This Week on the Web (January 6 – January 12)


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NEWS

Brown to end Blair's terror strategy
Telegraph

Gordon Brown vowed yesterday to take on President George W Bush and the Americans over foreign policy as he spelt out plans to break from Tony Blair's approach to the "war on terror".

The Chancellor, who is on course to succeed Mr Blair as Prime Minister this summer, made clear he wanted to place Britain's national interest above the special relationship with Washington.

Mr Brown also forced Mr Blair, his long-term rival, to authorise No 10 to issue its first statement denouncing the bungled execution of Saddam Hussein.

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Hospitals told to delay operations to ease debt
Telegraph

Hospitals have been told not to operate on patients until they have been on a waiting list for up to 20 weeks in the latest attempt to deal with the financial crisis in the health service.

The instructions to delay treating people for as long as possible are spelled out in leaked documents seen by The Daily Telegraph.

In one letter, hospital managers are told to work out how many operations can be put off until after the new financial year, which starts in April.

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Editor’s Note: More evidence as to why the immoral is impractical.



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COMMENTARY


'No Substitute for Victory': Replies to Criticisms
John Lewis, Principles in Practice

Regarding my article "No Substitute for Victory": The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism in The Objective Standard, readers have brought up several questions that I'd like to answer. Among them are two of great importance: (1) Isn't the enemy stateless, i.e., without the kind of centralized political state that controlled Japan? and (2) Can religion and state be separated in Islam, which is a social-political-legal system as much as it is a religion?

I will address these issues, and others, at length in a reply to readers' comments in the forthcoming issue of TheObjective Standard. But I wish to give a brief answer here in advance.

The power of a policy that states the goal of the war as eliminating State Islam is that it identifies the enemy precisely: those who use force to impose Islam politically. It states exactly what we want from the enemy: an end to his use of force. It has a successful historical precedent. It is also fully consistent with the requirements of individual rights and freedom; it does not ask us to win at the price of losing our liberty. It leads directly to a clear strategy to achieve the policy.


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Sticking it to low-skilled workers
John Stossel, Jewish World Review

Legal wage minimums kill all kinds of entry-level jobs, particularly those that would teach young people basic work habits and the benefits of effort. That's why there are no kids cleaning your windows at gas stations or working as ushers at movie theaters. Those jobs are extinct now because they are worth less than the legislated minimum. Who is helped by that?
Let's face it. The higher minimum wage is a feel-good law. A slight increase will pass because politicians and poverty activists will be able to say they have "done something" for the poor, while the victims of the policy go unnoticed. Those who can't find jobs because they produce too little are not likely to blame the law or the politicians who tried to "help" them. Then the resulting unemployment will justify expansion of the welfare state.
As George Mason University economist Walter Williams says, "It's tempting to think of higher minimum wages as an anti-poverty weapon, but such an idea doesn't even pass the smell test. After all, if higher minimum wages could cure poverty, we could easily end worldwide poverty simply by telling poor nations to legislate higher minimum wages."


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Editor’s Note: Also see Raising the Minimum Wage Will Not Reduce Poverty by The Heritage Foundation



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Arguments left and right
Jeff Jacoby, Townhall.com

The 110th Congress convened under new management last week, and in the House of Representatives, the rush was on. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrats got ready to plow through an ambitious pile of legislation in their first 100 hours. Among the items on their punch list: increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, expanding publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, cutting the interest rate on student loans, and imposing price controls on Medicare prescription drugs.

A more liberal policy agenda isn't all that will be moving into the spotlight. There will be a heightened focus on liberal *arguments* as well -- which means we'll be hearing more about good intentions and less about good results. Political discourse will dwell even more than it already does on "fairness" and "compassion" and "unmet needs" -- and even less on factual evidence and the historical record.


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Writing and Understanding
Lisa VanDamme, Principles in Practice

Several weeks ago, in my article "Pattern Recognition vs. Real Understanding," I stressed the crucial connection between writing and understanding:

For the student to write explanations, in complete sentences, about every subject—whether history, literature, grammar, math, or anything else—requires that he have a true understanding of the concepts at hand. But he can often do well on multiple choice, matching, or other rote exercises with no real understanding.

Let me elaborate on this topic.

If a student's understanding of a given idea is genuine, if he holds the idea independently and clearly sees its relationship to reality, then he can offer reasoned support for his view. In asking the students to write paragraphs and essays in every subject, we are able to emphasize this crucial aspect of thought—we demand that they give reasons for their assertions.

Far from the "every opinion is sacred" attitude learned in most all of today's schools, our students learn that "any unsupported opinion is sacrilege."


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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Objective Standard

Capitalism Magazine

4Commonsense.net

OpinionJournal.com

Junk Science

Activism Humor

The Intellectual Activist



Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

4CommonSense

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