REPORT: OBAMA’S NSA SPIED ON ISRAEL, CONGRESS, AND JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS

REPORT: OBAMA’S NSA SPIED ON ISRAEL, CONGRESS, AND JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IRAN, ISRAEL, OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY,PRIVACY

President Obama announced two years ago that he would stop eavesdropping on leaders of U.S. allies, after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs. According to The Wall Street Journal, this meant an end to spying on French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders.

However, Israel apparently failed to make Obama’s list of true allies. The Journal reports that the NSA continued routinely to intercept the communications of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and send them to White House officials for dissection.

And that’s not all. Spying on Netanyahu reportedly led to eavesdropping on members of Congress and leaders of American Jewish organization with whom the Israeli prime minister and his government communicated.

Originally, the stated justification for spying on Netanyahu was fear that he would attack Iran without first warning the U.S. However, by 2013, U.S. intelligence agencies had determined that Israel wasn’t going to strike Iran, so the rationale shifted. Now, Team Obama wanted to know whether Israel had learned of secret negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

As negotiations with Iran proceeded, Obama’s appetite for information about Netanyahu’s intentions grew. According to the Journal’s sources, the NSA tried to send updates to U.S. policy makers quickly, often in less than six hours after a notable communication was intercepted.

Obama also convinced himself that Israel was obtaining information about his negotiations with Iran by spying on the U.S. Israel has maintained that whatever it learned was the product of spying on the Iranians.

In early 2015, Israeli communications with members of Congress intensified. According to the Journal, the NSA apparently failed to learn about Speaker Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu to address Congress. However, it did sweep up other conversations between lawmakers and Israeli officials.

At this point, according to the report, the Obama administration told the NSA, in effect, to decide for itself what information obtained from surveillance of conversations with members of Congress to deliver to the president. The White House apparently thought that this approach would give it cover.

“We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ we didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it,’ a senior official told the Journal.

Spying from behind. Vintage Obama.

What are the rules that apply to U.S. surveillance that reaches members of Congress? The Journal says:

The rules were tightened in the early 1990s to require that intelligence agencies inform congressional committees when a lawmaker’s name was revealed to the executive branch in summaries of intercepted communications.

A 2011 NSA directive said direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress should be destroyed when they are intercepted. But the NSA director can issue a waiver if he determines the communications contain “significant foreign intelligence.”

The NSA has leeway to collect and disseminate intercepted communications involving U.S. lawmakers if, for example, foreign ambassadors send messages to their foreign ministries that recount their private meetings or phone calls with members of Congress. . . .

The Journal’s sources say that Israeli officials in the U.S. prepared detailed messages to the government about their exchanges with lawmakers. If so, and to that extent, the NSA had leeway to disseminate the exchanges themselves.

Did the NSA inform the appropriate congressional committees when a lawmaker’s name was revealed to Team Obama in summaries of intercepted communications? It says that the names were removed before the information was passed on to the White House. It also claims to have removed “trash talk,” such as personal attacks on the executive branch.

Is all of this true? Who knows?

What’s clear is that President Obama’s determination to obtain a deal with the mullahs that neither our closest ally in the region (pre-Obama, anyway) nor the American people supported led him to treat Israel as, in effect, an adversary and knowingly to invade the privacy of American legislators and American citizens.

Obama’s supporters would counter that the ends justified the means. So far, as Breitbartpoints out, the “ends” include Iran testing ballistic missiles in violation of U.N. sanctions; Iran sending Shiite mercenaries to fight the civil war in Syria; and Iran continuing overtly to support terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Nor will this by the “end” of similar “ends.”

In any case, it’s silly to talk about “ends justifying means” when Iran can pull out of the dealin short order as soon as it believes it has accomplished its ends.

A final thought. Obama desperately wanted to see Netanyahu and his party lose the 2015 election. Obama-tied operatives played a role in the anti-Netanyahu campaign in Israel. The U.S. State Department was also implicated.

To what extent, if any, was information that Obama obtained by spying on Netanyahu used in furtherance of the quest to see Netanyahu defeated?

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/report-obamas-nsa-spied-on-israel-congress-and-jewish-organizations.php

Just Asking about Islam and Terrorism

Just Asking about Islam and Terrorism

By Andrew C. McCarthy 

Let me ask you a question.

Let’s say you are an authentically moderate Muslim. Perhaps you were born into Islam but have become secularist. Or perhaps you consider yourself a devout Muslim but interpret Islam in a way that rejects violent jihad, rejects the concept that religious and civic life are indivisible, and rejects the principle that sharia’s totalitarian societal framework and legal code must be imposed on the state. Let’s just take that as a given: You are no more inclined toward terrorism than any truly peaceful, moderate, pro-democratic non-Muslim.

So let me pop the question: Is there any insulting thing I could say, no matter how provocative, or any demeaning video I could show you, no matter how lurid, that could convince you to join ISIS?

Mind you, I am not asking whether, upon my insulting and provoking you, you would ever want to have anything to do with me again. I am asking whether there is anything that could be said or done by me, or, say, Donald Trump, or Nakoula Basseley Nakoula — the video producer (Innocence of Muslims) whom Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama tried to blame for the Benghazi massacre — that could persuade you to throw up your hands and join the jihad? Is there anything so profoundly offensive to Islam that we could conjure up that would make a truly moderate, peaceful Muslim sign up for mass murder? Torching and beheading? Killing children? Participating in systematic rape as a weapon of war?

I didn’t think so.

RELATED: Yes, Islamic Is Islamic, But That’s Just the Beginning of the Debate

Yet, understand, that is what Washington would have you believe. Whether it is Barack Obama sputtering on about how Guantanamo Bay drives jihadist recruitment, or Hillary Clinton obsessing over videos (the real one by Nakoula that she pretended caused terrorism in Libya, and the pretend ones about Donald Trump that she claims have Muslims lined up from Raqqa to Ramadi to join ISIS), you are to believe violent jihad is not something that Muslims do but that Americans incite.

And it’s not just Democrats who’d have you buy this bunkum. Think of the Arab Spring fairy tale — about Libya, Egypt, and, most recently, Syria — that Republicans have been telling for years, critiqued by yours truly in Spring Fever. It is still GOP gospel, glibly peddled by Marco Rubio just a couple of weeks ago at the 2016 presidential candidates’ debate. (Disclosure: I support Ted Cruz.)

RELATED: Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth — the Muslim World Is Overcome with Hate

The fairy tale goes something like this. There is a terrible dictator who so tormented his people that they rose up against him. These were noble people, overwhelmingly moderate, secular Muslims — adherents of a “religion of peace” (or, as Bush secretary of state Condi Rice put it, “a religion of peace and love”), who craved democracy. (Caution: You can call them “rebels,” but words like “Muslim Brotherhood” and “sharia” are not to be uttered — we’re trying to build a narrative here!) Sure, the noble people may have tolerated the occasional jihadist in their midst, but that could happen to even the most well-intentioned peaceful moderate, right? (The pervasive presence of jihadists who used Syria and Libya as gateways to jihad against Americans in Iraq is also not to be mentioned.)

Now let’s let bygones be bygones. No need to tarry over small details — like how the noble people installed anti-democratic Islamists who imposed a sharia constitution on Egypt after ousting their pro-American dictator; or how Libya became a jihadist playpen where Americans are murdered after the U.S. government sided with the noble people to oust the U.S.-supported dictator who had been giving us counterterrorism intelligence about jihadists in places like Benghazi.

Let’s just skip ahead to Syria. There, the noble people needed America’s help, but Barack Obama turned a deaf ear. (No need to get into Obama’s collusion with the Islamic-supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to arm and train the “rebels.”) This forfeited our golden opportunity to intervene actively and empower the bounty of moderate, secular, America-loving, democracy-craving Muslims (because that worked so well in Libya). But for Obama’s default, these moderate legions could simultaneously have toppled the dictator and purged the teeny-tiny number of jihadists who might have been skulking about. (Let’s not get into how there don’t seem to be enough of these moderates to man a soccer team, let alone a legion; or how weapons supplied to these “rebels” somehow keep ending up in the hands of the jihadists.) Obama’s default, coupled with the ruthlessness of the dictator, created a leadership and territory void into which jihadists suddenly poured (apparently out of nowhere). Somehow, these spontaneously generating jihadists managed to entice recruits, vastly increasing in number and power (even though — you’ll have to trust us on this — the moderate, secular Muslims really want nothing to do with them).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how ISIS was born and al-Qaeda rose from the ashes.

You buying it? Me neither.

RELATED: Trump’s Muslim Immigration Ban Should Touch Off a Badly Needed Discussion

About 20 years ago, I prosecuted a dozen jihadists, led by the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, for waging a terrorist war against the United States — including the World Trade Center bombing and a plot to attack the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, as well as other New York City landmarks. The defendants were caught on tape building bombs, scheming to strike at American military sites, and planning attacks timed to achieve maximum infidel carnage.

At trial, the jihadists tried to tell the jury they were just moderate, peace-loving Muslims who had been provoked by American foreign policy, a perception of anti-Muslim bias, and videos of Muslims being persecuted in Bosnia. The Blind Sheikh insisted his incitements to jihad were simply a case of faithfully applying sharia principles, which, according to his lawyers, the First Amendment gave him the right to do.

So I asked the jury a simple question:

Is there any obnoxious, insulting, infuriating thing I could say to you, or show to you, that would convince you to join up with mass-murdering terrorists? To become a terrorist yourself?

Of course, a dozen commonsense New Yorkers did not need to be asked such a question. They laughed the defense out of the courtroom.

Alas, in the 20 years since, the defense they laughed out of the courtroom has become the bipartisan government policy of the United States.

Go figure.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/428967/print

Bay Area Job Growth Slows After Minimum-Wage Hikes

BY JED GRAHAM

 View Enlarged Image

The pace of hiring in the leisure and hospitality sector fell to a five-year low for the Bay Area last month, Labor Department data show. Job gains have slowed to less than half the rate that preceded Oakland's and San Francisco's adoption last spring of the highest citywide minimum wage in country.

After rising close to 5% a year, hiring at restaurants, hotels and other leisure sector venues rose just 2.2% from a year ago in November. Meanwhile, in the rest of California, where the minimum wage is generally $3.25 below the $12.25-an-hour level set in Oakland and San Francisco, leisure and hospitality employment rose 4.9%.

The data suggest potential employment headwinds from the higher minimum wage, which jumped 36% in Oakland and 14% in San Francisco. On top of that, Oakland's minimum wage is set to rise to $12.55 in January while San Francisco's will jump to $13 in July.

Yet the data are far from conclusive because they are still preliminary and cover the entire San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan statistical area, of which the two cities' population is one-third.

Detecting the employment impact of the minimum-wage hikes by comparing Bay Area job gains and those in the rest of California isn't likely to become any easier because the rest of California will be raising its minimum wage by $1 to $10 an hour on New Year's Day. San Diego's wage will rise to $10.50 at the start of the year, to be matched by Los Angeles in July.

Twelve other states also will see minimum-wage hikes in 2016, including gains of $1 in Alaska (to $9.75), Massachusetts (to $10) and Nebraska (to $9).

New York City fast-food workers will get a $1.75 minimum-wage hike to $10.50 in 2016, if they work at chains with more than 30 locations nationwide. In the rest of the state, fast-food workers at major chains will get a $1 hike to $9.75.

A subset of Seattle workers, those whose employers have more than 500 workers and who don't get employer insurance, will be entitled to the same $13 minimum wage set in San Francisco, tops in the nation. Those who do get employer coverage will get a $12.50 minimum. For smaller companies, the minimum wage will be $12 and hour, or $1.50 less for who get employer insurance.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/blogs-capital-hill/122415-786815-bay-area-is-red-flag-for-big-minimum-wage-hikes.htm#ixzz3vqf0xEav
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SIX REVEALING HILLARY MOMENTS FROM 2015

SIX REVEALING HILLARY MOMENTS FROM 2015

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, HILLARY CLINTON

When Richard Nixon’s book Six Crises came out in 1962, a wag said it should have been published in loose leaf form so additional crises (of which there turned out to be many) could be added. I feel the same way about this Politico article by Anne Karni called “6 moments that could haunt Hillary Clinton.”

Actually, all the moments are from 2015, and there’s a good chance Clinton will get through the year with no more potentially “haunting” incidents. But what’s the over-under for the number of days next year before Hillary has another “moment”?

The six moments selected by Politico from 2015 are:

1. “We now finally are where we need to be” on ISIL;

2. Republicans are my enemies (a rare moment of candor);

3. “What, like with a cloth or something?” (referring, of course, to the wiping of her email server);

4. Guns (she’s gone further to the left on them than is probably good for her in the general election);

5. Charter schools (she flipped on them after being endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers);

6. Not My Abuela.

I wasn’t familiar with the last of these moments. In case you’re not, here is Politico’s account:

A quick attempt by Clinton’s campaign to turn one of her favorite topics — being a grandmother — into an appeal to young Latino voters recently took a negative turn. Just before the holidays, the Clinton campaign posted a lighthearted list of “7 things Hillary Clinton has in common with your abuela,” a listicle illustrated with GIFs and a reminder that even entertainer Marc Anthony has endorsed her campaign.

The list went viral, but not the way the campaign might have hoped. #NotMyAbuela began trending on Twitter, with comments like: “#NotMyAbuela because she didn’t have to live in poverty with 14 kids and suffer because over half were separated over a border.” Clinton’s campaign, which is counting on Hispanic votes to win a general election, was accused of “Hispandering” — and she can’t afford to alienate those young voters by seeming out of touch or pandering.

If seeming out of touch or pandering is sufficient to cost Clinton the youth vote, then her campaign is doomed. But Politico is probably overestimating the discernment of this segment of the electorate.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/six-revealing-hillary-moments-from-2015.php

NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ISLAM, TERRORISM

I’m always puzzled when government officials say that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. If that is the case, why are guards at Guantanamo Bay required to wear gloves when they handle the Koran? Why did we give Osama bin Laden an Islamic burial at sea? Somehow, when you investigate terrorism, Islam keeps popping up.

The nothing-to-do-with-Islam San Bernardino murderers attended the Dar-al-Uloom mosque in Riverside. The mosque’s spokesman, cleric Roshan Zamir Abbassi, says that he barely knew Syed Farook and “didn’t know his terrorist wife at all.” But those claims don’t seem to be holding up.

Abbassi maintained at a press conference that he didn’t know Farook any better than he knew the reporters in the room. But members of the mosque say Farook was a fixture there. He had been coming to pray and study at least three times a week for two years. In fact, he memorized the Koran at there, something you cannot do without learning Arabic, a subject Abbassi teaches.

His other assertion that he never even saw Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, also strains credulity. Malik joined her husband in shooting 35 of his government co-workers at a Christmas party.

“No one knows anything about his wife,” assistant imam Mahmood Nadvi agreed. “She never came to prayer.

But longtime mosque member Gasser Shehata, who claimed to have prayed “shoulder to shoulder” with Farook, said Dar-al-Uloom prepared a chicken-and-rice dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding last year. Reportedly, hundreds of congregants attended the walima reception, including the mosque leadership.

Abbassi himself is a suspect figure:

Asked if Farook was radicalized at the mosque, Abbassi snapped, “Never.” He said the mosque teaches only peace, insisting no one has even an “extremist idea.”

“In Islam,” he said, “we are against innocent killing.”

Abbassi recently posted a message on Facebook condemning the United States and other Western nations for their Mideast policies, arguing they are equally guilty of violence to achieve political and religious goals. His mosque’s Web page features a video claiming that the San Bernardino shooting was carried out by the US government in a “false flag conspiracy,” and that Farook and Malik were “patsies” assassinated “by government-sponsored perpetrators.”

Right. Abbassi’s brother also has problematic associations:

Another person of interest is Abbassi’s brother, Mohammad Sabir Abbassi, a Muslim activist who serves as a trustee and English teacher at the San Diego mosque once headed by the late al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

FBI Agent Joel Anderson said in court filings that Farook indicated he was a big fan of Awlaki and listened to a series of sermons about jihad and martyrdom called “The Hereafter.”

Farouk reportedly was a member of an extremist sect called Tablighi Jamaal, which I don’t recall hearing about before:

In his filing, Anderson says Farook studied the ultra-orthodox Islamic sect Tablighi Jamaat. US officials say the cult, with 50,000 members, is rife with jihadists, and jihadi groomers are recruiting at mosques in at least 10 states.

“We have significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States,” said Assistant FBI Director Michael Heimbach, “and we have found that al Qaeda used them for recruiting.”

Homeland Security Department veteran Philip Haney said Dar-al-Uloom was among the mosques his agency was investigating as part of a probe of the Tablighi movement.

Dar-al-Uloom is the mosque that the San Bernardino terrorists attended.

“Individuals who were already in the case in 2012 went to that mosque,” Haney claimed in a Fox News interview.

He said he ID’d some 300 jihadists and terrorists tied to the movement in the United States before the Obama regime pulled the plug on the investigation in 2012. Known Tablighi alumni include the Lackwanna Six, the American Taliban John Walker Lindh, shoe bomber Richard Reid, dirty bomber José Padilla and would-be Brooklyn Bridge bomber Iyman Faris.

So why did the Obama administration pull the plug on the Tablighi investigation in 2012?

[I]n 2012, [Phil] Haney says that his team was paid a visit by the Department of State and its own Civil Liberties Civil Rights Division.

Haney says officials accused him of unfairly profiling Muslims because Tablighi Jamaat, the sub-group of Deobandi, was not on a list of specially designated terrorist organizations.

Another Obama coup that has gone mostly unremarked.

The Farook/Malik case illustrates the fact that when you poke around in the background of an Islamic terrorist, you find…Islam. That isn’t a surprising conclusion, unless you work in the Obama administration.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/nothing-to-do-with-islam.php

THE ENDURING POPULARITY OF FRAUD

THE ENDURING POPULARITY OF FRAUD

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN SOCIALISM

Steve’s post earlier today is a great reminder of how over the last 200 years, free enterprise has led to an unprecedented explosion of wealth, individual liberty and creativity. Nothing in human history–putting aside for the moment the claims of religion–has enriched the human race to anything like the same degree. If human history has conclusively established any fact, it is that free enterprise is fantastically successful, while socialism is a pitiful failure. Think of North Korea, the USSR, Maoist China, Albania, East Germany, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, India until it wised up. The list goes on and on.

And yet…the siren song of socialism still lures suckers. Currently, Venezuela is learning the age-old lesson the hard way. But we can’t laugh at Venezuelans, when Bernie Sanders is a serious contender for our presidency and is far and away the campus favorite. How is it that socialism (or the urge toward socialism, anyway) can survive? It is the cockroach of ideologies, seemingly impervious to all efforts to kill it.

It may be helpful to think of socialism as a species of fraud. There are many types of fraud, but nothing new under the Sun. The same frauds that Venetian merchants guarded against persist today. The same con games that flourished hundreds of years ago still work. Charles Ponzi’s financial empire collapsed in 1920, and he was arrested and sent to prison. Yet hardly a month goes by without another Ponzi scheme being revealed. There is only one way in which a Ponzi scheme can end: in disaster. This is a mathematical fact. Yet people fall for them, over and over.

People seem to be drawn to fraud like moths to a candle. When I was in law school, I learned about a relatively ingenious fraud. Someone placed an ad in all of the major newspapers on the East Coast. All it said was: “Friday, March 31, is the last day to send in your dollar. P.O. Box 1234, New York, NY.” Many thousands of people sent in their dollars: they didn’t want to miss the deadline. The perpetrators of the scheme were prosecuted, but it was a close-run thing: what was the fraud? The court accepted the idea that the ad made an implicit representation that there was a benefit to be gained or an evil to be avoided by sending in one’s dollar, but it was a pretty skinny case.

In the realm of fraud, the wisdom of the ages is reflected in the adage that a fool and his money are soon parted. The same, I think, is true of socialism. Socialism is fraud writ large. It is a fraud perpetrated by the cynical and greedy on the ignorant and credulous, just like a Ponzi scheme. Only we can add: a fool and his freedom are soon parted.

Only under socialism could Fidel Castro become the richest warlord, relative to his subjects’ wealth, in recorded history. (And that was the least of his sins.) Only under socialism could Maria Gabriela Chavez, daughter of socialist tribune of the people Hugo Chavez, beloved by the American left, waltz off with a $4 billion fortune. But then, she was a piker: Chavez’s Minister of the Treasury stashed $11 billion in Swiss bank accounts.

Charles Ponzi’s mistake was that he should have gone into politics. He could have gone far as a socialist politician, and could have avoided prison.

Socialism is, I think, a species of fraud, but socialism is also much worse than that. A fraudster like Bernie Madoff will only take your money. A socialist will take your money, but that is just the beginning. When you give power to the power-mad, your freedom and human dignity, and perhaps your life, are soon forfeit. So socialism is a uniquely evil variety of fraud.

The bottom line, though, is that, just as the familiar types of fraud have endured for centuries even though they have repeatedly been exposed and are known to the well-informed, so socialism persists, and will continue to endure, as long as men and women fall for the lies and blandishments of the cynical, the greedy and the power-mad.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/the-enduring-popularity-of-fraud.php

STATS ON POLICE SHOOTINGS UNDERCUT “BLACK LIVES MATTER” NARRATIVE

STATS ON POLICE SHOOTINGS UNDERCUT “BLACK LIVES MATTER” NARRATIVE

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CRIME, LAW ENFORCEMENT, POLICING,WAR ON STANDARDS

The Washington Post reports that police officers fatally shot 965 people this year. One can’t draw any important conclusions from these numbers alone, since they don’t tell us anything about the circumstances and/or justification for the police conduct.

However, the Post presents some additional information. It says that cases in which white officers killed unarmed black men represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. This statistic doesn’t quantify the number of cases in which the police acted improperly (Michael Brown was unarmed, but Darren Wilson didn’t act improperly, in my view and in the view of the grand jury). However, it’s clear that only a very small number of unarmed blacks are being shot by the police.

The Post also says that “the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: they were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to halt.” Thus, if blacks lives mattered to “Black Lives Matter,” the protesters would be focused on discouraging people from wielding weapons in the presence of police officers and encouraging them to halt when officers tell them to. They might also be seeking to help the suicidal and the mentally ill. And, of course, they would be trying to do something about the epidemic of black-on-black killings in communities across the country.

Instead, Black Lives Matter is urging that police officers be “fried like bacon.”

Meanwhile, some police departments have decided to rewrite the rules on chasing suspects who flee. Officers are called upon, instantaneously and under pressure, to apply what the Post calls “complex matrices” before deciding to chase. If their application of the matrices is second-guessed by folks with hours to spend on the task, they can lose their job and face criminal charges.

Meanwhile, criminals will escape. The Post reports that Cynthia Lum, a criminologist at George Mason University, reviewed 33 studies of pursuit policies. She found, not surprisingly, that tightening the rules on pursuing suspects led to more crime.

This represents an aspect of the Ferguson effect. We are expected to tolerate more crime because an element in our society is unwilling to obey basic rules.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/stats-on-police-shootings-undercut-black-lives-matter-narrative.php

POWER LINE’S CHART OF THE WEEK: THE ACHIEVEMENT OF CAPITALISM

POWER LINE’S CHART OF THE WEEK: THE ACHIEVEMENT OF CAPITALISM

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN BOOKS, ECONOMY, HISTORY

Herewith a new Power Line feature: Chart of the Week. Because data. Also innovation. Scheduled to appear on Monday or Tuesday each week.

I have been looking forward for a long time to the last in Dierdre McCloskey’s trilogy about capitalism (a term she dislikes) that began with Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, and Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. The third volume, coming out next year from the University of Chicago Press, is Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.

These are dense but well-written and easy-to-read books, rich with insight. Above all they attempt to explain the phenomenon of this chart:

McCloskey’s summa is directed in part against the economic pessimism of both left and right that thinks robust future economic growth is unlikely. But understanding how this explosion of prosperity happened is surprisingly elusive, and McCloskey rejects a lot of the monistic explanations. McCloskey explains her summa thus:

The trilogy chronicles, explains, and defends what made us rich—the system we have had since 1800 or 1848, usually but misleadingly called modern “capitalism.” The system should rather be called “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved.” Or “fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature.” The simplest version is “trade-tested progress.” Many humans, in short, are now stunningly better off than their ancestors were in 1800. And the rest of humanity shows every sign of joining the enrichment.

A crucial point is that the greatly enriched world cannot be explained in any deep way by the accumulation of capital, as economists from Adam Smith through Karl Marx to Varoufakis, Piketty, and Cowen have on the contrary believed, and as the very word “capitalism” seems to imply. The word embodies a scientific mistake. . .

Hear again that last, crucial, astonishing fact, discovered by economic historians over the past few decades. It is: in the two centuries after 1800 the trade-tested goods and services available to the average person in Sweden or Taiwan rose by a factor of 30 or 100. Not 100 percent, understand—a mere doubling—but in its highest estimate a factor of 100, nearly 10,000 percent, and at least a factor of 30, or 2,900 percent. The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has dwarfed any of the previous and temporary enrichments. Explaining it is the central scientific task of economics and economic history, and it matters for any other sort of social science or recent history.

What explains it? The causes were not . . .

Well, if you want to know more of her answer, read the whole thing (five pages, PDF file). Better still, order up all three volumes of the Bourgeois series.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/power-lines-chart-of-the-week-the-achievement-of-capitalism.php