Cyreenik Says
I was still in high school in 1964 when the Gulf of Tonkin incident happened that gave LBJ his excuse to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. And even has a high schooler I recognized it as a blatant war-starting excuse, very similar to the Marco Polo Bridge incident that the Japanese used to start their war with China. By that age I had already read a lot about war excuse starting in the military history books that I loved to read in those days.
So when the Pentagon Papers came out in 1971, my reaction was, "What's the news?"
My reaction to the current Wikileaks releases about Afghanistan is the same, "What's the news?"
In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the release, much to my amazement, turned out to be big news, and politicians used their release as an excuse to change their positions on the Vietnam War. For me, it was a surreal experience watching this old news become big news.
So for me, I'm watching to see if these Wikileaks Afghan papers become a case of surreal deja vu.
I hope not.
This title comes from a 26 Jul 10 WSJ editorial by Brian M. Carney, Fan and Fred and the Problem of Narrative, that to me explains part of the mystery as to why the Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac problem doesn't get more attention. These two don't get more attention because they don't make a good part of the "banker greed caused all the problems"-story that rests easy on the American community emotions and is easy for media to tell.
But the dark side of not being an easy part of the story is there is little pressure on media or politicians to fix the problem, and it's a five trillion dollar problem! We are well beyond Sam Rayburn's famous "A billion here, a billion there... pretty soon it adds up to real money!" We should be dealing with this now.
This 27 Jul 10 WSJ editorial, Survival of the Fattest, points out that the adding ethanol to gasoline program reduces carbon for $754 a ton. "To put that number in perspective, the budget gnomes estimate that the price for a ton of carbon under the cap-and-tax program that the House passed last summer would be about $26 in 2019." And the program is even less efficient than this $754 a ton figure because this doesn't take into account the natural gas and oil used to grow the crops.
This is yet another example of how guilt thinking can fuel a Blunder. This program was introduced, and is sustained, by the instinctive thinking that using ethanol as a fuel is good while using gasoline as a fuel is bad. This thinking is powered by guilt about what mankind is doing to the environment.
The problem with using "let your heart be your guide" thinking in environmental issues -- guilt thinking in this case -- is that cost/benefit thinking -- analytic thinking -- is tossed out the window... but cost/benefit is really at the heart of solving every environmental problem. That's because the heart of the environmental challenge is getting the most good out of the least economic resource.
Using Let Your Heart Be Your Guide thinking in an economic situation produces blunders, and this is a good example of that.
This 27 Jul 10 WSJ editorial by Francis Fukuyama, Immigrants and Crime: Time for a Sensible Debate, talks about the immigration issue in a way I agree with. The basic premise is that most illegal immigrants coming to the US are here to pursue the American dream -- working hard and becoming prosperous through their work. They are not coming to the US to become gun-toting violent criminals. The gun-toting violent criminal types come because of the decades-long Blunder that is US drug abuse policy.
But the non-violent immigrants, what the article calls informal immigrants, do need encouragement and help to become better participants in The American Dream.
Back in November 2009 I started talking about recession as a time of dream changing. This 20 Jul 10 WSJ article, China's Dubious Energy Accolade, is an example of how the dream is changing. It points out that in 2009 China passed the US in energy consumption, up from half the US consumption in 2000. Further, coal is 66% of the Chinese consumption versus 22% of US consumption, and much of that difference is because the energy is powering Chinese factories producing exports.
In a related 22 Jul 10 article, China Steel: Global Impact, Local Thinking, we find out that many of China's provinces want to boom the way Cleveland and Detroit did in the 1930's through 60's, by making steel. The central government in Beijing may be lukewarm on this idea, but it's white-hot at the provincial level.
This recession is showing that manufacturing is now an Asian forte as well as an American one, and that the US is going to have to be good at something else if it's going to be the best at something.
Thinking about what we will be good at next is what should be front-and-center in our thinking about how we regulate our businesses and lives, and how we spend our government money. We need to be thinking about what our next boom will be, and making sure we aren't killing it with The Curse of Being Important.
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