Immigration Reform: Why Obama and the Media Conservatives Are Wrong

Any faithful reader of my posts knows that I'm strongly pro-immigration reform. But I oppose both Obama, whom favors an alternative approach to reform, and the media conservatives, whom virulently oppose reform.

Obama is wrong in that his primary focus on low-skill immigration does not address our economy's need for knowledge workers for economic growth. Gordon Crovitz in today's Wall Street Journal column "We Need an Immigration Stimulus" points out that the waiting list for an H1B visa is 5 years, with just over 1 in 10 highly qualified applications approved, with artificially low quotas for countries like China and India. In addition, some 60% of those earning advanced degrees in engineering in the United States are foreign students; yet, many of those do not have an opportunity to stay and work in the United States. Our global competitors, including Canada and Singapore, are eager to take advantage of the United States' inexplicable policy of taking a pass on those benefiting from our world-class education or highly-skilled, motivated entrepreneurial professional workers.

Crovitz makes a convincing case for immigration, including more rapid economic growth during periods of high immigration and notes we are currently at low levels of immigration on a percentage basis. He points out that far out of proportion to their relative size in the population, immigrants hold more patents and start more job-producing businesses (e.g., nearly half in Silicon Valley alone).

Obama, in fact, during the unsuccessful 2007 drive for immigration reform, opposed reforms to end the practice of chained immigration (e.g., immigration of relatives, regardless of individual merit) and to put more emphasis on merit-based criteria (such as the ability to speak English and professional credentials).

The media conservatives, on the other hand, focus on the symptoms of a broken-down temporary worker system, i.e., illegal entry at the southern border with Mexico. The problem with the 1986 reform wasn't so much the lack of enforcement but the fact that there wasn't an agreement on an orderly flow for temporary low-skilled workers, which is fundamentally opposed by organized labor. There are only 5000 visas annually given for low-skilled positions.

Jason Riley in an April 20 WSJ op-ed entitled "Obama and the 'Amnesty' Trap" notes that the 1986 focused only on the temporary workers already here and in the labor force, not the future low-skilled labor needs for business. Obama's position simply to grant amnesty on grounds of compassion is unacceptable because it is simply "more of the same" of what we did in 1986--it refuses to address, in a realistic manner, the unsatisfied domestic need for low-skilled labor, and illegal entry of undocumented workers is what happens when the demand is there but US policy doesn't accommodate a more orderly, compassionate system for workers, most of whom are attracted by the lower wages and work circumstances (e.g., migrant farm labor) that many American workers aren't willing to fulfill.

Riley points out that FDR responded to labor-short farmers during WWII with the Bracero program, which enabled hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to work legally as seasonal workers; by the time the program ended in 1962 (under pressure from organized labor), illegal border crossings had dropped by almost 95%, not because of enhanced border enforcement.

Obama vs. the Media Conservatives

During the 2007 Immigration Reform battle, Obama refused to abide by the fragile bipartisan compromise whereby Republicans agreed, under certain conditions, to permanent legal worker status (including a path to citizenship) for undocumented workers in exchange for an end to chained immigration, a viable temporary worker program, and a more balanced, merit-based immigration framework. Obama was more interested in a policy empathetic to the plight of undocumented workers. The failure to support a guest worker program is a payoff to organized labor support, and another amnesty (after 1986) does nothing to address future low-skilled labor requirements and sets future expectations of a backdoor path to citizenship. More importantly, Obama ignores the pro-growth side of the immigration issue, namely a merit-based approach, along with revised quota allocations.

The media conservatives see the problem as being a law-and-order issue, but seem oblivious to the benefits of a temporary worker program in stemming illegal border crossings and the economic benefits involved with expanded merit-based immigration. In particular, I loathe the form of unbridled populism instigated by the media conservatives which all but shut down the Senate's attempt to resurrect the bill after the Democratic poison pills (supported by Obama) initially killed it. (We saw the same sort of thing happen over the straw man issue regarding AIG executive bonuses.) There is no doubt that some of that outrage reflects xenophobia or racism, which is unworthy of America and her immigrant roots. I have mentioned in other posts that in Texas I went to school with and taught Latinos and find that they typically have the same work ethic, dreams for a better future, and family values. We should not blame Latinos for the fact we have a dysfunctional guest worker program; that some who call themselves conservatives would oppose our reform steps is unconscionable.

Dr. George Zinkhan: A Former Student's Shock

In my recent "Need for Educational Choice" post*, I briefly mentioned that my MBA marketing administration professor had submitted a number of papers written in his course sections to some independent judge, and the latter had chosen my paper, describing the commercial failure of a computer application called CASHFAST, as the best of the group. Dr. George Zinkhan had stopped me in the hall to tell me the news (I was at the time now a PhD student with a shared office on the opposite end of the same floor as the marketing department); he quickly added he thought the same.

I had no idea when I went to ABC News' website to check out an alert that a University of Georgia professor was being pursued as a suspect in a multiple-murder case including his estranged wife, I would find the name of George Zinkhan and a photo of his familiar face. I hope to God that the rumors are not true, but there are enough circumstantial details that lead one to suspect it is true.

In my experience, George Zinkhan, as a professor, was very good and professional. I would never have expected these allegations; it doesn't fit with what I remember of the man. Yet something very wrong happened in Georgia, and nobody is above the law. I pray for the victims of this crime and tragedy and the children whom have lost their mother--and possibly the presence of their father in their lives. If and when Dr. Zinkhan is apprehended, I hope that he will be extended his full Constitutional rights, including that of a fair trial.

[7/28/12, further edits 8/18/12]. Corrections and follow-up: I originally referenced my academic retrospective Christmas Eve post; it was actually in a subsequent post, "Need for Educational Choice for Inner City Schools", when I first discussed Dr. Zinkhan. Second error: I identified victim murder Marie Bruce as Zinkhan's ex-wife (based on mistaken news accounts, e.g., click here); in fact, Zinkhan did have an ex-wife and children (from his first marriage) in Texas. Zinkhan was in the process of divorcing Marie Bruce but hoped for a reconciliation. Zinkhan's body was found a few days later a few miles away after the murders; he had shot himself in a covered self-dug grave. I do a follow-up on the Zinkhan story in my 7/22/12 post.

Courtesy AP

Miscellany: 4/24/09

Kudos to American Airlines...

for explicitly recognizing troops in a couple of symbolic ways on my trip from BWI to Dallas today. Maybe it's an everyday thing, and I just didn't know about it. But I was touched when I heard the agent at the gate invite the first-class passengers to board--and all uniformed military personnel as well. A fine young serviceman of color arrived at the gate area after the earlier announcements and was patiently waiting his turn; I went over to him and let him know he could board at any time, and he politely thanked me for the tip. I feel so blessed knowing that our country is protected by outstanding young men and women just like him. Also, the pilot let us know we were joined by several troops returning home from overseas duties, and the travelers all started clapping in appreciation.

Kudos Also to McDonald's....

The new Shrek promotion focuses on a healthier Happy Meal--white meat chicken nuggets, apple slices substituting for french fries, and low-fat mik in place of soda pop. As the owner of a few shares (ever since I made them the focal point of my capstone MBA business strategies course), I'm happy to see them moving in the right direction. Now if we can get them to do the same with adult combo meals, e.g., substituting a side salad with low-fat dressing versus fries and bottled water in place of soft drinks... I'm still hoping that the company will provide other alternatives as well, such as a choice of a whole wheat bun or a tuna wrap in lieu of Filet-O-Fish. There are things I question about McDonald's strategy, e.g., Boston Market. I always thought that the Carver sandwiches would have have nicely complemented their lunch fare, and I think that McDonald's could have sold a ton of rotisserie chickens to commuters going home and/or used the Boston Market formula to build up their long-elusive dinner crowd.

Garofalo Needs to Shut Up

Calling Tax Day tea party participants racists for opposing the policies of the worst tax-and-spender since LBJ and one of the least experienced Presidents in American history is ludicrous. It's not so much she opposes conservatives like myself; I'm used to people disagreeing with me. I just think uncivility is bad for business. I used to be one of Bruce Springsteen's biggest fans, but when he decided that people were as interested in his political rants as in his music, I lost interest and haven't bought an album since then.

Carrie Prejean, Miss California USA, is a Gift From God

I haven't watched a beauty pageant in years, and I'm glad to see we've gone past whether contestants believe in peace vs. war. But the vicious personal attacks against Carrie Prejean for saying she supports the traditional concept of marriage are unacceptable. It's even gotten to the point that people are claiming the runner-up DESPITE being given the most controversial question to answer would never have won anyway. Give me a break...

Plagiarism: A Cultural Concept?

In last week's book reviews, Christine Rosen took on Susan Blum's My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. I haven't had the time to read Ms. Blum's book yet, but as someone who taught classes as a graduate student and a full-time professor for 8 years, I feel my comments are relevant. Granted, I have not taught since the early 90's, and I'm sure with cellphones and, of course, the Internet boom, it has become more challenging to maintain academic honesty standards.

According to Ms. Rosen, Blum attempts to find a culturally-based explanation for why two-thirds of the college students surveyed admit to plagiarizing. She believes it has to do with coping for unrealistic expectations of success and a certain efficiency of effort so they can move on to the next item on their agendas. However, Blum quickly succumbs to the moral surrender of victimization theory: "We can only partly blame the individuals who cheat."

A few points. First, the results of self-report measures can be unreliable and reflect sampling bias and extraneous factors like social desirability (e.g., telling the survey people what they think they want to hear). Second, I really don't think that students are all that different. Granted, technology has made it more convenient and easier to cheat, but students have always been under pressure with expectations (getting into medical school and the like), and plagiarism is expedient. Third, students sometimes cheat because they can. No one who cheats expects to be caught. I've seen A students do it. Why? I personally think it's the thrill and danger, the challenge of pulling it off right under the professor's nose; they think they are above suspicion and perhaps a little narcissistic, thinking the same rules don't apply to them.

Are the professors really as clueless or hapless as Blum seems to suggest? Probably not. I and others uncovered and took action in multiple cases. But there are other salient issues in terms of time and effort in pursuing cheating, and especially for those of us untenured professors, there was a lot of political pressure not to pursue the matter. I mention two such incidents in passing in my Christmas Eve post.

At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I had assigned group projects in my graduate systems analysis course. The group consisted of a few foreign students from east Asia. They decided to submit a paper on certain techniques with which, unknown to them, I was especially well-read. I recognized the original passages and even the use of secondary sources. The paper was little more than stitched-together paragraphs from multiple sources, copied verbatim without attribution to the sources they used, definitely in the tradition of what Blum calls "patchwork". Literally the only thing original about that paper was the title.

What readers who have not been in academia may not know is that I simply couldn't just fail them on the assignment, but I had to work within the defined process: there was a limited time after they submitted their work for me to file academic dishonesty charges. I had to document the cheating, and they had a right to respond to the charges. I remember at the time I needed a copy of the last original source. I went to the library and (of course) found the book had been recently renewed. I tried to get them to recall the book; they refused. I couldn't get anything through interlibrary loan within the available window of time. I couldn't even get them to confirm the identity of the person checking out the book because it violated the student's "right to privacy". Yes, nothing quite like a librarian trying to rationalize aiding and abetting academic dishonesty. Never mind the fact the library's actions undermined the whole concept of an author's intellectual property, which constitutes the very essence of a library.

I really had more than enough evidence and called in the group of students. (I have been told I can be quite intimidating.) Almost immediately 3 of the students confessed and apologized profusely. The remaining student was angry, defiant, and unapologetic. He dismissed plagiarism as a quaint American construct and obsession. I made it clear to the tough guy that this was not acceptable behavior and any further incidents would result in more serious charges. I could have put them in danger of washing out of the MBA program by issuing C's or lower in the course, but I felt that they deserved a second chance.

The new Indian MIS professor next fall decided to pick up the graduate DSS course I voluntarily relinguished in making what turned out to be a bad decision to teach COBOL at the undergraduate level. A few weeks into the semester, he knocked on my office door and asked me to read a paper one of his students submitted, thinking it sounded "too professional." I instantly recognized it as verbatim from a classic MIS paper on group DSS written by the late Gerry DeSanctis. I was so focused on the content, it wasn't until some time later that I checked out the student's name--and was stunned to see it was the very same rogue plagiarizer.

I then went down the hall to stick my head in my friend Bob's office. I mentioned the guy's name to Bob and asked him if he had had the same guy in any of his classes. He said that he had had the guy the prior semester. I asked, by chance, if he still had any of the guy's work; Bob said he didn't think so, unless the guy didn't pick up his paper from outside Bob's door. As luck would have it, he never picked it up. (Why should he? He still had copies of the original sources...) Bob had given him a B+ on the paper. I glanced at the paper--and this time it got personal: He had patchworked the paper from the books I required in my system analysis course. I went to get my copy of an IEEE volume of readings and started pointing out the stolen passages. Bob now was fully engaged, uttering an expletive and asking me for my class texts, as he became obsessed with putting together the patchwork.

In the meanwhile, word of the serial plagiarizer surfaced in our informal MIS department. A well-known female MIS professor was indignant that I allegedly was violating the student's rights and had no right to know what he was doing in any other class. The male informal chairman of our area argued that I was sabotaging their foreign student recruitment program.

My two junior faculty colleagues caved in to political pressure and refused to pursue the matter any further. I got nowhere with the Dean's office; they refused to take action against the student, despite the evidence, and made it clear that any attempt to file a grade change (which would have resulted from changing his project grade to an F) would be quashed as unacceptable double jeopardy. (The facts that the student did not earn the grade he got and did not live up to terms of our agreement in good faith were irrelevant to the administrators.)

It was at the time I decided to escalate the matter to the university administration. It really wasn't about the student per se. It was because there was a systemic failure of others in the system to do the right thing. The fact that I was personally attacked (not the student) reflects the integrity of the people with whom I was working.

But to be honest, I wasn't that surprised. Early in my stay at UWM, another faculty member related to me the experience of another faculty member. He had administered multiple-choice tests on mark sense forms. He naturally got suspicious when students started complaining that there were mechanical scoring errors made because they had correct answers scored as errors. The professor suspected they were cheating by changing their answers. To test this theory, he made copies of the next exam's mark sense forms before handing them back. Sure enough, the dishonest students went to the well once too often. Students caught cheating often respond with ferocity (I think due to loss of face).

Another instance of academic dishonesty surfaced during my stay at the University of Texas at El Paso. (UTEP had recruited me primarily due to my research record and their pending application for business school certification. I'm not saying my resume made the difference, but the chairman of the department was eager to close the deal to get my resume in the file on time.)

To provide a proper context, I was teaching a database management course; my syllabus clearly stated that homework assignments (roughly 10% of the course grade) were not group assignments, but were to be the student's own work. This one exercise focused on learning basic SQL, a basic language used to retrieve desired data from a database. The exercise included description of a 15-column table, and one of my first questions involved specifying a command to return all the data in the table. I expected a simple command like select * from mytable; About 6 papers into the batch I was grading, I found an unconventional response. This student decided to write out all 15 column names (instead of '*')--but not only that, but the column names appeared in a random (vs. sequential) order. And then a few papers later, I found the very same thing: not only a random ordering of column names, but the same random order of column names. At that point I put the assignments side-by-side, and all the responses were clones, including for less structured questions.

At the beginning of the next lecture, I mentioned that I had come across papers that violated my syllabus academic honesty policy and reminded the students of the policy. At that point, one of the young ladies at the front of the class asked if she was one of the students. She, in fact, was, but I refused to acknowledge it, saying I would deal with the students in private at a later time. The young lady was not satisfied. She raised her voice at me saying, "I'm not a cheater--I don't need to cheat. I'm an A student. They'll never believe you; they won't let you do anything to me." I had never, in the pursuit of my 4 degrees, personally seen a student throw a temper tantrum in any class. This was escalating out of control: Do I call campus security? Do I dismiss the class? If I respond too strongly, the students will side with their peer; if I refuse to meet the challenge, I appear weak. I calmly suggested that we should talk about this after class. She responded, "No! I want to talk about it RIGHT NOW." I was about to dismiss the class when one of the female students in the front row cautiously expressed support for the idea that the matter should be discussed outside of class. One or two others chimed in their support for the same, and the angry woman, finding no support for her approach, retreated with folded arms across her chest, glowering at me for the remainder of the lecture.

I momentarily forgot about the student waiting to see me after class, dropping by my office on the way to lunch with some colleagues when I hear my office door slam shut behind me. It was the young woman still seething at me. This was not good; a single white male professor alone with a coed behind a closed door is in a politically precarious situation. I told her to open the door. She refused. She then drew a deep breath and then out a blood-curdling scream, "I am not a cheater!" I can see professors through my window pane coming out of their offices looking in the direction of my office. I demanded that she leave my office immediately. She refused. I then walked out of my own office and went to lunch, leaving her there.

The girl decided to appeal to the Dean of Students Office. In fact, I never met with the Dean in person, and at no time was I invited to a meeting or asked to respond to any allegation from the student or her cronies. That's how the university operated under the unconscionable, pathetic leadership of Diana Natalicio. The fact that the evidence of wrongdoing was overwhelming, not to mention the fact that I never identified the student as a suspect, but she outed herself in front of a full class. Her strategy seemed to be pressuring other students to falsely allege that I had orally contradicted the policy I specified in my syllabus. One of the students in question came to me and told me what was going on. She had other classes with him, including on a project. But once there, he refused to go along with her allegations--and found the Dean of Student Affairs arguing with him, saying the student was in the tank for me. He was very concerned because she responded to his "betrayal" by locking him out of the computer project they were assigned to in another class, and he wanted my advice or help in dealing with the issue. And I have to smile at his response when I thanked him for his support. He responded impatiently, " I didn't do it for YOU. I did it because of THE TRUTH." He was the kind of man whom gives me hope for the next generation. I have one of the few photos ever taken of me as a professor; he had dropped by my office before leaving for the MBA program at the University of Virginia, saying he liked to have pictures of people whom made a difference in his academic career.

The Dean of the Students continued on his personal bizarre prosecution of me. One day I answer my phone, and he's on the line. "You better not do it." "What in the world are you talking about?" "You know what you did--don't insult me!" I really had no clue. I never had a discussion with the young woman after she invaded my office. It was like getting blood from a stone. I eventually flesh out that the student told me I had threatened to blacklist her with employers. First, that never happened. I've never made a threat like that in my life to any person. Second, I was a first-semester professor--I didn't even have any industry contacts. I was in the publish-or-perish game. No one in industry during my 5 years ever paid me a dime or even made an offer for consulting. Why did the young woman smear me? I eventually discovered that before the incident, this woman--who never had me in a prior class and did not know me--had started listing me as a reference in applications she was sending out. Now she was in a state of panic over what I might tell them. It never even occurred me to me someone I didn't know would use me as a reference without my knowledge or consent. I think I got one postcard from a New York area employer and acknowledged knowing her but had nothing further to add.

The Dean of Students decided that the young woman won her appeal and demanded I give her full academic merit for her assignment. I simply refused to acknowledge the farce. And then, on the very next assignment after the kangaroo court decision--the same two students did it again. Surprise, surprise. Keep in mind we are talking about 10% or so of the final grade over multiple assignments.

I faced some of the very same types of problems Blum mentioned, twenty years ago. Grade inflation, coddling parents, students with unrealistic expectations, bad study habits and inadequate preparation for the courses they were taking, poor writing skills and study habits, etc. I think many of my colleagues simply gave up and went with the flow. (I had one colleague whom simply gave his programming students pseuodcode for their programming assignments, so they were little more than typing exercises with minor tweaks.) I made a decision when I was a professor that the buck stopped with me; there is not a lot I can do to make up for years of incompetent teaching and parenting, but when I found I had MIS major seniors in my classes at UTEP whom couldn't write a computer program on their own, I refused to simply give up on my students. I at least had control of what was going on in my classroom, and I had to accept my professional responsibility to make the best of the hand I was dealth. Parents who enforce the rules will tell you they aren't always popular with their kids. I wasn't there to make students feel good about themselves; I was their teacher.

Miscellany: 4/19/09

Oregon's Plan to Banish Your Beer Belly

As much as Sarah Palin used to talk about her affinity with "Joe Six-Pack", the fact is that Alaska had the nation's highest beer tax. Until now.

[As an aside, my MIS students at the University of Houston had colorful ways of referencing my exams. One student complained that taking one of my exams was like having a lobotomy. But one of my favorites was when a group of students told me how they rated my exams: by how many beers it took to forget them.]

Oregon's Democrats have found a way to pay for the budget they raised by over 25% last year, according to the Wall Street Journal: they're considering raising the beer tax from under $3 to over $52/barrel. Now isn't that a fair way to balance a budget deficit--by hitting up the average joe stopping by the bar for a cold one on his way home from a hard day's work? But maybe those wily Democrats are onto something: the average joe is going to have to drink a lot of beers to forget that 1900% increase in tax.

Two Victories for Common Sense

Spain's Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido Thursday criticized and opposed the prosecution of former Bush Administration officials in Spain, based on a human rights group's filing under activist Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon, widely known for his efforts to go after former Chilean dictator Pinochet. The attorney general said that this matter was best left to the American legal system and should focus on parties directly involved in alleged acts of torture. Whereas this does not necessarily put the matter to rest, it does rightly note the primacy of the American legal system in addressing this issue, and it does recognize the chilling effect such a prosecution would have on legal advisors giving candid advice to a chief executive.

I have previously expressed support for Obama's observation, in reaction to the Angry Left's demands that the Obama Administration criminalize political differences of opinion with the Bush Administration, that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past". Attorney General Holder made the right call in concluding that it's "unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department."

I do agree with former CIA director Hayden and Attorney General Mukasey, in Friday's Wall Street Journal column, that Obama was ill-advised to release various memoes and to tie the hands of interrogators to techniques discussed under the Army field manual: i.e., "the point of interrogation is intelligence, not confession." Let's put this in terms most Americans would understand: how many games of poker would you win if you showed everyone the hand you're playing, but your opponents continued to hide their own?

The Angry Left is going off the deep end, complaining Obama's measured decision undoes the good done by the Nuremberg trials. They have their priorities completely backwards. The persons best compared to Nazi war criminals are the international murderers whom targeted innocent civilians as in 9/11, not the patriots doing whatever it takes to get the intelligence on upcoming operations they need from high-value targets like Khalid Mohammed. We already know what people like Khalid Mohammed think about human rights and international treaties.

More on the Congress' Ill-Advised Lead Content Law

Dr. Beck commented on the Wall Street Journal's April 3 "Toys R Congress" editorial, which I cited in a previous post. (The lead content law has been enforced to eliminate several child-oriented goods, including motorbikes, from the marketplace.) "Our study [based on a US EPA model] found a child's intake of lead from riding an ATV or motorbike would be less than the typical intake of lead in food or drinking water, and would have no measurable impact on blood lead levels."

She continues, "The results of our study show the fundamental flaw with the product safety law passed by Congress last year. The law does not allow a risk-based approach to determine compliance or to support exclusions from the lead standard...If exposures to lead, or any other chemical, are very low, there will be no health effects. This point is particularly significant when applied to lead, because lead is naturally-occurring and can be found in air, water and soil, even in the absence of human activities."

Is it really a surprise that politicians and government regulators lack the scientific expertise to properly draft and enforce a risk-based approach to regulate lead-content in consumer goods? And the result of such badly drafted laws is a pointless reduction in consumer products and choices?

Health Care Insurance: What the Democrats Aren't Telling You

If you listen to the Democrats, they'll tell you that capitalism doesn't work when it comes to health care: government inherently has economies of scale, is quicker to accept technological solutions including digitization of medical records, etc. You'll then hear a couple of solutions to the health care problem: Expand the access of Medicare to everyone; enroll all comers to the same program that federal employees have access to.

Let's point out the obvious: there are real problems: Medical bills are a major motivation for declaring bankruptcy. Costs are rising. Primary care physicians in health care networks are increasingly reluctant to take on new patients. Hospitals are having to pass on the costs of non-paying patients to other patients or health care plans. Primary care doctors are finding it more difficult to match patients with preferred specialists that operate within the patient's network plan. Many people are not being diagnosed in early stages of serious health problems (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, and cancer) when it's more cost-effective and in the best interests of the patient.

Dr. Mark Siegal discussed some of these key issue in his April 17 WSJ column, "When Doctors Opt Out". He succinctly points out, "The Obama administration [promises] that universal health insurance will avoid all these problems. But how is that possible when you consider that the medical turnstiles will be the same as they are now, only they will be clogged with more and more patients? The doctors that remain in this expanded system will be even more overwhelmed than we are now." Amen.

My first information technology job was as a computer programmer/analyst in the property casualty division of a major insurance company. I remember talking to one of the actuaries about various legislative proposals going around at the time and was dumbfounded to learn that she actually opposed mandatory insurance legislation: how could that be when you're guaranteed paying customers? She explained that existing coverages reached something like, say, 75% of the target population, but mandatory insurance effectively only added a few percentage points above that--at an exorbitant price.

Mitt Romney, who probably should have been McCain's running mate last year and is the probable frontrunner for the 2012 nomination, may very well find that his embrace of the grand health care experiment in Massachusetts will be a political issue, at least in the GOP prmaries. The Massachusetts program costs are spiraling out of control, and that's with hardship exemptions for people not qualifying for government subsidies and with difficult budget constraints.

To be sure, there are philosophical differences between conservatives and libertarians over the very concept of government mandating health care: what place is it of government to tell citizens they must purchase health care insurance? For example, why should an in-shape young man, with low health risks, essentially subsidize the bad health decisions of older Americans? What will the government do next: arrest a fat man buying a Twinkie, a woman carrying a Down syndrome child, or a middle-aged person putting off his colonoscopy?

My own view is that a mandate of some kind is in order in the sense that catastrophic costs must be spread across all Americans and life isn't fair (e.g., young people, even children, sometimes contract fatal diseases or suffer debilitating accidents). I am an advocate of catastrophic health insurance which would limit the amount of out-of-pocket expenses in a year. I am also in favor of tax-advantaged health savings plans which provide an incentive for consumers to spend health care products and services more efficiently and improved web-accessible product and service databases (an extension, for instance, of what former Governor Jeb Bush did in Florida).

I also believe that we need to address health care provider issues, particularly, on the government side, with long-overdue malpractice insurance reform, onerous paperwork requirements, and fairer, more timely compensation. On the consumer side, we need to deregulate health insurance providers facing a byzantine patchwork of idiosyncratic state benefit mandates and enrollment policies, and we must provide equal protection of tax-advantaged health care benefits to remedy the status quo whereby those consumers without employer health care benefits must pay for insurance, good or services with after-tax dollars. This is a point former President Bush and Republican nominee John McCain both explicitly addressed.

The Obamaian solution is incompatible with the vision I've just outlines. There are a couple of recent Wall Street Journal op-ed's which should be mandatory reading for the American citizen and voter.

Kerry Weems, a former head of Medicare and Medicaid, and Benjamin Sasse wrote an April 14 column entitled "Is Government Health Care Cheap?" They correctly maintain that the liberals' favorable comparison between government and private sector administrative costs is intentionally misleading, because the government sector involves benefit payments, while private health care is in the managed care business. The government basically sets a take-it-or-leave-it schedule of payments, typically below market rates and requiring paperwork which often isn't even worth the physician's while to complete, while the private sector must negotiate rates with groups of providers. The authors make a compelling argument that private sector players are subsidizing whatever government (Medicare or Medicaid) business doctors are accepting. This is a critical point when you consider that shifting the primary provider to the government would change the dynamics because the shrinking private sector cannot subsidize government participants at a higher scale. Second, the government essentially allows all doctors to participate (beyond, say, rudimentary criteria like a criminal record check), while the private sector is more selective. Third, the government underinvests in anti-fraud measures, which the private sector cannot afford to do. The authors contend that the Medicare payment fraud results in over $10B of losses each year, and Medicaid-related fraud in 2007 amounted to over $30B! They say that despite some evidence of a 13-to-1 payback for anti-fraud investment, our Congressmen, in their infinite political wisdom, saw it as a zero-sum game with cancer research and anti-obesity campaigns. Yes, the very same geniuses whom insist we must rush to judgment in passing reform in the middle of a recession, involving a growing portion of our GNP; making the wrong decisions could create massive losses compounded annually... Finally, the private sector has certain marketing and other (e.g., regulatory compliance) expenses that the public sector doesn't have and has certain scale advantages, e.g., inserting Medicare notices with social security checks.

The April 12 WSJ editorial, entitled "The End of Private Health Insurance", points out the inevitable conclusion from the government essentially competing against private sector carriers. It argues that the government will compete unfairly, heavily subsidizing costs for rates susceptible to political vs. actuarially-sound considerations, using the printing presses of the US Treasury to back up operational losses. For example, on average, Medicare pays 71% of what hospitals charge the private sector and 81% of customary physician charges. As the government begins to dominate the market, it becomes the price maker and can basically cripple the industry by adding benefit mandates. Many companies will likely dump their health care plans, one of the highest rising labor costs to which they are exposed. The private sector hence will have fewer policyholders to cover their fixed costs. The natural response of businesses under these circumstances would be to consolidate, leaving the American consumer with even fewer choices.

There is no doubt that the status quo needs reform: as Dr. Siegal described above, he is finding it harder and harder to match specialists he recommends whom are acceptable under a patient's health plan network. Too many citizens are not getting proactive health care that can limit the costs of catastrophic illness that ultimately all of us must cover. Too many private health plans look to cherrypick policyholders, for example, refusing to cover and manage the costs of preexisting conditions. Too many doctors find that they must spend more time processing paperwork and working around constraints of patients' health care carriers than on doctoring.

The solution is NOT to do with health care what the Democrats did in supporting the expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with an unfair competitive funding advantage of the US Treasury against private players in the secondary market. In fact, I believe that government is largely responsible for the current state of affairs, which had its genesis in giving businesses a tax-advantaged workaround to wage/price controls and to the present stiffing doctors with overdue underpayments and voluminous paperwork and saddling private sector with having to subsidize uninsured patients and Medicare/Medicaid--and the American taxpayer for failing to invest in anti-fraud. Does the American taxpayer really want the same people responsible for the mess we're in to be trusted with monopoly control over the US health care system? That's the Obama vision and solution, one which we cannot afford.

The Tea Parties: Why I Didn't Participate

I consider myself a problem solver and inherently distrust marches or protests, which I see primarily as unconstructive and just a qualitative step away from the contagion of uncivility and mass riots and unjust attacks against people and the property of other people, whom worked, saved, and invested to buy a house or create a business.

In questioning rallies, I'm hardly espousing relativistic ambivalence to the truth or intellectual surrender of moral and political principle. It's more that I consider them to be ripe grounds for emotional manipulation, and I'm more intrinsically interested in the free market of ideas and solutions, which are missing from a kumbaya moment of Obamaian ethereal ecstasy, complete with mantra chanting of vacuous slogans.

My distaste for these contrived events stems from my years at Our Lady of the Lake, located in a poor, heavily Hispanic section of south San Antonio. Operated by the Sisters of Divine Providence, the college and its faculty were very progressive (i.e., liberal), with many sisters living not in the convent on campus but in the surrounding area. I mentioned in a prior post being required by an OLL professor to attend a campus lecture by then unknown Alex Haley on what later became the basis of an American television phenomenon, "Roots".

Even in those salad days of being a liberal, I chafed at the excesses. In one case, I heard a federal investigation cite, among other things, our wonderful but small philosophy department didn't have sufficient Hispanic representation, with tenured professors Rev. James Lonergan, with an Irish background, and Sister Mary Christine Morkovsky (of Czech descent). I have no doubt if class enrollments justified it and qualified Hispanic candidates were available and interest, they would have been given full consideration.

But in particular, I recall many Mexican-American students, some of them friends whom lived in the same dorm, noisily picketing in front of the school early in my tenure, winning coveted local news coverage. In some cases, I could barely hear my professors lecture. Particularly odious were the baseless smears, including a racist charge against one of my professors, a sister of Divine Providence. I was motivated enough to sign a petition disavowing the protests.

I had the greatest respect for my Chicano colleagues, many of whom were first-generation college students from migrant families with limited means. My best friend Ramon, an education major who graduated the year before me, once went with me to a UT recruiting event at the college; I was hoping to go to graduate school there. The recruiters mobbed Ramon just as soon as he entered the room, while barely even acknowledging my presence. Ramon was embarrassed by the disparity of attention he was receiving, based primarily on his ethnicity, pleading with them to talk to me instead. The point is, I never saw the need for the protests and people using the occasions to rationalize uncivil acts by mobs. The college has eagerly embraced ethnic students and has had outstanding programs in education and social work.

The tea party theme arose with CNBC's Rick Santelli, whose famous rant against subsidizing the mortgages of other workers included a proposal to have a Chicago tea party on the Fourth of July. Over time the date changed to Tax Day and parties mushroomed across the United States.

The tea party theme , of course, focused on taxes and spending, and anyone who has read my posts knows I see high taxes and spending as anti-growth, and I am also concerned about regulations, which I see as an implicit form of taxation.

The problem I have with the tea parties, which were intentionally antiestablishmentarian with Republican leaders such as RNC Chairman Michael Steele denied access to the podium, is that it is very difficult to channel these concepts into responsible government, and quite often populist responses focus on the wrong questions.

The Obamaian strategy has been to coopt the GOP strategy of lowering taxes by trumping any Republican tax cut proposals for the majority of household wage earners, willing to cede the votes of higher earners, a small minority of voters. What's harder to conceptualize is the fact there aren't enough high earners, and one is reminded of the famous saying by anti-Nazi Pastor Martin Niemoller:

In Germany they first came for the Communists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me —

and by that time no one was left to speak up.

The ironic thing is that when you add the households that dropped out of paying federal income taxes under the Bush tax plans to the additional ones from the Obama program, you have nearly half of American worker households whom not only do not pay any federal income tax but (if anything) feel entitled to refundable tax credits. Never mind the question of moral hazards: what we have here is not the American Revolution's theme of taxation without representation, but representation without taxation. A representation which has no stake in careful spending of other people's tax money, other than this vague notion that future generations will be on the hook for the exploding Obamaian federal deficit.

It's really tough to do the responsible thing, and the easiest thing for Congress to do is paper over the differences and let the next Congress deal with the real problems. Let me give an example from my computer consulting experience. A few years back I was looking into a proposed project which involved upgrading an Oracle WebDB application to Portal at a Navy base in southern Maryland. The problem was that Oracle had desupported WebDB a couple of years earlier, and the Navy administrators of the application had ignored desupport notices. There was one supported upgrade path for WebDB, but it required installing an interim version of Oracle's flagship application server--which had also been obsoleted, and Oracle Support has a policy of refusing to release obsoleted products. When I complained to the Oracle representative, I was curtly told that the Navy should have thought about it years earlier, because desupport is always announced ahead of time.

Similarly, I have found Luddism alive and well in other bureaucracies as well. When Oracle desupported its character-mode interface of Oracle Financials in place of a less usable, menu-driven front-end, I found myself attacked by staff accountants, whom were reacting to false rumors of problematic upgrades and more time-consuming "busy work" to perform core tasks.

You see, Obama has been preaching change, but the proof of real change is in the pudding. If you are not talking about streamlining how government operates, eliminating turf battles among redundant or overlapping government agencies, but simply negotiating the amount of percentage increase in agency budgets, you are not talking real change, but more of the same.

Spending cuts are never popular, particularly for recipients of the program and the bureaucracies that serve them. Efforts to contain the federal deficit have been almost laughable. Just look at the trouble the Pentagon has had trying to close redundant domestic military bases or seeing politically powerful Congressmen pushing constituent-produced military goods on the Pentagon that it didn't request or want. Even when it comes to obviously inappropriate earmarks, the Congress has been brazen; former Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican, threatened his Congressional party colleagues at the time with his own resignation if they didn't go along with funding for the infamous Bridge to Nowhere.

It exasperates me when the opposition responds by pointing out earmarks are a materially insignificant portion of the national budget. Are you kidding me? If you have a pest problem with bugs showing themselves in your residence in the light of day, do you regard that as an anomaly or indicative of a far worse problem, say that you might discover by turning on the kitchen lights in the dead of night?

To be fair, conservatives do try to personalize effects of Obama/Democrat overspending through metrics such as dividing the amount of new spending by the target number of new jobs, or averaging the accumulative deficit on a household level. But on a political level, it's very tough to win seats playing the role of bad cop to the Democrats' promises of financially irresponsible new entitlements.

The liberal mass media unfairly portrayed Obama's full-court press on passing a nearly $800B so-called stimulus package, with no real attempt in the House of Representatives to negotiate and the Senate Democrats focusing not on providing an authentic bipartisan mandate, but strictly a strategy of peeling off enough liberal Republican senators to ward off a filibuster. The nearly unanimous Republican rejection of both the stimulus and 2010 budget, representing the largest fiscal expansion in American history, was characterized as "obstructionist". Based on what? Republicans, hoping to compromise, were told "elections have consequences". John McCain, who last fall gave arguably the most honorable concession speech in American history, found no Democrats willing to compromise anything material.

Oh, to be sure, the 3 Republican senators who negotiated a filibuster bypass of the stimulus bill (Collins, Snowe and Specter) have argued the stimulus bill would have been larger. Let's get this straight: given evidence that the sham justification for the bill's speedy passage--multi-multiplier infrastructure projects--would have only minor disbursements over the short term, how can the referenced senators justify the fact that several federal agencies got double-digit or higher increases? Why was it necessary to put anything beyond modest relief spending increases (to cover unemployment/COBRA extensions) and some merit-based infrastructure spending in the measure? Why was it, given the prospect of lower than expected federal revenues, we didn't see any meaningful federal cutbacks? Oh, but in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of progressive economics, retention of unnecessary federal workers duplicating public services is seen as an "economic stimulus". The mass media and liberal politicians call private sector bankers, stiffed by homeowners not paying off their mortgages, as "greedy", but when government regulators fail to do their job and anticipate the problem, there are no calls for their termination.

Their reward? Political attacks for downsizing state/local bailout money. Has the liberal mass media focused on reckless activities of Democrats over the years, expanding programs and ignoring pension funding issues, leaving future legislators with the hard decisions to make? Now we have rainy days, where is the progressives' rainy day fund? Instead, we are facing the reality of the progressives' Ponzi scheme on the American taxpayer. Never mind the disgraceful AIG failure to post reserves for their credit default swaps: how could progressives fund programs, not anticipating the likely event of revenue shortfalls in the event of a recession? And these same Democrats hypocritically dare to attack bailouts in the financial sector of the economy?

This leads me back to a point raised earlier about the populists focusing on the wrong issue. Let's recall the AIG issue and the infamous contract bonuses. The fact is, AIG could have gone into bankruptcy, in which the contracts could have been nullified. Or the government could have negotiated, as the condition of a bailout, that management agree to waive or defer contract bonuses; chances are, the managers, facing a choice between a bailout and the uncertainty associated with bankruptcy, would have voluntarily agreed. Instead, the press painted a picture of the American taxpayer essentially subsidizing, ex post facto, the extra pay of incompetent managers. Not a word about incompetent government regulators, incompetent government negotiators, incompetent bond raters (whom retained AIG's AAA rating for too long, when AIG clearly wasn't managing risk), etc.

Instead, what we see is a rotation of government, not a change in or of government. We see that the Democrats, who failed to balance the federal budget in the decades preceding the 1994 GOP takeover, have failed to balance the budget since their return to power in 2006 and will continue to fail to balance the budget in the foreseeable future.

We have a President whom is long on rhetoric but short on results. We have fellow citizens unable to recognize a President's paying lip service vs. material, authentic change. "By their fruits you will know them."

Obama continues to build on a long history of Democratic politically convenient policy nuances, e.g., "I personally oppose abortion, but I support a woman's right to choose". For example, Obama opposes vouchers for private school enrollment, but he supports (state-supported) charter schools.

Let's go to Obama's lip service to charter schools: How much of the $100B of education spending in the so-called stimulus bill will provide meaningful competitive educational choice for students from limited-means households? What we see is unprecedented amounts of money going to the SAME public school administrators and the SAME public school teachers. The same ones, for example that, despite all the money thrown at them over the years, result in abysmal mean educational performance and graduation rates at Detroit schools.

Remember Obama's emotional appeal during his State of the Union address over funds to rebuild a crumbling South Carolina public school? No discussion, of course, on the implications on local and state accountability for public school infrastructure or even on appeals for community volunteers to repaint the school and make repairs. (I don't think Obama's union bosses would much care for that idea.)

Kevin Ferris, in the April 10 Wall Street Journal, points out that banks are reluctant to lend to charter schools, typically without startup building funding, because their funding is only guaranteed for 5 years. Jay Greene, in an April 16 column entitled "The Union War on Charter Schools", cites Eva Moskowitz, former NYC Council education committee chair, whom described "a union-political-educational complex that is trying to halt progress and put the interests of adults above the interests of children." He references a number of studies demonstrating comparative advantages of charter school students, most notably a study by Harvard economist Tom Kane which showed independently-operated charter school students significantly outperformed students whom lost the lottery and returned to regular district schools--but charter schools staffed by unionized teachers and run by school districts had no such performance advantages. Greene notes that NYC teacher unions have managed to use undemocratic "card checks", the same issue that recently failed to overcome filibuster obstacles in the U.S. Senate, to unionize two successful charter schools, and the unions are backing a likely budget that cuts over $50M from charter school funding, which is already less per-pupil than district schools and is not supplemented by local tax revenue or stimulus subsidies.

And that's on top of efforts by Obama's former Illinois Senate colleague Dick Durbin's efforts to quash funding of vouchers for private schools, which enable DC students to attend the same type of private school that the President's daughters attend (Quaker-run Sidwell Friends).

We conservatives have seen this game before, and we know how the game ends. The Democrats used the ruse of a global economic slowdown to push through unprecedented money, not for legitimate short-term relief spending but for pent-up demand for domestic program spending.

The problem is that Republicans have a hard time tapping into the current anxiety over chronic Democratic tax and spend policies--precisely because they lost their hard-earned 1994 reformist credentials. The public saw them as becoming corrupted by power, with politicians like Ted Stevens pushing for inherently indefensible chucks of public appropriations. The Republicans also lost credibility by expanding the deficit and by Bush's miscues on things like Katrina and nominating cronies like Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales for positions above their level of competence.

There are ways to channel this unrest. I'll simply outline a few hints here. First, the Republicans have to freshen their message. They cannot continue to repeat the 1980 election time and again; when the Republicans make their message that predictable, they are playing in the opposition's hands. There are messages that aren't working, including the point about private accounts for social security. Second, they need to acknowledge past mistakes and outline constructive steps they are taking to regain the public trust. Among other things, this might include every Republican candidate promising no earmarks and subscribing to ethics above the minimum required for the Congress. Third, they need to embrace simplicity, including taxation, by which savings and investment are encouraged and everyone, including lower middle-class households, are vested in an efficiently-run federal government. Fourth, they need to convince the American people that they are better stewards of public revenues. There are a variety of approaches; for example, Detroit requires its parts suppliers to cut their costs annually. Why not do the same with federal programs? What about increasing the internal rate of return on social security and Medicare reserves, thus limiting the need for future payroll tax increases? Fifth, they need to focus on simplifying the interface between government and businesses or households, e.g., single points of contact for regulation, lower reporting requirements. Sixth, they need to define alternative approaches to Obama's priorities on education, health care and energy. For example, just as deregulation led to lower prices and costs in trucking and brokerage trading charges, we should argue for deregulation for health care providers. Seventh, they need to focus on smarter government management: citizen-friendly metrics and benchmarks and improved business practices and management control (including fraud detection).

Miscellany: 4/14/09

Obama and the Rescue of Captain Phillips

Some conservatives (e.g., Sean Hannity) are reluctant to give Obama recognition for the flawless Navy Seal liberation of the courageous captured ship captain from Somalian pirates, claiming his involvement was pro forma.

I'm going give Obama credit since as Commander in Chief, he accepts responsibility or blame for the performance of the Armed Forces. However, if he thinks this is the end of it, he's sadly mistaken: he must not confuse treating symptoms for curing the underlying disease. This hijacking was not typical, the Somali pirates are vowing vengeance against the United States, and the de facto response of the international community to date has been to negotiate paying a tribute. We cannot tolerate this challenge to international law of the seas. There is some buzz about the Pentagon making contingency plans to attack Eyl, the Somalian pirate hub. Obama must ensure that the Somali rogues know the U.S. has a zero tolerance policy on acts of piracy against American ships, and any future attacks will result in an overwhelming response.

Obama to Resurrect Immigration "Reform"?

There are reports (i.e., from the New York Times) that the labor unions will agree to amnesty of undocumented workers in exchange to no meaningful temporary worker program.

First, I see no deal possible without sharp restrictions on chained immigration, an increased emphasis on merit-based factors and more balanced international immigration. Second, in no case should someone whom entered the country without authorized entry be given preferential treatment for citizenship. Third, the labor union quid pro quo--no orderly flow for guest workers--is a non-starter. The reason that we see illegal entry is precisely because of the fact that the guest worker program is broken. Fourth, without viable border protection in place, this just sets up the same game to be played 20 years for now, with new unauthorized workers feeling they'll be given amnesty in the future.

I think part of the rationale for Obama's manic frenzy of overloading his plate during the first year of his Presidency is his anticipation that a typical mid-term gain by the opposition party will weaken his hand. However, he may need a reality check. For example, McCain, a leading GOP voice on immigration, is facing a reelection battle in Arizona, where many conservatives are still fuming over his stand, and McCain during the campaign made an issue of Obama's poison pill votes and made it clear that an unbalanced immigration deal, just like the one the labor unions signed off on, is dead on arrival as far as the GOP is concerned.

In any event, you don't have to be a political genius to know with 8.5%-plus unemployment, immigration reform is a longshot; it was a white-hot issue in a full-employment economy back in early 2007. The last thing a political realist Obama would want to do is put Democrats in competitive districts and states on the hot seat where their vote could become an election issue next year.

Caroline Kennedy Vetoed as U.S. Diplomat to the Vatican

Fresh off her unsuccessful anomalous campaign for Secretary of State Clinton's former Senate seat, Caroline Kennedy, a nominal Catholic whom emphasized her support for unrestricted abortion, embryonic stem cell research, and gay marriage as a potential senator, has been rejected by the Holy See. In an environment where American bishops are debating whether pro-choice Catholic legislators should be denied communion, the fact that Obama would name a Catholic diplomat at odds with Pope Benedict's core moral teachings is a puzzling, rare Obama stumble on symbolism. I applaud the Pope for taking a principled stand and making it clear that sanctity of life is a core Catholic value.

Phil Spector Conviction for Murder

One of my favorite LP's is a collection of hit singles produced by "Wall of Sound" Phil Spector--classics like "Unchained Melody" by the Righteous Brothers and the glorious "River Deep, Mountain High" by Ike and Tina Turner. If there's anything sadder than to see a gifted producer, whom once worked with the Beatles, charged with murder, it's the fact that for years, certain people, particularly celebrities, seem to have gotten off serious charges. We cannot have a double standard.

What Do the Maryland Lottery and the Obama Economic Policy Have in Common?

For anyone who has watched television in Maryland over the past year, he or she almost certainly has seen the Maryland lottery commercial where the farmer wife excitedly rushes to tell her husband that they're set for life--she just discovered that the new hen they own had laid a golden egg. The camera then focuses on the farmer holding a partially eaten fried chicken leg, and the wife's utter dejected look as she realizes where it came from. (There is then a pitch for the Maryland lottery and its set-for-life jackpot.)

You can almost hear America's global economic competitors snickering as Obama confidently asserts his vision for America's economic future: Perhaps nanotechnology, personalized medicine, decentralized energy systems, virtual organizations or flexible manufacturing networks? Not exactly. He's talking about "investing" in alternative fuels, health care, and education. These are not new targets of government spending; for example, health care costs are going up in part due to an aging population with inevitable Medicare costs, and Obama is looking to increase, at considerable taxpayer cost in the midst of a severe recession, the consumption of health care products and services on a sector already struggling to cope with inflationary pressures. The staggering amount of deficit spending (to be repaid by younger generations struggling to compete in a tough global economy) will lure those looking to exploit soft spots in federal program controls (e.g., Medicare fraud). In any event, the burden of proof is on Obama to explain why the private sector has failed to respond to the intrinsic worthiness of these "investments" and how the government can be trusted to manage them competently, given the questionable history of government spending in these areas.

The real issue is how Obama is going to stoke that goose that lays the golden eggs, the world's greatest economy. After all, the government grows its revenue when businesses and taxpaying citizens are doing well. Proper conditions include a government which is limited, unobtrusive and consistent; a government which does not lose focus, which knows its place and doesn't try to unfairly compete with the private sector, which responds patiently with restraint during challenging times, and whose budget does not crowd out private savings and investment needed to finance business operations and growth.

What kills the goose are things like raising taxes on investment income and individuals with the discretionary resources to invest in the private sector, maintaining globally uncompetitive business tax brackets, increasing the scope and depth of regulations and reporting requirements (which are a de facto form of taxation and constitute barriers of entry for entrepreneurs), and engaging in counterproductive trade wars. We don't unilaterally take on major tax increases (e.g., cap-and-trade) or spending initiatives (like health care) in the middle of a severe recession.

This does not mean there isn't a role for government, but we have to be cognizant of the political equivalent of Newton's Third Law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you raise taxes, or implicitly do so through government mandates (e.g., increasing the minimum wage), individuals and businesses can respond in a number of ways, including moving or shutting down operations, redefining compensation plans (e.g., deferred compensation), or restructuring investments (e.g., from dividend-paying stocks to growth stocks or tax-advantaged bonds). If the government, with its deep pockets, moves to compete against private health insurers, chances are that private insurers will try to maintain margins by stricter underwriting (e.g., refusing to cover people with preexisting conditions), withdrawing from higher-cost or regulated markets, lowering benefit caps or focusing more on niche markets (e.g., supplemental plans).

In addition, we have the Hawthorne effect: paraphrased simply in a political context, the government changes things, not intrinsically, but by how and what it spends, taxes and regulates. A relevant prominent complaint, for instance, against the No Child Left Behind initiative under the Bush Administration, is that teachers would teach to the tests (i.e., government benchmarks). (Without consistent, validated tests and related evidence, government has little objective basis for assessing teacher and school performance.) The recently-passed Obama "stimulus" bill recently included $2.5B for Michigan education, including $500M for Detroit's public schools--with their abysmal high school graduation rate and teacher resistance to workrule changes, merit pay and/or market-based teacher salaries, more administrative authority to fire mediocre teachers, and meaningful competition to the public school monopoly (in particular, charter schools). The issue of Detroit schools is not a question of teacher salaries or (another liberal favorite rationalization) class size; in fact, the school system is one of the area's largest employers. Without meaningful reforms, there is no real change: it's just, as a prominent politician once said, "more of the same" government waste of precious taxpayer dollars.

Does that mean there isn't a need for change or reform? No. The American system has top-notch health-related university and research programs, our quality hospitals and clinics attract visitors from around the globe (including from countries with nationalized health care systems), and the American pharmaceutical industry consistently leads in the introduction of innovative care. I believe that part of the problem deals with government itself--for instance, tying tax-advantaged benefits to businesses, allowing consumers to wait until they are sick to start insurance (which is rather like permitting coastal area residents to wait until a major storm approaches to buy flood insurance), and states creating barriers to entry by requiring specific benefit mandates.

On the other hand, we have arcane government policies which introduce moral hazards: for example, inheritance taxes and government requirement for citizens to drain their lifetime assets before agreeing to assume most or all expenses related to catastrophic injuries or conditions. What incentive is there for citizens to save and invest if their reward is to see people whom have spent money they don't have receive government assistance from the get-go? With respect to inheritance, resulting from post-taxed income and investment, what incentive is there to save if the government taxes your beneficiaries as well? We have policy biases which actually encourage citizens not to save and invest, not to mention Obama's transparent attempt to soak highly-taxed taxpayers and redirect the revenue to workers earning beneath the taxable floor. (This actually gives workers an incentive not to improve one's income by retraining for higher-paying occupations or moving to areas with better job prospects, because they would lose these lucrative subsidies.)

Conservative opposition to the Obama stimulus plan and budget is not simply saying "no", as liberal politicians, journalists or commentators (e.g., Chris Matthews) want Americans to believe. There simply has been no meaningful, cautious, measured response to the severe recession; instead, we've seen a "bait-and-switch" on a so-called stimulus bill, the vast majority of which has little impact on short-term spending, instead of a more tightly written bill focusing on relief spending and merit-based infrastructure initiatives and a massive new budget proposal that provides the largest expansion of new domestic spending in some 40 years, more likely than not to introduce new moral hazards and without proper objectives and rigorous management control, including the heightened risk for fraud.

More worrisome are the impacts on American business growth. Obama and Democrats seem intent on applying a European-style social liberalism to America; they seem to forget that with the increased government footprint comes a cost. You try to save some companies arbitrarily from bankruptcy, and you interfere with the natural dynamics of American capitalism. If you increase barriers to free trade, American businesses lose foreign markets. If you install new compensation mandates or restrictions on hiring and firing, you raise barriers to hiring. We don't need the government micromanaging the auto or banking industries.

What we need is thoughtful reform. For example, why was Madoff able to perpetuate his Ponzi scheme given the existing regulatory environment? Why was AIG allowed to write swaps without proper collateralization? Why didn't we foresee issues concerning using derivatives as part of bank reserves and the impact of mark-to-market accounting in frozen, illiquid markets? By insisting all due speed is necessary and snubbing Congressional Republicans, Obama is really intending to intimidate dissent and rule out authentic bipartisan action.

In short, Obama is doing to the American goose that lays the golden eggs what that Maryland farmer did to the golden hen: The average American has about as much chance of winning in an Obamaian economy as a Maryland resident has of winning the lottery.

Government Regulation Run Amuck: Homemade Desserts at Fundraisers

I have to start with a disclaimer when it comes to desserts: I became a low-carb dieter in the summer of 2003, and over the next year or so regularly lost about 3 pounds a week, almost effortlessly.

For those whom may not know the different types of diets, the foods we eat consist of protein, carbohydrates, and fats. (There are essential amino acids (protein) and fatty acids, but there's no such thing as essential carbohydrates.) The principal prescribed diet over the past 4 decades has been low-fat, given the fact that fats are calorie-dense, and high consumption of certain types of fat (saturated fat) are thought to be associated with heart disease risks. A lower-carb diet focuses on minimizing intake from those higher-glycemic foods associated with higher rises in blood sugar (and the need for insulin to deliver these nutrients to cells): those nutrients are primarily carb-based. Thus, lower-carb diets try to limit the intake of the so-called "white foods"--sugar, rice, potatoes, and flour. A lower-carb dieter would minimize consumption of things like fruits, breads and pasta, and almost any dessert. During the 2003-2004 low-carb fad, the number of low-carb foods exploded in the U.S., and a number of bakeries saw a precipitous decline in sales. Like any fad, the low-carb movement ran out of steam, mostly because dieters often find the restrictions monotonous and difficult to follow in most restaurants, and some rumors rose after the death of a prominent proponent, Dr. Robert Atkins.

I discovered during my own learning experience that people can get as emotionally charged in debating food as they get in discussing religion or politics. I found that Atkins Diet purists accepted no variation in chapter and verse, and I was quickly deemed a heretic. People were choosing the few vegetables they eat based purely on carb counts. I remember one case in a forum where one dieter posted her diet and complained that she was not losing weight. Other readers were speculating on which vegetables in her mixed vegetables were holding her back. I thought the diet she was following was very good, and I asked her a simple question about her exercise regimen. She responded, saying she was chair-bound and didn't know what kinds of exercises to do. At this point, a flood of readers provided her helpful guidance and references, but it took someone like me to change the direction of the thread.

My own nutrition principles are beyond the scope of this post, but let's just say that my relatives have heard me lecture on the virtues of cold-water oily fish (like wild-caught salmon, mackerel, and sardines) and grass-fed beef (but I don't like processed meat products like hot dogs and Spam), I don't like gimmick foods like diet shakes and bars, and I prefer to steam, grill, broil or bake (vs. deep-fry) meat and fish, no breading (but I'm partial to hot 'n spicy preparation and eat more picante sauce, hot sauce and sliced jalapenos than most people).

So imagine how I felt when I found myself reading about the St. Cecilia Catholic Church in the suburbs of Pittsburgh which uses Lenten fish fries as a fundraising operation; in addition to deep-fried or baked haddock and cod prepared in state-licensed kitchens, slices of donated homemade pies are sold for an additional $1 each. And that is the source of controversy. A state inspector noticed the homemade goods on sale and since the good ladies who donated them have not had their kitchens inspected by the state, the homemade goods cannot be legally sold. And how many people are going to agree to public inspection of their home kitchens just so they can donate a pie?

My initial response is that I'm not a big fan of the very concept of deep-fried fish and sugary desserts; I think most people would be better served not eating these, although an occasional indulgence is forgivable. At the same time, I don't think that the government should micromanage dietary choices.

This is not a new type of controversy. For example, in many states, you have periodic stories of state or local authorities trying to shut down weekly Bingo games at churches. In most cases, these fundraisers serve a dual purpose: a means of socializing with other parishioners, and helping to subsidize construction or maintenance of church buildings and property or private school operations.

I'm sure that statists will argue that the health inspector was just doing his job; don't kill the messenger. Not to mention the slippery slope argument (where do we draw the line?), maintaining double standards, etc. But basically, most people understand that these women are not operating bakeries, and chances are, the only reason this is being treated differently than a potluck is the fact of the donation.

It's very difficult to demand common sense and judgment from public employees, instructing them not to sweat the small stuff, to consider the context and the scalability of the effort. I mean, what's next? A man getting busted for making toys in his home workshop for a charity raffle? What kind of message is this sending to people whom offered donated goods and services in good faith and find themselves being treated as lawbreakers?

It looks like Pennsylvania legislators are moving with due speed to provide legal cover for those wonderful, warm-hearted pie-baking housewives of St. Cecilia's. But it's impossible to anticipate all the possible excesses of government regulators seeking to unilaterally increase the scope of their mandate vs. realize that the very purpose of their job is to serve the public, not harass it.

Obama: Iraq and the Responsible Thing to Do

Obama's "surprise" visit to Iraq after his first European tour as President had actually been speculated on by the press in advance. The fact he personally expressed his thanks to the troops and promised his support was expected.

Perhaps what wasn't expected, given his initial opposition to the Iraq War (his signature contrasting position against his Democratic rivals)and as a leading Senate voice demanding a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq and arguing against the anti-insurgent surge, was his attestation to the validity of their mission: "From getting rid of Saddam, to reducing violence, to stabilizing the country, to facilitating elections -- you have given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country. That is an extraordinary achievement." [I'm sure that the anti-war groups, which have been in a state of denial over the efficacy of American initiatives in Iraq, are perplexed and feel betrayed by the President's words.]

Perhaps just as notable was Obama's earlier comment at a joint Turkish press conference. In reference to a Turkish student's question probing for practical differences in Iraq policy from George W. Bush, Obama said, "Just because I was opposed at the outset it doesn’t mean that I don’t have now responsibilities to make sure that we do things in a responsible fashion."

Technically speaking, Obama wasn't contradicting himself from his perspective; for a long time, the Democrats have sought to distinguish between their disagreements over policy from the performance of the troops, which is at least a step above protestors spitting at returning troops during the Vietnam era. However, challenging the validity of the mission of the troops takes away from the significance and valor of their efforts and sacrifices.

But isn't it time that Obama concedes what everyone now knows--that the national leaders (in particular, President Bush and John McCain), who paid a high price in advocating the Petraeus strategy after public sentiment turned against the war, made the right call? And perhaps the irresponsible ones preferred an alternate scenario which would almost certainly have resulted in an Iraq civil war, if not a regional war?

Pirates and the Obama Administration

You can almost hear the liberal angst in the White House over a thwarted capture of a US-flagged ship, one of the first attempts by pirates since the Barbary Wars in the early 1800's. The four pirates targeted the Maersk Alabama, carrying food aid to Somalia, Uganda, and Rwanda, capturing valiant Captain Richard Phillips.

Let's make it clear: this piracy was an act of war against the United States. There is no time for liberal angst, worrying about the civil rights of the pirates and obsessing over possible collateral damage. We have heard the account that Clinton once had an opportunity to take out Osama bin Laden in a camp with a strategic missile attack, but his advisors fretted over innocent third parties in the vicinity.

There must be zero tolerance. It's almost like we've gone back over 200 years in time to when the young US was paying protection money to ensure safe passage of their vessels. Giving in to pirate extortion demands simply reinforces international criminal behavior.

Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in his book Veil discussed a brutal but effective response when Palestinian terrorist group Hezbollah in 1980's Beirut kidnapped 4 Soviet diplomats and executed one of them. The KGB in turn nabbed the relative of a Hezbollah leader and "castrated him, stuffed his testicles in his mouth, shot him in the head and sent the body back to Hezbollah. The KGB included a message that other members of the Party of God would die in a similar manner if the three Soviets were not released." Hezbollah promptly freed the remaining Soviets.

I cringe at the thought of Obama responding to this crisis with an indictment of the Jefferson Administration leaving him a mess to deal with, pointing out his unique qualifications because he is the son of a neighboring Kenyan, saying to a foreign audience that Americans must acknowledge their responsibility in the circumstances of pirates becoming pirates, and drawing down the size of the Navy in response to the seizure (much like Gates' announcing a cut in missile defense systems right after the North Koreans launched their long-range missile).

It's time to take decisive action against pirates and their home bases.

Miscellany: 4/7/09

Iowa and Vermont Joining the Gay "Marriage" Bandwagon

Maybe soon to include Maryland, with a Democratic governor and legislature. First of all, I have no problems with gays exercising their right to pursue happiness and legal rights for committed couples (e.g., hospital visitation, inheritance, etc.) However, I'm flatly opposed to activist judges imposing their personal policy preferences and an unconventional use of the term "marriage". Marriage has always been between a man and a woman, the foundation of a family and procreation.

The cases of Vermont and California are somewhat different in the sense they had already legalized civil unions or domestic partnerships, with functionally equivalent legal protections, for years before deciding to appropriate the term "marriage" for nontraditional relationships. But I don't recognize the right or power of any elitist court or legislature to arbitrarily redefine an integral institution

The Binghamton NY Tragedy

One of the tough things in the current economic environment is seeing immigrants and others serve as scapegoats (e.g., being accused of taking jobs from American-born citizens). We are a nation built by immigrants. The fatal shooting of 13 at a New York immigration center is tragic; my prayers are for the victims and their families, and I applaud all groups helping immigrant Americans get settled.

If You Like How the Government Regulates Toys...

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting editorial last Friday, noting the aftermath of a regulation bill in response to the Chinese toy lead poisoning scandal. According to the American Toy Association, the bill will cost about $2B and has resulted in several unintended consequences, including in some cases taking books off the shelves. A particularly notable example is how the market for smaller-sized motorized bikes has been decimated, leaving adventurous youth with heavier, adult-sized bikes, which are more difficult to control and raise the risk of injury. All towards what end? The incidences of children dying from lead poisoning (although tragic) have been extremely low. The point is, are the regulations balancing risk with costs? Regulations are essentially a tax on businesses and ultimately consumers. With Obama and his cronies scapegoating the alleged lack of regulation to blame the recent economic crisis, which is nonsense, of course, and at the same time insisting they want to create jobs, you don't get there with policies that raise taxes or unduly increase regulations and reporting requiremets on businesses and their stakeholders (managers, owners, etc.)

Obama's Foreign Policy: Oil the Squeaky Wheel

Well, it wasn't 3AM. It was 4:30AM in Prague when Obama got a call that North Korea, as expected, launched its Taepodong-2 long-range missile, potentially capable of hitting the West Coast, over Japan. We now know what he does at 4:30AM: He talks and listens, listens and talks, but does not act.

"North Korea broke the rules once more," Obama thundered. "Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something."

But Obama is prepared to act! Just two days after North Korea launched its missile, the Obama Administration announced a 17% cut in the missile defense budget and a $5B cut in military modernization programs. [No doubt "Glorious Leader" Kim Jong-II will portray the cuts as a consequence and vindication of the missile launch.]

That's right: the same person who signed billions in earmarks, which he vowed during the general campaign he wouldn't do, and is proposing the biggest government expansion, budget and deficit in U.S. history, knows his spending priorities, where to draw the line and find cuts: the national defense of the United States.

Obama, at the same time, finds it impossible to give a public speech in a foreign country without first pointing out America's blemishes: slavery, mistreatment of native Americans, and racial discrimination, etc. So in discussing the need to reduce the presence of nuclear weapons, Obama felt compelled to add: "As a nuclear power, as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act."

Obama, in calling the North Korean action a "provocation", insisted on a unified international response--knowing that the Russians and Chinese, with veto power on the U.N. Security Council, are resisting sanctions and are paying lip service to the sham North Korean rationalization of launching a communications satellite.

And, as John Bolton's Wall Street Journal article today ("Obama's NK Reaction: More Talks") points out, U.S. Special Envoy for North Korea Stephen Bosworth promised, even before the expected missile launch, that the multi-lateral talks with North Korea would resume as soon as the missile launch gets off the front pages.

The fact is that Obama never provided any tough response that the North Koreans could respect and is already gaining an international reputation of being a paper tiger. I am not necessarily suggesting I would have advocated these steps, but the U.S. could have sent some strong signals it was prepared to act if and when North Korea launched against international wishes: e.g., an immediate suspension of food and energy supplies, announcements of additional manpower and/or improved military hardware for South Korea, Japan and other area countries, an indefinite suspension of multi-lateral talks, and possible preemptive military action against the missile site.

"Words? Just words?" Indeed. Just words...

Miscellany: 4/5/09

Symbolic Acts Are Job 1

Executive orders on torture and detention, the closure of Guantanamo Bay, even discarding the phrase "the global war on terror" and replacing it perhaps by Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano's "man-made disasters" or the Pentagon favorite, "overseas contingency operations", dropping the term "enemy combatant" and replacing it by the more innocuous term "detainees".

There is a tendency of this administration to focus on surface-level details and accomplishments and defer consideration of the underlying, more intrinsically difficult problems of how to deal with rogue outlaws, whom are not party to any international treaty and do not extend the same considerations to their soft innocent civilian targets. In particular, what so-called rights do they get? The same as American citizens? Even at the expense of being able of the outlaw being able to demand exposure of secret sensitive information which might undermine ongoing operations and tactics? Do we really want to treat terror cells as no different than from regular armed forces, when, in fact, their objectives, methods, and knowledge of operations are qualitatively distinct than US Army troops?

It's one thing to announce closure of Gitmo; it's another thing to decide how to detain them on an ongoing basis: which American prisons, exposing what neighboring communities? The fact that the Obama Administration has spent more time discussing the rights of terrorist detainees than on building on the Bush Administration's record of decisive, undeterred, unnuanced action in putting the safety of the American people first speaks volumes of Obama's improperly-set priorities. It's time that the current administration pays less attention to the good opinion of elitist European socialists or earning chits with the ACLU and more attention on proactive, effective tactics on protecting the American people from 9/11-style attacks, which IS job 1.

Ward Churchill: It's Time for an End to Academic Tenure

A Colorado jury agreed that Ward Churchill, the infamous tenured Colorado professor best known for describing the victims of 9/11 as "little [Nazi war criminal] Eichmann's", was unjustly fired from his tenured position and awarded him $1 in damages. The big remaining question is whether the judge will order Churchill reinstated to his former position, which would be unconscionable.

To explain what I mean requires analyzing the situation. The university decided to put Churchill's record under scrutiny AFTER Churchill started abusing the concept of academic freedom by engaging in provocative actions (such as the Eichmann reference). The traditional concept of academic freedom is meant to protect faculty from teaching or communicating findings that might be politically objectionable in the status quo. It's not quite the same thing as free speech; for example, I am entitled to express my pro-life views, but not in an unrelated college course I'm teaching, and if I spoke or wrote, specifically referencing my university affiliation, I would be honor-bound to provide a disclaimer and to distinguish whether my opinons were personal or based on relevant expertise and research findings.

A clearer example of academic freedom would be, say, if a Mississippi politician boasted of significant improvements in public education under his tenure, and an education or public administration professor published peer-reviewed research findings showing no statistically significant increase in relevant achievement test scores. The outraged politician might threaten the university with cuts in funding if they didn't get rid of the professor in question.

In the case of Ward Churchill, the university put his academic scholarship under scrutiny and discovered troubling, compelling evidence of professional misconduct. Apparently the issue with the jury was NOT whether or not the university had legitimate grounds for dismissing Churchill but the motive for putting Churchill's scholarship under the white glove treatment. Indeed, why didn't the University of Colorado do due diligence at the time they hired Churchill? If anything, the hiring of Churchill was in part to stir the pot; however, Colorado underestimated how hot it would get when he stirred the pot over 9/11 with his anti-American rants, which certainly were not the product of legitimate academic scholarship.

As a legitimate victim of violated academic freedom myself (it involved how I was teaching a data structures course; among other things, I was attacked ex post facto by senior faculty for not compelling the students to write their assigned computer programs in the PL/1 language--I allowed them to write their programs in the computer language of their choice), I resent Ward Churchill's hiding behind the concept of academic freedom to rationalize his intellectually pretentious viewpoints.

It is difficult to see how the judge could order the university to rehire Churchill, given the fact that Colorado almost certainly would never have hired Churchill given what they know today about his ethical lapses in scholarship activities. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why Churchill would want to come back to an institution where he is clearly unwelcome and where he does not enjoy the support of his colleagues or administration. It's time for Churchill to move on with his life.

Perhaps it's sour grapes on my part because I myself never attained tenure during my short academic career, but I think it's time to reconsider the concept of tenure in teaching in general. It hampers the ability of college administrators to control costs and manage resources.

International Prosecution of White House Advisors

There have been periodic threats from Democrats like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Leahy to prosecute Bush Administration officials (including former Attorney General Gonzales and Karl Rove among others), primarily based on political differences over policy, such as warrantless wiretaps, Gitmo, and the like. Obama is naturally wary of these attempts, in part because it's a distraction from his current agenda, but also he recognizes the slippery slope precedent that would be set, making his own administration the likely target of future Republican majority investigations. So Obama tries to walk a thin line, promising that he won't ignore evidence of wrongdoing but making clear he doesn't want to spend the next 4 years conducting a witchhunt.

This doesn't mean that others, particularly in Europe, aren't considering unprecedented steps against an admittedly unpopular Bush Administration, attempting to criminalize policy differences. A case in point is a former jailbird lawyer whom has filed a complaint with Baltasar Garzon, a Spanish activist magistrate, demanding that Gonzales and 5 other Bush Administration lawyers be prosecuted on grounds that they provided Bush with legal advice resulting in his decisions to permit "torture" of Spanish and other detainees at Gitmo, counter to the Geneva Conventions.

Douglas Feith, one of the cited lawyers, specifically refutes the alleged charges in an April 3 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled "Spain Has No Right to try U.S. Officials". He says he believes his implication is based on a popular text by a leftist British lawyer whom intentionally misrepresents a conversation he had with Feith. Feith says that, in fact, he strongly encouraged upholding Geneva rights in his advice to Bush, arguing the U.S. has a vested interest in maintaining the convention.

Feith notes that unlike the Nazi or Serb governments, the U.S. has a well-defined, independent judiciary (which, in fact, occasionally ruled against the Bush Administration), and any legal proceedings of American officials fall under the jurisdiction of the American judicial system. Furthermore, the criminalization of legal advisors establishes a chilling precedent and unwarranted intrusion into American internal affairs: Does Spain really want to open up Pandora's box resulting, say, in American prosecution of Spanish government lawyers over differences in policy?

It's time for the Obama Administration to stand up on principle and do the right thing: Foreign prosecution of American government officials is unacceptable. Moreover, frivolous lawsuits of American citizens based on little more than presumptuous, unsupported allegations and distortions of fact and substance will not be tolerated.

Sarkozy's Grandstanding and Scapegoating of the U.S.

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. Sarkozy was a classic liberal (i.e., free-market conservative), an unabashedly pro-American leader, a change of pace that President Bush eagerly embraced in contrast to Sarkozy's predecessor. Chirac went out of his way to ensure Bush would not get a majority vote in the Security Council after Iraq failed to comply with 17 UN resolutions, including material violations of ceasefire terms to the first Gulf War. (Since France, China, and Russia all held vetoes and had vested interests given Hussein regime sweetheart contracts, it was clear that an authorization to liberate Iraq would not carry, but a majority vote in the Council would provide Bush moral authority.)

Obama, in his bizarro world of international relations, decided to write a letter to Chirac, no longer in office, on March 20, the anniversary of the start of the liberation of Iraq:

I am certain that we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of peace and friendship to build a safer world.

If there's one thing Obama knows, it's symbolism. I wonder how Obama would feel if German Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote to former President Bush, saying, "I am certain we will be able to work together, in the coming four years, in a spirit of global economic growth, responsible domestic government spending, and free trade."

But however boorish, irresponsible and reprehensible Obama's naive tactless behavior may be, I'm not going to excuse Sarkozy's subsequent behavior at the G-20, threatening to walk out if his grandstanding demand for global financial regulatory framework, blaming the global economic crisis on "Anglo-Saxon" (American and British) policymakers and bankers: "The crisis didn't start in Europe, it started in the United States." Never mind the fact that just as World Wars I and II didn't start in the United States, it started in Europe, and the U.S. liberated France on both occasions, it's not enough that the world has depended on the American consumer time and again to jump start the economies of other nations by importing their goods and services.

Need I remind Mr. Sarkozy that the real estate bubble was not isolated to the United States and foreign investors in American derivatives, e.g., mortgage-backed securities, share the blame? If investors across the board had refused to purchase secondary market products including risky (subprime and other) mortgages, if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which dominate the secondary market, had refused to use an implicit government guarantee to finance the same securities, the original lenders would have been forced to maintain creditworthy standards, versus yield to predominantly Democratic political pressure: "It's good to spread the (mortgage money) around".

Mr. Sarkozy's politically convenient conversion to anti-American populism is a betrayal of his economically liberal philosophic roots versus the rest of us political conservatives, whom see the government and its fundamental incompetence at regulation as part of the problem, not its salvation.

A legitimate conservative response is not to cede national control (and thus responsibility) to some grandiose global financial regulatory system but to spread sunshine and transparency to the system, provide consumers, lenders and investors with improved knowledge and access to make contracts in good faith. It's time for Sarkozy to provide some responsible leadership and constructive criticism, not betray his core political beliefs.