Tag Archives: freedom

Defense and the Russians

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The Russian government has shown their fundamental view of the United States and of their relationship with us.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on our missile defense shield.

At a daylong Missile Defense Conference that took place in Moscow last week, the Russians made explicit their threat against us.  General Nikolai Makarov, the Russian armed forces chief of staff said, referring to missile defense installations currently contemplated by us in eastern Europe,

A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens[.]

Makarov extended the scope of Russia’s intended actions.  He displayed on a large-screen video system for the benefit of conference delegates from 50 countries, including the US and NATO, computer-generated imagery depicting the reach of the American radar and missile systems that are components of our missile defense shield.  Russian missiles were shown streaking toward the US before being intercepted.

But this overt aggressiveness is not a new position for the Russians.  They threatened nuclear attacks against Poland four years ago if we deployed components of a then current missile defense shield there and in the Czech Republic.  We quietly canceled those plans.  The Russians invaded Georgia over a manufactured pique and perpetrated a Sudetenland-like partition of that country while we stood meekly by.

A couple of questions arise.

Why would Russia be thinking about a nuclear attack against the US?

Why would Russia casually threaten us in front of the world?

Perhaps they sense timidity on the part of the US administration.  Certainly, in the face of these public threats against both our allies and our homeland, our own State Department Special Envoy for Strategic Stability and Missile Defense, Ellen Tauscher could only say that it was

pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.

But this was the point President Obama was making a couple of weeks ago to Medvedev when Obama pleaded for more time on the defense question—he’d have more flexibility to give the Russians what they want after he’s no longer accountable to the American people.

So much for Reset.  In the face of such naked threats of war—of preemptive war—how can the US do anything at all other than to press ahead with the deployment of a missile defense shield, now including defense against the long-range ICBMs that Russia has shown with their little demonstration that they fully intend to use against us?  On what basis can the Obama administration seriously be talking about disarming us in the face of these overt threats?

Some Thoughts on Free Markets and Limits

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I was driving to the airport to pick someone up after a too-long absence the other day when the traffic load struck me (figuratively).  I was driving on a modern freeway with no impediments to traffic flow.  Adjacent to this was a frontage road with traffic lights.  Even though the traffic loads were the same on both roads, the traffic on the frontage road stayed bunched up and slow moving—neither the drivers who wanted to go faster nor the slower drivers were able to go as fast as they wished due to the limits imposed on everyone traffic by those lights.

On the freeway, however, the traffic quickly got strung out and widely spaced, as the faster drivers moved apace, and the slower drivers—moving faster than their brethren on the frontage road—moved at their preferred slower pace.

What has this to do with free markets, one might ask.  It’s those limits.  The traffic lights—the limits a government applies to a centrally managed economy that requires (limited) licenses to manufacture so as to not over produce, licenses to sell so as to avoid unsanctioned pricing, licenses to handle the manufacturing scraps, donations to the correct political cause, and “protection” for everyone—keep everyone bunched up and slow-moving.  Certainly, the speed range between the fast-movers and the slow-movers was much narrower than the speed range on the freeway, but everyone was moving much more slowly than we were on our freeway.

Of course, on closer inspection, the analogy breaks down, but that closer inspection, now that we have the overall picture from the analogy, demonstrates the power of the free market economy compared to one that’s controlled by government, one that has those “traffic lights.”  Within the context of this post, the individual actors on each of the two highways are largely unrelated to each other, with the cars on the traffic light-limited highway, for instance, connected only by the physical presence of a car in front that’s held up by a red light or that is a slower-moving car in the forced bunch and so is holding up all the cars behind it.

In a free market economy, though, all the players are inextricably intertwined.  Indeed, the fast-movers don’t merely facilitate the slow-movers’ ability to get along down the market road, these fast-movers actually help pull the slow-movers along—even though the speed range between economic fast-movers and slow-movers in the free market is wider than it is in the managed economy.

Take luxuries, for example.  Two come to mind: air conditioners and televisions.

Oh, wait; these aren’t luxuries anymore, and they haven’t been for decades.

When these things first came out, only the rich, the economic fast-mover, could afford an air conditioner in the window of his house or a TV in his house’s living room.  But in a free market, these fast-movers helped create the market for the air conditioner and the television.  Call it a status symbol—I’ve arrived—or a desire to be first on the block to have one, or any other reason, only the rich both could afford such things and were interested in acting on the desire.

Air conditioner and television producers, wanting to sell more into that nascent market, produced more, and so more were bought.  In the free market economy, others wanted a piece of that action, and they produced air conditioners and televisions.  Competition between the producers—which doesn’t exist in a managed economy—began driving prices down, which made these luxuries more affordable—which drew in more producers wanting a taste of the money, which drove prices down even more, and ultimately, nearly everyone could—and did—buy.  Today, most houses have central air, and of those that don’t, most have window air conditioners that cost as little as $100—an unheard of level of cheapness 50 years ago—and air conditioning comes standard in our cars.

Today, most houses have multiple televisions, and increasing numbers have 50″ and 60″ plasma or LCD televisions, technologies not even imagined in the ’50s when television sets first started to become widely affordable.  And our higher end (no longer strictly high end, even) cars now have DVD players, or streaming video, or both—again, technologies unheard of just a bit ago.

Moreover, it’s those fast-movers that do the hiring of those slow-movers, either directly into their own production facilities, or indirectly, by the market’s push to get more manufacturing online, into other production facilities that are newly built or expanding existing operations to support the burgeoning market for all those (ex-) luxury goods. The ripples spread, too.  Supporting functions grow: the transistor and chip manufacturers to support the circuits in all those televisions, for example.

All this because the economic fast-movers wanted a luxury good, and a free market, unlimited by government “guidance,” enabled those luxuries to become commodities.

Finally, one too-often overlooked result is that those relatively farther behind free market slow-movers are vastly better off than are their slow-moving counterparts in the managed economy.  And with the jobs created by that free market, they have excellent opportunities to move up their economic ladder.

Buncha Crybabies

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Officials at Six Rivers Planned Parenthood of Eureka, CA, launched a “40 Days of Prayer” “prayer campaign” in March that offers daily prayers for pregnant women and clinicians who perform abortions.

Naturally, the Progressives have their panties in a twist over it.  Liberty Counsel, a pro-life…litigation group…is bellyaching that this is just a “desperate attempt” to garner publicity and funding by mocking pro-choicers.

They whine, for instance,

Planned Parenthood’s prayer crusade is an attempt to mock and marginalize the highly effective “40 Days for Life,” which has unified half a million voices for the cause and saved at least 5,838 lives….

Here’s Liberty Counsel founder Matthew Staver:

“Planned Parenthood’s ‘prayer’ campaign is offensive.”

I might think, “poor babies,” were the beef not so cynical.

As a commenter at Villainous Company puts it in a related venue,

Pro-choice? Most on the Left side of the aisle are extremely ANTI-CHOICE; do it their way or don’t do it.  Applies to lifestyles (no conservatives, no big families, no religion), work (no traditional one-worker families), the environment (no industry, assumed to pollute without question, global warming), and so on.  NO CHOICE ALLOWED which contradicts, interferes or denies leftist policy; no flexibility, even when the participants agree on what they want.
WE MUST OBEY or be criticized in every available arena….

Banks and Governmental Reform

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The World Bank report, “China 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society,” concerns China’s future over the next 25, or so, years, and it describes a number of “challenges” its economy faces.

The report suggests, with regard to the financial sector in particular (beginning in Chapter 5 of “Supporting Report 1”):

Despite the many reforms introduced so far, the Chinese financial system remains repressed, unbalanced, costly to maintain and potentially unstable….

and

Banks have been used as instruments of the government’s macroeconomic and sectoral policy goals and have not always been in a position to lend prudently.

The Epoch Times summarizes this way:

The report suggests that China’s financial sector is constrained by state ownership and regime interference. The Chinese state uses the financial sector to enforce its policies, preventing lending institutions from becoming a true market force.

Sound familiar?

 

h/t to Belmont Club

National Security and Education

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We don’t have enough concerns for our future.  Now a couple of items point out yet another.

The Council for Foreign Relations commissioned a report by an Independent Task Force which was co-chaired by chaired by Joel I. Klein, former head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.  The report laid out in so many words the failure of our K-12 education system, and the costs to our nation’s ability to survive if we don’t correct these failures.

A member of the task force, ex-Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has one summary:

We don’t have nearly enough people who are capable in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math.  When we think about the modern world of defense, the fact that we don’t have people who are capable to do this work is scary.

And

We don’t have people who know and understand foreign languages and other cultures….

The report itself summarized those concerns and put them in the context of five key aspects to the US’ competitiveness, and by extension, our survival as an independent nation:

Educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk

These, according to the report, consist of economic growth and competitiveness, US physical safety, Intellectual property, US global awareness. and US unity and cohesion.

Moreover, funding isn’t the issue, actual performance is:

[While] the United States invests more in K-12 public education than many other developed countries, its students are ill prepared to compete with their global peers.

The failures, the report says, include these:

  • More than 25 percent of students fail to graduate from high school in four years; for African-American and Hispanic students, this number is approaching 40 percent.
  • In civics, only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient or better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  • Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, roughly eight in ten Americans speak only English and a decreasing number of schools are teaching foreign languages.
  • A recent report by ACT, the not-for-profit testing organization, found that only 22 percent of U.S. high school students met “college ready” standards in all of their core subjects; these figures are even lower for African-American and Hispanic students.
  • The College Board reported that even among college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards, meaning that more college students need to take remedial courses.

For a nation of immigrants, and a nation whose demography requires a large and steady influx of immigrants, these are especially damaging.  How can we expect to remain the nation we have been, retain the cultural imperatives that made us so great, if we can no longer recognize who we are, or teach these to our newcomers—whether newborn or new immigrants?  How can we expect to remain the nation we have been, retain the cultural imperatives that made us so great, if we can no longer recognize where we came from, or identify where we want, as a nation, to go?

Klein added, and this is especially a propos that lack of a civics education, as well as our economic and defense technology competitiveness,

A massively undereducated country is not going to be competitive. It’s not going to be cohesive.

The Task Force offered three high-level policy recommendations:

  • Implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security.  Science, technology, and foreign languages are essential—as are creative problem-solving skills and civic awareness.
  • Make structural changes to provide students with good choices.  States and districts should stop locking disadvantaged students into failing schools without any options….  Enhanced choice and competition, in an environment of equitable resource allocation, will fuel the innovation necessary to transform results.
  • Launch a “national security readiness audit” to hold schools and policymakers accountable for results and to raise public awareness.  At the heart of this recommendation is the creation of more meaningful assessments and simulations of student learning and, then, a coordinated, national effort to create targets and repercussions….

The full report, U.S. Education Reform and National Security, is here:

As always, the devil is in the details.  These standards, this accountability, must be strict, rigorous, and followed with prompt reassignment or termination of those teachers or administrators who do not deliver.  The STEM courses not only should be taught at all grades, they should be supplemented at all grades with courses in American history, American civics, and the history of civilization.

And the standards and accountability must be applied to the students, also.  Those who do not perform must be held back until they do measure up.  And that, in addition to enabling our nation’s continued success, is the true path to Johnny’s self-esteem.