Fact and Comment
Fact And Comment
03.25.09, 6:00 PM ET
He Still Has the Slows Abraham Lincoln in exasperation once remarked about Civil War General George B. McClellan, "He's got the slows." The general was a brilliant army organizer, but when it came to fighting battles, he froze up, always grossly exaggerating the enemy before him. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has the same problem. Last November he promised that the Fed would buy $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities. Four months later he still hadn't fulfilled that pledge. In January he made encouraging comments about an active Fed approach to stemming the credit crisis. Little happened. And now the Fed, in a blare of headlines, has promised to purchase more than $1 trillion in bonds and mortgage-backed securities to get the credit system working again. However, Bernanke, mirroring McClellan, shows no inclination to aggressively push liquidity into our crippled credit markets. In fact, since December the Fed has removed nearly $400 billion from the financial markets. Instead of attacking, General Bernanke has been retreating. At a time when the U.S. and global financial systems are under the most intense stress since the 1930s, Bernanke's leisurely pace is a reminder of how the derisive phrase "banker's hours" originated. If the man can't quickly overcome his McClellan-like lack of nerve, he should have the courage and decency to step down. The damage caused by his relative inaction is becoming increasingly intolerable. Cowardly Pols Crucify Pilot Program for Kids The U.S. Senate recently blighted the lives of 1,700 Washington, D.C. schoolchildren. The school system in our nation's capital is just about the worst in the country, rife with crime and populated with kids who learn little. Several years ago Congress enacted an experimental program of school choice for D.C. students. This scholarship program gave low-income parents the opportunity to send their children to better-performing private or nonpublic schools. This alternative has been a huge success, with four applicants for every kid lucky enough to land a scholarship. Students learn more in these nonviolent, pro-education environments. The teachers unions, however, hate these kinds of vouchers. They see them as a threat to their monopoly power in public education.
Harlem Village Academies' founder, Deborah Kenny, celebrates the schools' success with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and pro-kid Schools Chancellor Joel Klein Imagine--low-income parents could pull their children out of failing schools. Horrors! So union bosses pressured Congress to end D.C.'s program. Union-fearing lawmakers have complied: The program will be shut down after the next school year, and its 1,700 beneficiaries will be forced back into a horrific public school system. Thus, their chance to obtain the necessary education to lead productive lives has been effectively smashed. Despite the program's success and popularity with concerned parents, the Senate voted 58 to 39 to defeat the amendment Senator John Ensign (R--Nev.) proposed to preserve the program. What's so nauseatingly hypocritical is that President and Mrs. Obama would never place their daughters in Washington's public schools. Yet the President refused to back the Ensign amendment. Worse, just before washing his hands of it he piously gave a speech on education, extolling the need for alternative schools as a way to improve educational opportunities for American children. Union apologists invidiously hint that the real problem is that poor kids make poor students--that given the financial and cultural poverty of their households, the students' miserable educational achievements can't be blamed on the schools. Nonsense. In New York City there are a number of charter schools--not burdened with mind-numbing, effectiveness-killing bureaucratic and union restrictions--that have achieved eye-opening success in educating deprived children. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown & Co., $27.99) chronicles the success of a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school in the South Bronx. Two reasons young people flourish in these schools are that the school day is longer and summer vacations are shorter. Gladwell cites research demonstrating that academic performance gaps between groups of students is very much tied to the amount of time kids spend being educated. Kids from more affluent families, for instance, spend their summers in highly structured, stimulating programs, while children from poorer backgrounds often end up doing little. But when these socioeconomically challenged students spend most of the summer in classes, lo and behold, their achievement scores soar. The gap goes. The Harlem Village Academies in New York are also proof of this. As at KIPP, students here spend more hours in class per day and have a shorter summer break than do those in public schools. In the most recent statewide testing of eighth grade students' math skills, Harlem Village Academies' kids pulled off a coup: Every student passed. Compare that with their Harlem peers in the public schools: Only 46% passed. Supremely Destructive Stupidity Innovation flourishes in a benign environment of low taxes, a sensible judiciary and commonsense regulation. The U.S. Supreme Court recently rendered a decision that is harshly hostile to medical innovation--and to other kinds, as well. In the case Wyeth v. Levine the Court gave a bright green light to personal injury lawyers filing crippling lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. The plaintiff alleged that a Wyeth drug, Phenergan, was improperly injected, with the result that Ms. Diana Levine lost an arm to gangrene. She understandably sued the hospital--a physician's assistant did indeed inject the drug directly into the vein, despite a clear warning on the label that read: "Inadvertent intra-arterial injection can result in gangrene of the affected extremity." Yet Levine also sued Wyeth. After all, why not go after a deeper pocket for some real money? Her suit alleged that Wyeth should have put an even stronger warning on its label. Wyeth's label had been specifically approved by the FDA. The Supreme Court nonetheless ruled that despite the warning label and despite the fact that this particular product was inappropriately administered by a third party, Wyeth could still be held liable for harm. In other words, instead of one warning label appropriately approved by a federally warranted agency, drugmakers must now gird themselves for warning labels as judged by 50 states and who knows how many other jurisdictions. This will sharply raise the cost of bringing new medicines to market by substantially increasing the risk of doing so. Companies can now suffer substantial losses when their products are improperly used even when users are amply warned. Bizarre. And highly destructive. Humanity Deniers The ugly spirit of Reverend Thomas Malthus is lurking again. More than 200 years ago, when the planet was inhabited by less than one-sixth the population it supports today, the pessimistic preacher posited the idea that Earth's big problem was too many people, that overpopulation made prosperity impossible. People are the creators of prosperity. Without human ingenuity and innovation, we would still be living in caves and have a life expectancy of 25 years. More people--in an environment of freedom and free markets--means more prosperity. Yet Malthusian Cassandras still beset us. You see it with environmental extremists: "If there weren't so many of us," these modern Malthusians mouth, "the planet would be better off environmentally; we wouldn't have catastrophic global warming." (The fact that the Earth's average temperature has risen less than one degree Celsius over the past century and that ice masses in various parts of the world are actually expanding seems to have escaped their notice.) Representative Henry Waxman (D--Calif.) is chairman of the committee that tried to slip pro-contraceptive programs into President Barack Obama's stimulus package for just such reasons. Ultimately they had to be pulled because of public opposition and ridicule. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D--Calif.) nonetheless defended the effort, saying, in effect, that contraceptives were good for future economic growth because fewer babies would mean less strain on the state and federal governments. In Great Britain the chairman of the government's Sustainable Development Commission is openly receptive to the idea of limiting the number of children couples are permitted to have. He declared, "I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible." People have to accept "responsibilty for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate." President Obama's new science adviser, John Holdren, is a fervent believer in the crank theories of Paul Ehrlich, a once popular scientist who wrote the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb,along with treatisespredicting imminent mass global starvation and various other apocalypses. High taxes, strangling regulations, protectionism, the lack of rule of law, currency debasement and social caste systems that severely hinder mobility are the causes of famines and economic catastrophes, not a growing population. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Good article. http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/25/fact-and-comment-opinions-steve-forbes.html
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