Thomas Friedman

Let me tee up Thomas Friedman's column today, entitled "Our One Party Democracy":

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste.

Yes, you read that correctly: China's autocracy is preferable to the current U.S. government. because Republicans won't do what President Obama says. Rather than go into just how profoundly wrongheaded this is, I'll outsource commentary on Friedman's column and suggest you go read Will Wilkinson, Jonah Goldberg and Matt Welch.

I read The Lexus and the Olive Tree and thought it was pretty decent, if at times aggravatingly childish with constant analogies made between the global economy and computer hardware. The World is Flat had some fun anecdotes but made a pretty obvious point and could have been published as a pamphlet without the reader being any less informed (although this is true of many books).

The signal to noise ratio of Friedman's columns meanwhile, has become such that I have pretty much stopped reading him. Beyond the lack of any real insight, his mind-numbing drumbeat on the virtues of "E.T." -- renewable energy technologies -- betrays a real arrogance, for it both implies that Friedman knows the future and American businesses are too stupid to seize this golden opportunity without government prodding.

With this latest column his march to irrelevance has taken a giant step forward.

Boxer on energy policy

Sen. Barbara Boxer writes an opinion piece in the Huffington Post that attempts to justify federal backing for "clean energy" sources:

The carefully crafted Climate Security Jobs bill that we will present to the Senate, based on the Waxman-Markey bill, will jumpstart our economy, protect consumers, stop the ravages of unchecked global warming, and ensure that America will be the leading economic power in this century.

But don't just take it from me. Thomas Friedman put it concisely in his most recent book, Hot, Flat and Crowded:

"...the ability to develop clean power and energy efficient technologies is going to become the defining measure of a country's economic standing, environmental health, energy security, and national security over the next 50 years."

John Doerr -- one of the nation's leading venture capitalists, who helped launch Google and Amazon.com -- has told us that putting a price on carbon will help spark the clean energy revolution. He predicted that the investment capital that will flow into clean energy will dwarf the amount invested in high-tech and biotech combined.

Doerr said, "Going green may be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century. It is the mother of all markets."

So the federal government should promote these types of energy sources because Tom Friedman and John Doerr say that it would be a wise move? I'm underwhelmed. Let's keep in mind that Friedman has no experience or expertise in the energy field, having served as a journalist, columnist and author for his entire career.

Doerr meanwhile is described by wikipedia as a "high profile supporter of the Democratic Party in Silicon Valley" who "has also invested heavily in 'carbon trading' and is a big advocate of its use." Given that he stands to directly benefit from Waxman-Markey I'm not sure his support should be chalked up as terribly remarkable.

Boxer continues:

This bill is a jobs bill. By creating powerful incentives for clean energy, it will create millions of new jobs in America -- building wind turbines, installing solar panels on homes, and producing a new fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Just look at a recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, which found that more than 10,000 new clean energy businesses were launched in California from 1998 to 2007. During that period, clean energy investments created more than 125,000 jobs and generated jobs 15 percent faster than the California economy as a whole.

This is a classic example of the broken window fallacy. Yes, supporting such legislation can help promote job creation in this sector. That, however, does not mean it is worthwhile. Far more important is the net impact across the broader economy as indicated by the unemployment rate -- an area where California is not performing terribly well:

Coincidentally, or not, Californians are also paying some of the highest energy costs in the country.

Government

Today's post over at the Boston Globe's Big Picture photo blog that shows pictures of people all over the world at their jobs prompted the following comment from one reader:

These photos highlight the creation of real wealth -- human toil turning natural resources into products which benefit everyone. You do not see a lot of government operations in these photos - governments do not create wealth. Everything they do comes at the expense of society's real producers.

It is important that we do not allow our governments to interfere in the mutually beneficial free exchange of goods and services, such as those depicted here, by engaging in "loser wins" bailouts and fallacious stimulus packages which do little more than expand the influence of politicians' decisions and crush the private sector's ability to produce.

Amen. Of course this also led to this response:

Actually all of the Chinese operations are probably state owned to one degree or another. Too bad the Chinese haven't been able to embrace "free enterprise" with all that GOVERNMENT mucking things up... they might actually get their products out there ~ make a profit perhaps....

And here in the States ~ boy I wish I had clean water, police and fire protection, electricity, paved roads, national parks ~ damn that government! They get in the way of EVERYTHING.

Now, on the one hand you can view this as just the ranting of some anonymous guy. But I think that there are a lot of people that really think this way. In fact, it made me recall this column from Thomas Friedman in which he equated the Republican freshman class of 1994 with anarchists who would feel right at home in the misery of sub-Saharan Africa where there are no taxes, gun control or welfare.

What a joke. Why is it that when people on the right criticize big government that the left frequently responds in this manner by talking about roads, police and fire departments -- as if that was the sum total? It's a complete strawman argument. And praise for the Chinese government, really? Of course most of those state owned enterprises are hemorrhaging money and are being privatized as fast as possible. Friedman, meanwhile, willingly conflates advocacy of limited government with no government.

It's the intellectually dishonety of such arguments that really makes you wonder. If these people were on the correct side you'd think they wouldn't have to resort to such mischaracterizations.

Friedman again

Thomas Friedman seems to be upset that gas prices have been in decline. He's distraught because it undermines his advocacy of a big government-led initiative to completely re-organize the U.S. economy around so-called "green energy" industries. Basically, it makes him less relevant. Boo hoo.

More Friedman nonsense

Thomas Friedman wrote an especially irritating column last week that has lingered in my mind ever since I left for vacation. The piece is based largely on an anecdote in which Friedman describes his experience jet setting from a conference in Hong Kong back to the U.S.:

[My day] actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.

Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.

The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.

Wielding this as nearly the sum total of his evidence, he then calls for what amounts to an overhaul of America:

We don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.

It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants. Generally, I’d like to see fewer government dollars shoveled out and more creative tax incentives to stimulate the private sector to catalyze new industries and new markets. If we allow this money to be spent on pork, it will be the end of us.

Friedman, in effect, is at least tacitly endorsing government expenditures of $1 trillion all because he had a bad day traveling. Friedman's experience, however, is more a commentary on the state of the New York/New Jersey Port Authority which operates JFK (which I can attest is in rather sad shape having passed through there last summer, although in fairness jetBlue recently opened a new terminal) and government-owned Amtrak.

After all, if we're going to base public policy on anecdotes then I could describe my own trip from Colorado to DC today. I took a car from outside Colorado Springs to Denver, using a toll road that made the 80 mile trip take just over an hour. Once there I was able to check in, pass security and then take the airport train to the B concourse with little problem. My flight arrived in Baltimore 25 minutes early and from there I took a bus to a metro station back to DC. The bus wait was under 5 minutes while there was no wait for the metro train.

Does that then mean that the U.S. has a first-class infrastructure in all respects? Not at all, but this is just as intellectually rigorous as what Friedman has offered up.

He then uses this as the basis for a course of action that is rooted in what can be charitably described as extreme naiveté. He calls for vast new expenditures but stresses that it must not be spent on wasteful projects -- as though such exhortations would make any kind of difference. What the Times columnist fails to grasp is that pork barrel spending and political considerations in government expenditures are an inherent part of the process. The notion that an army of technocrats can allocate taxpayer resources in a scientific fashion devoid of any outside influence is sheer fantasy.

This is compounded by his call for tax incentives to serve as a catalyst for the development of new industries -- as though the tax code is somehow free from the meddling of lobbyists. Also ignored is the fact that if tax incentives or other forms of government aid are required to make an industry viable that it is probably an industry that doesn't deserve to exist, much less constitute the wave of the future.

It's really an enduring mystery to me why this guy gets paid speaking fees upwards of $50K. A case of market failure?

Show us the money

With Bush increasingly out of the picture Thomas Friedman appears to have regained his sanity:

To all those Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Russians, Iranians, Chinese, Indians, Africans and Latin Americans who are e-mailing their American friends about their joy at having “America back,” now that Obama is in, I just have one thing to say: “Show me the money!”

Don’t just show me the love. Don’t just give me the smiles. Your love is fickle and, as I said, it will last about as long as the first Obama airstrike against an Al Qaeda position in Pakistan. No, no, no, show me the money. Show me that you are ready to be Obama stakeholders, not free-riders — stakeholders in what will be expensive and difficult initiatives by the Obama administration to keep the world stable and free at a time when we have fewer resources.

Examples: I understand any foreigner who objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the gross mishandling of the postwar. But surely everyone in the world has an interest in helping Obama, who opposed the war, bring it to a decent and stable end, especially now that there is a chance that Iraq could emerge as the first democracy, albeit messy, in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world. Obama was against how this Iraq war started, but he is going to be held responsible for how it ends, so why don’t all our allies now offer whatever they can — money, police, aid workers, troops, diplomatic support — to increase the odds of a decent end in Iraq? Ditto Afghanistan.

...President Bush, because he was so easily demonized, made being a free-rider on American power easy for everyone — and Americans paid the price. Obama will not make it so easy.

So to everyone overseas I say: thanks for your applause for our new president. I’m glad you all feel that America “is back.” If you want Obama to succeed, though, don’t just show us the love, show us the money. Show us the troops. Show us the diplomatic effort. Show us the economic partnership. Show us something more than a fresh smile. Because freedom is not free and your excuse for doing less than you could is leaving town in January.

Ditto. It's time to put up or shut up.

Friedman's Energy Crusade

Thomas Friedman uses his latest column to excoriate John McCain for being a prisoner to Big Oil. The thrust of Friedman's argument is the following:

I am not against a limited expansion of off-shore drilling now. But it is a complete sideshow. By constantly pounding into voters that his energy focus is to “drill, drill, drill,” McCain is diverting attention from what should be one of the central issues in this election: who has the better plan to promote massive innovation around clean power technologies and energy efficiency.

Why? Because renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

A few points:

* It is rather breaktaking that Friedman regards himself as such a prophet that he knows what the next great global industry is going to be. Not only does he proclaim to know which industry, but he also pronounces its relative size.

* Even assuming he is correct, so what? How does that justify a government role? Why do we need government subsidies? After all, if this is going to be such a great industry, why does it need help? Investors should already be clamoring to get a piece of the action -- unless of course you believe that government is smarter than the market.

* There is some validity that there are national security concerns surrounding oil. The correct solution is: price out those negative effects and tax accordingly. Then let consumers and the market choose the best energy source. Maybe that will continue to be oil. Maybe coal. Maybe nuclear, wind or hydroelectric. Maybe a technology we haven't even conceived of yet. But please don't let the government pick and choose winners and then shove them down out throats -- we've got enough ethanol already.

Update: Read this.

Friedman again

Thomas Friedman follows up on his most recent column in praise of China with an even more fulsome piece:

China did not build the magnificent $43 billion infrastructure for these games, or put on the unparalleled opening and closing ceremonies, simply by the dumb luck of discovering oil. No, it was the culmination of seven years of national investment, planning, concentrated state power, national mobilization and hard work.

...As I sat in my seat at the Bird’s Nest, watching thousands of Chinese dancers, drummers, singers and acrobats on stilts perform their magic at the closing ceremony, I couldn’t help but reflect on how China and America have spent the last seven years: China has been preparing for the Olympics; we’ve been preparing for Al Qaeda. They’ve been building better stadiums, subways, airports, roads and parks. And we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.

The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.

Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?

Yes, if you drive an hour out of Beijing, you meet the vast dirt-poor third world of China. But here’s what’s new: The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.

Reading this I can almost picture Friedman, riding on the maglev train in childlike wonder and concluding that the U.S. needs one of its own. So, tasked with writing two columns per week Friedman gets busy writing about how China has all this cool stuff and if we don't get some as well then our goose is cooked.

Please.

Let me provide you with another narrative about China's rise perhaps worth considering. China, a developing country, spends $43 billion conducting a spectacle to add to its prestige at the same time as millions of its people languish in a hand to mouth existence. Indeed, according to the CIA factbook over 50 million Chinese live on $125 per year or less. China's GDP per capita at $5,300 is less than half that of Romania.

In fairness, some of this spending will help promote future growth. Improved roads, airports, etc. can help bolster commerce and reduce the ranks of the poor and unemployed. But what is the famed Bird's Nest stadium going to do for them? Or the aquatic center? As Victor Matheson, an economics professor at Holy Cross, points out:

Expensive infrastructure projects undertaken for the Olympics also generally contribute little to long-run economic growth. While the construction of modern airports, highways, and transit systems are vital for economic development, the specialized sports infrastructure required to host an Olympic Games cannot easily be converted to other uses. The so-called Water Cube, the site of Michael Phelps's golden achievements, is an architectural and technological wonder. But after the closing ceremony, Beijing will have little use for a state-of-the-art swimming facility that seats 17,000.

Beijing will join good company in wondering what to do with its beautiful but empty venues. Most of the 10 gleaming new stadiums built in South Korea for the 2002 World Cup sit unused today, and Australian economists at Monash University suggest that the "redirection of public money into relatively unproductive infrastructure such as equestrian centers and man-made rapids" has since reduced public consumption by $1.8 billion (in US currency).

Unfortunately, while the facilities may sit unused, the debt accumulated to build these monuments still must be paid. Montreal finally paid off the last of its debts from the 1976 Summer Games just two years ago.

It's one thing if you are a first-world country and decide to host silly indulgences like the Olympics, but it's another when your people lack basic necessities. This is not something to be praised, it is to be condemned.

We must also examine how China was able to build so many of these projects so rapidly. It certainly helps when there is little respect for property rights and the government can order people off their land and bulldoze everything to make way for the latest project. Try that in New York City and see how far you get -- and that's a good thing.

Even with the cost advantage of being able to readily cast people aside to complete the vision of government planners there is still evidence that some of these projects are boondoggles. Just look at the maglev train that Friedman is so in awe of through the eyes of Henry Blodget:

For gawkers and other one-time users, the maglev is the equivalent of an adult theme-park ride: cheap, thrilling, and fodder for cocktail parties. For those who just want to get to or from the airport, however, it leaves much to be desired.

First, there's the problem that the maglev doesn't really run from Pudong to Shanghai, but from Pudong to the end of one of Shanghai's subway lines, aka the burbs. So, to get to Shanghai proper, you have to schlep your bags again, either into the subway or into a taxi like the one you could have grabbed at the airport.

Then, there's cost. Thanks to China's polarized pricing system—one price for goods and services sold to foreigners and other rich folks, and another for everything else—the $6 one-way ticket is not a deal. When you throw in the added schlepping at both ends, the maglev loses in cost, convenience, and possibly even time.

These are two of the reasons the train is running at less than half of capacity, and, probably, hemorrhaging money. The maglev cost $1.2 billion or more to build, which means the system chews through north of $60 million a year in capital costs alone. Assuming 12,000 passengers per day (my estimate), the maglev generates about $27 million of revenue per year, or less than half its capital costs, much less its total costs. It is not clear who is absorbing these losses, China or Transrapid, but, either way, someone's taking a bath.

Look, if Freidman wants to simply argue that we could use better infrastructure in this country, fine. It's an argument that I have some sympathy for. For example I find it endlessly frustrating that it has been almost 7 years since the Sept. 11 attacks and the WTC site has yet to be rebuilt, owing chiefly to endless bureaucracy and legal wrangling. There has been growing experimentation with privately financed infrastructure that I find interesting and perhaps that Friedman would care to further expound upon. If there are examples of creative infrastructure financing and construction in other democratic countries I would be interested to hear them. But from authoritarian China we have little to learn.

Update: More on privatizing infrastructure here.

Chinese lessons

Thomas Friedman notes that the U.S. and China were both the runaway leaders in the Olympics medals count, and seemingly based on this observation alone states that we have much to learn from each other:

The Olympics may just be a sporting event, but it is hard not to read larger messages into the results, especially when you see how China and America have dominated the medals tally. Both countries can — and will — look at their Olympic successes as reaffirmations of their distinctly different political systems. But what strikes me is how much they could each learn from the other. This, as they say, is a teaching moment.

Now, it's true that there is no shortage of things that China can learn from us: democracy, individual freedom, rule of law, civil society or economic liberalism, etc. But what can we learn from the Chinese? Not much as far as I can tell. But Friedman thinks otherwise:

...There are some things we could learn from China, namely the ability to focus on big, long-term, nation-building goals and see them through. A Chinese academic friend tells me that the success of the Olympics is already prompting some high officials to argue that only a strong, top-down, Communist Party-led China could have organized the stunning building projects around these Olympics and the focused performance of so many different Chinese athletes. For instance, the Chinese have no tradition of rowing teams, but at these Games, out of nowhere, Beijing fielded a women’s quadruple sculls crew that won China’s first Olympic gold medal in rowing.

The lesson for us is surely not that we need authoritarian government. The lesson is that we need to make our democracy work better. The American men’s basketball team did poorly in the last Olympics because it could not play as a team. So our stars were beaten by inferior players with better teamwork. Our basketball team learned its lesson.

Congress has gotten worse. Our democracy feels increasingly paralyzed because collaboration in Washington has become nearly impossible — whether because of money, gerrymandering, a 24-hour-news cycle or the permanent presidential campaign. And as a result, our ability to focus America’s incredible bottom-up energies — outside of sports — has diminished. You see it in our crumbling infrastructure and inability to shape a real energy program. China feels focused. We feel distracted.

Where to begin? Divided government and the separation of powers is an asset, not something to bemoan. Perhaps the very thing that our founding fathers feared the most was concentrated power in the hands of a few who could ride roughshod over the will of the people. Indeed, it's when Republicans and Democrats are united that the American people should run for cover. A list of legislation passed with bipartisan consensus during the Bush Administration: No Child Left Behind, Sarbanes-Oxley, Medicare drug benefit, campaign finance legislation, along with counterproductive and pork-laden energy and agricultural bills. Meanwhile, on an unquestionably good bills such as multilateral free trade you find fierce partisan divisions, with Democrats almost uniformly found in the opposition.

Just look at the examples cited by Friedman -- infrastructure and energy. With regards to infrastructure the 2005 transportation bill was to the tune of $286.4 billion. The problem isn't a failure to spend enough money -- spending taxpayer dollars is something that both Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

On energy, again, we did have an energy bill -- and predictably it was comprised to a great extent of favors for well-connected constituencies. That bill was such a smashing success that we have been left paying gas prices in excess of $3 a gallon.In fact, we don't need a national energy program. Politicians shouldn't be picking the energy sources of the future, markets should. In fact, there is no provision for such legislation in the Constitution (you may have heard of it -- it's something we used to govern by) anyhow.

Thank goodness for divided government, lest the Thomas Friedmans of the world get their way and start "big, long-term, nation-building goals" that lead us into oblivion.

Lastly, I can't leave Friedman's final sentence unremarked upon:

So, yes, America and China should enjoy their medals — but we should each also reflect on how the other team got so many.

OK, I reflected on it, and I have some answers. The reason that we won so many medals is because our sports programs are well funded. Corporate sponsorships, the non-profit USOC and our university infrastructure provide a world class environment in which to groom atheletes. China, meanwhile, has copied the Soviet system in which kids are taken from a young age and placed on a grueling training regimen so that they can accumulate more glory for the state.

Reflection complete: We have nothing to learn from them.

Energy policy

Thomas Friedman wrote a column on energy policy today that was listed at one point today as the most read article on The New York Times website and was linked to both by realclearpolitics and Glenn Reynolds. Clearly a lot of people agree with Friedman on the topic, or at least find him interesting -- and that is unfortunate.

Friedman begins by bashing -- correctly -- Senators McCain and Clinton for their endorsement of a federal gas tax holiday. He follows this up by stating:

This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Of course, he could have replaced China with Japan and Saudi Arabia with Canada and been just as accurate, but I guess it wouldn't have had the same ring to it. It's probably a lot harder to get people up in arms and throw around the term "crisis" when discussing our neighbors to the north.

He continues:

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Friedman is a big fan of the government coming up with some kind of energy strategy, but the truth is that we don't need one anymore than we need a national food strategy, a national housing strategy or any other industry strategy. In fact, I would submit that the last thing we need is more government intervention in this area. Government intervention in the energy sector thus far has resulted in diminished supply via restrictions on drilling in Alaska and offshore as well as promoting ridiculous alternatives such as ethanol that are a payoff to agribusiness and farming interests in key election states. This is not an unfortunate accident, it the way in which government works. Anytime money is spent -- your money -- you can bet that special interests will be there to influence who gets it.

The correct approach to energy is to have no policy. Rather, the market should decide what energy sources we use. Now, I will concede that some sources of energy bring certain costs along with them -- coal for example pollutes the air and its strip mining results in natural beauty that is turned into moonscape. This imposes a cost on all of us -- an externality -- whether we use coal or not. To compensate for this the government should impose a tax that accounts for the amount of the externality that is imposed, this is known in economic circles as a Pigouvian tax.

After such taxes are imposed the government should simply let the chips fall where they may. If oil is cheap there is no reason to develop alternative sources. If the price of oil increases then alternative fuels become much more attractive and money will be invested in them without government intervention. Indeed, we already see this happening -- so much so that The New York Times has expressed worry about a bubble occurring.

And who is more likely to uncover the next great energy source, the government and its attendant lobbyists or people who are out to make a buck by coming up with a product that works?

Returning to Friedman's column, he worries that this lack of government intervention will produce disaster:

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

You know, Washington DC is a town full of lobbyists, but you see very few people organizations that actually call themselves lobbying firms, instead they call themselves associations. This place is full of them. So you have Friedman quoting a solar power lobbyist about the need to spend more money on...wait for it...solar power and then declaring it "the next great global industry." Well, if it's the next great global industry then it should be able to get along fine without any assistance from Congress. Did Google, Microsoft or Apple need government handouts to help boost the tech industry? If this fortunes of alternative energy are really hanging by whether Congress gives it a tax break or not then count me as a skeptic regarding its long-term prospects.

More Friedman:

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

Well, here's what Friedman doesn't tell you -- that plant was only opened in Germany because it was given tens of millions of euros to do so. So the jobs weren't really created by the market, rather the EU just took a bunch of taxpayer money -- and jobs that otherwise would have been created elsewhere -- and decided to spend it on this chosen industry. Absent that funding there is no indication the plant otherwise would have been built, and if the free market can't support it on its own then I don't find the case terribly compelling.

Meanwhile, here's a story about a German solar company building an even bigger plant here in New Mexico. And really, when you think about it, doesn't solar power there make a whole lot more sense than in cloudy Germany?

Paying for the War

EJ Dionne has a recent column praising Democratic talk of raising taxes to pay for the war:

Would conservatives and Republicans support the war in Iraq if they had to pay for it?

That is the immensely useful question that Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, put on the table this week by calling for a temporary war tax to cover President Bush's request for $145 billion in supplemental spending for Iraq.

The proposal is a magnificent way to test the seriousness of those who claim that the Iraq war is an essential part of the "global war on terror." If the war's backers believe in it so much, it should be easy for them to ask taxpayers to put up the money for such an important endeavor.

Thomas Friedman seems to have received the same memo and pens a similar column today:

Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”

Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!

You know what, I actually agree with them. I think that taxes should be tagged to specific expenditures. Frankly I think that they are being too modest, I think that every government spending program should have a specific tax attached to it. All the billions spent on agricultural subsidies -- have a tax for it. Social spending -- tax for that too. Perhaps we could have a specific tax attached to every government department -- defense, commerce, energy, education -- the whole lot. I'm serious. I am absolutely in favor of taxpayers knowing what their money is paying for to promote a cost-benefit analysis.

If Friedman has stopped there his column would be quasi-tolerable -- but he continues:

Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible” to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.

Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.

We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow. The president has already slashed the National Institutes of Health research funding the past two years. His 2008 budget wants us to cut money for vocational training, infrastructure and many student aid programs.

This is pure nonsense. As George Will notes, poor U.S. infrastructure isn't due to a lack of funding:

You can no more embarrass a senator than you can a sofa, so the tears were not accompanied by blushing about having just passed a transportation bill whose 6,371 pork projects cost $24 billion, about 10 times more than the price of the levee New Orleans needed.

I suppose some people might say that it's "only" $24 billion -- a sign of just how much government spending we've become accustomed to -- but that's enough to fund 60 bridges to nowhere (at $400 million a pop). Friedman's willingness to give Congress a pass and simply claim that we lack enough to spend ("invest" in Friedman-speak) is ridiculous. With Democrats it's always a lack of money, never poor government.

His ranting about broadband is similarly bizarre, an OECD study ranks the U.S. 12th in the world in broadband penetration (which is more difficult in the U.S. owing to a dispersed population -- it's easier to roll out in countries with higher population densities). This places us ahead of France, Germany and the U.K. and hardly strikes me as a crisis. I also have no idea why it is the government's job to roll out broadband, and it's all the more puzzling given the failures associated with municipal wifi.

Friedman's mention of high speed rail is unsurprising as it seems to be a favorite of many of the left. My guess is that they visit Europe and see these futuristic shiny trains and wonder why we can't have the same thing here, forgetting the fact that passenger rail makes little sense in the U.S. outside of the Northeast, due to both the aforementioned lack of population density and the fact that in many cases it makes far more sense to take a plane given the vast distances between many U.S. cities. Given Amtrak's record with the Acela train I don't see any reason why that additional spending on high-speed rail would be anything other than a boondoggle.

Lastly, Friedman also claims the need to build schools. But why is this the role of the federal government? Can Friedman show any relationship between improved schools and increased federal spending? Of course, I don't find it any accident that where the government enjoys the least amount of responsibility, colleges and universities, the U.S. is far ahead of its European brethren.

Such details, however, appear to be lost on Friedman, who instead prefers to offer up simple formulations: the Bush Administration is dumb, foreigners are smart and more government spending is the answer.

9/11 Stupidity

Thomas Friedman wrote a column today entitled "9/11 is Over" that got me thinking. I noticed that it made a number of the points I had already made in this post -- basically that the Bush Administration has placed too big of a focus on 9/11 and the war on terror. While we should absolutely need to hunt down the terrorists we also need to keep a sense of perspective about the whole enterprise.

Friedman, however, also goes beyond this and tosses in some nonsense about shutting down Guantanamo and providing health care for Cubans -- which he is jumped all over for in this column.

I do like Friedman’s idea for building a free hospital at Guantanamo for poor Cubans … that’s pretty much all of them, I think … only I’d like to see it built next to the prison, not in place of it. The lines of people streaming into that place would be a pretty good joke on Michael Moore and Fidel. Getting past the Cuban army might be a problem for them, though, and the exit would have to be on the dock with boat service to Miami, or you’d never get them out of the place.

The rest of the column, however, is unfortunate and basically refuses to recognize the crux of Friedman's argument -- that we have lost perspective about the war on terror.

Given that some on the right are loathe to admit this point and that some on the left, such as Friedman, are unable to do so without tossing in some nonsense (e.g. Guantanamo) -- does this mean that I represent the sensible middle? Yikes.

Diversity

Interesting Thomas Friedman column today (no link):

When the Iraqi Navy drops you off on the Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser, two things just hit you in the face: one is the diversity of the U.S. Navy -- blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, all working together, bound by a shared idea, not an iron fist. To be sure, it took America a good 150 years after independence to embrace pluralism and women's rights, and we're still working at it. Nevertheless, America today is so different from anything in this part of the world. The Iraqi Navy is all men, and almost all Shiites. We are like Martians to them.

Mustapha Ahansal is a Moroccan-American sailor who acts as the Chosin's Arabic translator when it boards ships in the gulf to look for pirates or terrorists. ''The first time I boarded a boat,'' he told me, ''we had six or seven people -- one Hispanic, one black person, a white person, maybe a woman in our unit. Their sailors said to me, 'I thought all Americans were white.' Then one of them asked me, 'Are you in the military?' It shocks them actually. They never knew that such a world actually exists, because they have their own problems. I was talking to one of their higher-ups in their Coast Guard and he said: 'It is amazing how you guys can be so many religions, ethnic groups and still make this thing work and be the best in the world. And here we are fighting north and south, and we are all cousins and brothers.'''

Don't hate, participate.

Katrina and the community

Thomas Friedman quotes some idiot in today's column:

Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. "Today's conservatives," he wrote, "differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed.

"The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up."

Anne Applebaum's column, meanwhile, demonstrates that Mr. Devan doesn't know what the hell he is talking about:

Last week my son's elementary school raised several thousand dollars for hurricane victims by washing cars. My other son's preschool announced without fuss that a boy from New Orleans would be joining the class. My employer is organizing help for the company's Gulf Coast employees, my local bookstore is collecting money for the Red Cross and my favorite radio station raised $54,000 last weekend. Every church or synagogue attended by anyone I know is, of course, raising money, housing evacuees or delivering clothes to victims.

To put it differently, nearly every institution with which I come into daily contact -- my library, my grocery store, my search engine -- has already donated time or money to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and I don't think this makes me or my community unique. A Zogby poll conducted last week found that 68 percent of Americans had donated money to hurricane relief. An ABC News/Washington Post poll published yesterday found that 60 percent had already donated, and a further 28 percent intend to. Those percentages mean that donors must represent a huge range of political views, economic classes, even aesthetic preferences. Indeed, among the fundraisers listed in last weekend's Post were a jazz concert, a tea dance, a "Christian music" concert and a rehearsal of Verdi's "The Sicilian Vespers." No wonder the Red Cross has already collected more than half a billion dollars; no wonder it was impossible to get on to the Salvation Army's Web site at peak times last week.

To place the blame for the failure of government to effectively respond on the shoulder's of modern-day conservatives is laughable. The government didn't lack the resources to respond to Katrina, it lacked any iota of intelligence. It put up stupid regulations. It blocked people from helping. And really in a nutshell that is the problem with government. It isn't evil, it's just stupid -- read the rest of Applebaum's column if you have any doubt.

Update: Like I said, the government doesn't lack resources:

In last week's $51.8-billion emergency appropriation, Congress quietly raised the "micro-purchase threshold" to $250,000 for purchases relating to relief and recovery from Hurricane Katrina. That's a 100-fold increase on the typical $2,500 limit and a completely different animal from the $15,000 limit previously in place for disaster relief efforts. And don't assume that Congress intended this to help the government's professional buyers. The warranted, trained officials authorized to bind the government in contracts already enjoy the authority to make expedited purchases up to $250,000. Instead, the micro-purchase authority permits agencies to designate any employee, including, all too often, administrative support staff, to carry a government charge card.

I need one of those.