The Week - Column

National Review, Oct 1, 2001

--The Rev. Adrian Condit, Gary Condit's father, told his local newspaper that "Satan had a big-time role" in his son's troubles. Let's just call Satan an unindicted co-conspirator.

--More bad economic news. Unemployment has spiked up and the stock market is in the tank. The economy grew by only 0.2 percent in the second quarter, and the numbers look worse if the private sector alone is considered. President Bush's tax cut may help the economy, but only very modestly. Alan Greenspan has shown no interest in coming to the rescue. Only Republican congressmen are advocating serious pro-growth measures: not only the free-trade initiatives Bush is already championing, but a reduction in taxes on capital gains and business investment. Since the federal government is running a surplus of around $160 billion, the usual concern about the "cost" of tax cuts should not apply. Bush must choose between fictitious lockboxes and America's economic strength.

--Sen. Phil Gramm has decided not to run for reelection next year. Gramm has contributed to every conservative advance of the last quarter-century: the Reagan revolution, the exodus of conservative Democrats to the Republican party (and the eclipse of the GOP's liberal wing), the defeat of ClintonCare, and the Republican takeover of Congress. No conservative politician had a better understanding of the economics of politics-of the incentives that lead so many of his colleagues to support bad policies, and of the imperative to change those incentives. His presidential run in 1996, which NR endorsed, was a fiasco. Gramm apparently assumed that since he was the logical candidate of conservatives, he was therefore their inevitable candidate. Even if he had run a better campaign, a Gramm victory would have been a longshot. But Gramm leaves a better legacy than many presidents. The Senate has lost its smartest and most principled member, and the Congress its most effective strategist for liberty.

--Guest of honor at the annual Calvin Coolidge dinner in both his own and the 30th president's home state of Vermont was Sen. James Jeffords. In his address, Jeffords deplored the decline of "moderate" Republicanism and opined that the House-Senate budget conference this spring "was totally controlled by the right wing of the Republican leadership." This should not necessarily be taken as an insult to the memory of Silent Cal, who considered himself, and was considered by others, a moderate Republican in his own time, out ahead of the American public on many issues-race, for example, and female suffrage. It does, though, offer a striking example of how much American attitudes have changed in one human lifetime. Jeffords has devoted his career to bringing federal subsidies to his state's milk farmers. Coolidge, faced with a delegation of farmers clamoring for federal relief because they could no longer support themselves, advised them: "Better get religion." Coolidge wished the wealth of America to be kept so far as possible in private hands, that might use it to lift up their fellow countrymen. Jeffords wants much of it to be sucked into Washington, D.C., to be distributed by bureaucrats to favored groups. This has been the pilgrimage of moderate Republicanism these past 75 years: from the original American ideals of independence, minimal government, self-sufficiency, and charity, towards socialism, federal largesse, and the carving up of our people into docile, corralled groups of state-dependent clienthood. Calvin Coolidge ("The normal must take care of themselves") would not have been pleased.

--The recent spate of shark attacks off America's shores cannot be discussed in isolation from the larger, escalating war between, on the one side, animals and those who support their "rights," and on the other, those human beings who would prefer that sharper-toothed and - clawed animals be kept firmly in their place. It isn't just sharks: More cougar attacks have been reported in the western U.S. and Canada over the past 20 years than in the previous 80. In Washington State, of the one fatality and five non-fatal attacks reported since 1924, four attacks have occurred during the 1990s. Similarly with attacks by bears and wolves, though the latter prefer beef and lamb to human flesh. This is not an easy call. Almost everyone would be sorry to see North America altogether purged of its large native carnivores. But if faced with a choice, we would prefer protecting the human animals.

--The Justice Department has given up on trying to break up Microsoft or proving that the company illegally packaged Windows and Internet Explorer together. These are concessions not so much to Microsoft as to reality: The U.S. Court of Appeals had already made it clear that neither attempt would succeed. Justice Department lawyers will continue to press for restrictions on Microsoft's business practices-perhaps in order to save face for themselves. If President Bush is interested in reining in the government's antitrust activists, now would be a good time.