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April 12, 2012: Really good and interesting insight on economy by Tyler Cowen, the new golden boy economist. Writing in the American Interest (May/June 2012) Cowen: “leaves the impression that there are two interrelated American economies. On the one hand, there is the globalized tradable sector — companies that have to compete with everybody everywhere. These companies, with the sword of foreign competition hanging over them, have become relentlessly dynamic and very (sometimes brutally) efficient. “On the other hand, there is a large sector of the economy that does not face this global competition — health care, education and government. Leaders in this economy try to improve productivity and use new technologies, but they are not compelled by do-or-die pressure, and their pace of change is slower. “A rift is opening up. The first, globalized sector is producing a lot of the productivity gains, but it is not producing a lot of the jobs.” March 29, 2012: From Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, a great elucidation of what accounts for American exceptionalism.
In the closing pages of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, [historian] Bernard Bailyn summarized the core concern about the Affordable Care Act's reach that is trying to find its voice today: "At the Philadelphia convention, with exquisite care and with delicate nuances, they devised a complex constitution that would generate the requisite power but would so distribute its flow and uses that no one body of men and no one institutional center would ever gain a monopoly of force or influence that would dominate the nation."
March 27, 2012: William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University, in the Wall Street Journal today on “global warming”: There has indeed been some warming, perhaps about 0.8 degrees Celsius, since the end of the so-called Little Ice Age in the early 1800s. Some of that warming has probably come from increased amounts of CO2, but the timing of the warming—much of it before CO2 levels had increased appreciably—suggests that a substantial fraction of the warming is from natural causes that have nothing to do with mankind. Frustrated by the lack of computer-predicted warming over the past decade, some IPCC supporters have been claiming that "extreme weather" has become more common because of more CO2. But there is no hard evidence this is true. After an unusually cold winter in 2011 (December 2010-February 2011) the winter of 2012 was unusually warm in the continental United States. But the winter of 2012 was bitter in Europe, Asia and Alaska.
March 26, 2012: One of the best economic journalists, Robert Samuelson, looks at “Obamacare” just as it comes to the Supreme Court. He finds that government guaranteed health care doesn’t really improve overall health of societies, and cites a few studies to back it up. More significantly in my view, he talks about costs and Obama’s motivation for making universal health care the centerpiece of his presidency. Citing Noam Scheiber’s book The Escape Artists: How the Obama Team Fumbled the Recovery, Samuelson argues that the motivation behind this monstrous health care entitlement was Obama’s ego: he wanted to do something more, Scheiber quotes Obama as saying, then just “avoiding a Great Depression.” Well, Obama may have an outsized ego. I’ve written about that here. But this misses the point. Samuelson and Scheiber don’t consider for a moment what has become fairly obvious: Obama is ideologically obsessed with centralizing authority in the hands of the federal government. He believes this is the only way America, a generally selfish, predatory, oppressive, and discriminatory market-based republic, can be made a just and fair society. The health care law he signed goes further toward accomplishing this than any other piece of legislation in modern American history. As usual, Charles Krauthammer explains this best:
Ultimately, the question will hinge on whether the Commerce Clause has any limits. If the federal government can compel a private citizen, under threat of a federally imposed penalty, to engage in a private contract with a private entity (to buy health insurance), is there anything the federal government cannot compel the citizen to do? If Obamacare is upheld, it fundamentally changes the nature of the American social contract. It means the effective end of a government of enumerated powers — i.e., finite, delineated powers beyond which the government may not go, beyond which lies the free realm of the people and their voluntary institutions. The new post-Obamacare dispensation is a central government of unlimited power from which citizen and civil society struggle to carve out and maintain spheres of autonomy . . . Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.
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Seth Forman is the author of American Obsession: Race and Conflict in the Age of Obama, Blacks in the Jewish Mind: A Crisis of Liberalism and other books. He teaches government and public policy at Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College and serves as Chief Planner of the Long Island Regional Planning Council. This web site is not associated in any way with these institutions.
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Welcome to Mr. Forman’s Planet. This web site is designed to assist interested students of American life to better understand public policy, government, politics, and culture in America. This includes my own occasional musings, articles, and books; all time “must read” articles on a range of topics (I define “must read” here); links to what I think are the best web sites, and weekly “must read” recommendations. |
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