Rackets, Demography, and Spelling
Regarding President Obama's State of the Union Address last night, I think it established that the current Administration is by no means as debilitated as that of the lame-duck George Bush, or even of Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage episode. I noted particularly the president's ability to engage with polite dissent in his audience. George Bush, in vivid contrast, tended to treat the unenthusiastic portion of a crowd as hecklers who had somehow sneaked through the security cordon.
The most interesting section of the address for the long term was the call for a law to replace the campaign-finance provisions that the Supreme Court had just struck down on First Amendment grounds. The president sassed the Court to its face on national television. No doubt there is a great deal of daylight between Barack Obama's views on judicial review and those of Andrew Jackson (Jackson held that each branch of government is entitled to interpret the Constitution for itself.) Still, more will come of this.
Less speculatively, the only measure that struck me as worthy of particular commendation was the favorable mention of nuclear power. The only item I would condemn in principle was the endorsement of the latest incarnation of the Fair Pay Act, actually a comparable-worth law that would make the wage structure of the American workforce subject to the arbitration of the gender-rights bar in a way that would make them as happy as vampires in a blood bank.
The president reemphasized the need to put aside “tired old fights” and make changes that are necessary even if they are unpopular. That sounds suitably tough-minded, but the point is soddened by the sauce of sentimental anecdotes in which the nuggets of policy proposals float.
This rhetorical misfortune is not new with Barack Obama. Ronald Reagan famously turned his major addresses into soap-opera dramas of grit and uplift. Reagan, equally famously, was the president who began the lethal practice of prescribing tax-cut milkshakes as the cure for fiscal obesity. This kind of language makes it impossible to make genuinely tough proposals, proposals that will seriously inconvenience large numbers of innocent persons while making necessary systemic reforms.
The exclusion of the genuinely necessary has particularly unfortunate effects on the discussion of war and diplomacy. The president did, briefly, manage to mention the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where his policy actually conforms to a well-informed consensus. What chiefly struck me, however, was the president's apparently unshakeable determination that his strategy will proceed without reference to anything the enemy might do.
One side in a conflict cannot declare that a war will “end.” Not even a surrender always accomplishes that.
Any reform of American political culture must begin with the ability to recognize a public-sector racket and extend to the willingness to shut it down. In addition to the Fair Pay Act, another proposal of this type that the president endorsed last night was the use of some of the repaid TARP money to underwrite loans by small banks to small businesses.
This is a poor notion. Politically mandated loans are puffing up the Chinese economy, soon to China's cost and not much later to ours. One could argue that the recent financial crisis was also caused in part by politically directed lending: banks watered down their mortgage standards to meet the arbitrary lending requirements of the Community Reinvestment Act, which itself is essentially a patronage mechanism. Small businesses will have no trouble getting loans when there is a demonstrable market for these businesses to serve. Making loans before that market exists is just setting the debtors up for failure, or for more subsidies.
These comments have been chiefly about longstanding features of political culture. Point-for-point, what the president said last night was usually at least arguable. The Obama Administration is by no means beyond hope.
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Speaking of Chinese economic policy, James (Cassandra) Chanos recently made an
interesting clarification of how command-economies operate. In countries with market economies, GDP figures are like temperature readings; they are supposed to describe a facet of the empirical world. In the Soviet system, which China has to some extent retained, GDP figures are planning tools. The planning authority decides how much the economy needs to grow, and then sets about describing the projects and expenditures needed to meet the growth target. The "growth" is not problematical: you just add up the units of economic activity that have been ordered and delivered.
One can defend this practice in connection with the creation of public utilities, but its application to entire economies has tended to be suboptimal.
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Moving on to retail politics, Instapundit himself announced a few days ago that there would be a Tea Party in Jersey City yesterday evening.
The explanation is not far to seek. The city has provisionally approved remarkably high property-tax increases and sent out bills for the first quarter based on the estimate. (My own taxes went up about 15%.) It did not help that a large fraction of the local political establishment had been arrested in July for corruption above and beyond the call of duty. Some sort of protest at last night's City Council meeting was inevitable. However, when I walked past City Hall in the evening, I saw neither mob nor television truck. The actual organizers dismissed the Tea Party characterization. About 300 people actually attended. It seems to have been a lively enough meeting, but for the participants it had no apparent connection to national events.
What other so-called Tea Parties were just misreported zombie outbreaks, eh?
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Even in the case of demography, Randy McDonald suggests, everything you know is a lie:
I've earlier blogged about the slim li[k]elihood that Chinese immigrants are going to "colonize' and take over the Russian Far East. In the final installment of a five-part Foreignm Policy/Slate series on China's role in Russian border zones, Joshua Kucera suggests that the balance of power between the two countries is such that, rather than Chinese populating Russia, Russians are moving across the Amur to a dynamic China….,Demographically, it makes sense that Chinese people would flock to Russia. Look at it in economic terms, though: China's economy is booming, and its prospects seem limitless. Meanwhile, Russia is highly dependent on uncertain oil and natural gas reserves. Professionals already make more money in China than they do in Russia, and as China's economy grows, blue-collar wages will likely outpace Russian pay. So, rather than Chinese people moving to Russia, isn't it more likely that Russians would move to China?
I asked this question of many Russians in the Far East, and I usually got the same answer: It's already happening. Thus far, the Russian migration to China seems to be only a trickle. But it's not hard to imagine that this is just the start.
I'm left perplexed by Kucera's use of the word "demographically." Nothing in income differences, fertility rates, or migration trends would predict massive Chinese migration north. Heilongjiang's 30 millions outnumber the people of the Russian Far East five-to-one and live in a province with a much higher population density, but population density is irrelevant to migration: does Germany's high population density propel mass migrations to less densely populated France and Poland.
Readers of a certain age may find that last question tactless, but I take the author's point. Even in the event of a slowdown in China, it is hard to imagine the Chinese homesteading in Siberia.
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Russia itself is still full of surprises, as Mark Sedgwick suggests in a recent post on the Islamist Right in France and Russia:
And then there's voxnr.com, "le site des résistants au nouvel ordre mondial" (the site for those resisting the new world order), still going strong after seven years (it started in 2002), with its companion journal, Résistance. This site is New Right rather than Islamist, but reports news of Dugin and friends, and is certainly positive towards some varieities of Islam and Islamism. Interviews posted towards the end of 2009 dealt with Mircea Eliade and Guénon as well as the good relations between the Arabs and Fascism. And then there was also an interview with Edward Limonov of Russia's National Bolshevik Party, entitled "Every Day I feel closer to Islam."
I had always supposed that the Soviet Union was broken up to prevent the Islamization of Russia. And now this.
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As for spelling reform, on Sunday the New York Times Magazine favored its readers with a piece by Ammon Shea, entitled The Keypad Solution, which dealt with the relevance of texting to the reform project. The article quotes at length our fearless president of the American Literacy Council, Alan Mole, though it does manage to reverse one of his remarks (the ALC is interested in working with texters). In any case, here is a point I did not know about the provenance of texting conventions:
Whether texting conventions are supported by organized spelling reformists or not, can they possibly solve the difficulty of spelling our troublesome language? David Crystal, the author of "Txtng: The Gr8 Db8," told me in an e-mail message that "there's nothing in texting to suggest spelling reform," noting that texting relies heavily on abbreviations, which he sees as creative stylings, not systematic improvements. He added that there is very little that is new about most of the abbreviations and lexical shortenings that make texting so maddening to so many. In fact, he said, with the exception of a few recent coinages like LOL, "virtually all the commonly used ones can be found in English a century ago." For example, bn (been), btwn (between) and wd (would) can all be found in a 1942 dictionary of abbreviations.
I gather that Tolkien's Tengwar script has currency in some circles. Certainly Tengwar font sets for computers are not hard to find. However, I also gather that Tengwar users tend to transliterate English as much as possible, rather than respell it. I would point out that people literate only in English generally have trouble transcribing any unfamiliar word, even using the Latin alphabet, because their own orthography is so ambiguous.
But don't get me started.
