At The Corner, Daniel Foster passes along the kind news that makes you go hmmmm: "a 'source within the Murkowski campaign” is telling [the] Daily Beast" that

they know of one possible legal option to pursue a third-party run. If Murkowski is not victorious when the absentee ballots are counted and decides to wage an Independent party bid, they might consider using this option, which the source wouldn’t describe, but did confirm they were seriously looking at.

“We are going to take a look at them and see whether the option is there or not, but it’s a decision she (Murkowski) has to make,” the Murkowski camp source said. “There is an option I know of.”

Of "the obvious options," Foster writes, neither "looks good: Murkowski could either run a write-in campaign, which despite her general popularity in Alaska would be an uphill battle, or she could run on the Alaska Independence Party ballot. It has been done before, but the problem with the AIP is in the name: it’s a secessionist party."

Whereas secession is a political theoretical issue that won't stay dead, 'independent' general election campaigns by Republicans primaried out by their own party's preferred candidates seem to betoken a zombified longing for higher office. It's way too early to pronounce Cristomania the Year's Big Trend, and oh how I hope I never have to do so. But it would be remarkable indeed if the marginalized group in the GOP itching for third-party independence turned out this year to be the establishmentarians.

The temptation of the would-be Crists of the world is to style themselves as the Sane Adults soldiering on in the face of an upsurge of unprofessional kookiness on the right. That's a big mistake. Not only does it distort the truth about the candidates who defeated them -- it looks mighty transparent at a moment when the careerism of the so-called 'political class' rankles, for good reason, many a sane and adult voter right, left, and center.

On one of my favorite blogs, Krugman in Wonderland, economist William Anderson regularly explains the pathology of the NYTimes' flagship economics columnist.

Here he is, in an open letter to Paul Krugman, taking apart one of his recent columns, arguing for the repeal of the Bush Tax Cuts:

In your column today on extending the lower tax rates that now exist on the highest levels of income, you justify your point on two levels:

1. The government needs more revenue and the state needs to take as much property as possible from private owners;
2. Wealthy people are unlikely to spend every penny of their income immediately, so it is important for the Political Classes to get their hands on those funds, as governments will spend freely in the short run.

Thus, from what I can tell, you believe that it is the Very Duty of Everyone to spend everything quickly, and since you are advocating such beliefs publicly, I would like to challenge you to practice what you preach. Here are some suggestions...

He goes on to recommend that Krugman impose his own tax rates on himself; spend 100% of his current income; dump his investments; and refuse to buy commodities. He winds up this way:

I realize that you might be objecting by now. After all, why should you be the fall guy? However, as I read your words, you are claiming that there not only is an economic problem with paying less taxes, saving money, and abstaining from some personal spending in order to save for the future, but also a moral problem, then I would hate for you to be forced to act both unprofessionally AND engage in immoral behavior.

Holding the left accountable for its nutty philosophies? Nicely done.

In college, one of the best courses I ever took was “Public Economics.” We studied distortions in the market caused by boneheaded political schemes, determined whether it was more advantageous to get married on December 31 or January 1 (it can make a big difference in your taxes!), and memorized sections of the tax code. At the end of every lecture, the professor flashed a PowerPoint slide with the phrase “Incentives Matter.” If we remembered nothing else from the class, the professor insisted that we never forget that incentives really do affect behavior. If you want more of something than exists at market equilibrium, incentivize or subsidize it. If you want less of something, tax it.

What if you want fewer people?

One solution – China’s solution – is to impose a steep sin tax on the production of people. Since 1979, the Chinese government has enforced a policy

requiring couples from China's ethnic Han majority to have only one child (the law has largely exempted ethnic minorities).

Depending on where they live, couples can be fined thousands of dollars for having a supernumerary child without a permit, and reports of forced abortions or sterilization are common….Those who volunteer to have only one child are awarded a "Certificate of Honor for Single-Child Parents."

On the other hand, as India is discovering, fines and forced abortions might not be the only way to slow fertility rates. The New York Times reports on India’s ingenious experiment:

The program…in Satara is a pilot program — one of several initiatives across the country…trying to slow down population growth by challenging deeply ingrained rural customs…In Satara, local health officials have led campaigns to curb teenage weddings, as well as promoting the “honeymoon package” of cash bonuses and encouraging the use of contraceptives so that couples wait to start a family.
[T]he district government…pay [s] 5,000 rupees, or about $106, if the couple wait[s] to have children.

But what if you want more people?

Much of the Western world must contend with the threat of extinction. Russia, for example, with its anemic fertility rate of 1.41 children per mother offers cash prizes amounting to 250,000 rubles (about $9,200) to women who give birth to a second child. Is $9,200 enough of an incentive to increase Russia’s fertility rate? Yes, but only marginally. In the four years since the cash for babies policy was implemented, Russia’s fertility rate has risen from 1.28 to 1.41 children per mother.

A more creative solution for all parties involved? India could use its cash-for-waiting budget to subsidize a Russian advertising campaign that entices young Indian families to move to Russia with promises of land grants (Russia’s got plenty of land east of the Ural Mountains). As deal sweeteners, the Russian government could take its cash-for-babies budget to buy each transplanted Indian family a yurt, a cow, and a set of parkas. The result? India decreases its population; Russia increases its. Win-win! Incentives matter!

Attention Ricochet Podcast fans: This week, we're going to try something a little different. Peter and Rob will be opening the floor to questions, suggested topics, and comments. Ask them here in comments or tweet them to us at @Ricochet. We'll be recording tomorrow morning from 8AM to approximately 9AM Pacific and we'll be checking this post and our Twitter stream continuously during that time. And yes, at some point in the near future, we will occasionally live-stream the podcast and be able to take questions in real time. But not tomorrow. Baby steps, people.

Edit: We weren't going to have a guest this week, but we're happy to announce a late-breaking booking: author and columnist Shelby Steele. Submit your questions for him below.

While playing my new favorite lost Cheap Trick classic on YouTube, I was confronted with this sidebar ad:

Bush? Where's Bush? Better yet, where's Jerry Brown?

The Bush Administration wisely stayed away from UN-sponsored "human rights" events, which invariably end up featuring a bunch of dictators lambasting the US, the UK, and Israel for alleged failures. But this administration can't get enough of this stuff. The State Department has just submitted a self-assessment of America's human rights record to the UN Human Rights Council, for scrutiny by such paragons of human rights as Cuba, Angola, Gabon and Bahrain. The report finds, predictably, that the US has plenty of shortcomings like high minority unemployment (which under international law is a "human rights issue).

Okay, but can the Apologizer-in-Chief actually say something nice about the US human rights record? You bet! Here are some examples of the progress cited by the State Department:

• We now have an African-American President
• That President is "committed" to repealing Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell
• That President has enacted health care reform.

As Michael Cannon at Cato notes, for the Obama administration “legislation that threatens U.S. residents with prison if they fail to purchase health insurance" is somehow evidence of progress on human rights.

I'm for Mitch Daniels for President. I may have mentioned that once or twice around here.

Slight snag: he isn't running. Yet, anyway. But he isn't ruling it out. From the Lousiville Courier-Journal:

In an interview with The Courier-Journal Editorial Board on Wednesday, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels said he is not taking any steps to run for president and is not particularly interested in holding the office.

“This is nothing I have started, encouraged,” said Daniels, a Republican in his second term. “People have asked, ‘Please don’t absolutely close your mind’ and I have said I’ll think about it.”

There has been increased speculation nationally and within the GOP that Daniels might seek the nomination for president in 2012. But Daniels pointed out that he’s not raising money for a campaign and is not campaigning in Iowa or other early primary states. He said that shows he’s not actively seeking the office.

“It’s nothing I’m going to do anything about,” Daniels said. “If it’s still an interesting subject in a few months, ask me then.”

And then there's this tantalizing tidbit:

Daniels said that he remains worried “about the condition and direction of the country and I’m a lot more worried even than I was a year and a half ago.”

He said Republicans need to offer voters a clear alternative and a positive agenda in this fall’s campaigns and the 2012 race.

I'd rather not wait a "few months." I'd rather stand outside his bedroom window, like Lloyd Dobler in Cameron Crowe's great movie, Say Anything, and play something inspiring on the boom box until he agrees to run. Which song should I blast?

Okay, I need a Ricochet reality test here. We thriller writers do spin scenarios from time to time and I look at Obama now and feel we're living through an old Fletcher Knebel novel. I see a narcissist whose delusions have been confirmed all his life by a left wing environment in which he operated without effect and therefore without consequences. It would be as if, instead of writing, I described my novels to my wife while she told me I was greater than Dickens. (But enough about my sex life.) Now, he's suddenly tossed into the real world at the very top... and it turns out all his brilliant ideas don't actually work. In fact, the USSR proved socialism was misguided; Europe's vaunted soft socialism was underwritten by American capitalism; and, oh yeah, 9/11 put paid to multi-culturalism. The whole agenda is schoolhouse rot! Obama looks to me as if he's reacted by going into some sort of dissociative daze, utterly divorced from reality. Am I making this up? Tell me I'm making this up. Hey, Fletcher Knebel's dead: I could put the plot to good use.

Read Jason Kuznicki's withering attack on Cash for Clunkers. If destroying cars really generated wealth, he writes,

the appropriate course would be to generalize, and to destroy all goods in exchange for government scrip. Then we could play Monopoly, I guess, for what all good the money would do. But we’d have to scrape a board in the dirt to do it.

That’s because money isn’t wealth. Money is at best a measure of wealth, which actually consists of goods. Money retains its value as long as there are goods to be traded for it. When the goods disappear, the economy grows poorer, regardless of how the money is shuffled around.

And the payback isn’t long in coming — today’s used car prices are soaring owing to reduced supply. (This link gives even more dramatic numbers, but I’m less sure of them. h/t Radley Balko.)

See how that works? You can’t get something for nothing. Cash for Clunkers turns out to have been a highly inefficient wealth-transfer program, that is, one that destroyed a bunch of wealth along the way. It gave wealth to those already relatively wealthy people who did the government’s bidding (that is, those who could afford to part with a used car and buy a new one). And now it’s taking wealth from those relatively poor people who need a used car today — in the form of higher prices.

Along the way, it destroyed hundreds of thousands of cars — that’s the real wealth these poor people don’t have access to anymore, because the scrapped cars aren’t a part of the economy.

Jonah has more:

That Washington is shocked by the news that Americans like getting free money shows how thick the Beltway bubble really is.

Like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, Washington can only see the economic activity it has created, not the activity it has destroyed.

One of Ronald Reagan’s great legacies is that states count.  We’ve had some devolution of power from the Federal Government back to the states.  So it matters who the governor of each state is.  Firstly, it matters who the governor is because states are most often responsible for generating new and appropriate public policy.  Look at California – if that state’s policies were different, it would be in much better shape.  

Secondly, and very importantly, the governors who are elected this year will preside over redistricting.  Having the census this year means that we must reapportion and redistrict both the U.S. House and both houses of the state legislature over the next two years.  Thirty-nine governors have a role in reapportionment.  Suppose Republicans gain 45 seats in the House this year, which would give us a five-seat majority, and then we get gerrymandered out of 30 seats in redistricting.   Governors can veto the redistricting plan – that matters.  

It also matters who the governor of a state is during a presidential election.  If you have an attractive, aggressive, hard working Republican governor in a state, it’s worth a couple of points in the presidential election of 2012.  

Finally, very rarely do you get a new Republican senator elected in the place of a Democrat, if the same day you lose the governor’s race in that state.  That’s hardly ever happened in the past 17 years.  Twenty-seven states this year have both a governor’s race and a senate race.  

This November, thirty-seven gubernatorial elections will take place across the country.  It is of paramount importance that we elect the right candidates for these offices.

Home sales are down. Way down. Maybe that's because the sentimental attachment to the idea of the home as an investment -- and as a good investment -- is fading away. From the NYTimes:

“There is no iron law that real estate must appreciate,” said Stan Humphries, chief economist for the real estate site Zillow. “All those theories advanced during the boom about why housing is special — that more people are choosing to spend more on housing, that more people are moving to the coasts, that we were running out of usable land — didn’t hold up.”

Instead, Mr. Humphries and other economists say, housing values will only keep up with inflation. A home will return the money an owner puts in each month, but will not multiply the investment.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that it will take 20 years to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth that has been lost since 2005. After adjusting for inflation, values will never catch up.

Stung by a collapsing market, a lot of potential home buyers are waiting for prices to bottom out. But in the meantime, rental vacancies are way up (thanks to the income-property speculation boom of the past decade) which means rents are low. From Business Insider:

With nationwide vacancy rates now well over 10%, it is extremely difficult for a landlord to even consider raising rents. Since roughly 25% of all home sales are currently going to investors paying cash, large numbers of homes will continue to be thrown onto the rental market.
The one major market where there is apparently a shortage of nice 3-4 bedroom rental homes is Phoenix according to the Cromford Report. If this claim is accurate, it is due to thousands of former homeowners who have lost their house to either foreclosure or a short sale and are looking for an attractive home to rent. The supply is down because, as I have reported in a previous article, banks are withholding most repossessed homes from the market.
...the attractiveness of renting will be a serious impediment to the return of potential buyers to the housing market.

I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. Why is home ownership seen as such a universal good? Why not become a nation of renters?

At The Weekly Standard, John McCormack breaks down last night's primary elections.

On McCain/Hayworth: "The death of Hayworth's campaign may have actually occurred on June 21, when an infomercial of Hayworth hawking free government money surfaced."

On Miller/Murkowski: "Miller leads Murkowski 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent--or 45,909 to 43,949 votes. But the election isn't over quite yet. The Hotline's Reid Wilson writes that there are 8,000 absentee ballots to be counted beginning next Tuesday. But, assuming Miller maintins his 1,960 vote lead as the final two percent of precincts are counted, Murkowski would need 5,000 of the 8,000 absentee votes break in her favor to overtake Miller."

Plus there's Florida, where Marco Rubio has delivered his victory speech. (Not the last, one may hope.)

Finally, McCormack also has a helpful primer on Joe Miller, Alaska's Palin-boosted dark horse (papa grizzly?).

This week, David Brooks looks back on a time when

people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.

This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

[...] in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. [...] Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

That harsh judgment seems fair, but 'mental character' seems to me not quite the right phrase. What Brooks is really talking about is imposing one's character on one's mind. That's not a quality of mind so much as a quality that rules over it. Of course, the potential for that kind of impressive, important quality is there to begin with. But Brooks' whole point is that we're just not -- if I may -- capitalizing on it. And where does the discipline come from to exercise such austere authority, such true self-government, over oneself? You tell me!

Manhattan, here I come. I've been wide awake since three in the morning and I'm not going to get a chance to sleep, I don't think, before meeting Ricochet member Jonathan Gilbert tonight here to see how these guys stack up to the Turkish competition. Got questions about Thatcher and Thatcherism, Turkish foreign policy, the Muay Thai clinch? Come join us and we'll see what we can do to sort you out. I'll be a little tired, but that's okay. At least I won't have to pull off this act in a highly inflected and agglutinated Ural-Altaic language.

Note: This post has nothing to do with politics or even current events. It has everything to do with a small slice of summer enjoyed, and the memories a warm summer night on the road can inspire:

From Columbus, OH, around midday on Saturday, I managed to make a 7AM delivery Monday morning in Pensacola, FL. That little feat required rearranging my schedule so that I wound up doing a night drive for the final leg of the trip which took me down I-65 in Alabama. A fog hovered over the road rather than on it, and framed the moon with a fuzzy orange halo. The thick, warm, muggy air almost seemed like a comfortable embrace to me, as it nearly always does when I return south.

Fearing a reprisal of the lacerating opera that nearly cracked my windshield during my last night drive, I instead selected a New Orleans jazz collection on the smart phone. Soon, the dreamy haze of moonlight was accompanied by a lone, soulful clarinet. The familiar notes from the old standard, Summertime, seemed perfect to the drive.

It’s funny sometimes how a song will bring memories back in vivid form. My Dad used to sing that song, Summertime, while driving me home from kindergarten in Baton Rouge. The drive would take us right by the Governor’s mansion, which back then was home to politicians that were so crooked that they had to be screwed into the ground when they died.

I remember the kindergarten pretty vividly too. It was a Presbyterian operation, as I recall, …at least I think it was. They used to march us into a sanctuary where the lighting didn’t work. It seemed like a huge, cavernous place, though I’m sure it has shrunk considerably in the intervening years. It was imposing and full of shadows, except for the little light attached to the pulpit, where a gaunt man in a black robe spoke sternly to us. I never knew what he was saying, because by the time his voice made it to us it had bounced off the walls several times and the echoes were colliding against each other so that he ended up talking over himself, making the entire speech pointless. The light from the pulpit cast odd shadows on the man’s face, and he didn’t seem entirely happy with us. Which was just as well, because I wasn’t entirely happy with his kindergarten.

I was the terror of that place. Not understanding that my Mom had to go to work to help support the household, I blamed the staff there for taking me away from her. Not only that, but they kept giving me orders, which at age 3 or 4, I wasn’t very well inclined to take (I‘ve made small improvements since then, but not many). Not only that, but the little wooden chairs we sat in for story time had splits in the seats that pinched our derrieres. I remember one day when I got lucky and ended up on a chair that didn’t pinch. Naturally, the story that day was a short one, so my comfort was short-lived. The teacher told us to put our chairs away and I said no. She said she would take me to the Principal’s office if I refused, and I said she could take me there if she wished but I was taking the chair with me. So she yanked me up by my left arm (this would become the arm of choice for transporting me to the Principal’s office where I had reserved seating) and I dragged the chair behind me with my right arm. Soon the chair escaped my grasp, leaving my right hand free. With that right hand, I caught her with a round-house to the chops. Well sir, we practically flew to the Principal’s office after that. It was the first of several skirmishes I had with the pleasant people at that little place.

Driving down the highway, 45 years later, I recalled that when I first went to that kindergarten, the teachers were mostly young,attractive and cheerful ladies. By the time I left, three years later, the place was staffed by blue-haired, battle-hardened veterans who wielded those little green roofing sticks from Lincoln Logs with a speed and ferocity that would make Doc Holladay proud. As the highway hums along to the music, I wonder what ever became of those people from so long ago. Does my friend Sam still bear the scars from a rather memorable fight we got into? What ever became of that one very short kid named Itzy (as in itsee bitsee spider)? He insisted he had changed his name to Buck, and who could blame him? And how's the guy with the perpetual runny nose that he wouldn’t wipe doing these days?

From moving around as a minister’s son, to a career in the military, to being a long haul trucker, I’ve spent the vast majority of my life on the move. I’ve been rich in the number of friends made over the years. But I lost track of many of them. On this morning, in the misty hours before sunrise, as the music of my home and my childhood help pass the time on the highway, I count myself a blessed man. Blessed with friends, with a wonderful family, and with rich memories of a colorful life. But I still miss that chair…

A few years back, I got caught in a nasty snow storm on I-84 in New York. A traffic accident, induced by icy roads shut down the west bound side of the interstate for several hours, leaving us all to sit there in the snow. Several of us truckers volunteered to let folks in passenger vehicles spend some time in our cabs and stay warm while we idled our engines so they wouldn’t have to decide between burning all the gas in their cars or freezing. For about five hours, we all made the best of it. But imagine a traffic jam that lasts weeks!!

My daughter alerted me to this story today on the phone, and our Diane Ellis sent the story to me this afternoon. What is currently a 60-mile backup near the Chinese capital of Beijing, stands every chance of lasting until mid-September. The reason? Road construction. Sound familiar? People caught in this colossal case of government subsidized constipation are moving along at, …get this… approximately one third of a mile per day. They should rip out their speedometers and replace them with calendars! I wonder if their construction zone has also broken out in a rash of orange government signs gleefully announcing their (unwitting and involuntary) participation in the Chinese Recovery and Reinvestment Act?

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The latest edition of the Economist has the usual selection of small delights and large annoyances - if the “Lexington” columnist’s article on summer vacations had any more padding, it would have to carry a byline from the American Kapok Manufacturers - but there’s an interesting piece on the China-India relationship (fraught with obstacles, but with hopeful signs) and Asian beer consumption. (Chinese people drink 70% more beer than Americans.) The more you know, the more you can bore your dinner party companions!

But I was snag-faced by a few British terms I’d not heard before. ThePakistan government’s reaction to the flood crisis was reviled for its “cack-handedness,” for example. It means clumsy, awkward. In a piece about Russian 4G networks and some customers’ appetites for bandwidth, my new favorite: “One square-eyed user downloaded nearly two terabytes in a month - the equivalent of 2,000 feature-length films.”

Square-eyed? Yes: it means someone who watches too much television. It’ll have to be rectangle-eyed soon.

Work 'em into your conversation this week, if you can. Note: I made up “snag-faced.”

--

PS: the Lexington column concerns the American inability to take a vacation, and how he can’t really take one either because of the demands of work:

For reasons only the flinty-hearted editor of this newspaper can explain, there will be no summer break this year for your columnist. True, Lexington has been allowed to saddle up his ultimate driving machine and motor north to join friends in a cabin in the Adirondacks. But get away from it all? No sir, this is a space that must be filled week in and week out the summer, come what may.

From his blog, August 4:

I MAY do little or no posting in the next two weeks. Tomorrrow I head to a secluded cabin in the Adirondacks for a family holiday. By a miracle of pre-planning, my print column will continue to appear, but my ability to fill this space will depend on access to the internet, which I will probably not have. Sorry.

Sounds like a summer break to me.

Democrats are running scared. November is starting to look like a bloodbath. And most of the blame, they think, goes to Obamacare. So what to do? Well, first, hire pollsters. And then, have them assemble a PowerPoint presentation to deliver to key allies of the Obama administration, highlighting the ways in which Obamacare can be sold -- or, frankly, resold -- to the American voter.The PowerPoint is here. It's worth looking at. From Politico:

The confidential presentation, available in full here and provided to POLITICO by a source on the call, suggests that Democrats are acknowledging the failure of their predictions that the health care legislation would grow more popular after its passage, as its benefits became clear and rhetoric cooled. Instead, the presentation is designed to win over a skeptical public and to defend the legislation — in particular, the individual mandate — from a push for repeal.

The presentation concedes that groups typically supportive of Democratic causes — people under 40, non-college-educated women and Hispanic voters — have not been won over by the plan. Indeed, it stresses repeatedly, many are unaware that the legislation has passed, an astonishing shortcoming in the White House's all-out communications effort.

But I can't resist posting the last slide. It's a list of "don't do's" for Democratic candidates running in November.

So, to rephrase the last two bullet points: Don't call opponents to Obamacare racists,andDon't promise it'll make health care costs go down, or reduce the deficit.Now they tell them? I'm starting to feel sorry for Democrats running in November.

Who knew? Not I. The striking black and white photos are under copyright, so I can't post here. But the whole impressive collection is just a click away -- along with accompanying comments from Goldwater like these:

There is no more typical Mexican face than there is a typical face of any people.

The Mexican is industrious, kind and a very warm family man whose hogar (hearth) is his citadel, his castle and his life. A Mexican is particularly devoted to his country and will defend it against any slur or attack. Mexicans are loyal and true friends whose word becomes their bond. One doesn’t find all of these attributes reflected in any one face, but often a reflection of the dignity born of them comes through.

This man, for example, was a Mexican fisherman with whom I fished the waters of the Gulf of California many years ago. He could be many Mexicans, but not all of them. The sparkle of dignity and pride, however, are common possessions.

Wherever Santiago is today, I wish him buena suerte.

A brief observation from the Ghost of Healthcare Future: The United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence -- sardonically known as NICE -- has denied payment for Roche's anti-cancer drug Avastin in the treatment of advanced colorectal cancer. It's not that Avastin doesn't prolong cancer patient's lives; it does. Avastin isn't cost-effective. Says who? In the words of NICE CEO Sir Andrew Dillon, "We are disappointed not to be able to recommend bevacizumab [Avastin] as well but we have to be confident that the benefits justify the considerable cost of this drug."

In the same vein, last June NICE denied coverage of Tarceva, another breakthrough biotechnology drug from Roche for the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer. Dillon again explains why, "These issues led the committee to conclude that, on current evidence, the cost of the drug related to the benefits it brings means that erlotinib would not be a good use of NHS money."

Point one: There's a critical difference between using your money to purchase health insurance under contract and bureaucrats deploying "NHS money" on your behalf.

Point two: Will anglophile Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services director Donald Berwick also expect a knighthood for denying patients access to lifesaving drugs once he achieves his aim of emulating the NHS?

Point three: Explain to me once again how Sarah Palin is mentally deficient for decrying the "death panels" that couldn't possibly follow the arrival of our own version of the NHS?

... you have never felt as jet-lagged as I feel right now. I just had the terrifying thought that pilots must fly in this condition all the time. Someone who feels the way I do right now shouldn't even be allowed to use a fork, no less captain a 767.

The shoes are now gone--I checked. But this contribution to the discussion seemed to me so worthy of merit that I am--right this very second!--taking time away from my grandmother's 100th birthday celebrations to commend your attention to it.

E.J. Hill, are you taking requests? How would you illustrate, "Claire Berlinski reflects upon fixing the structural flaws in the economy that increase the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment?" Because that's what I'll be doing tonight, I think, barring any further encounters with mysterious espionage shoes from Heaven.

It's a bit trickier to make that question appealing to a mass audience--trust me, I know--but someone's got to do it.

One of my most vivid memories as a kid was watching a bill collector at our door talking with my mother. After some discussion, she handed him a few dollars, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick roll of bills, adding our paltry contribution to his stash. I remember being amazed that any one person could walk around with that much money in his pocket. For all I knew, it could have been fifty one-dollar bills, but it looked like the gross national product of Finland to me, and I decided I wanted to have my pockets filled with a wad like that one day. What I don’t remember doing is hating the guy because we were scuffling for cash and he wasn’t. My parents had apparently neglected to teach me the joys of class envy. Well, what my parents forgot, present-day Liberals have remembered.

As I listen to debates over tax rates and income disparity and the haves, the have-nots and the have-not-enoughs , the common thread seems to be the notion there is only so much money on the table, and anyone who takes more than his “fair” share is making it impossible for others to get theirs. More and more, success is equated with greed and lack of empathy. I have a number of well-to-do (and downright wealthy) Left-leaning friends who share that view and spend their days lecturing the rest of us on why taxes should be higher and why the government should expend a greater effort to spread that wealth around. Apparently those accursed low tax rates (along with their high-priced accountants) force them to keep way too much of their income.

Here’s the suggestion I make to them, and I happily share it with everyone else who’s forced to keep too much of what they earn: simply give the government more. The tax rates are merely legal minimums, and available deductions are not required to be taken. In addition, any of us is welcome to make out a check to the U.S. Government, and someone will be happy to endorse it and deposit in the general fund (or at least apply it to the general deficit). There are, in fact, people who do that, though I’m pretty sure I don’t know any of them.

So Liberals of the world, unite! Figure out what your fair share comes to, and then send the rest to your government. It’ll be thrilled, you’ll be leading by example, and I’m sure our leaders will see that your largesse is re-routed to those who most deserve it. However, just as that bill collector didn’t pass any of his money to my mother, I don’t expect the higher-taxes crowd to jump at this idea.

Net Neutrality is one of those wonky issues that just begs to be skipped over. In a world of limited mental bandwidth, some things are just kicked to the side so that we can spend time thinking and reading about important stuff, like taxes and illegal immigration and mosques in downtown Manhattan and Tiger Woods' divorce.

Here's the nutshell version: should internet service providers be required to carry all data -- no matter whose -- for the same rate? Meaning, should they be prohibited from charging, say, Facebook traffic or Hulu videos less -- or more -- than some New Internet Startup to carry their packets of data?

My answer: no. I'm against regulating ISPs. If they want to charge more for some data and less for another kind, my view is, let them. If their customers don't like it, they'll walk. If there aren't enough ISPs in a region to foster useful competition, then attack the problem that way, by creating ISP competition, not by regulating (or, really, pre-regulating businesses before there's even a problem to address). There's a cogent argument against Net Neutrality here.

Other people answer a different way. Some think web innovation and entrepreneurial zeal will suffer if big companies (like Google and Verizon) get together to make data transportation prohibitively expensive for smaller startups. Some think that the web needs to be divided into two bright categories: companies that move and deliver data, and companies that create the data to be transported. There's a cogent -- and conservative -- argument for Net Neutrality here.

The best -- and clearest -- explanation of both positions can be heard on NPR's "Planet Money" podcast, which is really excellent.

Meanwhile, the debate has made for some strange bedfellows. From The Hill:

The Gun Owners of America (GOA) severed ties with the net-neutrality coalition Save the Internet after a conservative blog questioned the association with liberal organizations such as ACORN and the ACLU.
The blog RedState described Save The Internet as a "neo-Marxist Robert McChesney-FreePress/Save the Internet think tank" and questioned why GOA would participate in a coalition that includes liberal groups such as the ACLU, MoveOn.Org, SEIU, CREDO and ACORN.
GOA was one of the charter members of Save the Internet, but a spokesman for the gun rights group said times have changed.
"Back in 2006 we supported net neutrality, as we had been concerned that AOL and others might continue to block pro-second amendment issues," said Erich Pratt, communications director for GOA.
"The issue has now become one of government control of the Internet, and we are 100 percent opposed to that," Pratt said.
Save The Internet had long pointed to the support of gun owners as evidence that net neutrality is a nonpartisan issue....
Save The Internet views net neutrality as a free speech issue rather than a liberal or conservative one. He noted the group’s membership still includes a number of conservative groups, including the socially conservative Parents Television Council and the Christian Coalition.

Anything that all of those groups agree on has got to be wrong, somehow.
But I love the idea of those furious, paranoid MoveOn-ers sitting next to SEIU thugs, sitting next to uptight Christian Coalition guys in blue suits, sitting next to heavyset ACORN ladies, sitting next to permanently scandalized Parents Television Council, all waiting outside the FCC hearing room to testify for Net Neutrality. Maybe after that they all go for a hilariously tense lunch together. Maybe to a local Chipotle or something. (Do they have those in DC?) The lunch ends badly when the Christian Coalition guy reaches out to hold the hands of the SEIU thug and the MoveOn-er to offer a little blessing before they all dig in. And he's too late, anyway, because the ACORN lady is already into the communal chips.
Wait. What were we talking about?

One of the principal pleasures of cyberspace, at least for this little boy? Talking back. This morning, let’s take a look at the lead editorial in the New York Times, “Time for a Real Debate on Taxes.”

THE GREY LADY: Americans need to hear a serious debate about how the country can meet the twin fiscal challenges of supporting the weak economy now and taming the budget deficit as things improve. That debate is not happening in Washington, and it is certainly not happening on the campaign trail.

ME: Balderdash. Earlier this summer, Republicans in the House published an alternative budget based on—yes, indeed—the twin fiscal challenges of promoting economic growth while containing the deficit. The numbers all fit neatly together. How did the Republicans do it? By containing spending, not raising taxes. Cong. Paul Ryan has put forward a detailed plan for promoting economic growth and taming the deficit—again, without raising taxes. And one Republican candidate after another out on the campaign trail has addressed the deficit, calling for adjustments in entitlement programs, the repeal of ObamaCare, and other spending cuts.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody’s there to hear it, does it make a noise? Beats me. But when a Republican advances an argument that the New York Times refuses to cover, the Republican has still advanced an argument.

THE GREY LADY: The Republicans are insisting on extending each and every one of the tax cuts forever. It is impossible to square that demand with their calls to reduce the deficit, so they do not even try.

ME: What’s the intensive form of “balderdash?” “Balderdashier?” Whatever. Extending the tax cuts is wholly consistent with bringing down the deficit, just as long as the federal government does what Republicans—and, if the polls are accurate, most Americans—insist upon. To quote Gov. Haley Barbour—and I can remember this quotation precisely, because it consists of just two words: “Cut spending.”

THE GREY LADY: President Obama is right when he says the country cannot afford to extend all of the tax cuts.

ME: Stop right there. “The country” cannot afford tax cuts? I can afford tax cuts. The editors of the Times can afford tax cuts. Businesses of every size, shape and stripe can afford tax cuts. The only entity that would have trouble with tax cuts is the federal government. Since when, exactly, does it make sense to speak of the federal government as “the country?” The federal government represents one specific set of entities or institutions set up to serve the country, not to subsume it. Jeepers. Have the Times editors even read the Constitution?

THE GREY LADY: He [President Obama] wants to let the tax cuts expire on the top 2 to 3 percent of American households (couples making more than $250,000 a year, individuals making more than $200,000) and permanently extend them for everyone else. The problem is that a permanent extension of the so-called middle-class tax cuts is also unaffordable.

ME: This is Keynesiansm in a pure—I almost said archaic—form. The trouble with Keynesianism? The last several decades of American history. In the nineteen-seventies, Keynesian policies brought us stagflation. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, anti-Keynesian, free market policies—including, notably, tax cuts—brought us an economic expansion that lasted for a quarter of a century. You may argue that this or that aspect of Reagan’s policies proved mistaken. You may argue, in particular, over various excesses that developed, particularly in the financial markets. What you may not do is pretend that the free market policies and economic growth of the last 25 years simply never took place. Unless, of course, you’re an editor at the New York Times.

And they call us Neanderthal.

Ricochet being a place where you may indeed beat a dead horse, feel free to add a few blows of your own.

Conor, you got my wheels turning this morning with two competing posts at the Dish. In the first, you continue your longstanding criticism of Mark Levin as a prisoner of Manichean thinking. By viewing American politics as a permanent throwdown between the forces of liberty and their opponents, you say, Levin makes the mistake of assuming that "today's liberals are fundamentally driven by Statism, whereas actually what motivates most of them is a substantially different project." Later in the same post, you seem to use liberal and progressive interchangeably -- about which more in a moment.

In the second post, you hint that if liberty vs. tyranny is the wrong way to frame our ruling political conflict, rule by citizens vs. rule by elites might be the right one. And you end with the right provocation:

Here's one succinct way to put the question to Tea Party leaders: if we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way now, what alternative do you recommend?

My answer would begin with Tim Carney's latest for the Examiner: "The Republican Divide: K Street vs. the Tea Partiers." Tim lays bare the nature of the divide, which is more profound than mere politics:

Lott’s proposed co-opting is not primarily ideological — Norton and Grayson, and their inside-the-Beltway patrons are all fairly conservative. The main distinction between Team Lott and Team DeMint might have less to do with policy platforms and more to do with a politician’s attitude toward the Washington nexus of power and money.

I think it's consistent with the intuitions and judgments powering the tea parties to answer your pregnant question like this: it's not that we're choosing our ruling class the wrong way; it's that our ruling class is the wrong kind of people. They have the wrong character, the wrong disposition, the wrong objectives, the wrong -- values. The problem isn't that 'politics is broken'. That's a symptom of the real problem, which is that the ruling culture of our ruling elites is broken.

If that's right, how did we get here?

The answer takes us back to the difference between liberalism and progressivism. Those who would remind us of this difference range from Claire "I'm a liberal" Berlinski to avowed lefty liberal public intellectual Alan Wolfe. As I wrote in my American Spectator review of Wolfe's revealing book The Future of Liberalism,

Wolfe recognizes that liberalism is most threatened today not by boring conservatism but by fashionable progressivism, in its twin emotional and scientific strains. This is true in spite of his parallel claim that, with “communism now dead and socialism on the defensive, ideology is more likely to make an appearance from the right, whether in the form of free market utopianism or unrealistic hopes in what military power can achieve.”

[...] Wolfe distinguishes between the ideology of big-L Liberalism, which conservatives uniformly oppose, and the political philosophy of small-l liberalism, which conservatives criticize as friends. As Harvey Mansfield has persuasively argued, conservatism is the political philosophy that best cures liberalism from its own defects. It is a refinement of liberalism, not an alternative to it.

[...] This refined element is of great significance to conservatives. It teaches them how to be better critics of the left by showing that progressivism seeks to capture liberalism entirely and cleanse it of any and all conservative wisdom. Progressivism tempts liberalism with a paradoxical vision of perfection—perfect progress, so perfect that it is perfectly immune to criticism. For Wolfe, “progressivism’s firm insistence that it knows what is right conflicts with temperamental liberalism’s lack of certainty, and its preference for ends undermines procedural liberalism’s respect for means.”

This is true, but Wolfe then blames the progressive ethos on the necessary evil of government. “The curse the state visits upon liberalism,” he claims, “is Progressivism.” But political progressivism, as he by then has already established, isn’t the great threat to liberalism today. It’s antipolitical progressivism—in the forms of emotivism, for which politics is incidental to the insistence that all demands and desires be recognized as rights, and scientism, which frees us “from a supernatural power” only to make us “enslaved to a natural one.”

In a philosophical project all conservatives should support, Wolfe’s liberalism rejects the progressivist proposition that we have no choice but to accept the raw, unbounded power of our beastly desires and our ever-more-godlike power to appease them.

You're right to want to probe deeper than the truism that statism appeals to liberals for political reasons. But doing so reveals that progressivism appeals to liberals -- both liberal elites and everyday liberals -- for cultural reasons. And progressivism tells liberal elites that the practice of politics is an obstacle to perfecting liberal culture. As Bill Voegeli's remarks suggest, if elites with a more conservative philosophy are vulnerable to a different set of temptations, they're much less susceptible to this one. The issue is simple: what is the foundation of that more conservative philosophy? What are the principles that fuel the right culture among conservative elites?

The central philosophical proposition of the tea parties is that the Republican Party establishment has too many elites who have become untethered from those principles and have been born and raised in the wrong culture of elitehood. Whether by coincidence or for some other reason, this organizing conviction resonates extremely powerfully with the contention that the central conflict in American politics is between those who see political liberty as our most precious possession and those who see political liberty as an outdated obstacle to true justice and flourishing.

From the standpoint of the lover of liberty, there is a punchy and potent shorthand for that conflict ready to hand: liberty vs. tyranny. That's a slogan that must be unpacked, to be sure. But is it -- to use your phrase -- "almost completely useless?" I report, you decide.

To the steady drumbeat of China's rising! China's taking over the world! comes another, contrarian view. From Foreign Policy magazine, writer Michael Pettis suggests:

for all the recent excited commentary, there's less cause for baijiu toasts in Beijing than they might think. That's because China's economic growth has followed what's sometimes called "the Japanese model." In Japan and other Asian countries, this model has proved extraordinarily successful in the short term in generating eye-popping rates of growth -- but it always eventually runs into the same fatal constraints: massive overinvestment and misallocated capital. And then a period of painful economic adjustment. In short: Beijing, beware.

The parallels with Japan are clear:

For a worrying case study, one need only look to Japan, which grew very rapidly thanks largely to very high rates of investment forced through the banking system. For a long time the problem of misallocated investment -- which was whispered about in Tokyo but not taken too seriously -- didn't seem to matter. Everyone "knew" that Japan's leaders could manage a transition easily. After all, they were extremely smart, with a deep knowledge of the very special circumstances that made Japan unique, with real control over the economy, with a strong grasp of history and penchant for long-term thinking, and most of all with a clear understanding of what was needed to fix Japan's problems. Sound familiar?

The trouble is, Japan is a staunch ally of the United States. Japan has no territorial ambition in East Asia. Japan is a democracy. So when Japan faces another Lost Decade, nobody really worries about the place going haywire, about a troublesome, ambitious, anti-American government trying to take the heat off of itself and onto its trading partners. Even in Japan's heyday it didn't hold $850 billion in US Treasuries.

So it's unclear which is worse, from an American perspective. A faltering, stagnant China with a blue-water navy, or a growing China knit more closely to the world economy.