The Long View 2007-08-24: The Sublimity of Bush; Health Care Misdirection; Immigration & Bubbles

I read a lot of David Warren, because John read him. Much like John, David later came to regret some of his enthusiasm for the Iraq War, and retreated to a life of prayer and contemplation, much like Benedict XVI.

Warren’s quote here reminds me of my youth, when I assumed that the Republicans were the party of War, while the Democrats were the party of Peace. That Warren, a Canadian, assumed the same is remarkable, but not nearly as remarkable as my realization through the Obama years that this impression was wholly false.

Sure, Reagan had Star Wars, and Bush I had the Gulf War; Clinton had not only Somalia [immortalized by Mark Bowden] but perhaps more important and less well-known Operation Storm. Bill Clinton, as President, was pretty willing to extend American power throughout the world. We shouldn’t pretend that anything that happened in the Horn of Africa or the Balkans matches the scope of the Cold War, but it is arguably on the same scale as everything that happened in the quarter century since.

The Presidency of Barack Obama taught me the Democratic Party in the United States was just as willing to drop the hammer as the Republicans ever were, and looking back on John’s work, plus a few other notables, showed me that had been the case for a long time.

I don’t recall at the moment if this is the first place John said this, but John J. Reilly is the one who inspired my view that healthcare is a good, not a right:

Of course there is no right to health care. There is no right to airports or meat inspection, either, but public necessity required turning those things into public functions. The same may or may not happen to health care in the US, but we will only gum up the works if we treat it as a rights issue. It's a police issue.

I find it an example of synchronicity that the same Richard Epstein referenced here recently embarrassed himself by lowballing the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in America.

The Sublimity of Bush; Health Care Misdirection; Immigration & Bubbles

David Warren, who is the Canadian I read regularly in addition to Mark Steyn, judges that the world will be a more dangerous place after Bush:

[T]he Russian military chief of staff, Yuri Baluyevsky, chose the 39th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to advise Prague this week to "think again" about allowing radar installations for the U.S. missile defence shield to be installed on Czech soil....And in case that wasn't bald enough, he then explained that he was referring to the next U.S. presidential election...We are caught in a trap. The very success of the Bush strategy, in preventing another major terror strike on the U.S., confronting and arresting the progress of Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere and also in consolidating the post-Cold War European gains of NATO and the European Union, contributes to an illusion of security in a world that has seldom been such a dangerous place. People forget what alliances require...Like al-Qaeda in Iraq and the many other adversaries America and the West must continue to face, the Russians are looking forward to the time after George Bush leaves office...They might well be right...It is assumed that the American electorate has by now tired of playing policeman to the world and that the next president will be a liberal Democrat, eager to make unilateral concessions, slash military budgets to fund social programs and cut-and-run from foreign battlefields.

But here's the interesting point: Bush never gave the electorate the impression that he was trying to play policemen to the world, even though during his administration the US continued to provide the same sort global utility services it has for the past 60 years.

George Bush ran in 2000 on a platform of partial disengagement from the world. The foreign policy initiatives with which he entered office dealt with Latin America, particularly Mexico. He was quite willing to publicly defer to the UN on international governance issues, if only because he did not take them seriously. He repeatedly derided the concept of nation building. After 911, he implemented the policies he found in Bill Clinton's Inbox, made some Churchillian speeches, and then devoted his time to the policies he had intended to pursue originally, such as the privatization of social security and the opening of the borders. He never took a step toward aligning his fiscal policy with the foreign policy his occasional bursts of brilliant rhetoric suggested. People notice these things.

The same was true of his Department of Defense: Donald Rumsfeld had plans to prepare the US military for a future of Special Forces warfare, in which small numbers of globally mobile, technologically empowered troops would fight brief, low-casualty, high-intensity campaigns. The idea was to be able to change governments on short notice, not societies. This was a reasonable program, but by the winter of 2003 it was irrelevant to what the the US had to do, yet Rumsfeld kept trying to do it.

We should recall that the Clinton Administration really did try to act publicly like a world policeman. The results may have been mixed, but those are the people who bid fair to return to the White House in January 2009.

* * *

Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? is the title of a book by by Richard A. Epstein that was published in 2000. Instapundit linked to the Amazon page for it yesterday, so I took a look. There I found that Library Journal characterizes it thus:

Noted legal scholar Epstein challenges the right to universal healthcare, deriving his fundamental argument from his own interpretation of common law, the basis of American justice. Epstein argues that the system of rights and duties enshrined in common-law principles cannot be extended as obligations to provide care and assistance. He fears that state control of redistributive taxation threatens to shift entitlements from old to young and rich to poor and guarantees state support for a system of healthcare that, in the long run, may not provide an adequate structure for reform and regulation.

Of course there is no right to health care. There is no right to airports or meat inspection, either, but public necessity required turning those things into public functions. The same may or may not happen to health care in the US, but we will only gum up the works if we treat it as a rights issue. It's a police issue.

* * *

Last week, when I was otherwise occupied, Mickey Kaus went barking up the wrong tree in search of a connection between immigration and the collapse of the mortgage markets and returned to present his readers with this red herring:

Am I crazy to think that the failure of comprehensive immigration reform--and with it, the prospect (despite sponsors' assurances) of millions more legal and illegal immigrants--has something to do with the trouble in the housing market? The recent Bush anti-illegal crackdown has only emphasized the possibility of a lower-immigration future. Fewer immigrants = lower demand for housing. If you built your expectation of rising home values on that anticipated demand, and like much of the MSM you actually believed the Grand Bargainers' blustery predictions of success, then you've had to reassess your portfolio sharply downward, no? Just a thought.
Friday, August 17, 2007

Yes, there's a connection, but it's not that those poor Central American construction workers you see shivering in cloth jackets at construction sites in the winter have much intention of buying the $500k condos they are building. The connection is that those guys work so cheap that projects seem plausible that otherwise no one in his right mind would undertake. Immigration put the air in the housing bubble from the supply side.

Kaus did immediately redeem himself, however:

... P.S.: Cheaper housing, coupled with higher wages for the unskilled. In the long run that sounds like a good combination, even if some of Jim Cramer's friends lose their jobs in the transition. ...

Exactly.

Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly

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