As we start a new decade, I’m looking back at the naughties (the best name I’ve heard for a decade that never did get a good name) and thinking things could have been worse.  (For those who argue that the new decade doesn’t really begin until 2011, my counter-argument is that the decade has been bad enough that we should do what we can to get it behind us.)

As bad as the naughties were, my claim that the decade could have been worse comes from comparing it with the 70s, the worst decade in my lifetime.

As the decade began we were mired in the Vietnam war, fought by draftees.  OK, we’re mired in two wars now, but the draft is long-gone.  Score one for liberty.

In 1971 President Nixon imposed economy-wide wage and price controls, and while the were withdrawn piecemeal, some still remained by the end of the decade.

One result of those price controls was periodic shortages of gasoline, lines at the gas pump, and stations that had run out of gas.  Despite rising gas prices in the naughties, there were no serious calls for price controls.  (There were some serious calls for excess profits taxes on oil companies, though.)

Prices (measured by the CPI) approximately doubled during the 70s as a result of continually rising inflation that ended the decade in double digits.  The silver lining here for those of us who teach economics is that when we argue that in theory price controls can’t stop inflation, we can point to the price controls imposed in 1971 followed by ever-increasing inflation as a real-world example.

Unemployment continued to rise during the 1970s.  Another silver lining here is that the rising inflation and rising unemployment put a dent in the Keynesian illusion that there is a trade-off between inflation and unemployment.

The highest marginal income tax bracket in the 1970s (federal taxes only) was 70% throughout the decade.  It was half that in the naughties.

The term “stagflation” was coined in the 70s, and the economic stagnation coupled with rising energy prices and shortages created a general feeling that for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution living standards were going to fall for the next generation.  The slogan “Think Small” was also coined in the 70s to reflect this general pessimism, and the Club of Rome’s book, The Limits to Growth, came out in 1972 predicting the collapse of the world’s economy, which according to that book should have already happened.  In fairness to the naughties, Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse, was published in 2005 and predicts the same thing.  And in fairness to every other decade, predictions like this have been fashionable ever since Malthus published his Essay on Population in 1799.

I’ve focused on economic and political events, but the 70s also saw the introduction of disco music and polyester leisure suits into the culture.  All-in-all, the 70s was not a good decade.

So, while the naughties won’t shine as a great decade, look at the bright side: it wasn’t as bad as the 70s.

Several years ago, I chuckled when I dropped my young daughter off at a friend’s elementary school. In fact, the school was named an “Attendance Center.” I never learned why “school” was suddenly out of fashion.

“Attendance Center.” How apt a phrase for what is happening in higher education, as every politician and president (Bush and Obama included) promise “more, more, more!”

A new book is getting acclaim for documenting how simply funding more college “attendees” is a waste of money: Jackson Toby, The Lowering of Higher Education in America: Why Financial Aid Should be Based on Student Performance. Toby hammers home the message that always shocks people when I tell them that most of those who go to college will never graduate with a degree. Moreover, mere “attendance” at a college does little to improve earnings and leaves many in debt. The situation is even worse at community colleges, where politicians at the state and national levels are heavily subsidizing two-year college education. By accepting all, the old whip of “working hard in high school” to “get into college” is gone—every K-12 student knows they can go to college whether they prepare themselves or not.

The following excerpt from an article on the abysmal state of community college “attendance centers” highlights how much worse the problem is at that level:

A cursory look at the data is not encouraging. Although 41 percent of America’s college-bound students enter community colleges each year, only 28 percent of this cohort actually complete their studies and earn a degree, an even more dismal outcome than that displayed at the nation’s baccalaureate colleges, where 56 percent manage to graduate. These depressing statistics haven’t dampened the general consensus favoring support of community colleges because proponents appear to believe that college “access” trumps successful college completion and that “some college is better than none.” Refuting the latter point, U.S. community college non-graduates have only marginally higher earnings and lower unemployment rates than high school graduates and do far less well than their counterparts that manage to complete their studies. The disappointing outcomes at community colleges are to some extent hard-wired into four aspects of their design. These institutions are proudly and aggressively “open admissions” which means that there are no academic criteria to get in except, in most places, a high school diploma. . . .

Readers interested in learning the graduation rates (and other vital statistics) of any college in America can find it here. Will financial aid be tied to merit rather than a free lunch for everyone, regardless of performance? The political incentives work against any such reform. After all, the citizens of Entitlement U.S.A. believe it is their unalienable right to a discounted (or free) college education. Furthermore, politicians count votes and “something for nothing” is always popular. On we go . . .

A Facebook friend of mine posted his response to a poll: “Would the world be better without religion?” two days ago, generating, to date, 3,627 comments—by far the most I’ve ever seen for any single Facebook posting, and remarkable for one with 481 “Friends.”

While I haven’t read all of the comments, the general flavor seems to be a confusion between “religion” and “theocracy.” “Religion,” after all, is simply a set of beliefs, and as C.S. Lewis shows in his brilliant book, The Abolition of Man, nearly every civilization in the history of the world has shared a belief in Natural Law, or what Lewis calls the Tao, from “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you,” (Confucius), and “I have not slain men” (ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead), to “Thou Shalt Not Kill” (Judaism), and “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” (Christ).

All in all, not bad bases from which to conduct one’s life.

Indeed, I’ve yet to have anyone successfully explain to me how a world without “religion” would operate by anything other than purely situational ethics—from whence would one derive a concept of “Right,” much less “Rights”?

So why this hostility to “religion”? A much-repeated phrase is something along the lines of “religion is responsible for all wars.” Yet even a cursory review of a list of wars exposes this as patently false:

• Hundred Years War: No
• Revolutionary War: No
• Civil War: No
• Boer War: No
• World War I: No
• World War II: No
• Vietnam War: No

And despite the much-ballyhooed framing of the current “War on Terror” as a “clash of civilizations,” “jihad,” or any other such, even the vast majority of Americans who support its prosecution do so under the mistaken belief that it protects Americans’ security rather than on religious grounds.

It thus seems more likely to me that the multiple comments were excited by confusing “religion” with “theocracy”: the intermingling of Church with State. As C. S. Lewis put it in his essay, “Is Progress Possible?: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”

I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ it lies, and lies dangerously.

(He continues to presciently add: “On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in.”)

Rodney Stark’s For the Glory of God provides a fascinating take on the change that occurred when Constantine made Christianity the official State religion, setting off a continuing struggle between the “Church of Power,” vs. the “Church of Piety.” The American Founders’ “Separation of Church and State” was thus as rooted in an understanding of the corrupting influence of the State on the Church, as any fear of a Church corrupting the State—and both are well worth guarding against.

Face it: the State does not itself function well as a protector of the poor, suffering, downtrodden; and most States have been primarily a deliverer of death, privation, famine, destruction. The most effective killing machines have been those that banned religion: China, the Soviet Union, Cambodia. Meanwhile, the individuals who have stood up to challenge the evils being perpetuated, champion the oppressed, and deliver relief to the suffering, have overwhelmingly been motivated by and drawn their courage from their belief in God and the need to fight for their fellow man—in short, religious beliefs. From William Wilberforce’s successful campaign against the British slave trade, to the Salvation Army’s fight against sexual trafficking since the 19th century and extensive social services and disaster relief provided worldwide, to John Paul II’s consistent attacks against oppressive regimes everywhere, to the much-admired Mahatma Ghandi, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu.

Yes, there are plenty of examples of evil-doers invoking the name of God to justify their actions. But are these isolated individuals the source of “religion” as the root of all evils in the world? Or are the truly large-scale horrors primarily rooted in divorcing ethics (what is right to do) from science and society: Darwinism’s “survival of the fittest” evolving through eugenics and Hitler’s Aryan supremacy and “final solution,” to China’s one-child policy’s forced abortions and infanticide; to regimes killing millions of their own citizens while heralded as great leaps forward; to acceptance of the argument that the end justifies the means to perpetuate mass bombings; to a relentless quest to wrest autonomy from the individual and invest it in the State.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn so eloquently summed it up:

Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

It seems to me the world rather needs more religion: more declarations that every individual is a beloved child of God not to be indentured, bombed, tortured, enslaved, or generally interfered with. And if indeed “God is Love,” then even John Lennon might have thought better of “and no religion too” as the answer to a hurting world.

Syndicated columnist and bestselling author Dave Barry’s provides an incisive and hilarious, month-by-month review of the year 2009, “Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009.” As he begins:

It was a year of Hope—at first in the sense of “I feel hopeful!” and later in the sense of “I hope this year ends soon!”

It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting “business as usual,” finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.

Enjoy and Happy New Year!

The end of a year or a decade tempts many of us to make up lists of the best or the worst of things—events, movies, songs, books—during the interval that is coming to a close. Having consumed many such lists, I now undertake to produce one of my own, with a twist.

The twist is that I cannot in good conscience represent my list as one that contains the best books of the past decade. My reading is much too limited for me to make up such a list, and I have no doubt that many excellent books were published that I did not read. However, I have read some excellent books that were published between 2000 and 2008, and I list them here with brief notations in order to bring them to the attention of readers who may not have read them. I present them not with an endorsement of everything they assume, affirm, or argue, but as the works of intelligent, thoughtful, and careful authors. Most of these books are works of exceptionally deep scholarship.

I list them chronologically, but I do not order or rank them here in any other way.

1. Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000). Stinnett carried out an extraordinarily dogged search, involving many interviews with people directly involved and many years of digging in archives, formerly classified documents, and other sources, for answers to the two great questions: who knew what, and when did they know? Members of the Establishment will not like his answers, but they cannot accuse Stinnett of bias against Roosevelt: even after finding compelling evidence that U.S. leaders knew the Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, was coming, he continues to believe that the president acted properly by deliberately bringing the United States into World War II through the “back door.”

2. Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). I have argued that the crisis of World War II did much to promote statism in the United States. Friedberg argues, with impressive scholarship, that this outcome might have been much worse, and he explains in great detail why it wasn’t.

3. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). Sciabarra’s deeply-learned book ranges from Aristotle to Murray Rothbard. If you think of dialectics as grist only for block-headed Hegelians and other odd ducks, this book will change your mind. The greater part of it is given over to what is arguably the most sophisticated analysis ever made of Rothbard’s oeuvre.

4. Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: F.D.R. and the War within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). War, said Clausewitz, is the continuation of politics by other means, but war does not bring politics by the usual means to an end. Indeed, if anything, it sharpens and enlarges normal politicking because the stakes are greater than during peacetime. Because Fleming is not a Roosevelt idolater, but he is an exceptionally good historian, his book offers a refreshing antidote to the countless hagiographical works that have glorified Roosevelt and his lieutenants for their actions during the greatest of all wars.

5. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: The True Price of America’s Cold War Victory (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). A highly informed, wide-ranging survey by an author who writes with an insider’s familiarity and an outsider’s detachment. Even if you disagree with his interpretation from time to time, as I did, you are certain to learn a great deal.

6. Charlotte A. Twight, Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). How exactly did the politicians bring us during the past century into our current inextricable entanglement in the welfare state? The road was paved with a great deal of lying and scheming by self-serving politicians. Twight’s forte is extraordinarily careful and complete documentation, combined with a novel analytical framework of her own design.

7. Randall G. Holcombe, From Liberty to Democracy: The Transformation of American Government (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2002). The Americans of the late eighteenth century fought a revolution for liberty, but during the centuries that followed, the revolutionaries’ descendants tended to substitute democracy for liberty, until, in our day, they had greatly expanded the former and greatly diminished the latter. Holcombe’s account carries us smartly from the colonial era to the twenty-first century.

8. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: Random House, 2002). Journalist Hedges spent a great deal of time at the scene of wars. What he saw, though occasionally relieved by acts of humanity, was for the most part vile and disgusting, and hardly any different from vicious criminality writ large. If you’ve ever imagined war as glorious or uplifting, you need to read this book.

9. Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003). The prolific Fleming brought out this book only two years after the publication of his book on World War II, but it rests on reading and thinking that must have been done over a long period. Of all of the great mistakes that American “statesmen” have made, plunging the United States into the cauldron of the Great War was arguably the worst, because of the horrible train of events it set in motion in many parts of the world.

10. Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Hayek’s interpreters tend to be disciples or opponents. Caldwell, in contrast, approaches Hayek’s thought with a true scholar’s outlook. His book is replete with detail, context, and nuance. To my knowledge, it is by far the best work available for conveying an understanding of what Hayek accomplished and failed to accomplish as a social thinker.

11. Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). A retired Army officer with a Ph.D. in history from Princeton, Bacevich combines an insider’s understanding with adherence to scholarly standards and a genuine passion for saving the country from the disasters that spring from its current love affair with militarism and from the U.S. military’s global interventions. Although his misunderstanding of the international economics of oil demand and supply leads him astray in places, he has for the most part an excellent grasp of the socio-political role the military now plays in American life.

12. Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007). If I said I don’t love this book, I’d be lying. Not only do I wish I had written it; I wish that I had the talents and intelligence to have written it. Alas, I can only recommend this beautifully written volume to everybody as one of the very best books I’ve ever read: the product of deep and wide scholarship, it presents a fascinating account of the life, times, and intellectual activity of the twentieth century’s greatest economist. You can also learn a great deal from the book besides what it teaches you about Mises himself.

13. Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). Few books have moved me as deeply as this one. An unusual work, it is a sort of organized scrapbook of brief news accounts, excerpts from letters, and other contemporary sources in which the actors, great and small, speak for themselves. Baker intrudes only occasionally to set the scene. As the reader goes along, he comes to appreciate the great extent to which the horrible tragedy we call World War II was driven almost willfully by “statesmen” on both sides whose distinguishing qualities were viciousness, foolishness, vanity, overweening lust for power, utter irresponsibility, and recklessness. Some say that we get the leaders we deserve, but I refuse to believe that, on the average, we the people are nearly as evil as the “great men” who lead us.

In an editorial article in its December 2009 issue, “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense,” the popular-science magazine Scientific American claims that the Climategate revelations and the findings from an increasing number of scientists who question climate alarmism are ignorant, irrational and unfounded. The magazine lists and then attempts to refute what it claims are the seven major arguments being made by climate skeptics, and implies that Senator James Inhofe and others who question global-warming alarmism are akin to those who believe “in ghosts, astrology, creationism and homeopathy.” The magazine further states that:

Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists. Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.

In a step-by-step reply, “Scientific American’s Climate Lies,” Viscount Christopher Monckton shows that each and every “straw man” point by the magazine is fundamentally flawed and deceptively so. Indeed, Monckton shows that on at least this issue, the magazine has become unscientific, vitriolic, politicized, and deeply biased.

Pajamas TV has just released the excellent video, “A City Destroyed by Liberal Idealism,” which discusses the ruin of the City of Detroit as a result of “liberal” (i.e., “Progressive”) statism. And this disastrous story is repeated in major cities across the U.S. to the extent that government, urban, collectivist policies have been imposed.

For excellent examinations of the destructive effects of such policies and the need for privatization and marketization of urban enterprise, housing, education, security/policing, transportation, and welfare/charity, please see the following books:

The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society, edited by David T. Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alexander T. Tabarrok

Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, edited by Randall G. Holcombe and Benjamin Powell

Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads, edited by Gabriel Roth

To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice, by Bruce L. Benson

Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, by Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder

Copenhagen scam
Snow in Louisiana
Turn up thermostat
________________

Health care reform hoax
Splendid investment they say
Fog will lift next year
________________

Afghanistan war
Soldiers in cold winter fight
Widows wearing black
________________

Change you can believe
Dark clouds on the horizon
Night comes on quickly
________________

Frightened birds take flight
False hopes fall down suddenly
Foolish citizens
________________

Democrats on throne
Republicans hunker down
What goes round comes round
________________

Global warming soon
Peer review makes no mistakes
Cold winter this year

That’s the title of a new book by Robert and Brenda Vale.  I’m not sure if it is available in the U.S., but did find it on Amazon in the UK.  Here is an article about the book.

The book says your pet dog has a bigger carbon footprint than your SUV, even when you include the enargy required to build the car.  Cats do a little bit better, but even a pair of hampsters has the carbon footprint of a plasma TV.  A goldfish uses the energy equivalent of two mobile phones.

Here’s something to talk about with your environmentalist friends when they drive their Priuses home to feed their dogs.  No true environmentalist should have pets of any kind.  Driving a Prius — or even a bike — doesn’t help as much as owning a dog hurts.  (I don’t buy into this, by the way.  I have two dogs and three cats, or the environmental impact to two SUVs and three Volkswagen Golfs.)

I haven’t actually seen the book, so I’m wondering what the Vales have to say about animals people are supporting, but not keeping as pets.  For example, here in Florida there has been a major effort to reintroduce the Florida panther into the state.  How big is the carbon footprint of a Florida panther?

And America’s largest landowner, Ted Turner, owns a herd of 45,000 buffalo.  Buffalo aren’t carnivores, so one buffalo probably doesn’t have a carbon footprint as large as one panther, but still, a herd of 45,000 must have a pretty big carbon footprint, not to mention all the methane they’re adding to our greenhouse gasses.  Mr. Turner owns a very nice Bombardier CL-600 jet, but the carbon footprint of his jet must be tiny compared to that of his buffalo herd.

One difference between your dog and Mr. Turner’s buffalo is that people actually do eat his buffalo, so I’m not accusing Mr. Turner of anything here.  I’m still wondering about those pet-loving environmentalists who advocate reintroducing panthers, wolves, and other high-carbon-footprint predators into the environment, though.  Was there any discussion about this in Copenhagen?

Left-liberal Glenn Greenwald points out that the health industry’s stocks are exploding as Obamacare comes close to passing. This bill is a huge gift to big business, as much as its supporters and some of its opponents claim otherwise. In another post, he notes that the tea party movement and the progressive left, the latter of which opposes a health insurance mandate so long as it doesn’t have a public option, are actually more in agreement than people realize as it concerns their opposition to corporatism:

It’s certainly true that health care opponents on the left want more a expansive plan while opponents on the right want the opposite. But the objections over the mandate are largely identical — it’s a coerced gift to the private health insurance industry that underwrites the Democratic Party. The same was true over opposition to the bailout, objections to lobbying influence over Washington, and most of all, the growing anger that Washington serves the interests of financial elites at the expense of the working class.

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing: a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.