Jonathan Last's book, recently released and pictured here, was a very interesting look at plummeting fertility rates in the United States. It's also, somehow, quite funny, engaging personally thought-provoking. I'm not surprised that book clubs across the country are reading it (if my Facebook wall is any indication of that trend ...).

In his latest piece for The Weekly Standard, he looks at some interesting research looking at median home values, marriage rates and GOP voting.

Turns out it's not just love -- but also voting Republican -- that goes together with marriage. That whole Sandra Fluke thing makes so much more sense now, eh?

Anyway, the long and the short of Last's piece is that, "In the same way no politician ever misses an opportunity to extol the virtues of college, Republicans should insistently be making the case for marriage."

This isn’t a heavy lift. There’s an enormous amount of research demonstrating that marriage makes people happier, healthier, and wealthier. The most recent addition to the literature came just a few weeks ago in the form of a report titled Knot Yet, by Kay Hymowitz, Brad Wilcox, Jason Carroll, and Kelleen Kaye, which examined the same delayed-marriage phenomenon that Hawley was studying in his model.

The Knot Yet authors have put together a list of policy ideas that could help Americans get to marriage earlier. For starters, Republicans could champion nontraditional degrees and vocational training instead of robotically pushing the universal four-year degree, which these days too often comes with a crushing load of debt. When Republicans talk about reforming the tax code they ought to advocate measures that will make family formation more affordable—like increased child tax credits—and be wary of plans—like removing the mortgage-interest deduction—which could make it more difficult.

Other ideas abound. Lately some Republicans have become obsessed with trying to outbid Democrats on issues, such as immigration and same-sex marriage, which do not offer any obvious political advantages. If they’re going to get into bidding wars, why not do it over a suite of issues that could actually bear electoral fruit? For instance, today Democrats are the only ones promoting family-friendly workplace policies. Hawley’s research suggests that Republicans ought to be competing in this space, too, helping to mitigate the professional costs young men and women incur by entering marriage and family life, and thus encouraging more of them to take the plunge.

As the party of commerce and free markets, Republicans are constitutionally disposed toward prizing economic growth, job creation, and lower taxes, which is fine, so far as these things go. But regaining the White House and becoming a majority party again will require more than that. Instead of flitting from one political fad to the next, the GOP ought to be fixating on the foundational questions that most influence voting behavior: encouraging young men and women to get hitched and lowering the financial barriers for those ready to tie the knot.

Sociologists have long acknowledged the good societal outcomes of such behavior. George Hawley has demonstrated in no uncertain terms the good political outcomes. If the Republican strategists don’t take note, they’ll deserve to keep losing elections.

Thoughts?

Dear Penelope,

I feel bad even complaining about this but it's becoming a real problem. 

My husband (I'll call him Joe) is a great guy in lots of ways. He's good at all kinds of things, including household accounts (he's an accountant), racquetball, and child-entertaining (he's the kind of dad who makes up songs on the spur of the moment to make the kids laugh). He's also convinced that he's a great handyman, and that's where the trouble starts.

We have an old, rambling house that needs plenty of maintenance. Except in very rare circumstances, he refuses to hire professionals to come to fix anything because he'd rather do it himself. He's very proud of his efforts and I wish I could be too.

But he's awful at it.

One example: we had the dumb idea to renovate the master bathroom last summer, and he took on the entire job. He worked incredibly hard, sacrificing all his free time for months. He had a great time doing it.

Well, if you walked into the bathroom today, you'd see that every single thing in it is off: the faucet that's supposed to stick straight out of the wall is coming out at an angle, the toilet is mounted to the wall crooked, the showerhead is mounted wrong, the tile is uneven, the grout is a mess...you get the idea. He doesn't see any of these problems. As far as he's concerned, the job's done. I cringe inside every time I go in there, but I just don't have the heart to carp about how unprofessional it looks after all the hard work he did.

I love Joe with all my heart and don't want to hurt his feelings. But if this goes on, our whole house is going to end up looking like a villain's lair on the old Batman show, where everything is crooked. And plus, he told me he wants to teach our daughters (6 and 8) all about home repair. I love the egalitarian message, but yikes.

Is there anything I can do about this? We're not quite there yet, but I'm afraid this could end up putting a dent in our marriage.

Thanks,

Please Don't DIY

Dear Please,

You say Joe doesn't see the mistakes in the work. Do you mean that when you show him a crooked faucet, he literally can't see that it's crooked? (A level might be a great gift.) Or do you mean that he doesn't spot the flaws on his own, without being shown? There are people who notice uneven tile and people who don't. You're clearly a member of the former category, so you're going to have to be honest with Joe or risk feeling more and more resentful. 

But there's no reason to approach that conversation with dread. Remember that while all this work on the house is very satisfying for your husband, he's also doing it as a gift for you. It's very possible that he would want to know what you are seeing that he doesn't, so that he can perfect the work and improve the gift. Indeed, he might be appalled to learn that his efforts are making you unhappy.

I don't know if you've considered this, but your attention to detail is an asset that can let you participate in these projects. The two of you can become allies over the grout, rather than stay stuck in the roles of cheerful, clueless laborer and secretly dissatisfied recipient.

If you approach this problem with tact, it can bring you closer together. If Joe wants to involve your daughters, he may be happy to include you as well.

If you fear that his work is structurally unsound rather than just cosmetically off, suggest that he supplement his knowledge with a course in DIY, or get him some good books on the subject. That can be interpreted as critical or as encouraging, depending on how you approach it. I wouldn't try to dissuade him from being handy; just try to help him find ways to do it better. That would be something you both could celebrate.

Got a question for Penelope? Write to AskPenelope@ricochet.com.

Disclaimer: The advice offered in this column is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended to replace or substitute for any professional, financial, medical, legal, or other professional advice. If you have specific concerns or a situation in which you require professional, psychological or medical help, you should consult with an appropriately trained and qualified specialist. Neither Ricochet nor the writer of this column accepts any liability for the outcome or results of following the advice in this column. Ricochet reserves the right to edit letters for length and clarity.

From an editorial in today's London Times headlined, "Mrs. Thatcher's time in office assured the survival of this newspaper":

Perhaps the most telling of any opinion ever offered in The Timeson Mrs Thatcher is the verdict reached by this newspaper on May 4, 1979, the day after the general election that brought her Conservative Government to power. At this momentous event in British political history The Times said nothing at all. That was because an industrial dispute over printing methods that were already obsolete had taken The Times off the newsstands.

Were it not for the reforms to the power of trade unions introduced by Mrs Thatcher’s Government this newspaper would most likely not be here today to report on her funeral. Nor would many other national and regional titles whose print runs and profitability had been held hostage night after night, week after week, by the intransigence and Spanish practices of print unions that blackmailed editors with impunity.

Had Mrs Thatcher not won those early battles, there would have been little prospect of would-be press magnates, suddenly liberated from the stranglehold of closed shops and secondary picketing, finding themselves able to make financial sense of launching new titles. The reforms fuelled democracy in the workplace as much as they did a spirit of entrepreneurship. They remain a huge legacy of her premiership, a legacy evident daily in the quality and breadth of this country’s media.

Just a few weeks ago, my husband wrote "The Unions vs. Obamacare: Disenchantment sets in."

Yesterday, the United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers International released this statement:

“Our Union and its members have supported President Obama and his Administration for both of his terms in office.

But regrettably, our concerns over certain provisions in the ACA have not been addressed, or in some instances, totally ignored. In the rush to achieve its passage, many of the Act’s provisions were not fully conceived, resulting in unintended consequences that are inconsistent with the promise that those who were satisfied with their employer sponsored coverage could keep it.

These provisions jeopardize our multi-employer health plans, have the potential to cause a loss of work for our members, create an unfair bidding advantage for those contractors who do not provide health coverage to their workers, and in the worst case, may cause our members and their families to lose the benefits they currently enjoy as participants in multi-employer health plans.

For decades, our multi-employer health and welfare plans have provided the necessary medical coverage for our members and their families to protect them in times of illness and medical needs. This collaboration between labor and management has been a model of success that should be emulated rather than ignored. I refuse to remain silent, or idly watch as the ACA destroys those protections.

I am therefore calling for repeal or complete reform of the Affordable Care Act to protect our employers, our industry, and our most important asset: our members and their families.”

Is the dam beginning to break?

Most of us presume as much. But in France, where they purport to know a great deal about such matters, serious doubts have been raised. According to Reuters, "a little-known sports doctor" who is employed at "the small University of Franche-Comte in the eastern town of Besançon" has spent 16 years studying this pressing matter and has examined some 300 subjects, and he has concluded that they can stand on their own.

One of this physician's patients comments, "You breathe better, you stand up straighter, you have less back pain."

It strikes me that this is the sort of question that only the wisdom possessed by members of Ricochet can resolve.

From the Boston Herald:

Just a few months into her first U.S. Senate term, Democrat Elizabeth Warren is generating increasing support among liberals as a White House contender — putting her on a potential collision course with presumed front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Warren’s tough stand against the Obama administration’s proposal to potentially cut Social Security benefits has become a lightning rod for progressive groups looking for a more liberal standard bearer in 2016.

“If Elizabeth Warren ran, millions of people would obviously support her candidacy enthusiastically,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, who helped draft Warren to run for U.S. Senate against GOP incumbent Scott Brown.

Green said Warren already has won huge support from progressives for her recent bold questioning of financial regulators who she said are protecting big banks over families. Her rapid opposition to Obama’s proposed cuts only added to her star power.

“If Hillary Clinton or others don’t firmly oppose these cuts, they open up a huge amount of political space for an insurgent to run and win,” Green said.

It's generally a bad idea for partisans of one stripe to war game the other party's primary process. Remember when the Obama people were congratulating themselves on defanging the threat from the Ultimate Republican Presidential Candidate, Jon Huntsman? They turned out to be wrong both about keeping him away from the campaign trail and about the GOP's desire to nominate a guy who's eerily reminiscent of the creepy husband in a Lifetime movie (yes, I've seen them; no, I don't want to discuss the circumstances). So, full disclosure up front: I don't pretend to have a finger on the pulse of the Democratic base.

But Elizabeth Warren? I get it as a primal scream for the left, but surely Democrats have to nominate someone with an appeal beyond Cambridge and Marin County. I can't imagine that the nation has shifted enough to make her a viable general election candidate. But could she conceivably be competitive for the nomination? What if Hillary takes a pass?

There's a weird and unnatural sclerosis to the way the modern liberal views the world. As though the circus of human affairs were a quiescent control group and federal policy a precise, scalpel-like scientific variable. If we can only tune things just right!

Of course it does not work that way. I spent all of Saturday morning and afternoon paying taxes, which prompted me to pull some data. Let's chart the top marginal tax rate -- the rate very successful people pay on their last slice of income -- against the actual total federal income tax receipts as a percentage of the economy. 

Top Bracket Rate versus Individual Tax Receipts as a Percent of GDP

We can tax the rich 1%, 91%, or anything in between. 1% will free the economy and spark superior capital allocation and new invention. 91% will cripple our prospects for new medicine, new technology, and new ways to enjoy life. But no matter what the President does, he's only collecting 8% of GDP on April 15. His decision is whether or not he wants that figure -- the GDP -- to grow. So: does he?

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik can be a wonderful writer, but, I read this passage in an already questionable piece, and, puzzled, I read it again, and then I gave up, recognizing nonsense when I saw it:

What I think we need to do, and need to do clearly, is to see that the question of cause and effect is a little misplaced in this debate. The reason we don’t want our kids—or our teen-agers, or ourselves for that matter—lost in violent imagery, whatever the beauty of the pixelated townscape, is not because of something that they will cause but because of what they are right now. It’s not what they might do it’s who they are in the act of becoming. Fictive or not, violent images increase the sum total of violence in the world. If we believe that we, as Edmund Burke said, should hate violence and love liberty, then we can’t hate violence and still make it part of our idea of pleasure.

We could debate the extent to which certain individuals are affected by the violent imagery they see on the TV, playing a video game or, for, that matter, going to the theater (Titus Andronicus anyone?). We could also examine the extent to which fictional depictions of violence serve as a fantasy release for instincts that would otherwise take malign, real world form, but, unless we are to lose any sense of the difference—and the importance of the difference—between  fact and fiction, the statement that “fictive or not, violent images increase the sum total of violence in the world” is not, in any meaningful sense, true.

This month, many of the nation's best and brightest high school seniors will receive thick envelopes in the mail announcing their admission to the college of their dreams. For many of them, going away to college will be like crossing the Rubicon. They will leave their families -- their homes -- and probably not return for many years, if at all.

That was journalist Rod Dreher's path. Dreher grew up in the small southern community of Starhill, Louisiana, 35 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. He decided to return home after his sister Ruthie passed away from terminal lung cancer, a beautiful and moving experience he describes in his new book.

After listening to the Acculturated podcast with Rod (and Ben and Abby), I started thinking a lot the conflict between career ambition and relationships, which I write more about here. The conflict lies at the heart of many of our current cultural debates, including the ones sparked by high-powered women like Sheryl Sandberg and Anne Marie Slaughter. Ambition drives people forward; relationships and community, by imposing limits, hold people back. Which is more important? Just the other week, Slate ran a symposium that addressed this question, asking, "Does an Early Marriage Kill Your Potential To Achieve More in Life?" Ambition is deeply entrenched into the American personae, as Yale's William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue­ -- but what are its costs?

As Dreher was writing his book, one of his East Coast friends told him, "Everything I've done has been for career advancement ... And we have done well. But we are alone in the world." He added: "Almost everybody we know is like that."

Meanwhile, people like Ruthie, who devote themselves to their communities and to others, are surrounded by love.

For many years, Ruthie and her mother had a Christmas Eve tradition of visiting the Starhill cemetery and lighting candles on each of the hundreds of graves there. On that first Christmas Eve after Ruthie died, her mother could not bring herself to keep the tradition going. And yet, driving past the cemetery after sunset on that Christmas Eve, Dreher saw sparks of light illuminating the graveyard. Someone else had lit the candles on the graves -- but who? It turns out that a member of their community named Susan took it upon herself to pay that tribute to the departed, including Ruthie.

In the final paragraph of the novel Middlemarch, George Eliot pays another kind of tribute to the dead. Eliot writes, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." We may not celebrate these people in the media--and they may not be successful in a material sense--but they are the ones who, when they were alive, kept the peace of the world.

If you're interested in some of the interesting psychology research surrounding ambition, relationships, and community--or want to know more about Rod and his sister--you can read my piece here.

The heated debate over Margaret Thatcher’s economic legacy shows many progressives have little use for the pro-market shift taken by US and UK policymakers starting in the late 1970s. They argue that the combo of deregulation, privatization, and lower marginal income tax rates achieved little more than higher incomes for the rich and stagnant incomes for the middle class.

Now, I don’t think the data support such an interpretation. But rather than again argue that point, let’s instead again examine the economic era American liberals pine for: the post-WWII era, particularly the 1950s. As President Obama has said: “In the decades after World War II there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own. …This consensus, this shared vision led to the strongest economic growth and the largest middle class that the world has ever known. It led to a shared prosperity. “

It was a time of strong labor unions, plentiful manufacturing jobs, and high taxes. If it worked before, why not go back to the future? Some new research shows why America likely won’t, and why liberals are wasting their time pushing nostalgia economics:

1. The decline in manufacturing jobs, though not manufacturing output, stems from globalization and automation. And this is a phenomenon hardly restricted to the US. Lane Kenworthy:

Protecting existing manufacturing jobs, bringing back lost ones, and creating new ones is a perennial aim of the left. But possibilities here are limited … manufacturing’s share of employment has been shrinking steadily in all rich nations. Even South Korea, which didn’t industrialise until the 1970s and 1980s, has joined the downward march. … Two decades from now, manufacturing jobs will have shrunk to less than 10 per cent of employment in most affluent countries.

The good news here is that while this may be a problem for income growth, it doesn’t have to be one for job growth: “There is no tendency for those with a larger share of employment in manufacturing to have a higher employment rate.”

2. As with the decline of manufacturing jobs, the decline in unionization is widespread. Again, Kenworthy:

Unionisation has been falling in most affluent nations. Only five now have rates above 40 per cent, and four of those (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden) are countries in which access to unemployment insurance is tied to union membership. … Even if there is no further reduction in bargaining coverage going forward, in all but a handful of the rich countries 20 percent or more of the employed already are outside the reach of collective agreements. And in half of the countries it’s 40 per cent or more.

3. As Paul Krugman has enthusiastically noted, “[In] the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years.”

In short, the rich paid more and the system was fairer. But in a study for the Manhattan Institute (from which the above chart is taken), Arpit Gupta argues the facts say otherwise:

1. In the 1950s, very few people paid the very high income-tax rates aimed at the wealthiest.

2. Claims that wealthy people paid more taxes rest instead on the assumption that the rich, as stock owners, bore the entire burden of higher corporate taxes of that era. There are good reasons to doubt this assumption about corporate taxes.

3. Even if we leave these assumptions unchallenged, the economy of the 1950s was so different from our own that its tax structure cannot be reproduced today. …The collapse of the global economy after World War II and the nature of postwar industrial capitalism, created a period of high corporate earnings in the United States. American firms did not vie then, as they do now, with competitors on every inhabited continent. Both law and convention supported large, monolithic corporations in an environment in which disruption was rare. Capital was relatively immobile, and corporate profits were high—boosting redistribution in the forms of union activity (resulting in higher wages and benefits for workers) and government taxation.

Half a century later, the nature of global capitalism has drastically changed. Though the U.S. still has a high statutory corporate tax rate by developed-country standards, corporate tax revenue today is far lower as a percentage of GDP. Greater competition within industries, the spread of corporate tax loopholes, and the global spread of business and capital mean that domestic capital and corporate earnings are no longer a “captive” source of revenue that can be easily taxed away. Additionally, the holders of capital have diversified. They now include pension funds and ordinary investors. Therefore capital taxes no longer fall so sharply on the very top end of incomes.

4. The most plausible viable paths to higher taxes in today’s economy would render the tax system less fair, not more so.

Gupta’s bottom line: “It is potentially misleading to imagine that U.S. taxes in the 1950s can serve as a model for a better approach in 2013. Income tax rates actually paid in the U.S. have remained stable for decades.

Corporate taxes may have played a role in pushing up the total tax burden for the rich during the 1950s, but this is not as clear-cut as is claimed. And even if high corporate tax rates did lead to high tax burdens on the rich in the past, it is unlikely that we can replicate that experience today.

Meanwhile, the European example does not teach us that higher tax rates can be levied with little effect while enhancing progressivity. Rather, it teaches that the most reliable way to raise taxes in our time would be a broad-based approach that would be the opposite of progressive. The solution to the United States’ revenue debate cannot be found in past.

Back to the 1950s? The left better look for a new model.

When he first entered office, President Obama sent back the bust of Winston Churchill. Now he is refusing to attend former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, and no one serving in his Administration will be going either. Not Vice President Biden, not Michelle, not even Secretary of State John Kerry.

The decision was made before the bombing in Boston.

Who is going? George Shultz and James Baker; both served as Secretary of State while Thatcher was prime minister.

Obama’s snub hasn’t gone unnoticed in Britain. Sir Gerald Howarth, chairman of the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward group of MPs and peers, said, “The bonds forged between the UK and the US through Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was instrumental in ending the Cold War and liberating millions of people. That the present administration feels unable to be represented as the world marks the extraordinary contribution Margaret Thatcher made will be a source of disappointment to those who served with her in that great endeavor.”

Former defense secretary Liam Fox, a close ally of Thatcher, said, “I think it would be both surprising and disappointing if after President Obama's fulsome tribute to Lady Thatcher, the American administration did not send a senior serving member to represent them.”

The Republican Party is sending three members of the House of Representatives: Marsha Blackburn, Michele Bachmann, and George Holding. Newt Gingrich will also be attending, along with Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger. None of the former presidents will be going, including George W. Bush.

As Obama stays home, other world leaders will be in attendance: Stephen Harper of Canada, Italy’s Mario Monti, and Donald Tusk from Poland.

When President Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Margaret Thatcher attended his funeral as did Prince Charles, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, French President Jacques Chirac, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, among many others.

Yesterday, I caught a little flack from some readers when I suggested that the insensitivity of pop star Justin Bieber might be indicative of a trend toward self-absorption in our culture. Some felt I was too hard on the Biebs, and I feel bad about that. But my greater point had to do with a certain rise in self-regard and self-centeredness that I sense is taking place among young folks today--fueled in equal parts by wealth and social media technology.

Let me explain a little: One study I read about suggests there has been a marked rise in self-esteem over the last four or five decades among American youth. I wrote a piece in January citing a another study that showed that, compared to 40 years ago, students are increasingly likely to label themselves "gifted" today--even though key academic skills have declined on average over that time period.

As Bono once sang: "Some people got way too much confidence, baby."

Before I run out to my front porch and yell at the kids to get off my lawn, I'd like to take aim at a new target: Peter Pan.

Not only does the flying boy deserve ridicule for dressing in green tights, but I assert that his desire to avoid growing up is evidence of selfishness. I say this because I've become convinced that my generations' love affair with prolonged adolescence--our inability to grow up, in other words--is closely tied to our growing comfort with the Big Government welfare state. ( "Young, Liberal, and Open to Big Government" the New York Times rhapsodized in a big feature story back in February.)

Move over Uncle. Daddy Sam just got to town! Government is taking over as proxy parent to the young twenty-somethings of today--promising a kind of comprehensive, lifelong financial security. And this Daddy has advantages--like the power of confiscatory taxation and limitless deficit spending (for a while). And with all that self-esteem, it's the perfect audience for the "Yes we can" slogan.

But back to the guy in green tights. I wrote a piece called "Peter Pan Goes to College" for the latest edition of the journal SOCIETY, in an attempt to make sense of the culture of credentialism, delayed marriage, random hookups, and general lack of purpose that I see among so many of my young peers in their twenties and early thirties. I think it's all linked somehow.

Today, the college years function less as a transition into adulthood and more as an extension of adolescence. For students, this postpones the “other-centeredness” of marriage and parenthood in favor of the relative self-centered focus of childless single life, where one’s primary concerns are often one’s own happiness and fulfillment, not that of spouse and child. In other words, the old notion of young adulthood entailed taking responsibility—economically and emotionally—for a family. For better or worse, today’s educated class has cast that model aside.

In our present culture, life for young people is endlessly transitional. Everything is temporary. The most conspicuous evidence of this evanescence is the hook-up culture, which seems above all to have been conceived as a way for ambitious young people to get by, sexually, until they have enough degrees and enough professional experience to justify devoting a significant portion of their energy to non-career pursuits. Loveless, drunken sex with strangers—it’s the oil that keeps our hypercredentialist, post-feminist society running.

What I really want to know is: Am I being too hard on Pan? Does the freedom to delay traditional adult responsibilities encourage self-centeredness? Or is all of the freedom to defer responsibility that young people enjoy today, on the whole, a good thing?

This morning, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick repudiated earlier reports of five incendiary devices (two that went off, three that didn't). He said there were only two bombs. Full stop.

Nobody has come forward to claim responsibility and any persons of interest or suspects, at this point, are just that. So we don't know who was involved or why.

But if there were only two bombs, and they were very crude bombs, that could have been carried out by a single individual.

If the terror in Boston yesterday required a handful of people to accomplish, would it be easier to thwart future similar efforts? Would the inability or lack of desire to develop a team mean that current efforts to stop acts of terrorism such as this are working pretty well?

There's very little to go on here with this bombing, but what are your thoughts at this early stage?

Also, is it surprising to you that we don't have more of these types of events?

In my column this week for Defining Ideas,  I discuss yet another misguided government regulation that will stall economic recovery.

As I wrote in my Defining Ideas column last week, the condition of the labor markets remains perilous. Even though the nominal jobless rate has declined by a tenth of a percent, the sharp reduction in labor market participation gives a clear indication of the ever-decreasing fraction of Americans who are able to find steady work. My recommendation was, and is, that the only way to revive these markets is to remove the barriers to entry created by government regulation.

Today’s army of activist groups is not focused on restoring jobs, however. The hot-ticket item in the current labor market disputes is legislative mandates for paid sick leave. The unintended consequence of paid-sick leave legislation, whether in New York City or elsewhere, will be to block the creation of new jobs by limiting the deals that employers and employees are lawfully allowed to make with each other. I explain further in my column.

As a brief respite from the dreadful carnage in Boston, here is a photo of George and Laura Bush with their first grandchild, Mila. She was born Saturday night. 

 Mazeltov!

-- The Washington Post is reporting two dead with approximately 100 injured. The New York Post, by contrast puts the death toll at at least a dozen and pegs the number of injured at 132. Multiple sources have claimed that one of the dead is an eight-year-old boy.

-- The New York Post is also reporting a Saudi national currently being treated for shrapnel wounds in a Boston hospital as a "suspect" (other sources have referred to this individual as simply a "person of interest"). NBC News describes a person of interest who is reportedly in the United States on a student visa, but never provides enough information to confirm if this is the same person in the Post story.

-- According to the CBS affiliate in Boston, the two devices that went off were placed in trash cans (likely in backpacks) and two other devices that did not detonate have been recovered. The New York Post, however, has at least one of the devices going off in a hotel along the marathon route. The New York Times puts the number of devices as high as five.

-- Cell phone service was reportedly temporarily shut down in the area (though some providers deny that they received any such request) to prevent the remote detonation of any explosives.

-- President Obama is receiving some mild criticism for the fact that he didn't use the word "terrorism" in his statement at the White House earlier today (though White House officials are making clear that's exactly what they believe it was). Obama was reportedly hesitant to use that language without a fuller understanding of the nature of the attack, lest it be perceived as automatically indicating an Al Qaeda plot or something similar.

If there's a consistent rhetorical refusal to face facts (as there was with the Administration's handling of the Fort Hood shooting or the Benghazi attack), this strikes me as a legitimate grievance. But given that the President was speaking only hours after the event, when even the most basic details were still murky (as evidenced by the contradictory points above), that amount of discretion, particularly on a one-time basis, does not strike me as misplaced.

My conservative friends are intensely jealous that I was honored by the Russian government over the weekend-- I've been banned from traveling to Moscow in retaliation for U.S. human rights sanctions on Russia. Here's the Wall Street Journal's report:

MOSCOW—Russia on Saturday named 18 Americans banned from entering the country in response to Washington's imposing sanctions on 18 Russians for alleged human-rights violations.

The list released by the Foreign Ministry includes John Yoo, a former U.S. Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantanamo Bay detention center: retired Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson.

The move came a day after the U.S. announced its sanctions under the Magnitsky Law, named for Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested in 2008 for tax evasion after accusing Russian police officials of stealing $230 million in tax rebates. He died in prison the next year, allegedly after being beaten and denied medical treatment.

There goes the judo match with Putin and the seaside dacha on the Black Sea for the wife. 

But seriously, I couldn't go to Russia during the Cold War and I can't go now. What's the difference these days in regimes?  Obama has as much chance of resetting relations with Putin as he would have with Stalin.

Reports are emerging from Boston about a grisly scene at the end of the Boston Marathon. From Fox News:

At least three people are dead and dozens injured - including up to 10 with amputated limbs - after two explosions rocked the area near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. 

The simultaneous explosions, and reports of at least one other unexploded device found near the scene - raised suspicions that the explosions, just before 3 p.m., could be terrorist attacks. Competitors and race organizers were crying as they fled the bloody chaos, while some witnesses reported seeing victims with lost limbs.

"Somebody's leg flew by my head," a spectator, who gave his name as John Ross, told the Boston Herald. “I gave my belt to stop the blood.”

Details, we should stipulate, are always subject to be misreported in initial media coverage. What's clear, however, is that this is a tragic day for the city of Boston.

Thoughts and prayers.

In case you're one of the few Ricochet readers who doesn't automatically receive "Justin Bieber" Google Alerts on your personal computer, let me fill you in on the latest celebrity scandal to hit the blogs.

The young teen-pop sensation visited the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam last week during his European tour, and reportedly wrote the following in the museum's guestbook:

"Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

A "belieber," as defined by the irrefutable Wikipedia is "a fanatical devotee of the Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber.

In other words, Bieber's emotional response to the tragedy of Anne Frank's life was to wish that she too could have been his devoted fan. He got blasted by some critics for this perceived lack of sensitivity. The incident got so much attention that the ADL was prompted to make a statement.

If by this point in this post you're still asking yourself, Who is Justin Bieber?, here's a 5-minute video primer that pretty much tells you everything there is to know:

Now you are beginning to sense the reason for the guestbook outrage.

Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post put it well in her column today:

I have both of their autobiographies on my bookcase. Justin Bieber has an entire page consisting only of the word “GIRLS” written over and over in varying type sizes, and I suspect that this is the work of a ghostwriter. And he expects ANNE FRANK to become HIS fan?

...If I were cruel I would say that the difference between Anne Frank and Justin Bieber is that we wish Anne Frank had lived past 16, because she had real talent.

But “You can’t shame and humiliate modern celebrities,” P.J. O’Rourke once noted. “What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity.”

Maybe Petri is a bit harsh on the Bieber here. But her full column is worth a read. I find Bieber's rather insensitive slip of the pen more saddening than infuriating.

This is a fame-hounding, publicity-whoring generation we've got on our hands. Every youth is the star of his own YouTube channel and Facebook page. Self-obsession is our greatest cultural ill. And Bieber isn't alone in his self-obsession; he's just been unusually successful at turning it into a business.

Sometimes I think Tom Wolfe was about 30 years early in his pronouncement of the "me generation."

UPDATE: Here's a few pictures of Bieber hamming it up at the Anne Frank museum. Not a good look.

When it comes to the mainstream media, as everyone who reads Ricochet knows, there appears to be a news blackout regarding the murder trial of Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell. Pravda-on-the-Hudson is silent. So is Pravda-on-the-Potomac, and CNN, CBS, ABC, and NBC cannot be bothered to cover developments.

What, I asked myself, about The Wall Street Journal? As a subscriber, I have access to the newspaper's archives online. So, last night, I plugged in the abortionist's name, and I found that two years ago when Dr. Kermit Gosnell was first indicted for murder, the Journal ran a series of stories -- not only about the charges lodged against the physician but also, tellingly, about the failure of the state agencies responsible for oversight.

"In the end, Gosnell was only caught by accident, when police raided his offices to seize evidence of his illegal prescription selling. Once law enforcement agents went in, they couldn't help noticing the disgusting conditions, the dazed patients, the discarded fetuses. That is why the complete regulatory collapse here is so inexcusable. It should have taken only one look," the grand jury report said.

The grand jury condemned Pennsylvania's departments of Health and State for failing to shut down the clinic. The two departments failed to act in spite of receiving numerous reports about troubling events at the clinic, the grand jury said.

Although the state health department found violations during site reviews in 1989, 1992 and 1993, it failed to ensure they were corrected, the grand jury report said. A representative of the Pennsylvania Department of Health didn't return calls to comment, and the Department of State referred calls to a spokesman for newly installed Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican. The governor's spokesman didn't respond to messages for comment.

After 1993, there were no more inspections because the Pennsylvania health department "abruptly decided, for political reasons, to stop inspecting abortion clinics at all," the grand jury reported. There was supposed to be an exception for "complaints dumped directly on the department's doorstep," yet the Women's Medical Society wasn't inspected in spite of repeated complaints about Dr. Gosnell, the report said.

In many ways the Department of State "had more damning information than anyone else," the grand jury said, since nearly 10 years ago, a former employee of the doctor's presented the Board of Medicine with a complaint "that laid out the whole scope of his operation: the unclean, unsterile conditions; the unlicensed workers; the unsupervised sedation; the underage abortion patients; even the over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street."

The state department dismissed the complaint after an investigator interviewed the doctor offsite and never inspected the facility, questioned other employees or reviewed records, the grand jury said.

In the two years since this story appeared, my search revealed that the name of Dr. Kermit Gosnell was not again mentioned in The Wall Street Journal.

Stop and think about this for a moment. The story of this abortionist's conduct is not just a story of personal failure. It is a political scandal of the first order. It is a story of systematic failure; failure that took place due to a political decision made, if memory serves me correctly, by a pro-abortion, country-club Republican Governor of Pennsylvania.

This was known in 2011. It was spelled out in the grand jury report -- and there has been no follow-up in the mainstream press. I would like to know who scotched this story at The Wall Street Journal. I would like to know why it too is silent in the face of medical conduct deliberately overlooked by the governmental agencies responsible for oversight, which is reminiscent of what we learned about what went on in Hitler's concentration campus.

It would, for example, be interesting to know whether what happened in Philadelphia is an isolated case. There are abortion clinics in every state in the land. It would not be surprising if the abuses discovered in Philadelphia existed elsewhere, and, as John Fund pointed out near the end of his post this morning, there is reason to suspect something of the same sort is amiss in Delaware. But the intrepid investigative reporters of the mainstream press -- including The Wall Street Journal -- have thus far looked into . . . nothing.

The Journal is today our only respectable national newspaper. Is it, too, more interested in managing the news  in the interest of the libertine left than in reporting it? Why are its editors and columnists silent? What is going on?

Two recent data points:

1. Younger music fans are listening to lots of music. Just not on the radio. From Deadline.com:

 ...in Q4 online services including Pandora, iHeartRadio, and Spotify accounted for about 23% of the average weekly music listening time among 13-to-35 year olds, up from 17% at the end of 2011. The latest figure is just about even with AM/FM radio: It accounted for 24% of the music listening time among young fans, down two percentage points from the previous year. The change is “driven by mobility and connectivity” — especially the growing use of smartphones as music devices ...Traditional radio still has a lot of fans among older listeners. AM and FM stations accounted for 41% of music time for those 36 and older. They spent about 13% of their time with Internet radio.

Old people are still listening to the radio, poor things. And they're probably still watching television, too.

2. People are ditching their televisions and watching what they want to watch on-line.  From Quartz:

...one-third of America’s internet users—and more than 80% of the population is an internet user—say they would consider ditching TVs altogether, according to a new report by market research firm eMarketer.

That may not sound like a huge proportion but by next year, more than half of American internet users will be watching movies and television shows over the internet. In 2012, 106 million Americans watched TV online. By 2017, that number will 145 million, an annualized growth rate of nearly 7% year-on-year. The industry likes to refer to it as “cutting the cord.” It is an apt metaphor.

People still love music. And they're watching more television content every year. They're just moving away from the traditional distribution devices onto more customizable, personal, flexible, and responsive gadgets. People are demanding -- and getting -- more choices and more power in their entertainment.

So why are they choosing the opposite when it comes to health care and education, just to name two important things that government wants to deliver?

Listeners to "Law Talk" will have heard my suggestion that the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty may create domestic authority for gun control. In this piece in Today's Wall Street Journal, John Bolton and I lay out the constitutional reasons for concern. 

The treaty requires states to establish what it calls a "national control system" and a "national control list" for weapons, ranging from heavy conventional weapons all the way down to small arms. Under the old Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Holland, there is some reason to think that treaties can extend beyond congressional statutes in their power to regulate domestically. Either Congress or President Obama could claim authority from the treaty to implement new gun control measures under this loophole:

Opponents of capital punishment have used treaties to press the Supreme Court to stop the death penalty in Texas. Women's rights groups advocate an international convention that would achieve the goals of the failed Equal Rights Amendment. And supporters of bans on "hate speech" invoke international norms to defeat First Amendment objections. There also is an international legal doctrine that during the period when a country has signed but not yet ratified a treaty, it must take no measures that defeat the treaty's object and purposes. Under some liberal theories, this would allow the president to put some measures of the new arms treaty into effect by executive order.

Bolton and I argue that the Senate should refuse to give its advice and consent to the treaty rather than looking to the courts to prevent the treaty from reinforcing the authority for gun control.

This is the funniest thing to come out of Saturday Night Live in a while:

Of course, punk was always more diverse than the mass media suggested. 

Today is Memorial Day in Israel. It takes place every year, with a poetic appropriateness, on the day before we celebrate Independence Day.

Although we are routinely castigated for our purported indifference to human life, that allegation is shattered not only by the unprecedented efforts the IDF goes to to avoid casualties on the parts of our enemies but also by the way Israelis behave toward those they are closest to. Life is celebrated with an incredible exuberance here, and devotion is expressed shamelessly and openly. So is sorrow.

Our army is unconventional in some ways, and one of them is the way grief is unabashedly expressed. These are Israeli soldiers at a funeral of one of their number. There is nothing stiff-upper-lip about these people. They stand together in danger, they love and honor their comrades, and their hearts visibly break when one of them dies. 

There are heroes among us, where I'm sitting and where you are, too. Today is our Memorial Day, but it's a good day to remember all soldiers -- everyone who puts his body between us and catastrophe. We can't begin to repay these people. The very least we can do is bless, honor, and remember them.

While standing in line at Legoland yesterday, I sent out a tweet that I thought was mildly amusing, about Back to the Future. Not thinking anything of it, I skimmed through my feed when I noticed a prominent Ricochet contributor with large following had retweeted me.  Immediately someone in his timeline caught a factual error.  To which I was like, "Pffffssh, what does she know? I got this off Facebook, which way more reliable than twitter."  But then, the floodgates broke wide and Back to the Future fans came unhinged, literally, with the cries of foul taking over my timeline.  At which point I was like, "Oh no, I just juked the third smartest man in the world, and all around nice guy!"  I quickly sent out a redaction, but it was no use. I watched in semi-horror as the retweets took off.  Somewhere in all this I started to get curious, "I wonder how bad this is gonna get?  How many people will retweet this even though it's been acknowledged to be false?"  

According to science, I had several processes working against my attempt to fix the error. As Frank Farley, a psychology professor at Temple University points out, "You can do a fast correction, but it hardly ever has the value of the original."  But why, Dr. Farley?  

 Jame Gleick, author of The Information, answers it this way:

"The fact is, we love this fast pace. We're exhilarated by it," he says. "We're happy to be able to reach in a pocket and press a button or speak to our device and instantaneously get an answer to a question -- even if we know that the answer is not 100% reliable."

And being first (or, to many Internet commenters, "First!") is even better: the "primacy effect," it's called in psychology. We tend to remember the first items in a series more than later entries.

So people are more likely to believe what they remember.  That makes sense, but there are other factors at play, too, like the credibility and popularity of the person retweeting.

 Neiman Journalism Lab wrote about a study by Microsoft Research which found, "A false tweet with credible features, or a false tweet from a credible person, might as well be true."  

Add to that a study by Microsoft and the University of Michigan, which found, "the mention rate" or popularity, "of the person tweeting is a strong predictor" of how many retweets or "offspring" a tweet will produce.  

Finally, there is the matter of speed.  How fast does a tweet travel?  This interesting article by Wired, attempts to answer that question.  I think they settled on 100 km/s, but the author does say numerous factors will influence speed, chief among them, the time lag between the tweet and when someone will read it. 

So what did I learn from all this?  Unless you are equally credible and popular, it is almost impossible to stop the spread of bad information by correcting it with good information.  Also, Bruce Carroll is now following me, so that's cool.  

In the Review section of Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I came across a squib by Daniel Akst entitled Closing Ceremony, in which the following was reported:

When consumers make a choice, they're happier with it if they perform some small act that emphasizes the finality of their decision.

A paper about four studies found that "choice closure" inhibits people's tendency to reconsider and increased the chooser's satisfaction. In one study, participants were asked to choose from an array of chocolates on a covered tray; then some were asked to close the lid. They reported liking their chocolate more than those who hadn't closed the lid.

There is more in Akst's piece to the same effect, and it makes perfect sense to me. But I suspect that you get his point: "research" shows "that people are happier with irrevocable choices, which promote rationalizing and make it harder to conduct post-choice comparisons."

We ought, I believe, to rethink matrimony in this light and to do away with no-fault divorce. Marriage -- when viewed from a civil perspective -- is said to be a contract. We Catholics think of matrimony as a sacrament as well, and we regard it, the proliferation of annulments notwithstanding, as a permanent arrangement -- as do nearly all brides and grooms, which is why they marry instead of merely shacking up. Consider the traditional wedding vows:

 . . . to have and to hold,
 for better or for worse,
 for richer or for poorer,
 in sickness and in health,
 to love and to cherish;
 from this day forward,
 until death do us part.

Then, ask yourself: Can you think of any other legal contract in which there is no penalty for breach of contract? And can you think of any other moral commitment that ought to be weightier?

As things stand in the United States, however, these vows are all too frequently a baldfaced lie. It would be more truthful for the two to promise "to have and to hold, from this day forward, until boredom, temptation, or inconvenience do us part." But very few brides and very few grooms would want to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in so bold and bald a fashion -- which is why pre-nuptial contracts outlining the terms of an anticipated divorce are still relatively rare. What bride and groom want to think about their upcoming divorce on the day they wed?

No-fault divorce is, of course, a great convenience. As I know from personal experience, it eases one's exit from a bad marriage. But we cannot have this convenience, great as it is, and a strong sense of finality as well. Given the weakness, the folly, and the dysfunctional character of fallen man, there is much to be said in favor of closing the lid after one has selected the chocolate. "Irrevocable choices" really do "promote rationalizing," and they "make it harder to conduct post-choice comparisons." The messier and uglier we make divorce, the firmer we make marriage. It is not for nothing that the Book of Common Prayer states, "Marriage is a condition not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently" and "deliberately."

The greatest political threat we now face stems from the breakdown of marriage. If we want to halt this country's slide into soft despotism and reverse it, we should arguably begin with marriage. It is, after all, the foundation of all political communities; and, as Tocqueville pointed out long ago, it is especially important to bourgeois society.

Whether we like it or not, the law is a moral teacher. No-fault divorce teaches the insignificance of the marriage vows. Requiring that fault be established and assessing penalties in its light would teach the significance of those promises.