Unqualified Offerings from Jim Henley. Thoughtful commentary on US politics from a left-liberal perspective. I’ve also added Manas whom I mentioned a few days ago.

Update Jim Henley writes in the comments thread to inform me that he is a libertarian and not a ‘left-liberal’. Sorry about that !

It just goes to show I shouldn’t try to infer a complete political position from arguments on a few key issues. Still even on the basis of the little I’ve read of Jim’s blog I can say that I wish there were more libertarians like him.

Confusion regarding Iraq and the Middle East is everywhere. Scuds from North Korea hidden under a load of cement are apparently a legitimate cargo. The WashPost runs a story quoting Administration officials saying Saddam has given VX gas to Al-Qaeda and it’s already on its way to the West. If correct, this would certainly justify war, but would also give it a ‘shutting the stable door’ quality. The next day, the report seems to be little more than a rumor.

Meanwhile the Iraqi declaration and the US response are puzzling in the extreme. In the standard warblogger scenario, the declaration was the trigger. Once it came out, the US would produce the evidence to show Iraq was lying and the war would be under way. The peaceful resolution scenario was that Iraq would ‘fess up and destroy its weapons. Instead, Iraq is denying everything but the US is in no hurry to prove that Saddam is lying.

Today’s NYT quotes US officials as saying that the report fails to account for stocks of WMDs that were already located by the last round of inspections. If this claim stands up, it would make a pretty strong case for declaring Iraq in material breach. But, as the NYT says, it’s hard to prove a negative. What I find really bizarre is this:

The second [option] is to continue with the inspections, and to aid inspectors with intelligence that would guide them to suspect locations. But Mr. Fleischer said earlier this week that the inspectors would receive no information that revealed the sources and methods used to collect them.

How serious a threat can Saddam be if it’s more important to protect any and all intelligence sources than to produce the evidence that would justify his overthrow. You can imagine cases where the US would put sources first – for example a highly-placed mole in Saddam’s entourage. But the kind of evidence that’s been hinted at so far is nothing like this – it’s routine surveillance using satellites, phone intercepts etc. Kennedy compromised sources far more sensitive when he produced the photos proving the Russians were building missiles on Cuba.

The only interpretation that makes sense is that, despite all the dossiers that were waved about a few months ago – including satellite images of ‘suspect’ sites – the Administration doesn’t really have anything beyond some suspicious purchases.

Blix will apparently give his assessment of the Iraqi document next Thursday, My guess is that he won’t give much support to a ‘material breach’ finding and will instead call for more inspections. That puts any real action off until the first inspection report, due on January 26 as I recall.

There’s still a significant chance that Saddam will be nailed on a clear falsehood in the declaration or that inspectors will turn up something damning. And there’s an outside possibility that the alleged links to Al-Qaeda will pan out. But it’s becoming more and more likely that neither terrorist links nor WMDs will be solid enough evidence to justify an invasion.

What’s left of the case for war is the obvious fact that Saddam is an evil dictator and a menace to peace in the Middle East. The problem is that a war based on this argument must be conducted very differently from one based on evidence that Saddam is aiding terrorists or hoarding WMDs. Overthrowing one oppressive dictator in a region full of them is not a sustainable policy. Unfortunately many of the dictators are US allies, just as Saddam was 20 years ago. And the oppressive Middle Eastern regime that arouses the most resentment is that operated in Palestine by America’s closest ally. The fact that the same ally operates the only real domestic democracy in the region makes things even trickier.

Quite frankly, I don’t believe the US Administration is capable of managing a war for democracy in the Middle East. But if they show that they can, for example by demanding an immediate start to the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Palestine, and dumping their friendly dictators, I’ll be the first to cheer them on.

Brad DeLong asks Six Questions About Productivity Growth. The first:
Rapid American productivity growth has continued through the recession. What conclusions should we draw from this?

Occam’s Razor suggests adopting the simplest solution. The fact that productivity growth is normally procyclical (that is, it goes up during booms and down during recessions) is something of a puzzle. Given a fixed capital stock, if employment declines during a recession, the capital stock per worker increases and therefore labour productivity should rise, not fall. Declining labour productivity during recessions has been explained in a number of ways, but the most popular is ‘labour hoarding’. This is the idea that firms do not sack workers when demand slows down because there is some sort of implicit long-term contract, which includes the fact that the employees will stay on and contribute when demand picks up again. The big achievement of the 1990s was to destroy this sort of implicit contractual relationship, to the point where firms now engage in large-scale layoffs even when they are profitable. Employees, particularly younger ones, have learned the lesson that loyalty is for suckers. Hence, labour hoarding is no longer significant, and there is no reason to expect procyclical labour productivity, particularly in the aftermath of a gigantic boom in capital investment.

This isn’t the only possible answer but it seems like a good one to me. It works in nicely with the Thatcher effect, which also yields a combination of weak or negative output growth with very strong productivity growth. The Thatcher effect arises when the lowest-productivity workers are sacked (or plants are closed) raising the average automatically.

The blogosphere as a whole comes out of the Lott-Thurmond affair looking pretty good. The normal practice, when someone prominent on the political right praises segregationism, is to play it down and pretend nothing happened. And woe betide anyone on on the left who wants to make an issue of it, especially if they are foolish enough to use the dreaded “R Word”. The mainstream media played this one true to form, burying Lott’s remark that it would be a good thing if Thurmond’s 1948 Dixiecrat campaign had been successful.

It was only after bloggers, and particularly ‘right-wing’ bloggers such as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit started piling on to Lott, that the media decided there was even a story here. Now it looks as if Lott’s career has suffered severe, and possibly fatal damage. Moreover, it has even become possible to state the obvious truth, that large sections of the US Republican party have prospered by pandering to racist sentiment, exactly as Lott did. [As I’ve observed previously, despite some occasional mis-steps like an appearance at Bob Jones university, Bush is genuinely non-racist, but so far he represents the exception rather than the rule].

For those who want to stick to an image of the blogosphere as a haven for right-wing bigotry, there’s always Mark “Not the truth, not the whole truth and everything but the truth” Steyn, who manages to devote 700 words to praise for Thurmond’s sexual promiscuity without mentioning his racist politics.

And I should observe that the same things happen on the left. Although the parallel is not perfect, Steven Den Beste points to an anti-US screed, headlined The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal, and published in the Daily Telegraph of all places, by former “Angry Young Man”, Harold Pinter, who has previously opposed not only the war in Afghanistan but also Kosovo and Bosnia, and advocated the release of Slobodan Milosevic. The natural reaction of leftists is to ignore such embarrassments, but this is a mistake. The view, exemplified by Pinter and Noam Chomsky, that everything the US does is always wrong undermines those who want to support some US actions and oppose others just as much as the “USA all the way!” line taken by so many on the right.

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit attacks critics of the war on Iraq, saying

I think that this “pressure of public opinion” language is a recognition by Saddam that the “anti-war” movement is objectively on his side, and not neutral.

George Orwell used this rhetorical manoeuvre long before there was an Instapundit, but was self-critical enough to recognise and expose its dishonesty. It’s sad to see it being revived yet again.

As this piece reprinted from the NYT notes

[Orwell] tirelessly exposed the argument that one should refrain from attacking ‘X’ (the goodies) because this ‘objectively’ helps ‘Y’ (the baddies). This common argument—which is in essence what Revel calls devotion—is ‘only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist’, Orwell wrote. ‘It is a tempting manoeuvre and I have used it myself more than once*, but it is dishonest’. What’s more, it doesn’t work: ‘if you lie to people, their reaction is all the more violent when the truth leaks out, as it is apt to do in the end’.

* (For example, when he asserted during WWII that pacifists were ‘objectively pro-Fascist’)

Update The BlogGeist strikes again. Jim Henley made the identical point, a bit before me, with more links. So far, the response has been a solid piece of Steynwalling.

Tim Blair’s latest column is a fisking of a piece in the Guardian by Rod Liddle. Tim intersperses paras by Liddle (in italics) with his own comments. Perhaps this has been done in print before, but I haven’t seen it.

I’m not sure that this works. In the debate on fisking that took place on this blog a few months ago, the point was made that the potential for unfair distortion was offset by the standard practice of linking to the target article. This is more difficult in print – Tim mentions that the article appeared “on Tuesday” but the Oz doesn’t give a URL.

It doesn’t help that this inaugural print fisking is not one of Tim’s better efforts, being made up more of petty quibbles than of either reasoned responses or sharp putdowns. A fairly typical extract

The Prime Minister, John Howard, seems to suggest that his country will invade any Asian country it suspects of harbouring terrorists.

Howard suggested nothing of the sort. He said: “If you believed that somebody was going to launch an attack against your country, either of a conventional kind or of a terrorist kind, and you had a capacity to stop it and there was no alternative other than to use that capacity, then of course you would have to use it.”

A distinction without a difference, as far as I can see.

I mentioned in a recent post that “we are all Keynesians now”, in the sense of accepting that governments will run deficits during recessions and surpluses during slumps to stabilise the economic cycle. While this is broadly true, the natural corollary, that, over the course of the economic cycle, the budget should balance, implying a stable ratio of public debt to GDP, is much more controversial.

Broadly speaking, social democrats accept this position in principle, although they lean towards some tolerance of deficits. On the other side of politics, opinion is sharply divided between hawks who want to wipe out public debt and ‘supply-siders’ who favor continuous budget deficit. Ken Davidson points out the many flaws in Costello’s advocacy of zero debt.

Meanwhile Anthony York at Salon reports that Stephen Friedman’s nomination as chair of Bush’s National Economic Council is running into opposition from ‘conservative opponents of balanced budgets’ . This description would have been an oxymoron before 1980, but it is now apparently routine. I was surprised, for example, to read that the Cato Institute opposes balanced budgets

Chris Edwards, director of fiscal policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, was not overly enthusiastic about the possibility of Friedman heading the council. But, he said, “Even if he comes in with a balanced budget philosophy, if he can be a team player, then I see no problem.

BTW, ‘Team player’ is a term that could benefit from analysis. As used here, it seems to mean someone willing to repudiate their own views for the sake of a prestigious entry on the vita.

New Zealand has ratified Kyoto and the Canadian parliament has endorsed the treaty, clearing the way for ratification. Provided Russia ratifies (this seems certain, but you can never be sure with Russia) the treaty will now come into force.

The Canadian report includes an estimate that the economic cost of Kyoto will be around 0.4 per cent of GDP. This is consistent with estimates made here by both supporters and opponents of Kyoto.

Manas (‘spicy hot’ in the main East Timorese language) is a new Ozplogger, focusing so far mainly on East Timor. As with other female bloggers, she includes a picture* (more than one, actually). The text looks promising so far.

*I don’t quite know why male bloggers are so shy. In my case, it’s just that I’m too lazy to make the necessary changes to my template – I have a picture on my website here. Actually, in view of the many comments on my beard, it’s not surprising that other males have been coy.

CalPundit has an easy introduction to Keynesian economics, pointing out that ‘we are all Keynesians now’.

To clarify this, nearly everyone accepts that the public sector acts, and should act, as an economic stabiliser by allowing tax revenues to decline and expenditure to rise during recessions (and the opposite during booms). Most economic policymakers are willing to supplement the automatic stabilisation arising from the tax-transfer system with some discretionary fiscal stimulus during recessions.