From The Street...
Friday, March 26, 2004
Finishing the War...
Victor Davis Hanson, again, says it all and says it well...from today's National Review Online
"It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom — never."
Finishing...
Thursday, March 25, 2004
Peggy Noonan on Clinton's Moral Retardation
Leadership is doing the right thing...and convincing people to support you doing that, not governing by polls.
Hearings Won't Make Us Safe
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
CounterTerrorism Expert Speaks...
With all the political talk about blame pre-9/11, I recall seeing Larry Johnson trotted out on several news channels in the past to "explain it all". He was the State Department Guy In Charge of Counterterrorism.
Here is a reference to his thoughts before 9/11 - from NR Online today,
Cliff May's article.
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Michael Ledeen, in his fine book, The War Against the Terror Masters, points to an op-ed that ran in the New York Times on July 10, 2001 — almost exactly two months before the 9/11 attack. Written by Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism specialist, it reflected the conventional wisdom within America's foreign-policy elites.
"...If you are drilling for oil in Colombia — or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia," Johnson wrote, "you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear."
Johnson actually predicted that terrorism would decline in the decade beginning in 2000 as, he argued, it had in the '90s because of "the current reluctance of countries like Iraq, Syria, and Libya, which once eagerly backed terrorist groups, to provide safe havens, funding and training."
Johnson blamed excessive fear of terrorism on "24-hour broadcast news operations too eager to find a dramatic story" and on "pundits who repeat myths while ignoring clear empirical data," along with politicians who "warn constituents of dire threats and then appropriate money for redundant military installations and new government investigators and agents."
Johnson also criticized the military and intelligence bureaucracies, saying they were "desperate to find an enemy to justify budget growth."
This is an astonishing analysis when you consider that Johnson was writing after the first bombing of the World Trade Towers, after the bloody battle depicted in the book, Blackhawk Down — involving Osama bin Laden-trained Somali guerillas — after the attempt by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait, after the bombing of our troops in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, after the terrorist attacks on America's embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and after the attack on the USS Cole, and after Secretary of State Albright included Iraq among the seven countries designated as state sponsors of international terrorism in 2000.
Sunday, March 14, 2004
Cheaper Medicine
I met Peter Huber at a Gilder Telecosm several years ago. A great writer who now does an occasional column for Forbes.
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3/10/04
The cost of health care in the U.S. has been declining steadily for the last 50 years. It will decline faster still in the next 50. All of the doleful commentary about mushrooming costs and budget-busting programs ignores the principal economic costs of illness, which are falling fast, and the science of pharmacology, which is transforming the economics of health care.
By far the largest economic cost of illness is lowered labor productivity. Sick people can't work, and when adults die in their prime, they take all their intelligence, skills and initiative with them. Until recently, the cost of illness among children and the elderly was also shouldered mainly by the healthy adults who devoted countless hours to their care. Such costs aren't reflected in revenues to doctors or hospitals, still less in federal insurance programs. They are felt in lost corporate profits, lower wages and, for many women, tireless but entirely off-budget toil in the home.
Several developments radically changed this economic calculus in the second half of the 20th century. Vaccines all but eradicated many of the most common childhood diseases and substantially curbed infectious disease among adults as well. However much it cost to develop the whooping cough vaccine or to distribute it free to families who couldn't afford it, the cost must surely have been dwarfed by the economic gains that came from freeing up mothers to engage in other pursuits. Antibiotics had a comparable impact. Tuberculosis was a fantastically expensive disease a century ago--think of the balconies in the mountains of Davos or Saranac Lake. Polio meant braces and iron lungs. Those costs have all but disappeared...
More at Medicine Gets Cheaper
His Web site:Peter Huber
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Got Rice?
Nice to hear a little bad news about what the Chinese are doing occasionally. The following is from the inestimable ("too great to be calculated...") Mogambo Guru
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"...The Chinese are discovering that the sad result of rapidly expanding the money supply, a lot of which was used to soak up all those American dollars that are flooding the world, is that it causes price inflation. And the poor people, and there are lots and lots of Chinese people who are poor and almost-poor, and who get really irritated when they have to pay higher prices for things. In this particular case, it is the price of rice that is causing distress. The price of rice, which is referred to as a "staple," is up around 40% from this time last year. While all foodstuffs are rising mightily, it is rice that is garnering the lion's share of the publicity, as it is the predominant staple I guess. And all other prices are rising, too, in case you were wondering, which only goes to show you that inflation seeps into the prices of everything.
To show you that government idiocy is pandemic in the world, the Chinese response is to "increase supply" by increasing farmer subsidies by $1.2 billion to encourage them to grow more rice. "Supply-side China" is a phrase that ought to send chills up your spine. Apparently they are unaware that the $1.2 billion is money, too, and they are just making the problem worse by giving them more money, and they will necessarily reap not only a little more rice, but also the mal-investment of artificially jiggering the economy. Which will, if you are up to date on your mal-investment jiggering theory (MJT), create more mal-investments."
