubted, for instance, that good houses, well-paying jobs, and decent medical care were fine things. But the liberal alchemy that transformed these fine things into "rights" was powerful magic. Such rights implied, in turn, duties to provide the houses, jobs, and medical care now guaranteed to most everyone.

And on whom did the duties fall? Liberalism never came clean on that question. It pointed sometimes to the rich, suggesting that enough of their wealth could be redistributed to provide the plenty that would be required to supply houses and medical care and jobs to those who lack them. But liberalism also liked to say that the duty to provide these things fell broadly upon the American middle class -- that these were basically insurance programs into which people paid and from which they took out their benefits when needed.

Could future benefits be cut or eliminated? Liberals breathed nary a word about such unhappy scenarios, selling the new rights as though they were self-financing -- that is, as if they would be cost free in the long-term, if not a net revenue generator. In fact, entitlements are the offspring of formulas that can be trimmed or repealed by simple majorities of the legislature. And the benefits have to be paid for by someone -- as it turns out, primarily by the young and the middle class.

The moral costs of the new rights went further. Virtue was the way that free people used to deal with their necessities. It took industry, frugality, and responsibility, for example, to go to work every morning to provide for your family. It took courage to handle the fears that inevitably come with life, especially in old age. But the new social and economic rights tended to undercut such virtues, subtly encouraging men and women to look to the government to provide for their needs and then to celebrate that dependency as if it were true freedom. In truth, the appetite for the stream of benefits promised by the new rights was more like an addiction, destructive of both freedom and virtue.

The new entitlements pointed to a beguiling version of the social contract. As FDR once described it, the new social contract calls for the people to consent to greater government power in exchange for the government providing them with rights: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, etc. The more power the people give government, the more rights we receive. FDR's New Deal implied that there's nothing to fear from making government bigger and bigger, because political tyranny -- at least among advanced nations -- is a thing of the past.

In truth, however, the new socio-economic rights were group rights, not individual rights. They were rights for organized interests: labor unions, farmers, schoolteachers, old people, blacks, sick people, and so forth. Collectively, these rights encouraged citizens to think of themselves as members of pressure groups or to organize themselves into pressure groups. Subtly and not so subtly, citizens were taught to identify their rights with group self-interests of one kind or another.

These new group rights were conspicuously not attached to obligations. The old rights -- the individual rights of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution -- had come bound up with duties. The right to life or the right to liberty implied a duty not to take away someone else's life or someone else's liberty. The new rights, on the other hand, had no corresponding duties -- except perhaps to pay your taxes. The new rights pointed to a kind of moral anarchy in which rights without obligations became the currency of the realm -- in which rights, understood as putative claims on resources, were effectively limited only by other, stronger such claims. The result was, at best, an equilibrium of countervailing power.

President Obama's New New Deal doesn't look so distinctive when you view it in this historical light. The collectivization of healthcare, for instance, is a hearty perennial of liberal politics and fulfills a 65-year-old promise made by FDR. Moreover, in cultivating the aura of a prophet-leader, uniquely fit to seize the historical moment and remake his country, Obama follows the theory and example of Woodrow Wilson. But there are signs of a few new or distinctive principles in this current leftward lurch, and I will mention two.

First, there is the postmodernism that crops up here and there. Postmodernism insists that there's no truth "out there" by which men can guide their thoughts and actions. Postmodern liberals admit, then, that there is no objective support -- no support in nature or in God or in anything outside of our wills -- for liberalism itself. Liberalism in these terms is just a preference. The leading academic postmodernist, the late Richard Rorty, argued that liberals are moral relativists who feel an "aversion to cruelty," and it's that aversion that makes them liberals. And indeed, if one admits that all moral principles are relative, the only thing that really sets one apart as a liberal is a certain kind of passion or feeling. President Obama calls this feeling empathy. And yes, of course, all this implies that conservatives don't have feelings for their fellow human beings -- except perhaps a desire to be cruel to them. Now I don't mean to suggest here that President Obama is a thoroughgoing postmodernist, because he's not. But neither is he just an old-fashioned progressive liberal of the 1930s variety. New Deal liberals believed in the future. In fact, they believed in a kind of predictive science of the future. Postmodernists reject all truth, including any assertions about progress or science. Postmodernists speak of narrative -- one of those words one hears a lot of these days in politics -- rather than truth. Narrative means something like this: Even if we can't find meaning in any kind of objective reality out there, we can still create meaning by telling each other stories, by constructing our own narratives -- and the more inclusive and empathetic these narratives, the better. President Obama often speaks this postmodern language. For example, here is part of a discussion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties [notice cruelty: he's against it] of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.

Obama's point here is that absolute truth and ordered liberty are incompatible, because absolute truth turns its believers into fanatics or moral monsters. Now granted, it was certainly a good thing that America escaped religious fanaticism and political tyranny. But no previous president ever credited these achievements to the Founders' supposed rejection of absolute truth -- previously known simply as truth. What then becomes of those great self-evident truths that President Obama's admitted hero, Abraham Lincoln, celebrated and risked all to preserve? And that Martin Luther King, Jr., invoked so dramatically?

Postmodernism came out of the 1960s university -- though it flowered, if that's the right word, in subsequent decades, especially after the collapse of Communism. President Obama is a child of the 1960s -- born in 1961. The Sixties Left was in some ways strikingly different from the Thirties Left. For one thing, the 1960s left was much more -- as they liked to say in those days -- "existentialist." That is, 1960s leftists admitted to themselves that all values are relative, and therefore irrational. But they still believed or hoped that morality could be felt, or experienced through the feelings of a generation united in its demands for justice now. Shared feelings about values became a kind of substitute for truth among protesting liberals in the 1960s, which goes far to explaining the emotionalism of liberals then and since. But when the country refused to second their emotions -- when the country elected President Nixon in 1968 and again, by larger margins, in 1972 -- the kids grew bitter and increasingly alienated from the cause of democratic reform, which used to be liberalism's stock-in-trade. In this context, President Obama represents not only a return to a vigorous liberal reform agenda like the New Deal, but also a kind of bridge between the alienated campus left and the political left.

The second new element in President Obama's liberalism is even more striking than its postmodernism. It is how uncomfortable he is with American exceptionalism -- and thus with America itself. President Obama considers this country deeply flawed from its very beginnings. He means not simply that slavery and other kinds of fundamental injustice existed, which everyone would admit. He means that the Declaration of Independence, when it said that all men are created equal, did not mean to include blacks or anyone else who is not a property-holding, white, European male -- an argument put forward infamously by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, and one that was powerfully refuted by Abraham Lincoln.

In short, President Obama agrees with his former minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, much more than he let on as a presidential candidate. Read closely, his famous speech on that subject in March 2008 doesn't hide his conclusion that Wright was correct -- that America is a racist and ungodly country (hence, not "God Bless America," but "God Damn America!"). Obama agrees with Wright that in its origin, and for most of its history, America was racist, sexist, and in various ways vicious. Wright's mistake, Obama said, was underestimating America's capacity for change -- a change strikingly illustrated by Obama's own advances and his later election. For Obama, Wright's mistake turned on not what America was, but what America could become -- especially after the growth of liberalism in our politics in the course of the 20th century. It was only liberalism that finally made America into a decent country, whereas for most of its history it was detestable.

Unlike most Americans, President Obama still bristles at any suggestion that our nation is better or even luckier than other nations. To be blunt, he despises the notion that Americans consider themselves special among the peoples of the world. This strikes him as the worst sort of ignorance and ethnocentrism, which is why it was so difficult for him to decide to wear an American flag lapel pin when he started running for president, even though he knew it was political suicide to refuse wearing it.

As President Obama hinted in his Berlin speech during the campaign, he really thinks of himself as a multiculturalist, as a citizen of the world, first, and only incidentally as an American. To put it differently, he regards patriotism as morally and intellectually inferior to cosmopolitanism. And, of course, he is never so much a citizen of the world as when defending the world's environment against mankind's depredations, and perhaps especially America's depredations. In general, the emotionalist defense of the earth -- think of Al Gore -- is now a vital part of the liberalism of our day. It's a kind of substitute for earlier liberals' belief in progress. Although his own election -- and secondarily liberalism's achievements over the past century or so -- help to redeem America in his view, Obama remains, in many ways, profoundly disconnected from his own land.

This is a very different state of mind and character from that of Franklin Roosevelt, who was the kind of progressive who thought that America was precisely the vanguard of moral progress in the world. This was the way Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, and every great liberal captain before Obama thought about his country -- as a profoundly moral force in the world, leading the nations of the world toward a better and more moral end point. Obama doesn't think that way, and therefore his mantle as an American popular leader -- despite his flights of oratorical prowess -- doesn't quite fit him in the way that FDR's fit him. One can see this in the tinges of irony that creep into Obama's rhetoric now and then -- the sense that even he doesn't quite believe what he's saying; and he knows that but hopes that you don't.

Obama's ambivalence is, in many ways, the perfect symbol of the dilemma of the contemporary liberal. How can Obama argue that America and liberalism reject absolute truths, and in the same breath affirm -- as he did recently to the United Nations -- that human rights are self-evidently true? You can't have it both ways, though he desperately wants and tries to. Here, surely, is the deepest crisis of 20th-century American liberalism -- that it can no longer understand, or defend, its principles as true anymore. It knows that, but knows as well that to say so would doom it politically. Liberals are increasingly left with an amoral pragmatism that is hard to justify to themselves, much less to the American public. The problem for liberals today is that they risk becoming confidence men, and nothing but confidence men. *

"It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth -- and listen to the song of that syren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? . . . For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it." --Patrick Henry

Murray Weidenbaum

Murray Weidenbaum holds the Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professorship at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as the honorary chairman of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.

To break the suspense right away, I offer my forecast of the global economy. By all the standard measures, worldwide growth is picking up once again. The overall world economy is rising at over 4 percent this year. That is in "real terms," after boiling out the effects of inflation. That's an improvement, although far from setting any new record. Nevertheless, that favorable trend should continue at about that rate into 2011.

The business outlook likewise is upbeat and a combination of threats and opportunities, both in the short run and especially in the longer run. That requires a bit of explanation, so here goes.

At the outset, it is useful to remind ourselves of where we stand. Almost every way you measure it, the American business system is the largest and most successful in the world. Far more often than not, we are the trendsetters. In industry after industry, U.S.-headquartered companies lead their competitors on a worldwide basis. This is so whether you examine high-tech aerospace design and production where my old company Boeing has been in the lead for decades, or low-tech soap and detergents and encounter that household giant Procter and Gamble.

On a more micro level, individual brands like Coca-Cola and Microsoft generate instantaneous worldwide recognition. In fact, Cadillac has become an adjective, denoting a top-of-the-line product. FedEx is often used as an active verb to indicate delivering an item as rapidly as you can.

Nevertheless, all this good news does not mean that U.S.-based companies -- or any other firms competing in the global marketplace -- can rest on their laurels. Some historical perspective helps on that score.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, European companies, especially those located in England and France, dominated international commerce. And then a rapidly expanding newcomer in North America elbowed its way into the club of leading world economic powers. In absolute terms, the economies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean continue to expand substantially. But Europe never regained its dominant share of the world market.

In the second half of the 20th century, Japan played a role similar to that of the United States a century earlier. It became an important member of that club of economically advanced nations. Japanese companies such as Sony and Toyota became strong global competitors. Major Western industries continued growing, often rapidly, but frequently losing some market share. Today, we are in the midst of yet another such significant shift in the array of economic and market power. China has rapidly become a major force in the international marketplace. By some measures, it is already number two, second only to the United States. However we measure it, our lead is rapidly shrinking. The fact that this country initiated the most dangerous global credit crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s does not exactly enhance American leadership in either economic or financial matters. We cannot take much consolation from the sad current experiences of the Euro bloc countries.

Forecasts are inherently fragile. That is a kind word from this veteran prognosticator. So I'll state my point carefully: there is a reasonable likelihood that, in the next several decades, China will surpass the United States as the largest economy in the world. That shift surely is not inevitable.

Historians remind us that in the middle of the previous millennium -- around 1500 -- China was the most culturally advanced and economically powerful nation on the globe. That is, until one misguided emperor decided to reduce foreign influences by cutting off trade with the rest of the world. China is still trying to recover from this fundamental blow to the economic prospects of the Middle Kingdom. In the future, self-inflicted wounds of similar magnitude may come from a very different source in that huge and not entirely unified nation of 1.3 billion people.

In any event, on a per capita basis, the United States, by a very substantial margin, will still be the wealthiest large country on the globe. Our domestic marketplace will remain the most attractive. American companies will continue to be worldwide leaders of many key industries. But that is precisely why it is so important to divide our examination of the changing global marketplace into the short-term and the long-term situation. The differences will be substantial and occasionally startling.

In the short run, many countries, certainly including our own, are still struggling to recover from the sharpest economic and financial decline in over 70 years. The recovery is now significant but not especially rapid. Despite all the talk from Washington about focusing on employment, job creation in the United States continues to be discouraged by a seemingly endless array of federal initiatives that -- intentionally or otherwise -- make it more expensive to hire new employees in the United States or even to maintain the size of existing workforces. The costly and frustrating red tape generated by the detailed rules accompanying the stimulus and health reform legislation have been amply discussed by business executives and in the trade press.

However, that is not the end of the line. The latest administration proposal to increase the bureaucratization of the workplace has not received the attention it deserves. Apparently the U.S. Department of Labor, without any new legislative authority, is developing detailed regulations to require every business to prepare a new and detailed set of reports showing specifically how they will comply with a host of employment-related laws and rules. These new requirements in the works range in coverage from wage and hour laws to equal employment guidelines to job safety regulations to distinguishing between contract workers and those that are directly on the company payroll. All this will be reviewed by a new breed of Labor Department compliance officials.

From a more macro viewpoint, American companies are likely to find it challenging to raise new funds in domestic capital markets that will be dominated by increasing levels of governmental deficit financing. The rising interest rates likely to be required to accommodate the unprecedented amounts of Treasury borrowing will inevitably make it more difficult for private firms to borrow at reasonable rates.

On the bright side -- this will be much shorter -- we can anticipate that, sooner or later, American companies will learn how to overcome this new array of obstacles facing them and to resume a path of growth and penetration of overseas markets. However, there is no guarantee that the outcome will be as successful as it has been in the past.

I say that because, in the longer run, internationally oriented businesses will be facing key changes in the composition of global markets. Perhaps the most fundamental will be the rising tendency of East Asian companies to buy as well as sell in East Asia itself. This is not an unusual or unexpected development. Just examine the experience of the older parts of the modern industrial world. Since the creation of the European Common Market, rising shares of the "foreign trade" of the member nations have been staying in the European Union area. Of course, the elimination of trade barriers within the EU helped move this process along. However, the tendency of countries to focus their foreign trade with their neighbors is of very long standing.

Closer to home, major shares of the exports and imports of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are staying in North America. The creation of the North American Free Trade Area surely helped encourage that development. Nevertheless, that close economic relationship reflected the importance of obvious geographic factors that have always been present.

We are now seeing a similar regionalization of trade in Asia and without a formal intergovernmental structure. It is not surprising that the economic importance of geographic closeness continues to be strong, despite the reduction of transportation and communication costs resulting from technological advance. The strength of cultural and political ties surely exert powerful influences on patterns of commerce.

Nevertheless, a special and vital factor is underscoring the significance of the continuing regionalization of international trade: by a substantial margin, East Asia, and especially China, is the major growth area of the globe. On any comparative basis, the cost structure of the area is very competitive. Thus, American companies are likely to be facing a rough time in the years ahead in maintaining their current large shares of worldwide markets.

In this regard, fundamental changes in our public policy -- both positive and negative -- can be vital in strengthening (or weakening) the American position in international commerce. In the short run, we are in the midst of a rapidly growing tendency for the federal government to directly influence business decision making. How far this trend will go is anybody's guess. However, American history tells us that the policy pendulum does not always move in one direction. Rather, it swings back and forth and often at unexpected times.

In that connection, it is important to remind the American public of the vital importance of enhancing American competitiveness in foreign markets. Our nation needs to focus on fundamental factors that transcend the political cycle as well as the business cycle. One of those key factors is the continued expansion of science and technology and especially of the professional workforce that produces the major advances and breakthroughs. Since the early 1980s, an important but undramatic crossover has occurred in the United States. From the end of World War II until the end of the 1970s, federal government agencies, especially the Department of Defense, provided the majority of the funds to perform research and development. Since then, however, private industry has become the major funder of R&D, as well as the major sector performing R&D.

The differences are profound. In the earlier period, the federal government, especially the military establishment, set the key priorities for the nation's R&D efforts. In more recent years, the great majority of the R&D conducted in this country has responded to the needs and views of private enterprise. It is not surprising that recent decades have witnessed unexpectedly large increases in the productivity of the American economy. The accelerated flow of new and improved products and production processes are the expected results of large and continued investments in R&D. Substantial shares of American exports have been in high-tech products such as aerospace, electronics, and scientific instruments. A beneficial side effect is that the design and production of high-tech products generates a large portion of the demand for highly skilled and highly paid professional employees. That has been a major factor in rising living standards in the nation.

In that regard, it is sad to see the relatively small numbers of American-born college students now majoring in the subjects vital to research and development, notably science, math, and engineering. By no means is this a plea to reduce the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities. As a teacher, I can attest to the fact that a diversified student body makes for a more stimulating classroom experience. My point is that it would be desirable if greater numbers of our native sons and daughters studied those "difficult" subject areas.

On the other hand, my concern also reflects the shortcomings of our traditional immigration policies. At the present time, it is easier for a low-skilled but relatively distant relative of a legal resident of the United States to stay here than for a highly educated prospective immigrant, even with a degree from an American university, to do so.

Over the longer run, it also would be helpful if the American public, and especially governmental decision makers, would take more enlightened positions on the vital role of private enterprise, especially companies involved heavily in international trade and investment. Specifically, officials in both the legislative and executive branches need to be better informed about the positive contributions of multinational business to the domestic American economy.

Here are just a few points that participants in the public policy arena should consider before launching yet another assault on the alleged shortcomings of business: American factories owned by multinationals (MNCs) tend to be larger and more efficient than their domestically oriented competition. American factories owned by MNCs are less likely to close than purely local firms. U.S.-based multinationals create more U.S. jobs than in their overseas operations. They export from the United States far more than they import.

Multinational companies around the globe score better than purely domestic firms in various measures of business performance. U.S. firms, in particular, are rated as better managed than those in other countries, including companies in China and India. However, the gap is not overwhelming.

Contrary to widely held opinion, multinationals operating in poor developing countries usually pay more than local employers and their workplace conditions tend to be better. I can underscore the last point from my own experience as an outside inspector of factories in China producing for American companies.

On reflection, the single most important point that comes out of any comprehensive analysis of the outlook for American companies heavily engaged in international business is the growing competition from Asia and especially China. For example, a decade ago, the United States was the world's leading exporter and China was in ninth place. Last year, we were still #1, but China had jumped over several major European countries to rank #3. Even more significantly, China's exports grew at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent over the decade, compared to a modest 4.3 percent for the United States.

Surely, Americans love competition. We certainly pay homage to that powerful force. In that regard, the rise of China is a positive development. The shift in that nation's practical focus from economically backward communist-style production patterns to modern capitalistic techniques has been a positive development. So was the opening of that vast nation to international investment and trade and thus to Western culture and ideas. Those changes also provide a striking reminder to the United States that the specific effects of greater competition can also be painful. We cannot coast along, depending on past achievements. In retrospect, the rise of East Asia's economic power led to a renewal of European competitiveness as well as our own. China should have that overall positive effect on the West in the years ahead. The ultimate beneficiaries will be consumers enjoying higher standards of living.

Let me leave you with a final thought. The most fundamental result of the expansion of international trade and investment -- or to use the common shorthand, globalization -- is not economic at all. By enabling more people to use modern technology to move and communicate across national boundaries, globalization empowers individuals and does so more fully. Globalization makes possible a far greater exchange of the most powerful of all our resources -- people with new ideas. *

"If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy." --Thomas Jefferson

Donald G. Lee

Sir,

Your June editorial reminds me of two themes that I want to hammer in my campaign for the Minnesota House of Representatives, district 39a this summer. One is that of the responsibility of the voters, and the other is my insistence that nothing should be considered malice that can be adequately explained by incompetence.

In the first place, I think it is somewhat misplaced to consider the choices as being exclusively in the hands of politicians. Our democracy is nothing if not efficient and effective in reflecting the wishes of the public. The finger of blame belongs not on the politicians, but on the people who elected them. This is one of my themes -- that voters need to stand up and take responsibility for the behavior of their representatives.

We elected them. We supervise them, and in some cases we can recall them. Politicians make many promises to get the enthusiastic support of voters. No politician is going to voluntarily surrender the power that he and his constituents believe he needs to fulfill those promises. Whether he is altruistic or corrupt, the power must be wrested from him by citizens who insist on running their own affairs. We the voters must say with a single voice: -- "Butt Out."

To the contrary, politicians face a constant stream of demands to use the power of the state to enact the innumerable agendas of various constituencies.

We cannot have it both ways. We cannot condemn politicians for being interventionist AND for not being "responsive." We vote for "responsive." We demand "responsive." We can't blame politicians for giving us "responsive."

In the second place, I do not believe that politicians as a group are so much corrupt and conniving as they are misguided and gullible.

Politics, as far as I can tell, is a game that is played by two types of people. The first type is the altruist who really believes that he is doing something for "society." The second type is the power-hungry type. I believe that the latter is rare, and tend to be found out.

The first type is thrown into the lion's den, and unless his character is made of the purest and strongest steel, he is soon subtly corrupted, and in time ends up doing and saying things inconsistent with good character.

In the case of debt and finance, the problem is less that politicians know better and are choosing to keep their positions, as that the general understanding of economics is so politicized and corrupted by self-interest that rational decision making is very difficult.

In short, voters demand that government "create jobs" because they believe that that is the right things to do. Very few economists stand up and say "TARP was a big mistake" because their institutions often depend heavily on the political good graces of the feds.

With conventional wisdom firmly on the side of the misguided policies being followed, I don't blame politicians for "going along." We don't vote for people who are domain experts in economics, physics and medicine. We elect politicians. Politicians do what the voters ask them to do. They cannot be expected to be more competent than the experts in the relevant fields who are advising them.

The heavy lifting is to convince the public that the conventional wisdom is wrong. That is a job for leaders -- not politicians.

Rush Limbaugh

Barry MacDonald -- Editorial

Rush Limbaugh, an Army of One, by Zev Chafets. Penguin Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, pp. 229, ISBN 978-1-59523-063-8, $27.80 hardbound.

One cannot be indifferent to the voice coming through the radio. If there is an impervious liberal bent, then the words carry deception and lies. If there is a conservative view, then the effect might be like having listened as English families did to Winston Churchill during the Nazi bombings: the gathering together for mutual encouragement.

And the smallest openness presents the possibility of conversion, the overturning of cherished beliefs for a new perspective. The words tumble out pell-mell and joyous, recreating a political battlefield with familiar personalities and issues, and clarity is imposed. The proud are humbled, the deceitful are revealed, and opinions presented with coherence and a command of detail. Scoffers may scoff, but Rush cannot be ignored. The listener is drawn in, transfixed.

Fifteen years ago I returned to America after a long absence to work for The St. Croix Review. I remember entering the garage with the van radio on and hearing Rush for the first time. He was responding to a hateful caller with such panache that it was as if he picked the spitting fellow up by a foot, dangled him about, and tossed him off the air.

Sometimes my work involves running a printing press; I put a radio near the press so I could listen to Rush. When delivering printing I listen to Rush on the van radio. I listen to him during lunch breaks. For fifteen years since my homecoming he has been dangling liberals by a foot and tossing them away.

Zen Chafets has done an impressive amount of research in writing this book. He has visited the important locations and interviewed hundreds of people. He has written a human portrait that includes vulnerabilities surprising to regular listeners -- Rush has struggled to find a sense of belonging. He played spin the bottle and the high school prom queen refused to kiss him. A program director in Chicago gave an unmerciful review of his early work. Larry "Superjock" Lujack, a radio personality Rush admired, said nasty things about him -- Rush hasn't forgotten.

After much struggle he arrived in New York with his techniques honed and found hostility from the famous broadcasters and entertainers he sought acceptance from. He was a nobody who wanted to be somebody on the streets of New York, and when he was recognized in rare instances he encountered rudeness. He was ambushed on the Pat Sajak Show when the topic turned to AIDs and an activist audience shouted "You want people to die!" and "Murderer!"

Rush often comments on air that he believes elected Republicans in Washington, D.C. lack fighting spirit because they crave acceptance from the media establishment and the social salons, as he had sought acceptance in New York, and Republicans are willing to compromise their principles to find belonging -- an impulse Rush would not indulge.

Rush has been divorced three times (he has recently married again), and was fired on multiple occasions from radio shows early in his career. He was summarily dismissed after a brief stint as a sports commentator for the flagship ESPN show "Sunday NFL Countdown," after expressing the opinion that Donavan McNabb was overrated as quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles because the press wanted a black quarterback do well.

He was prevented years later, in a public and humiliating way, from becoming an owner of St. Louis Rams after being portrayed as a racist and drug addict (Zev Chafets covers Rush's addiction to prescription drugs that caused his deafness -- a disability that would have ended the broadcasting career of an ordinary human). The friends who invited Rush to become an owner of the Rams deserted him when it became clear that he was unacceptable to the NFL club.

Above all, the person whose admiration Rush sought most, his father, was grudging in his approval and constant in skepticism. His father disparaged Rush's passion for radio broadcasting and told Rush that by dropping out of college, as Rush did after one year, he was limiting himself romantically and professionally. It is sorrowful to Rush that his dad died before he acquired EIB One, a Gulfstream G550 jet that might have proved to Big Rush, who was a WW II fighter pilot and an aviation buff, that Rush had made it.

Zev Chafets has provided the reader with depth of understanding. Rush's persona is a show. The bombast, the intellect, satire, drop-dead funny parodies, the everyday servings that make the show so joyful for Rush to perform, as he often expresses on air, and so much fun to listen to, come with a cost. Since his days of anonymity on the streets of New York, Rush has achieved a level of visibility equal to movie stars and presidents, but because he is famous for his outspoken conservatism he may be the most hated and feared man in America.

Four months into President Obama's presidency, at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, Wanda Sykes, a comedienne, said:

Mr. President, Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails . . . like "I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, or our soldiers in Iraq." He just wants our country to fail. To me, that's treason. . . I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a waterboarding, is what he needs . . .

Rush said to Zev Chafets that he knew that he was in the first place on the enemies list of the President of the United States. He said in an email:

I know I am a target and I know I will be destroyed eventually. I fear that all I have accomplished and all the wealth I have accumulated will be taken from me, to the cheers of the crowd. I know I am hated and despised by the American Left.

How many of us could live with such hatred, with privacy hard to come by? Listeners should not begrudge him his frequent vacations, because he more than anyone feels the brunt of the cultural war.

It's not possible to capture the genius of Rush Limbaugh in a book, although Zev Chafets does a good job, or in a few pages of an editorial. Rush covers the whole array of political and social issues well, but he is especially good at showing how damaging and self-defeating liberal economic policies are. Is there anything more valuable during the Obama Presidency?

A good friend and strong supporter of the St. Croix Review has said that Rush is more trouble than he is worth, because he is harsh, and gives people a negative impression of conservatism. But my friend also said that his work hours don't permit him to listen when Rush is on air, 12:00 to 3:00 eastern time; he just goes by what other people say.

This is a mistake: Don't let other people form your opinion of Rush Limbaugh -- maybe they don't listen to him either. Listen to him yourself. You can hear his show anytime by visiting his web site at www.rushlimbaugh.com. *

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." --Winston Churchill

Some of the quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.

The following is a summary of the June 2010 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In "Turning Point," Barry MacDonald writes that the time has come for politicians to make hard financial choices.

Mark Hendrickson, in "The Governing Elite vs. the Rest of Us," details the lavish benefits and salaries federal and state government employees receive, at the expense of taxpayers who receive far less; in "The VAT-Man Cometh?" he writes that a value added tax would be destructive and harm the vulnerable most; in "Sen. Dodd's Financial Reform Bill: The Problem of Leverage," he writes that the proposed legislation would give the executive branch the authority to shut down private companies if they were thought to be failing -- such power would make "vassals and serfs" of financial institutions; in "The 'Social Justice' Fallacy? Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," he says "The Lord's mission was to redeem us from sin, not to redistribute our property or impose an economic equality on us"; in "Financial Intrigue in Greece: Should We Care?" he says yes we should -- through the IMF American taxpayer money would be involved in a bailout, and our national deficits and debt are approaching the size of Greece's.

Herbert London, in "Brzezinski, Obama, and Foreign Policy Reconceptualization," describes a "failure" in policy; in "The Conservatives' Road to Recovery," he reviews Emmett Tyrrell's book in which Tyrrell sees the need to reclaim the culture from radical elitists; in "Start Up May Be a Start Down," he enumerates the demerits of the President's new START treaty with the Russians concerning nuclear weapons; in "ACT Reviews Education in America," he discusses the many problems of America's schools.

Allan Brownfeld, in "Skepticism of Government Is Growing: The Founding Fathers Would Be Pleased" he says both parties have incurred scorn because of profligate spending and grasping of power; in "To Defeat Terrorism It Is Essential that We Understand the Motivation of Those Who Have Declared War Against Us," he writes that our political leaders don't see that Muslims oppose us because of the roles we play; in "Despite Promises to Curb Lobbyists in Washington, A New Golden Age Is Emerging," he details business better than ever, with retired politicians of both parties making tons of money.

Sean Varner, in "One-Sided Arms Control," reviews the details of the new START treaty that President Obama signed with Russia. He believes that the president conceded too much, compromised American interests, benefited the Russians, and weakened international security and stability.

In "The Great American Debt 'Roll,'" Fred Kingery describes the catastrophic effects of accumulating national debt.

David Bean, in "Economics 101," lays out the hidden and pernicious effects of taxation on the production of goods and services from raw material to finished product: a dramatic rise in prices and a deprecation of currency.

In "The Politics of Arrogance," Marvin Folkertsma compares President Obama to historical figures who brought their nations to the brink, or the reality, of disaster because of arrogance; in "Barack and the Buchanan Precedent," he draws lessons of cluelessness and spinelessness from both men; in "When Regimes Reach Insanity," he shows how an educated populace, sophistication, and technological savvy aren't enough to save a nation from awful leaders.

Paul Kengor, in "God Gets His Healthcare Bill," looks at the lengths the Religious Left will go to justify government power; in "Buchenwald and the Totalitarian Century," he reveals how the Soviets kept the Nazi concentration camps in operation after WW II; in "Speaking Truth to History: A Perfect Game," he comments on a movie, "The Perfect Game," about poor Mexican kids who overcame hardship to win the Little League World Series in the 1950s -- it is a story of faith, hope, and the American dream.

In "Progressing Backwards," Jarrett Skorup shows that the solutions climate-change alarmists propose -- wind, solar, biodiesel, and light rail -- have already been tried and have proven to be failures.

In "The Character of George Washington," Gary Scott Smith explains why George Washington is often valued as the best American president.

Robert L. Wichterman, in "America's Moral Condition," describes the nations' various faiths as in flux and under attack by the progressive Left.

In "My University Is Closed for the Summer," Thomas Martin shows what is lost with the expansion of on-line university courses: "a teacher will not hear a pulse pick up and carry the energies of new life in an active mind."

Jigs Gardner, in "Westerns," surveys this uniquely American genre, and examines one nonfiction book that captures the essence of the cowboy.

Gillis J. Harp reviews Jennifer Burns' biography: Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, depicting the inspiring and off-putting qualities of this powerful writer who helped shape post-WW II conservative thought; Robert C. Whitten reviews Brian Sussman's ClimateGate, that explores the motives, science, and politics involved in the recent scandal.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns, Oxford University Press, USA (October 2009), 384 pp., List Price: $27.95.

Prior to the 1990s, few scholarly studies of post-World War II American conservatism were published. Happily, this situation has changed in recent years. Much solid academic work has appeared which takes conservative thought seriously and attempts to explain its historical and cultural context. Jennifer Burns' new biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, is a welcome contribution to this growing body of literature. Burns has produced a thoroughly researched and critical (but fair) study of one of the conservative movement's most influential and colorful thinkers.

Like many of the intellectuals who shaped the movement in post-World War II America, Ayn Rand was a Jewish European emigre. She was born Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905 to Anna and Zinovy Rosenbaum, the latter an ambitious, self-made man who ran a chemistry shop in Petrograd, along with his cultured wife. Ayn's father's business enabled her family to live in considerable comfort, but the Russian Revolution changed everything. Bolshevik soldiers forcibly seized her father's store, and his daughter never forgot the traumatic event.

Despite her hostility to the Communist regime, Rand studied at Leningrad State University, where she first encountered philosophy, including the writings of Aristotle. Among her most formative early influences, however, was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose bracing atheism and celebration of the heroic individual she found exhilarating. Upon graduation, Rand became obsessed with motion pictures, watching a staggering 117 films in 1925 alone. The young Rand first caught glimpses of urban life in the United States in some of these silent movies, and when an opportunity to leave Russia and join relatives in Chicago came up, she jumped at it.

Ayn Rand spent only six months with her American cousins, soon making her way to California, where she sought work in the nascent film industry as a screenwriter. The ambitious and vivacious Rand made important business connections there, and found a husband (marrying bit-part player Frank O'Connor), but the industry changed with the advent of talkies. As she quietly wrote plays and screenplays, Rand also nursed dreams of becoming a serious philosopher, writing in her private journal in 1934, "I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion" (Goddess, 29).

Hoping to work on a possible Broadway production of one of her plays, Rand and her husband moved to New York in November 1934. The city's frantic pace and intellectual life suited Rand better. During these early years in New York, Rand published her first book, We the Living (1936), which drew upon her experience in Leninist Russia. The hostile reaction to the book by many of New York's left-leaning intelligentsia convinced Rand that all was not well with American culture. Rand concluded that the rot of collectivism was infecting the home of rugged individualism. Though she voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Rand soon became a harsh critic of the New Deal. She was introduced to the turbulent world of partisan politics by contributing to the Wendell Wilkie campaign of 1940.

In 1941, Rand wrote the booklet, "Manifesto of Individualism." Yet, it was her two published novels, The Fountainhead (1943), and Atlas Shrugged (1957), that catapulted Rand into celebrity. The first eventually became a bestseller and won favorable reviews even from critics not fond of Rand's philosophy. The second, though it sold well, was less fortunate; it was dismissed by many as heavy-handed and patently ideologically driven.

Meanwhile, Rand had gathered around her a circle of adoring students in her New York apartment, where she held court on a regular basis. Among the more notable participants were the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and the future chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Rand assumed an even higher profile in the public arena with her support for Barry Goldwater's presidential bid in 1964. When, however, Rand's adulterous relationship with disciple Nathaniel Branden became public in 1968 -- a relationship bizarrely sanctioned by both Branden's wife and Rand's own husband -- many followers felt betrayed by their idol and grew disenchanted with the official movement. Nonetheless, Rand's novels continued to sell well and her ideas attracted considerable interest among college students dabbling with libertarianism and anarchism during the 1960s and 1970s.

Conservatives with Christian convictions may be inclined to dismiss Rand's personal story as a weird aberration, while cherry-picking those bits of her philosophy they find attractive (eschewing, of course, her obnoxious atheism). That would be a mistake. Rand's objectivism is of one piece and Burns's biography is in part a sobering cautionary tale for conservatives. The narrative offers at least three timely lessons worth noting:

One involves Rand's radical individualism. Americans have a well-earned reputation for being fiercely individualistic, but Rand's system is based upon a hyper-individualism developed to its logical (often absurd) conclusion. Burns includes a chilling account of how the young Rand wrote admiringly about a brutal, unrepentant serial killer named William Hickman, praising his uncompromising independence and bold willingness to flout societal norms. "What the tabloids saw as psychopathic, Rand admired," Burns comments (Goddess, 25).

The sort of individualism at the heart of Rand's system was plainly toxic. For instance, Rand's response to conservative critics of abortion was to exclaim: "An embryo has no rights"(Goddess, p. 263). Though her critic in other respects, Murray Rothbard here agreed, contending that

. . . what the mother is doing in abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person's body (Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty [1978], 108).

Dispensing with God can leave one with either an all-powerful state, or the all-powerful self. Predictably, Nathaniel Branden, Rand's one-time disciple and lover, later became "a leader of the self-esteem movement" during the 1970s (Goddess, 248).

Second, Rand and her circle consistently demonized the state as the principal source of evil in the world. Such a caricature has been alien to Christian political theology from Thomas Aquinas, to Richard Hooker, to Leo XIII and Reinhold Niebuhr. Rand's anti-government stance can lead to troubling contradictions in a representative democracy, and Burns notes how Rand often slipped into an arrogant elitism. The rational faculty she increasingly emphasized in her thought was best exhibited by "the better species, the Superman," and not by that group of mindless citizens she dismissed as mere "human ballast" (Goddess, 114, 326, note # 7).

Third, her elitism was connected to a myopic dogmatism that would have warmed the heart of any Stalinist. Sadly, some conservatives have occasionally exhibited some of the same unattractive characteristics of their opponents. The circle of students and disciples that gathered around Rand in her New York apartment (ironically labeled the "Collective") evinced an almost cultic spirit. Curiously for a woman who professed to be fascinated by ideas, Rand ultimately became genuinely anti-intellectual in her unwillingness to see truth anywhere but within the narrow confines of her own closed system. Ideologues on both the right and the left have often fallen into this sort of blinkered sectarianism, speaking only to true believers and dividing the world neatly into enlightened individualists and crude collectivists.

During the spring and summer of 2009, a few Tea Party protestors showed up at demonstrations with placards inscribed with the question: "Who is John Galt?" The reference was to a character in Atlas Shrugged who personifies the rugged individualist battling organizational conformity and statism. Jennifer Burns' insightful biography clarifies that Christian conservatives should be deeply suspicious of any movement that celebrates Ayn Rand's "superman."

--Gillis J. Harp

Gillis J. Harp is professor of history at Grove City College and member of the faith and politics working group with the Center for Vision & Values. This article is from V & V, a web site of the Center for Vision & Values.

ClimateGate, by Brian Sussman. Washington, D.C., World Net Daily, 2010, $25.95.

On November 17, 2009, hackers, or possibly inside "whistle-blowers" at the Climate Research Unit (CRU), East Anglia University, UK, released a series of emails involving climate researchers in Europe and the U.S. The senders and recipients were very concerned that much of their atmospheric and ocean temperature data did not support their claims of unprecedented warming of the Earth during the 20th century. The fraud exhibited by the emails has come to be called "ClimateGate." Hence the title of Sussman's book.

In his analysis of "environmentalism" Sussman goes all the way back to Marx as the basic inspiration for the movement. He also notes that, by design or coincidence, the first Earth Day coincided with the centenary of Lenin's birth. The book then provides a brief history of environmentalism, including the influence of the late Rachel Carson's Silent Spring on human life in outlawing DDT as a means of controlling malaria; the loss of life in Africa has been in the millions. More recent and of more immediate concern to Americans is the claim of global warming as the result of the anthropogenic emission of "greenhouse gases," mainly carbon dioxide. Much of the climate debate, if one can call it that, centers on a purported temperature record from 1000 to 2000 AD developed and published by Michael Mann and associates of Pennsylvania State University. A statistical analysis of this record shows a linear temperature decline of about 0.2 degrees Celsius until about 1900 and then a sharp rise of about 0.4 degrees in the 20th century; the resemblance to a hockey stick led to the record's being referred to by that name. Because the atmospheric carbon dioxide mixing fraction has also risen (from about 280 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm), Mann et al. attributed the apparent rise to the increase of that gas, and more specifically to human generated carbon dioxide. After noting the absence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, two Canadians, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, challenged the methodology used in the analysis. They found numerous errors in the data and after making appropriate corrections found that the hockey stick blade disappeared.

Why would researchers and politicians such as former Vice President Albert Gore continue to promote anthropogenic global warming, or as it now called, "climate change?" As one would expect, the answer is money and political power. Gore, for example, has made a fortune estimated at more than $100 million, perhaps a great deal more, all made from "cap-and-trade." Amazingly, or perhaps not so amazingly considering the bestowers, Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and is about to be awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Tennessee, both on the basis of his misleading documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Gore is not the only investor who stands to gain. Windmill and solar investors as well as many utilities are also in line to increase their riches. Cap-and-trade also promises vast opportunities to politicians for control of the populace. Sussman develops these themes in great detail.

Sussman, a former weather announcer for a San Francisco television station and now a radio talk-show host (KSFO in San Francisco), holds a degree in meteorology and is well-equipped to write on the subject of climate change. Unlike many of the works in the field that have been published in recent years, ClimateGate is written for a popular audience. The discussion of the science is easily understood and the treatment of the politics is especially well done. ClimateGate is strongly recommended to anyone wishing to be armed against the authoritarians of human-caused climate change. I do have one nit: the inclusion of an appendix providing a large sampling of the ClimateGate emails would have better supported the title and improved the book. For St. Croix Review (April, 2010) readers, Senator James Inhofe has provided many of the emails.

--Robert C. Whitten

Robert C. Whitten is a research scientist, NASA-retired and is the author or co-author of over 100 papers and five books in the field. He has been researching global warming -- climate change for about twenty years.

"When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe." --Thomas Jefferson