June 2004 Archives

I enjoyed Christopher Hitchens's thorough fisking of the latest work--a clear embarassment to any thoughtful anti-war position--of Michael Moore, that huge, and corrupt, war profiteer. Excerpt:

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

Yet another case of big business using government to build barriers to innovative, new, and potentially commercially threatening business, aided and abbetted by paranoid radicals. Henry Miller and Gregory Conko point out that the biotech industry is now reaping what it helped sew. Excerpt:

Long before the first gene-spliced plants were ready for commercialization, a few agrochemical and biotechnology companies, led by Monsanto and Calgene and supported by BIO (and its precursors), approached policy-makers in the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s and asked that the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration create a regulatory framework specific to gene-spliced products.

The policies recommended by the biotechnology industry, predicated on the myth that there is something fundamentally novel and worrisome about gene- splicing techniques, were far more restrictive than could be justified on scientific grounds and often even more burdensome than proposals by regulators.

Ostensibly, the goal of these policies was to placate anti-biotech activists and provide reassurance to consumers that regulators had evaluated and cleared gene-spliced products, but the real motives were less benign. Industry representatives have admitted after the fact that the companies wanted excessive regulatory requirements to make biotech R&D too expensive for possible competitors such as start-ups and seed companies; in other words, regulatory expenses and delays would serve as a market-entry barrier.

The USDA and EPA in particular were glad to oblige industry, with draconian policies that focused specifically on and discriminated against plants and microorganisms crafted through gene splicing. As a result, a field trial on a gene-spliced organism today costs 10 to 20 times as much as the same trial with a plant that has virtually identical traits, but that has been modified with less precise and predictable conventional techniques.

Victor Davis Hanson describe the "New Defeatism" in National Review Online. There is a staggering amount of pessimism going around--especially for a country that not long ago won what had been for decades seen as an unwinable struggle: the Cold War. One might add "The New Scapegoating" to go along with this new pessimism--and perhaps even "The New Bigotry"--as a worrying number of Americans are becoming positively European when it comes to their attitude towards Jews and Israelis. Supporters of the war will find this perspective refreshing. Opponents will hate it. Excerpt:

We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.

David Henderson makes the case for the US to sell ALL of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Excerpt:

The Wall Street Journal's editors do have one legitimate objection. They argue that "Releasing oil for political purposes would make matters worse by removing the incentive for private companies to carry inventories." That's true. And that's why there's an even better reform. There was never much justification for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the first place. Private holders of oil have the right incentive to hold inventories if the government can't undercut them by selling when prices are high. But the very existence of the SPR means that inventory holders always have to second-guess the government. There's only way to solve this problem: have the government sell the oil until there's none left. Then the government could reduce the debt by about $16.3 billion (assuming conservatively that it gets an average price of $25 a barrel on its 650 million barrels), bring the price of oil down by $5 a barrel at least, and avoid messing up future incentives for private firms to hold oil reserves. Now there's the right trifecta.