Right Opinion

Is Seasteading the Future?

Here's a novel idea: Escape the suffocating chains of intrusive government by starting your own country! That's Patri Friedman's idea. He comes from an impressive line of libertarian thinkers. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize-winning free-market economist, was his grandfather. His father is David Friedman, author of the libertarian classic "The Machinery of Freedom." Milton Friedman advocated severely limited government. David Friedman thinks we need no government at all. And now Patri believes he has an effective solution to bad government: communities on the ocean surface, or seasteading.

Michelle Obama: First Lady of Junk Science

While her husband may have paid lip service to ending the abuse of science for "politics or ideology," first lady Michelle Obama gave herself a super-sized waiver. Two of her showcase social engineering campaigns -- tax preferences for breast-pumping working mothers and expanded nutrition labels -- are based on distorting or dismissing the prevailing public health literature. Just as the White House costumed Obamacare activists in white lab coats, the fashionable Mrs. O has cloaked her meddling anti-obesity crusade in medical fakery.

Lonely, Hurting Marriages

"I just can't do this for 20 more years!" Stacy's lonely marriage was worse than it had ever been. Now she wanted out. National Marriage Week, which kicked off on February 7th this year, reached a crescendo on Valentine's Day. Across the country, millions of married couples exchanged cards, sent flowers and had romantic dinners as they celebrated their commitment to each other. It was a beautiful reminder that in spite of the naysayers, marriage is not dead.

Self-Inflicted Poverty

Why is it that Egyptians do well in the U.S. but not Egypt? We could make that same observation and pose that same question about Nigerians, Cambodians, Jamaicans and others of the underdeveloped world who migrate to the U.S. Until recently, we could make the same observation about Indians in India, and the Chinese citizens of the People's Republic of China, but not Chinese citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Let's look at Egypt. According to various reports, about 40 percent of Egypt's 80 million people live on or below the $2 per-day poverty line set by the World Bank. Unemployment is estimated to be twice the official rate pegged at 10 percent.

Got to Be Free: Did Bush's Foreign Policy Set the Stage for Middle Eastern Democracy?

As hundreds of thousands of Egyptians poured into the streets of Cairo, braving riot police, tanks and the government's plainclothes thugs in an ultimately successful effort to end Hosni Mubarak's 30-year dictatorship, Elliott Abrams realized something important: George W. Bush was right. Writing in The Washington Post, Abrams, a deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration, credited his former boss with recognizing that "Arab nations, too, yearn to throw off the secret police, to read a newspaper that the Ministry of Information has not censored and to vote in free elections." Other Bush partisans echoed Abrams, praising the former president for insisting, as he put it in a 2003 speech, that "every person has the ability and the right to be free."

Shirley Sherrod's Unconstitutional Attack on Andrew Breitbart

On Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011, Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, the impresario of the ACORN scandal and a growing investigative force in the conservative media, held a press conference at the Conservative Political Action Conference. At that press conference, he laid out evidence of a concerted effort by government officials, race-baiting lawyers and certain black non-farmers to defraud the federal government of millions of dollars by exploiting a legal settlement called Pigford. On Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011, Shirley Sherrod, the single largest recipient of cash from the Pigford settlement, filed a lawsuit against Breitbart for defamation. Sherrod, you may remember, was a ranking Department of Agriculture official in Georgia. Breitbart released a video of Sherrod speaking to the NAACP, where she told a story about discriminating against a white farmer before realizing that such discrimination was wrong. The purpose of releasing the video, as Breitbart clearly stated, was to demonstrate that the same NAACP that labeled the tea party racist tolerated racism within its own ranks. The video accomplished that purpose -- members of the NAACP cheer and laugh as Sherrod describes her past racism in the video.

Socialism's Trajectory: Obama's HHS Bigger Than LBJ's Government

Anyone who doubts the trend toward socialism is pushing America toward ruin should examine the historical tables President Obama published Monday along with his $3.7 trillion budget. In fiscal 2011, according to these tables, the Department of Health and Human Services will spend $909.7 billion. In fiscal 1965, the entire federal government spent $118.228 billion. What about inflation? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' inflation calculator, $118.228 billion in 1965 dollars equals $822.6 billion in 2010 dollars. In real terms, the $909.7 billion HHS is spending this year is about $87.1 billion more than the entire federal government spent in 1965.

The Media's Budget Fantasy Land

Jaws dropped across the nation's capital at the audacious annihilation of the truth on the front page of the Feb. 15 Washington Post. The top headline read, "Obama budget makes deep cuts, cautious trades." It's another day at the Post, where every day is an April Fool's joke. Reporter Lori Montgomery didn't exactly say "deep cuts" in her first sentence. She explained that Obama's budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2012 made "surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs." But two paragraphs later, the reporter admitted, "(T)he president's offer to freeze funding for domestic programs would produce minimal savings in the short term." That doesn't match the "deep cuts" headline in large, bold type -- because there are none.

Obama Has Already Thrown in Towel on 'Winning the Future'

It's pretty hard to stomach when President Obama even talks in terms of cutting the deficit, because his entire economic philosophy compels him to keep spending as if his goal were to impoverish our children and because he continues, in fact, to spend at such bankrupting levels. Reuters reports that Obama's proposed budget would cut the deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Are you kidding me? We wouldn't even come close to balancing the budget if we applied all those cuts in one year, but spread out over 10 years, they are insulting. Plus, many of these "cuts" would be solely the result of bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trip to Vietnam Revives Hatred of Communism

It was difficult to control my emotions -- specifically, my anger -- during my visit to Vietnam last week. The more I came to admire the Vietnamese people -- their intelligence, love of life, dignity and hard work -- the more rage I felt for the communists who brought them (and, of course, us Americans) so much suffering in the second half of the 20th century. Unfortunately, communists still rule the country. Yet, Vietnam today has embraced the only way that exists to escape poverty, let alone to produce prosperity: capitalism and the free market. So what exactly did the 2 million Vietnamese who died in the Vietnam War die for? I would like to ask one of the communist bosses who run Vietnam that question. "Comrade, you have disowned everything your Communist party stood for: communal property, collectivized agriculture, central planning and militarism, among other things. Looking back, then, for what precisely did your beloved Ho Chi Minh and your party sacrifice millions of your fellow Vietnamese?"

Hold the Champagne

Conservatives have been chastised in some quarters over the past week for their lack of enthusiasm for the "revolution" in Egypt. "... Fear and loathing -- of Muslims especially -- rules the Right" declared John Guardiano, on the FrumForum. "Within some conservative precincts," chided Commentary's Peter Wehner, "there has been reluctance even to share in the aspirations of the Egyptian people." Paul Wolfowitz has been utterly unambivalent: "I think it's a terrific vindication for the Egyptian people ... And the people who said for years that somehow Arabs didn't care about freedom are just dead wrong."

In Defense of Custom

Civility and the need for it is much in the news these days, often enough in a political context, and even more often when pundits and pols are accusing each other of lacking it. Civility, like so many other virtues, tends to be more preached than practiced. And to judge by much contemporary commentary, it is a practice most needed by others. Even so, such lectures may have a wholesome effect. Note the president's State of the Union yawner some weeks ago. This year he didn't pause to ream out the various members of the Supreme Court of the United States in attendance. Last year they were arrayed (and arraigned) before him like prisoners in the dock waiting to be lectured severely. Which they were.

The War on Profit

Something there is -- to paraphrase Robert Frost -- that doesn't love an oil company. That, in fact, wants to Shake Fat Cat Oilmen Till Their Teeth Rattle, then Make 'Em Pay for Polluting the Skies and the Oceans!! Then ... ah, well, that'll do for starters. Whatever that "something" may be, Barack Obama has at least a mild case of it: his new budget being case in point. Any federal budget, a political document as much as an economic one, is complex, but from it, you get simple hints as to what's on the minds of those who propose it. The Obama budget -- all $3.7 trillion of it -- signals chiefly a desire to achieve political traction by sidestepping cuts that would anger Democratic constituencies; it likewise signals a dismal understanding of how to create jobs and growth -- for instance, by making energy cheaper.

NPR, PBS Federal Subsidies Should Go

The liberal group Moveon.org has been sending out e-mails to warn that Republicans are back in control of the House and to ask recipients to sign a petition that states, "Congress must protect NPR and PBS and guarantee them permanent funding, free from political meddling." Of course, the best way to guarantee no political meddling would be to eliminate some $500 million in federal funds allocated annually to these media's parent organization, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Egypt's Dim Future

The events of recent days in Egypt offer a sober lesson to westerners who think the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak resembles the American Revolution. Much of the television commentary revealed complete ignorance about the history of the region and of Egypt and especially the clear and present danger of a theocratic coup by the Muslim Brotherhood. First prize for those who are clueless about what is transpiring before their blind eyes goes to James Clapper, director of National Intelligence (though the runner-up prize goes to a TV commentator who compared demonstrators in Tahrir Square to America's tea party movement.)

Rocky and Republicans

Diagnosing the Left

Sometimes I feel like I'm a research scientist. But instead of pursuing a cure for a dread disease, I keep trying to figure out liberalism. On second thought, it is something of a dread disease. What makes it unique is that it's only those suffering from it who are unaware that they have it. But, say we have two brothers raised in the same household. What I want to know is why it is that one will grow up to be honest, decent and intelligent, while the other sibling, who has shared all the same advantages, will turn out to be a Democrat.

The Risk That 2/11/11 Will End up Like Iran's 2/11/79

It looks like 2/11/11 will go down in history with 11/9/89, not 6/4/89. 6/4/89 is when the Chinese military obeyed orders to massacre protesters in Tiananmen Square; 11/9/89 is when East German leaders announced the opening of the Berlin Wall and declined to order border guards to shoot the Berliners who began dismantling the barrier that had stood for 28 years. On 2/11/11, last Friday, as the Egyptian military remained unwilling to fire on the crowds jamming Tahrir Square, Hosni Mubarak resigned after nearly 30 years as president. When people take to the streets in great numbers, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes can only survive if the police or military are willing to shoot.

Berkeley Does Guantanamo

On Feb. 15, on the recommendation of its Peace & Justice Commission, the Berkeley (Calif.) City Council is set to vote on a resolution to invite "one or two cleared" Guantanamo Bay detainees to resettle in Berkeley. Peace & Justice Commissioner Rita Maran told me that the idea was to invite to Berkeley "the kind of people you'd like to have living next door to you or dating your cousin." While the resolution doesn't name the one or two detainees, her panel presented material that cites two -- Russian-born Ravil Mingazov and Algerian-born Djamel Ameziane -- whom it claims have been "cleared." The resolution also asserts that "cleared" detainees have been determined to "pose no threat to the United States." Where they got that information, I do not know.

The GOP's Defense Dilemma

WASHINGTON -- Tall, affable Buck McKeon sits, gavel in hand, at the turbulent intersection of two conflicting Republican tendencies. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee embodies the party's support for a "strong" defense, which is sometimes measured simply by the size of the Pentagon's budget. But the 35 Republicans on his 62-member committee include 13 first-term legislators, some of whom embody the tea party's zeal for cutting government spending. The United States spends almost as much on military capabilities as the rest of the world spends, and at least six times more than the second-biggest spending nation (China). But McKeon says, "A defense budget in decline portends an America in decline." And: "I've been around a long time and I've seen us cut defense investments over the years after wars. ... But I've never before seen us make cuts during a war. Cuts to defense investment in the midst of two wars is unacceptable." Asked, however, about the immediate future of the defense budget, he says, after a long pause: "It's probably going to be smaller."