Some Good Reading

Over the last couple days, I have read a couple articles that I think everyone should take a look at. The first is from Clive Crook of the Financial Times deciphering Barack Obama's policy from his rhetoric. Now, I will admit that one of the main reasons I enjoyed his piece so much is that it echoed my own regarding Obama's jobs plan.

My perspective as a pro-market egalitarian condemns me to be perpetually disappointed by politicians. Mr Obama may prove no exception. Last week, in a speech at a General Motors plant in Wisconsin, he unveiled an economic plan. It mainly gathered previously announced ideas, spun to appeal to the “working Americans” in Mrs Clinton’s base. Indeed, the Clinton campaign accused him of plagiarism. Costed (conservatively) at more than $140bn a year, it includes comprehensive reform of healthcare, subsidies for alternative energy, investment in infrastructure and tax cuts aimed at the low paid. Unwinding some of the Bush tax cuts, together with unspecified increases in other taxes on companies and the higher-paid, would pay for it all, he said.

The goals are worthy. The US healthcare system is long overdue for reform. The country’s infrastructure has suffered years of increasingly apparent neglect. The Bush administration’s tax cuts worsened inequality at a time when economic forces were already pushing strongly in that direction.

But American corporate taxes are already high. Post-Bush, top marginal rates of tax on personal income are not low, when you take state and local taxes into account. Mr Obama’s proposal to restore top rates to the levels of the 1990s, and then lift the cap on social security taxes as well, constitutes a swingeing rise in the highest rates. Very high rates applied to a narrow base is bad tax policy. A more broadly based and (above all) far simpler tax system with a moderately progressive structure of rates is the way to combine increased revenues, a more equal distribution of post-tax incomes, and tolerably efficient incentives. No sign of this in Mr Obama’s proposals. It is also a great shame that Mr Obama, like Mrs Clinton, has adopted a populist stance on trade. He attacks her for having once supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he blames for “exporting jobs”.

He makes several great points including the one about corporate taxes. When I saw Rudy on the campaign trail, the thing that impressed me most was his reference to productive and unproductive taxes. He felt that those taxes that were higher than most of the Western world were unproductive because they made our country uncompetitive. I felt that Rudy's sensible view of taxation came from his years of practical experience as a leader and manager. Here Obama wants to raise corporate taxes even though they are already quite high. Now, only Obama knows why he thinks this is a good idea, however I believe that he wants to raise corporate taxes because it is likely a good political, not policy, strategy. Most people don't like corporations and will cheerlead when a politician tells them he will stick it to corps and use the extra money to help them. Of course, this is nothing more than class warfare. It is the sort of thing that someone with experience in campaigning but not governing would come up with.



I am also glad that Crook actually defends free trade and points out its attack as the naked politicking that it is. The MSM has made attacking free trade as one of its missions and so his view is a minority one in his circle to be sure.



Crook makes one more very perceptive point...

Mr Obama is a paradox, as yet unresolved. His plan and his votes in the Senate show that he is a liberal, not a centrist. And he is no wavering or accidental liberal. His ideas are of a piece. He sees – or convinces people that he sees – a bigger picture. And yet this leftist visionary is pragmatic, non-ideological and accommodating of dissent. More than that, in fact, he seems keen to listen to and learn from those who disagree with him. What a strange and beguiling combination this is.

On my favorite show, The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly had a body language expert on to analyze the SOTU in 2007. They looked at the body language of Hillary Clinton and of Barack Obama. Clinton had a bewildered and bored look and obviously she wasn't paying much attention. Obama was in a clear position of thinking and so his body language also clearly showed that he was genuinely taking what the President was saying in. That's the thing about body language. It usually doesn't lie. On the other hand, the National Journal named him the most liberal Senator in 2007. Thus, it is unclear just how much his open minded attitude will affect his policy making.

The second article was by Christopher Hitchens about archbishop Rowan Williams' suggestion that Britain incorporate Sharia law into its own common law. Hitchens is a columnist that I agree with sometimes and disagree with other times (many times I strongly disagree with him), but he is never anything but provocative. In this article, he is quite provocative...

A BBC interview with Williams had him saying that the opening to sharia would "help maintain social cohesion." If that phrase is even intended to mean anything, it can only imply that a concession of this kind would lessen the propensity to violence among Muslims. But such abjectness is not the only definition of social cohesion that we have. By a nice coincidence, a London think tank called the Center for Social Cohesion issued a report just days before the leader of the world's Anglicans and Episcopalians capitulated to Islamic demands. Titled "Crimes of the Community: Honour-Based Violence in the UK," and written by James Brandon and Salam Hafez, it set out a shocking account of the rapid spread of theocratic crime. The main headings were murder and beating of women, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and vigilante methods employed against those who complained. It could well be since we are becoming every day more familiar with the first three—that the fourth is the one that should concern us most.

This entire line of thinking by Williams is downright dangerous, and as Hitchens points out, its roots are no less dangerous...

You might think that such relics of the medieval ghetto, and of the rabbinical control that was part of ghetto life, had more or less disappeared in England in the 21st century. And you would largely be right. There exists a "Beth Din," or religious court, in the prosperous North London suburb of Finchley to which the ultra-Orthodox submit some of their more arcane disputes. (This little world is very amusingly described by Naomi Alderman in her lovely novel Disobedience.) But to speak in general, Jews in Britain consider themselves, and are considered, to be answerable to the same laws as everybody else. Should I mention any of the numerous reasons why it would be extremely nerve-racking if this were not true?

Hitchens goes on to explain that Williams believes that Sharia Law maybe appropriate because portions of England already follow their own religious laws outside the common law system like the Jewish Orthodox that he mentioned. The lunacy is even more scary when you come to learn that Williams is the leading religious figure in Britain.