This Week on the Web (March 24 – March 30)

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COMMENTARY

Permission to celebrate Jamestown?

Mona Charen, Jewish World Review

By all means, let's be honest about American history and admit that American Indians were often mistreated (broken treaties, displacement, murder). The Trail of Tears deserved its name. But the description of Powhatan culture as "advanced" is ridiculous. When the two cultures met, one was hundreds of years more advanced than the other. If the Powhatans had been further along, they would have prevailed. They certainly didn't lack the will.

One of the early setbacks (1622) for the British Jamestown settlers was a fierce Indian attack that killed 400 men, women and children. And though the exhibit does mention this elsewhere, it is worth remembering what should be too obvious to require restatement — that precolonial America was no idyll. Indian tribes were in more or less constant warfare with one another — just like humans in the rest of the world.

Some black leaders have objected to celebrating Jamestown's founding because it led to black slavery. It is perhaps worth recalling that Captain John Smith, a figure who gets less attention at the new Jamestown observance than Powhatan rulers Wahunsonacock and Opechancanough and African Queen Njinga, was once a slave himself. Fighting in Transylvania in 1602, he was captured by the Turks and enslaved. Through scheming and murder, Smith was able to escape back to England in 1605 and departed for Virginia soon after. His firm hand permitted the tiny outpost to survive. He memorably explained to the settlers that "He who does not work will not eat." And, as every schoolchild used to know, he believed that Pocahontas saved his life when her father captured him.

Black slavery was actually still several decades in the future when Jamestown was founded. And while neither Virginia's nor America's history can be unchained from the taint of slavery, can't we be mature about this? Keith Richburg, foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, was stationed in Africa in the early 1990s. What he saw there — rampant corruption, casual cruelty on the streets of Nairobi, civil war in Somalia and genocide in Rwanda — made him express gratitude that his ancestors had been dragged to the New World, the horrors of slavery notwithstanding.

There is every reason to celebrate the 400th birthday of America — for warts and all — there never has been a better country for all its citizens.

Legalize 'Price-Fixing'

The Ayn Rand Institute (via Principles in Practice)

On March 26 the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., where the justices will decide whether antitrust law forbids a manufacturer from setting a minimum retail price for its products. In the past, judges have ruled that this is "price-fixing," and therefore must be prohibited. Critics of this precedent, including the Bush administration, claim that it is "outdated" and "cannot withstand modern economic analysis."

"An overturning of this particular anti-price-fixing precedent would be a welcome development," said Alex Epstein, a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. "But the Court should go further and repudiate any prohibition against so-called price-fixing.

"Prohibitions against 'price-fixing' are defended by alleging that if multiple companies agree to sell some product at the same price, they will be able to gouge consumers by making that price exorbitant.

"But this is nonsense. So long as the government stays out of the market, no group of companies can force a customer to pay more for a product than it is worth—nor can a group of companies that arbitrarily jack up their prices prevent worthy competitors from winning over their customers.

Inconsistency Has No Appeal

Amit Ghate, Thrutch

As much as I sympathize with anyone trying to stand up to the rabid Islamists, in watching the videos of these "moderate" muslims, I was struck by how hopeless their position truly is. That is, they accept all the claims of the fundamentalist muslims, but then ask that one not take the ideas too seriously. Or to look at it another way, the fundamentalists can better be classified as "consistent" muslims, while the "moderates" are more accurately described as "inconsistent" muslims.

Who is going to be swayed by a call to inconsistency?

The only hope any opposition has of challenging the fundamentalist is to disavow his ideas at their root and then offer different (better) ones. Trying to have it both ways (we believe the teachings and the method but don't want to go to "extremes") has no logical or emotional appeal and so can't win. Of course the fundamentalists don't even see this -- as they are beyond any type of reasoning -- so, predictably, they've responded with death threats.

Finally an ally in the struggle against establishment Islam

Jeff Jacoby, Jewish World Review

Over the years, CAIR and other Islamist groups have gotten much mileage out of such strong-arm tactics — typically while posing as moderate defenders of civil rights. But there is good news: Some Americans are pushing back. And even better news: Some of the push-back is coming from Muslims who forcefully reject the Islamist project.

[…]

I is hard to overstate how important the Zuhdi Jassers are in the free world's struggle against radical Islam. We call it the "war on terrorism," but terrorism is only a means to an end, namely, bringing the entire world under sharia — Islamic law. Not all Islamists are jihadi terrorists, but all Islamists *do* want sharia to reign supreme. When the chairman of CAIR, Omar Ahmad, addressed an audience of California Muslims in 1998, he asserted that Islam is in America not to be equal to other faiths but to become dominant, and that the Koran should be the highest authority in America, according to a paper that covered his speech. "Everything we need to know is in the Koran," he told his audience. "We don't need to look somewhere else." (Ahmad now denies having said this, but the paper stands by its story.)

By contrast, Muslim reformers like Jasser explicitly reject political supremacy for Islam and the Koran. "As a devout Muslim," he told me last week, "I can testify that a Muslim can truly love the faith of Islam, yet believe deeply not only in the separation of mosque and state but in the pre eminence of Americanism over Islamism." When he was commissioned as an officer in the US Navy, Jasser took an oath to defend the Constitution "against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and he sees no enemy more hostile to the Constitution today than the ideology of radical Islam. CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and Al Azhar, Shi'ite ayatollahs and Wahhabist sheiks — whatever their differences in tactics and style, they are as one in seeking universal compliance with sharia.

Here in America," says Jasser, "Muslims, Christians, and Jews can practice their faith freely and without fear. Precisely because the Constitution forbids any state religion, all religions live together in harmony. I wish the Muslim world would show such tolerance! As an American, I cherish that liberty. The Islamists would take it away." In the global conflict between Muslim theocracy and secular democracy, Jasser has no trouble choosing sides. "I venerate the Koran, but I want to live under the Constitution," he says. "Under Islamism, the Koran would be the Constitution."

On 9/11, many Americans woke up to the fact that a deadly enemy is arrayed against us and that effective counterterrorism is critical to our national security. But even more critical is the need to delegitimize the Islamist message that resonates with so many Muslims. To permanently end the "war on terrorism," we must defeat the ideology that motivates the terrorists. We have no allies more valuable in that cause than Muslim reformers like Zuhdi Jasser, in whose passion for pluralism and liberty lies the hope of an Islamic Enlightenment.

In Defense of Income Inequality

Peter Schwartz, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Principles in Practice)

Income inequality used to be a rabble-rousing issue of the left. Now it is being raised by mainstream figures, from the head of the Federal Reserve to President Bush, who are apologetically trying to offer solutions. But what is the actual problem they wish to solve? Certainly, it is not a growth in poverty. To the contrary, between 1979 and 2006—the period during which income inequality has supposedly become more acute—real wages for the median worker rose 11.5%. Even workers in the lowest tenth percentile had an increase of 4%.

No, the alleged problem is not that some are becoming poor—but that others are too rich. The complaint is that while the bottom tier enjoyed a 4% rise in income, the top tier enjoyed a 34% increase. The complaint is that over the past 25 years, the share of income of the top fifth of households climbed from 42% to 50%, while that of the bottom fifth fell from 7% to 5%.

But this development represents an injustice only if we use a perverse standard of evaluation. It is unjust only if we measure someone's economic status not by what he has, but by what others have—i.e., only if he benefits not by making more money, but by making his neighbor have less.

This is the standard of egalitarianism—the standard that demands a uniformity of income, regardless of anyone's ability or effort. It is the standard of envy, whereby a problem exists whenever some have more, of anything, than others. And the egalitarian's solution is to eliminate all such inequalities.

Egalitarianism is the antithesis of the valid tenet of political equality, under which we have equal rights.

Who Pays America's Tax Burden, and Who Gets the Most Government Spending?

The Tax Foundation

While many studies answer the ques­tion of who pays taxes in America, the question of who gets the most government spending is often overlooked. Just as some Americans bear a larger portion of the nation's tax burden than others, some Americans also receive a larger share of the nation's government spending.

This report summarizes the key findings of a comprehensive 2007 Tax Foundation study of federal, state and local taxes and government spending. The results show that when we consider the distribution of government spending as well as taxes, it provides a dramatically altered view of how U.S. fiscal policy affects Americans at different income levels than is apparent from the distribution of tax burdens alone.

Overall, we find that America's lowest-earning one-fifth of households received roughly $8.21 in government spending for each dollar of taxes paid in 2004. Households with middle-incomes received $1.30 per tax dollar, and America's highest-earning households received $0.41. Government spending targeted at the lowest-earning 60 percent of U.S. households is larger than what they paid in federal, state and local taxes. In 2004, between $1.03 trillion and $1.53 trillion was redistributed downward from the two highest income quintiles to the three lowest income quintiles through government taxes and spending policy.

These findings suggest tax distributions alone do not tell Americans how much the nation's fiscal system is helping or hurting low-income households. To answer that, we must look beyond tax burdens to government spending as well. Lawmakers who ignore the distribution of govern­ment spending risk making policy judgments based on an incorrect set of facts about the United States fiscal system.

What to Do About Gasoline Prices

Alex Epstein, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Principles in Practice)

In response to recent rises in gas prices, we are once again hearing calls for the government to "do something" to force prices lower. But no matter what the price of gasoline is, such calls are wrong. All market fluctuations in the price of gasoline, up or down, are a good thing—and none of the government's business.

When customers' demand for gasoline increases relative to the supply, the sellers of gasoline raise their prices. As the producers and owners of gasoline, this is their right—and we should be glad that they exercise it. Not only do price increases encourage future production, but without such price increases, we would very quickly see shortages as customer demand for cheap gasoline far outstripped the available supply.

[…]

There is no moral or economic justification for any politician or consumer to declare market prices "too high," and to use the government to coerce lower prices. To do so violates both the rights of gasoline producers and their productive customers to set voluntary prices—and, in doing so, causes destructive shortages. When shortages exist, how much gasoline one is able to get depends not on one's willingness to pay a mutually agreeable price, but on one's political pull to secure rations, or on whether one has time on one's hands to wait in endless lines (as in the 1970s).

There is only one sense in which we are entitled to tell the government to "do something" about gasoline prices: insofar as these prices are made artificially high by the government's many regulations on oil and gasoline production.

[…]

The government is right to take action if an oil company provably threatens or harms a person's property. But to impose huge costs on oil companies and their customers in the name of preserving untouched nature is unconscionable.

What should the government do about gasoline prices? Get its hands out of the market—and keep them off.

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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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This Week on the Web (March 17 – March 23)

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NEWS

Iran Is Playing a Growing Role in Iraq Economy

New York Times

While the Bush administration works to stop Iran from meddling in Iraq, Iranian air-conditioners fill Iraqi appliance stores, Iranian tomatoes ripen on the windowsills of kitchens here and legions of white Iranian-made Peugeots sit in Iraqi driveways.

Some Iraqi cities, including Basra, the southern oil center, buy or plan to buy electricity from Iran. The Iraqi government relies on Iranian companies to bring gasoline from Turkmenistan to alleviate a severe shortage. Iraqi officials are reviewing an application by Iran to open a branch of an Iranian bank in Baghdad, and Iran has offered to lend Iraq $1 billion.

The economies of Iraq and Iran, the largest Shiite-majority countries in the world, are becoming closely integrated, with Iranian goods flooding Iraqi markets and Iraqi cities looking to Iran for basic services.

After the two countries fought a devastating war from 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein maintained tight control over cross-border trade, but commerce has exploded since the American-led invasion of 2003.

Much of the money is heading in one direction, though: Iraq is becoming dependent on imports because industries here have been ravaged by the economic sanctions of the 1990s and the current sectarian violence. Reconstruction and security have lagged so far behind the expectations of ordinary Iraqis that cheap goods from Iran and neighboring countries often provide the only comforts in their lives.

“What is happening in Iraq at the moment is a lot of trade, but it’s almost all one-way trade,” Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister for finance, said of the country’s economic ties with Iran and other neighbors. “If you take oil away, there’s a lot of imbalance in this.”

Iraqi leaders from the Shiite bloc currently in power say political and economic ties with Iran, which is governed by Shiite Persians, will inevitably strengthen. As driving factors, they cite the hostility of Sunni Arab nations to a Shiite-run Iraq and the ambivalence of the White House toward the devout Shiite parties here.

Czech leader Klaus fights global warming 'religion'

SignOnSanDiego.com

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a a 'religion' that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.

The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

‘Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

COMMENTARY

The Theory of the Leisure Class: An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich?

Steven E. Landsburg, Slate

As you've probably heard, there's been an explosion of inequality in the United States over the past four decades. The gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers is bigger than ever before, and it continues to grow.

How can we close the gap? Well, I suppose we could round up a bunch of assembly-line workers and force them to mow the lawns of corporate vice presidents. Because the gap I'm talking about is the gap in leisure time, and it's the least educated who are pulling ahead.

[…]

A certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

Right Data, Wrong Lesson

Gus Van Horn

Clarence Page pens an interesting column in which he describes the enormous success of America's black immigrants, and yet at the same time, ignores some obvious implications. The interesting question is: Why?

Consider the following data. Each bullet is quoted directly from Page's column.

• 43.8 percent of African immigrants had earned a college degree, compared with 42.5 of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent of immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole. [These statistics are from a 2000 study. For comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau reported in 2005 for Americans over the age of 25, 28% overall held at least bachelor's degrees, 49% of Asian-Americans, but only 18% of blacks. Not using the age cutoff, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported in 2004 an11% figure for blacks earning four-year degrees or higher. --ed]
• About 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, ..., but somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of the black students were "West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples."
• Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation's college-age black population, account for more than a fourth of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study of 28 colleges and universities published recently in the American Journal of Education. The proportion of immigrants was higher at private institutions, 28.8 percent, than at public colleges, where they made up 23.1 percent of enrollment.

Impressive, no? This is even more so when we compare black immigrants to native-born black Americans.

I am inclined to think that, based on such data, two things stand out. (1) If the America Martin Luther King dreamed of, in which blacks "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character", is not already here, it is near at hand. (2) American blacks ought to do some serious soul-searching about why they still remain, in so many respects, at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

Wallpapering with red tape

George Will, Jewish World Review

In the West, where the deer and the antelope used to play, the spirit of "leave us alone" government used to prevail. But governments of Western states are becoming more like those elsewhere, alas.

Consider the minor — but symptomatic — matter of the government-abetted aggression by "interior designers" against mere "decorators," or against interior designers whom other interior designers wish to demote to the status of decorators. Some designers think decorators should be a lesser breed without the law on its side.

Those categories have blurry borders. Essentially, interior designers design an entire space, sometimes including structural aspects; decorators have less comprehensive and more mundane duties — matching colors, selecting furniture, etc.

In New Mexico, anyone can work as an interior designer. But it is a crime, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to a year in prison, to list yourself on the Internet or in the Yellow Pages as, or to otherwise call yourself, an "interior designer" without being certified as such. Those who favor this censoring of truthful commercial speech are a private group that controls, using an exam administered by a private national organization, access to that title.

This is done in the name of "professionalization," but it really amounts to cartelization. Persons in the business limit access by others — competitors — to full participation in the business.

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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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Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested (or they can sign up by sending an email with “Week on the Web” in the subject line to rsmurphy@hotmail.com).

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This Week on the Web (March 10 – March 16)

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Quote of the Week:

“It's this appeasement which is victimizing our troops, not the ‘war-hungry’ mentality the Democrats claim President Bush possesses.”

- Michael Hurd

Video of the Week:

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Channel 4 (via YouTube)

“This short program, produced and shown in England, destroys the arguments put forward by Al Gore and the human caused Global Warming activists.”

NEWS

Professor's Invitation At GMU Pulled, Muslim Complaints

ABC 7

An Ohio professor who has called for war with Iran had his invitation to speak at George Mason University rescinded after Muslim students complained that he advocates violence.

On Friday, however, it appeared that the speech might be rescheduled for April.

John Lewis, who teaches history at Ashland University, was invited to speak in conjunction with an article he wrote in December titled "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism."

In the article, Lewis calls for war against the Islamic government in Iran and the "immediate, personal destruction" of Muslim clerics and intellectuals who advocate the formation or support of an Islamic state.

The speech had been sponsored in part by the school's Objectivist Club, which promotes the social philosophies of self-interest of author Ayn Rand. The invitation was pulled after the school received complaints from Muslim students and it was discovered that the club's charter had lapsed.

Lewis said Friday that the speech had been tentatively rescheduled for April, with the university's College Republicans club as a new sponsor. But university spokesman Daniel Walsch said the school had received no notice of the club's invitation.

[…]

In a phone interview, Lewis said he does not advocate violence against individual Muslims in the United States who support Islamic law.

"I didn't plan on going to George Mason with an armed gang. I'm coming to share my ideas," Lewis said.

He said he would tell any student who advocates implementation of Islamic law that "it's impossible for you to live in the United States," but that the best way to defeat militant Islam at home is to destroy the Iranian government and eradicate the world's most prominent theocracy.

"They need to witness the destruction of the Iranian state and be shown its failure," he said.

In his article in The Objective Standard, Lewis compares the fight against radical Islam to the fight against the Japanese in World War II.

"Ask whether it would have been in our interest to have left the regime of 1945 in power, to continue preaching religious militarism and training kamikaze. The best thing Americans did for themselves (and, incidentally, the kindest thing for the Japanese) was to burn that regime to the ground. So it is Friday," Lewis wrote.

COMMENTARY

The “Forward Strategy” for Failure

Yaron Brook and Elan Journo, The Objective Standard

The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah, the Islamist regime in Iran, the Mahdi Army, Al Qaeda—these are all part of an ideological movement: Islamic Totalitarianism. Although differing on some details and in tactics, all of these groups share the movement’s basic goal of enslaving the entire Middle East, and then the rest of the world, under a totalitarian regime ruled by Islamic law. The totalitarians will use any means to achieve their goal—terrorism, if it proves effective; all-out war, if they can win; and politics, if it can bring them power over whole countries.

Bush’s forward strategy has helped usher in a new era in the Middle East: By its promotion of elections, it has paved the road for Islamists to grab political power and to ease into office with the air of legitimacy and without the cost of bombs or bullets. Naturally, totalitarians across the region are encouraged. They exhibit a renewed sense of confidence. The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah war against Israel last summer is one major symptom of that confidence; another is Iran’s naked belligerence through insurgent proxies in Iraq, and its righteously defiant pursuit of nuclear technology.

The situation in the Middle East is worse for America today than it was in the wake of 9/11.

[…]

The problem does not lie with a shortage of resources or blunders in executing the strategy. The problem lies with the strategy’s basic goal, whose legitimacy critics fail to challenge.

The strategy has failed to make us safer, because making us safer was never its real goal. That goal is mandated by the corrupt moral ideal driving the strategy.

What, then, is the actual goal of the strategy?

Nonnegotiable: “Diplomacy” with Iran means ignoring what its leaders are saying

Michael Ledeen, Jewish World Review

Kissinger’s refusal to acknowledge the religious and revolutionary nature of the Islamic Republic is of a piece with the scores of diplomats who insist that negotiations will eventually tame the Islamic Revolution. It won’t work. Only the defeat of the Islamic Republic can accomplish that goal, because that would demonstrate that the mullahs do not have divine support for their global jihad.

There’s something about diplomats, no matter how brilliant, that leads them to see a world that never existed, and most likely never will. The past results achieved by the grand master of diplomacy were often disappointing. Kissinger attempted to tame the Soviet Empire by constructing “détente,” which probably extended the life of the Communist superstate by a decade or more; it took Ronald Reagan to bring it to an end.

[…]

No matter how much evidence of Iran’s determination to destroy or dominate us, no matter how many times Khamenei or Ahmadinejad leads the chant of “Death to America,” no matter how many American fighters and Iraqi citizens are killed as a result of Iranian support for the terrorists, she and the Kissingers of this world continue to convince themselves that things are getting better, that Iran shares our goals for peace in the region, and that if we only make one more generous offer, the whole unpleasant situation will work out for the best.

It is not so. They are not like us, and they do not share our dreams. Diplomacy will not tame them. Only our victory will.

Faster, Please. Our kids are getting killed every day by these people, and we’re next on their list.

Free Radical: Ayaan Hirsi Ali infuriates Muslims and discomfits liberals

Joseph Rago, Opinion Journal

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is untrammeled and unrepentant: "I am supposed to apologize for saying the prophet is a pervert and a tyrant," she declares. "But that is apologizing for the truth."

Statements such as these have brought Ms. Hirsi Ali to world-wide attention. Though she recently left her adopted country, Holland--where her friend and intellectual collaborator Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist in 2004--she is still accompanied by armed guards wherever she travels.

Ms. Hirsi Ali was born in 1969 in Mogadishu--into, as she puts it, "the Islamic civilization, as far as you can call it a civilization." In 1992, at age 22, her family gave her hand to a distant relative; had the marriage ensued, she says, it would have been "an arranged rape." But as she was shipped to the appointment via Europe, she fled, obtaining asylum in Holland. There, "through observation, through experience, through reading," she acquainted herself with a different world. "The culture that I came to and I live in now is not perfect," Ms. Hirsi Ali says. "But this culture, the West, the product of the Enlightenment, is the best humanity has ever achieved."

[…]

Many liberals loathe her for disrupting an imagined "diversity" consensus: It is absurd, she argues, to pretend that cultures are all equal, or all equally desirable. But conservatives, and others, might be reasonably unnerved by her dim view of religion. She does not believe that Islam has been "hijacked" by fanatics, but that fanaticism is intrinsic in Islam itself: "Islam, even Islam in its nonviolent form, is dangerous."

The Muslim faith has many variations, but Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the unities are of greater significance. "Islam has a very consistent doctrine," she says, "and I define Islam as I was taught to define it: submission to the will of Allah. His will is written in the Quran, and in the hadith and Sunna. What we are all taught is that when you want to make a distinction between right and wrong, you follow the prophet. Muhammad is the model guide for every Muslim through time, throughout history."

This supposition justifies, in her view, a withering critique of Islam's most holy human messenger. "You start by scrutinizing the morality of the prophet," and then ask: "Are you prepared to follow the morality of the prophet in a society such as this one?" She draws a connection between Mohammed's taking of child brides and modern sexual oppressions--what she calls "this imprisonment of women." She decries the murder of adulteresses and rape victims, the wearing of the veil, arranged marriages, domestic violence, genital mutilation and other contraventions of "the most basic freedoms."

These sufferings, she maintains, are traceable to theological imperatives. "People say it is a bad strategy," Ms. Hirsi Ali says forcefully. "I think it is the best strategy. . . . Muslims must choose to follow their rational capacities as humans and to follow reason instead of Quranic commands. At that point Islam will be reformed."

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype

William J. Broad, New York Times

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

Quotable

“It’s been said before, and it’s worth saying again: If the Arabs put down their weapons, there would be no more war. If the Jews put down their weapons, there would be no more Jews.”

- Bart Hinkle

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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

**********************************************************************************************************

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested (or they can sign up by sending an email with “Week on the Web” in the subject line to rsmurphy@hotmail.com).

Send links to articles that you feel would be a good addition to this newsletter to rsmurphy@hotmail.com.

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This Week on the Web (March 3 – March 9)

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NEWS

Gates warns on US immigration curbs

Financial Times

Speaking before the Senate committee on health, education, labour and pensions, Mr Gates said that tighter US immigration policies – governed partly by concerns over terrorism – were “driving away the world’s best and brightest precisely when we need them most”.

“It makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled individuals, many of whom are educated at our top colleges and universities, that the United States does not welcome or value them,” Mr Gates said. “America will find it infinitely more difficult to maintain its technological leadership if it shuts out the very people who are most able to help us compete.”

Mr Gates said that other countries were taking advantage of restrictive US policies by catering to highly skilled workers who would otherwise choose to study, live and work in the US.

Net worth of U.S. households skyrockets

Yahoo! News

The net worth of U.S. households climbed to a record high in the final quarter of last year, boosted mostly by gains on stocks, the Federal Resever reported Thursday.

Net worth — the difference between households' total assets, such as houses and bank accounts, and their total liabilities, such as mortgages and credit card debt, totaled $55.6 trillion in the October-to-December quarter.

That marked a 2.5 percent growth rate from the third quarter, the previous quarterly record high. Stocks gains helped fuel the increase in net worth, although real-estate gains played a role, too.

For all of last year, households' net worth rose by 7.4 percent, a slower pace than the 7.9 percent increase registered in 2005.

Household debt, meanwhile, grew by 8.6 percent in 2006, down from a 11.7 percent increase in the prior year. The Fed said this deceleration "was accounted for by much slower growth of home mortgage debt."

FEDS: February Temperatures were below normal, 34th coolest in 113 years

National Climate Data Center

The average temperature in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was -1.8 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 34th coolest February in 113 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.

1.56 inches of precipitation fell in February. This was -0.46 inches less than the 1901-2000 average, the 16th driest such month on record. The precipitation trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.00 inches per decade.

COMMENTARY

Profit makes medicines cheaper

Richard Ralston, The Orange County Register

Advocates of medical socialism want to reduce the profits of pharmaceutical firms and put health insurance companies out of business completely. But who profits from profits – and exactly who profits when they are destroyed?

[…]

Of course, it is precisely because insurance companies need to make a profit that they monitor and control what they pay out. Their only source of funds to pay for services is the premiums paid by their policyholders. Medicare and Medicaid do not need to bother about such things as costs because of an endless source of tax revenue or government debt. That is why so much of the increase in cost that alarms politicians is caused by government health care spending. That is why the government can keep the "administrative cost" of burning money quite low. Who profits from that?

Our pharmaceutical industry has produced a revolution in medical treatment that has greatly improved health and longevity in the U.S., with no extra charge to the rest of the world. Each year, $60 billion is spent by the industry on research and development of new drugs.

Yet the most explicit and outrageous fabrication we hear from industry critics is that most drug research is funded by the government or universities, which then just hand the new drugs over to pharmaceutical firms to manufacture and make all the profit. The source of such nonsense is animosity toward free enterprise and all business as such. Business executives are considered "for-profit thieves" who must be exiled from the health care system as unworthy of providing health care, and the financial support of their investors must be denied any return on investment. Better more misery and no new miracle drugs than to allow someone, somewhere to make a profit. This ideology is enormously destructive.

Who Is Gouging Whom?

David Holcberg, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Capitalism Magazine)

Last Wednesday 79 members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill instituting criminal and civil penalties on any corporation or individual found guilty of gasoline "price gouging." But the real gouger driving up gasoline prices is not the private sector, it is our government.

To "gouge" means to extort, to take by force--something that oil companies and gas stations have no power to do. Unlike a government, which can forcibly take away its citizens' money and dictate their behavior, an oil company can only make us an offer to buy its products, which we are free to reject.

Because sellers must gain the voluntary consent of buyers, and because the market allows freedom of competition, oil and gasoline prices are set, not by the whim of companies, but by economic factors such as supply and demand. If oil companies could set prices at will, surely they would have charged higher prices in the 1990s, when gasoline was under one dollar a gallon!

Al Gore's Inconvenient Electric Bill

Steven Milloy, JunkScience.com

The March 1863 Enrollment Act permitted wealthy men to legally dodge the Civil War draft by paying a $300 commutation fee to the U.S. Government. This controversial loophole fueled public perception of a “rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.”

The sight of well-dressed men during the 1863 New York City draft riots prompted angry crowds to derisively call out, “There goes a $300-man.”

It is, therefore, somewhat odd that Al Gore has ventured to become a latter-day $300-man in his crusade against global warming, especially since he touts himself as courageously leading the charge for wide-spread personal sacrifice.

At the end of Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” viewers are asked, “Are you ready to change the way you live”? Following this line of thinking, the movie’s web site suggests many ways that you can “reduce your impact at home,” including using less heating and air conditioning, buying expensive fluorescent light bulbs, using less hot water, using a clothesline rather than a dryer, carpooling, flying less and buying cost-inefficient hybrid cars.

Given that Gore calls the fight against global warming a “moral imperative” in the movie, you might reasonably think that he practices what his movie’s web site preaches. But you’d be wrong.

Gitmo's Guerrilla Lawyers: How an unscrupulous legal and PR campaign changed the way the world looks at Guantanamo

Debra Burlingame, Opinion Journal

He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando, was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi fortress in Afghanistan when the uprising of 538 hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters began. Spann emptied his rifle, then his sidearm, then fought hand-to-hand as he was swarmed by raging prisoners screaming "Allahu akbar!"

The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and U.S. forces went on for several days, only ending when 86 of the remaining jihadi fighters were smoked out of a basement where they had retreated and where they murdered a Red Cross worker who had gone in to check on their condition. Spann, a former Marine, is credited with saving the lives of countless Alliance fighters and Afghan civilians by standing and firing as they ran for cover. His beaten and booby-trapped body was recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory suggesting he had been shot execution style.

One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living somewhere in Kuwait, a free man.

[…]

According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of hate mail when the organization filed the very first Guantanamo detainee case in February of 2002. The shocking images of 9/11 were still fresh; it would be three more months until most human remains and rubble would be cleared from ground zero. There was no interest in Guantanamo from the lawyers at premium law firms.

But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal nuisance. The Guantanamo cases gave lawyers a chance to take a swipe at the president's policies, give heroic speeches about protecting the rights of indigents, and be a part of the kind of landmark legal cases that come along once in a lifetime. The Guantanamo Bay Bar increased from a lonely band of activist lawyers operating out of a run down office in Greenwich Village to an association of 500 lawyers. Said Mr. Ratner about the blue chip firms that initially shunned these cases, "You had to beat the lawyers off with a stick."

[…]

Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies--while casting themselves as patriots--makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we eliminated "lawyer-free zones."

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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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