Some classic quotes:

The America Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. — Alexis de Tocqueville

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. — James Madison

A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader. — Samuel Adams

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stuart Mill

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. — Ronald Reagan

I hope we have once again reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: as government expands, liberty contracts. — Ronald Reagan

“When the United States was formed in 1776, it took 19 people on the farm to produce enough food for 20 people. So most of the people had to spend their time and efforts on growing food. Today, it’s down to 1% or 2% to produce that food. Now just consider the vast amount of supposed unemployment that was produced by that. But there wasn’t really any unemployment produced. What happened was that people who had formerly been tied up working in agriculture were freed by technological developments and improvements to do something else. That enabled us to have a better standard of living and a more extensive range of products.” — Milton Friedman

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.” — Milton Friedman

“What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other — two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior. The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. … In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.”  –Shelby Steele

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” — Adam Smith
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. — Winston Churchill

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have. — Barry Goldwater

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. — Martin Luther King

Every measure which establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives to it an administrative form creates thereby a class unproductive and idle, living at the expense of the class which is industrious and given to work — Alexis de Tocqueville

From the Baltimore Examiner:

…Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, with about $60 billion in assets each, are America’s richest men. With all that money, what can they force us to do? Can they take our house to make room so that another person can build an auto dealership or a casino parking lot? Can they force us to pay money into the government-run retirement Ponzi scheme called Social Security? Can Buffett and Gates force us to bus our children to schools out of our neighborhood in the name of diversity? Unless they are granted power by politicians, rich people have little power to force us to do anything.

A GS-9, or a lowly municipal clerk, has far more life-and-death power over us. It’s they to whom we must turn to for permission to build a house, ply a trade, open a restaurant and myriad other activities. It’s government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption….

Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s hawking of Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat; Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel’s alleged tax-writing favors; former Rep. William Jefferson’s business bribes; and the Jack Abramoff scandal are mere pimples on the government corruption landscape. We can think of these and similar acts as jailable illegal corruption. They pale in comparison to what’s for all practical purposes the same thing, but simply legal corruption….

I’m a couple weeks late for DTN’s first anniversary, but I thought I’d post some site stats anyway.

Since we started monitoring traffic with Google Analytics on 2/15/07:

• We’ve had 72,030 visits and 153,211 pageviews, about 200 and 400 per day, respectively.
• 78% of visitors are from the US. Other top countries are Australia, Canada, and the UK. To my daily readers Down Under (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide), I’d be delighted to get a comment from you sometime.
• We’ve had visitors from all US states and 92 countries. 30 countries had >100 visitors. Pleasantly surprised to see a few dozen visits from Iran, Iraq, and Syria. No luck with Cuba or North Korea yet. Big holes are former Soviet Republics (got just 6 of 15) and Africa (got just 13 of 53).
• The top US state is NY (40% of US visitors), followed by CA, CO, NJ.
• The top metro areas are NYC, LA, and SF/SJ.
• Northernmost visitors (32 visits) are from Reykjavik, Iceland. Southermost are from Hobart (Tasmania Island) Australia (3 visits).
• Our most popular post was McIntyre/NASA Followup from 8/18/07 (2394 visits). This was a follow-up to a previous post discussing NASA’s admission that a ‘computer error’ had caused the agency to overstate warming in the US from 1930 to 2006 by 42%.
• The next top post was Euronomics from 2/8/07 (2072 visits), comparing standards of living in the EU and the US. Since the post was a week before we started tracking with Google Analytics the actual visit count was probably higher.

(Lifted in its entirety from P&S)

OOPS!   You know all that talk the last few years from pessimists on both the left and the right about the supposed “negative savings rate” in the US? About how we’re spending more than we’re earning, become a nation of indebted global beggars? Turns out it was all just a data error. On Friday the Bureau of Economic Analysis released a major revision of the last three years of national accounts data, and it turns out that US individuals earned, cumulatively, about $185 billion more than had been previously reported (equivalent to the entire annual GDP of Norway, oil and all). That’s enough to turn the savings rate positive. So all that talk, all that hand-wringing — it was just a data error. Poof! Any retractions forthcoming? Don’t count on it. The end of the world crowd is too busy worrying about sub-prime mortgages.

From Saturday’s WSJ:

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture — but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level. True, there were always tiny aristocracies who lived far better, but numerically they were quite insignificant.

Then — just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations — people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

Then it got even better. By the 20th century, per capita real incomes, that is, incomes adjusted for inflation, were growing at 1.5% per year, on average, and for the past half century they’ve been growing at about 2.3%. If you’re earning a modest middle-class income of $50,000 a year, and if you expect your children, 25 years from now, to occupy that same modest rung on the economic ladder, then with a 2.3% growth rate, they’ll be earning the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $89,000 a year. Their children, another 25 years down the line, will earn $158,000 a year.

Against a backdrop like that, the temporary ups and downs of the business cycle seem fantastically minor. In the 1930s, we had a Great Depression, when income levels fell back to where they had been 20 years earlier. For a few years, people had to live the way their parents had always lived, and they found it almost intolerable. The underlying expectation — that the present is supposed to be better than the past — is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago…

…As far as the quality of the goods we buy, try picking up an electronics catalogue from, oh, say, 2001 and ask yourself whether there’s anything there you’d want to buy. That was the year my friend Ben spent $600 for a 1.3-megapixel digital camera that weighed a pound and a half. What about services, such as health care? Would you rather purchase today’s health care at today’s prices or the health care of, say, 1970 at 1970 prices? I don’t know any informed person who would choose 1970, which means that despite all the hype about costs, health care now is a better bargain than it’s ever been before.

The moral is that increases in measured income — even the phenomenal increases of the past two centuries — grossly understate the real improvements in our economic condition. The average middle-class American might have a smaller measured income than the European monarchs of the Middle Ages, but I suspect that Tudor King Henry VIII would have traded half his kingdom for modern plumbing, a lifetime supply of antibiotics and access to the Internet.

That “for…99,800 years or so, nothing happened” is of course an exaggeration. Somewhere around 5,000-10,000 years ago we got domesticated animals and crops, which was a big leap. But you could certainly argue most people weren’t any better off in 1500 AD than they were in 1500 BC. As someone has pointed out, you could cross Europe faster in 0 AD on Roman roads than you could in 1850, before the introduction railways.

The author appropriately attributes much of the advance of the last 200 years to “technological progress.” I would cite a more fundamental, underlying force - human freedom. Economic, material, and technological advance has not been the default state for most of the history of humanity. It is only possible when individuals are free from coercion to improve their own lives.

From the WSJ:

Mark Malloch Brown spoke Monday to a crowded auditorium at the World Bank’s headquarters, warning that the bank’s mission was “hugely at risk” as long as Paul Wolfowitz remained its president. Only hours earlier, news leaked that a special committee investigating Mr. Wolfowitz had accused him of violating conflict-of-interest rules. A coincidence? We doubt it.

Mr. Malloch Brown, remember, was until last year Kofi Annan’s deputy at the United Nations. In that position, he distinguished himself by spinning away the $100 billion Oil for Food scandal as little more than a blip in the U.N.’s good work, and one that had little to do with Mr. Annan himself. Last week, Mr. Malloch Brown was named vice president of the Quantum Fund, the hedge fund run by his billionaire friend George Soros. A former World Bank official himself and ally of soon-to-be British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mr. Malloch Brown would almost surely be a leading candidate to replace Mr. Wolfowitz should he step down. Not surprisingly, Gordon Brown cold-shouldered Mr. Wolfowitz at a recent meeting in Brussels.

The bank presidency would be a neat coup for Sir Mark, and not just because the post has heretofore gone to an American. He also stands for everything Mr. Wolfowitz opposes, beginning with the issue of corruption. Consider Mr. Malloch Brown’s defense of the U.N.’s procurement practices.

“Not a penny was lost from the organization,” he insisted last year, following an audit of the U.N.’s peacekeeping procurement by its Office of Internal Oversight Services. In fact, the office found that $7 million had been lost from overpayment; $50 million worth of contracts showed indications of bid rigging; $61 million had bypassed U.N. rules; $82 million had been lost to mismanagement; and $110 million had “insufficient” justification. That’s $310 million out of a budget of $1.6 billion, and who knows what the auditors missed.

Mr. Malloch Brown also made curious use of English by insisting that Paul Volcker’s investigation into Oil for Food had “fully exonerated” Mr. Annan. In fact, Mr. Volcker’s report made an “adverse finding” against the then-Secretary-General. Among other details, the final report noted that Mr. Annan was “aware of [Saddam’s] kickback scheme at least as early as February 2001,” yet never reported it to the U.N. Security Council, much less the public, a clear breach of his fiduciary responsibilities as the U.N.’s chief administrative officer. Mr. Malloch Brown described the idea that Mr. Annan might resign as “inappropriate political assassination”–a standard he apparently doesn’t apply to political enemies like Mr. Wolfowitz.

George Will says don’t mend it, end it:

Born in 1944, at the apogee of confidence in governments and international governmental organizations, the bank’s mission is “to fight poverty with passion and professionalism.” The great prerequisite for curing poverty is, however, economic growth, and the world has learned, during a 63-year retreat from statism, that the prerequisite for growth is free markets allocating private capital to efficient uses.

Much of what recipient countries save by receiving the bank’s subsidized loans they pay in the costs of “technical assistance,” the euphemism for being required to adopt the social agendas of rich nations’ governments that fund the bank. Those agendas focus on intrusive government actions on behalf of fashionable causes — the empowerment of women, labor, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, etc.

The bank argues, incoherently, that its clients value the “technical assistance,” but that the clients would not adopt it unless bribed — unless it were a condition of receiving subsidized loans. So the bank subsidizes projects that the client countries do not deem worth financing with money borrowed at market interest rates. As Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University says, money is fungible: Projects with the highest social or economic return are often dangled in front of the bank to get its loans — but these projects would have been funded anyway. So, in effect, the bank’s loans support marginal projects that would not have been funded without the loans…

…The World Bank’s problem, as Wolfowitz seems to see it, is humanity’s blessing: Middle-income countries are proliferating. This means that the bank is losing its battle to retain whatever relevance it once had. The bank’s real mission statement is the non sequitur that makes government undertakings immortal: We were created for a reason, therefore there must forever be a reason for us to exist…

…It is said that the Wolfowitz matter might damage the bank’s reputation. But its reputation that matters concerns the waste and corruption that inevitably attend the political yet unaccountable distribution of many billions of dollars.

It is said that unless Wolfowitz goes, some donor governments might withhold funds. At the bank, the right thing, even done for a silly reason, would be an improvement.

Claudia Rosett agrees:

Behind the mudfight over Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank lurks the real question: Why do we still have a World Bank? We shouldn’t. A relic of the collectivist utopian fallacies of the mid-20th century, the World Bank has long been in the business of funneling billions in cheap loans, often accompanied by bad advice, to governments with especially stellar talents for wasting and filching money. Too often, World Bank projects have the effect of subsidizing and supporting despotic regimes that are the real cause of poverty.

The laws of supply and demand suggest that when you lower the price of an activity, you will probably get more of it — and the World Bank, however noble its aims, is fundamentally in the business of picking up the tab for damage done by bad policy, and thus encouraging more of the same. In theory, the Bank offsets this problem by harnessing some of its loans to tutorials in World Bank-approved behavior. But this is an operation underwritten by a grand committee of governments, and implemented by Bank bureaucrats whose tax-free salaries insulate them from the effects of their own preachings. Would you want a World Bank bureaucrat running your life?…

…That does not excuse the attack on Wolfowitz, which has nothing to do with poverty, and everything to do with politics. This is not a quarrel over the best way to help hungry children; it is a scramble by the Old Boys of the Bank to protect their mighty jampot of World Bank taxpayer-funded clout and patronage.

Must read essay, Entrepreneurs Are the Heros of the World,  in this quarter’s Cato Letter (ht SJS). Excerpts:

The amazing fact is that entrepreneurs and innovators and businesses have turned luxuries that not even kings could afford into low-priced everyday items at your local store. That is the best defense of capitalism.

During 1,000 years of absolute monarchy, feudalism, and slavery, mankind’s average income increased by about 50 percent. In the 180 years since 1820, mankind’s average income has increased by almost 1,000 percent.

During the last 100 years, we have created more wealth, reduced poverty more, and increased life expectancy more than in the previous 100,000 years. And that happened because of people like you—entrepreneurs, thinkers, creators, innovators—who had new ideas, who traveled geographical distances and, more important, mental distances to create new things and who saw to it that old traditions, which would have stopped new creations, would not stop them for long.

That is why we have all this wealth. That is why our son, who will be born in January, has a greater chance of reaching retirement age than children in all previous eras had of experiencing their first birthday.

Who was Dirck the Noorman? He walks among us even now.