The bombs that ripped through London Thursday morning surely will rock this side of the Atlantic. While our British friends and allies must cope with the shock and casualties from this mayhem, it vividly should remind Americans that terrorists are tenacious and dedicated to their murderous craft.

These human cockroaches are utterly unimpressed with the good that Britons are trying to do for Muslims, among others, right now. Sir Bob Geldof staged a July 2 concert in London’s Hyde Park, one of 10 “Live 8 ” shows worldwide designed to promote economic development and health advances in Africa, a continent that 345 million Muslims call home.

“It is particularly barbaric that this has happened on a day when people are meeting to try to help the problems of poverty in Africa,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters Thursday.

When these bombs exploded, Blair was hosting the G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where leaders of the major industrial powers discussed debt forgiveness and trade relief for impoverished Africans — Islamic and otherwise.

“The contrast couldn’t be clearer,” President Bush said, “between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill — those who have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks.”

Of course, nothing satisfies these perpetrators. They don’t give a damn about the west’s mercy, charity, or assistance. Their destination is religious totalitarianism, and their path is paved with crushed bones, twisted metal, broken glass, and spilled blood. They offer nothing but
death itself.

Consider the glee with which “The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe” applauded this carnage on a militant Islamic website:

“Rejoice, Islamic nation. Rejoice, Arab world . . . The heroic mujahedeen carried out a blessed attack in London, and now Britain is burning with fear and terror, from north to south, east to west.”

News channels feature a deep-red, British double-decker bus, the sort that instantly and cheerfully tells a visiting American exactly where he is. With its roof yanked off, it resembles an Israeli vehicle demolished by Islamic extremism.

Fox News analyst Mansour Ijaz reported Thursday that British cops recently raided a northern London home where several Middle Eastern men were dismantling some 200 units of a common appliance to extract radioactive materials for use in a “dirty bomb.”

These facts should hush Americans who have grown ho hum about if not hostile toward fighting Islamofascism. Those who carp night and day that Guantanamo is not a Club Med finally may abandon their endless whining. The enemy combatants detained there are being interrogated specifically so officials can prevent the homicidal outrage that now tries Londoners. If placing these thugs in isolation, stress positions, or uncomfortably warm rooms makes them talk, get on with it. Far better for them to endure those inconveniences than for New Yorkers, Washingtonians, or San Franciscans to suffer a rush hour such as London witnessed Thursday.

Similarly, U.S. civil libertarians should compare Thursday’s concrete casualties of Muslim extremism against the imaginary risks of the USA Patriot Act. The House of Representatives foolishly voted 238  187 on June 15 to scuttle the Patriot Act’s so-called “Library Provision.” Even though seven of the 19 September 11 hijackers used public libraries for Internet access and to purchase tickets on one of the doomed flights, the House seemed more worried that some overzealous FBI agent might try to learn who checked out “The Joy of Sex”. If, equipped with court orders, the FBI can unravel Islamic terrorists’ Internet communications via public-library computers, hindering these investigators could hasten the day when American commuters suffer the fate of their British counterparts.

For now, Londoners are exhibiting the common sense one expects from our Atlantic cousins.

“Unlike the Spanish, who turned on their government on 3-11, I suspect British sentiment will now harden against terrorists,” predicts Fraser Nelson, political editor of The Scotsman newspaper. “We did not need this attack to bind Britain and America together in our resolve. But we are closer still. In a macabre way, we are now blood brothers: And this can only mean surer and earlier defeat for those who seek to disrupt our way of life.”

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia.

Two items appearing in today’s press, one in the Washington Post, the other in the Washington Times, finally begin to address some of the real mistakes made in the conduct of the Iraq war, as opposed to the standard litany of “mistakes” which were no such thing.

In “Official Admits Errors in Iraq”, Ann Scott Tyson reports on an interview with Douglas J. Feith, who is leaving his post as undersecretary of defense for policy. Bizarrely, inaccurately and yet revealingly, the subhead of the article reads “Feith Cites Delay in Transfer of Power, Size of U.S. Force.” The description is half true, anyway, and perhaps we should chalk that up as progress for the MSM.

Feith certainly, and correctly, observes that one crucial error “was the reluctance among some U.S. officials to transfer power early on to an Iraqi government and dismantle the U.S. occupation authority, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.

“‘How would Iraq have been different if we had terminated the CPA in May or June of '03?’ and created an Iraqi government, he asked. ‘Some people said if you do that and it fails, you’ll set the country back irretrievably and . . . the only way you could set up a government early on would be to rely unduly on the ‘externals’,’ he said, referring to Iraqi exiles.

“‘My views were generally in favor of transferring responsibility to the Iraqis earlier. I thought there were ways of getting the ‘internals’ involved earlier,’ he said, speaking of prospective Iraqi leaders inside the country who were not well known to the United States before the invasion.” What he doesn’t say, but what we know, is that this policy dispute pitted the Pentagon against then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, the State Department and the CIA. The latter insisted upon delay, and led us into error. That error, however, was almost predetermined by the earlier stance taken – again, in error – by State and CIA with respect to the other great mistake Feith describes. Tyson, with marginally more accuracy than the headline writer, describes this second (but prior and determinative) mistake as “that he [Feith] did not know whether the invading U.S. force was the right size.”

But if you read Feith’s words (even as represented by Tyson) carefully, you find that that’s not quite it at all. “Feith acknowledged that there were ‘trade-offs’ and ‘pros and cons’ to the Pentagon’s plan to use a relatively small invasion force in Iraq, voicing uncertainty about whether that decision was correct. The war’s ‘rolling start’ with a streamlined ground force achieved some tactical surprise, he said, potentially averting a longer war and other catastrophes such as the destruction of Iraqi oil fields. But he acknowledged that a small force had drawbacks, and others have criticized the plan for failing to stop widespread looting and insecurity after Saddam Hussein's government fell in April 2003.

“‘I am not asserting to you that I know that the answer is, we did it right. What I am saying is it’s an extremely complex judgment to know whether the course that we chose with its pros and cons was more sensible . . . .”

Achieving “tactical surprise” and thereby winning earlier and more easily with fewer casualties (How many fewer? Hundreds? Thousands? More than 1,750?) and “saving the oilfields” (Saving billions of dollars in assets and cleanup costs for the new Iraqi government and precluding unknowable environmental damage that might even have been greater) are hardly trivial considerations. Feith isn’t saying it was a mistake. He is saying that it was a complex judgment, and whether or not it was right, we will probably never know.

But he does in fact outline a second and more vital error, which almost inevitably entailed the “delayed transfer of power to a new Iraqi government.” Tellingly, this error is mentioned first and emphasized by Tyson, but only second by Feith. Again, we should attend carefully to his own words as represented. “He said mistaken actions and policies in Iraq resulted in frequent ‘course corrections,’ pointing to two that he considered significant – both resulting from an early failure to put Iraqis in charge.

“First, the United States missed the opportunity before the war to train enough Kurds and other Iraqi exiles to assist the U.S. military, he said. ‘That didn’t happen in the numbers we had hoped,’ he said.

“A plan to train an estimated 5,000 Iraqi exiles in Hungary produced instead only a few hundred, in part because U.S. military leaders at the Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, were uncomfortable with it [and, we also know, because State and CIA opposed it strenuously]. Training Iraqi forces has since emerged as the central thrust of the U.S. exit strategy for Iraq.”[I’d bet that little interpretive phrase “exit strategy” wasn’t Feith’s at all.]

So even through the interpretive fog and “analytical” distortion of the Post’s reporter, Feith indicates that the failure to create a viable Iraqi allied force prior to the invasion, which could have served as the nucleus of a liberating Iraqi army (remember images of DeGaulle marching into Paris, and imagine what might have been had Saddam’s statue been toppled by Free Iraq Forces) and also forming the nucleus of a new Iraqi government, was a fundamental dual mistake.

The third crucial mistake is outlined by Rowan Scarborough in a Washington Times article entitled “Analysts Urge U.S. Forces to Attack Invaders at Border”. This is the failure to bring military force to bear against the FascIslamic Baathist government of Bashar Assad in Syria, allowing them for two long years to provide vital sanctuary, succor, aid and comfort to the jihadist terrorists and their revanchist terror allies, the irreconcilables. The failure to seal Iraq’s border with Syria has permitted mass infiltration of enemy combatants, weapons and supplies, costing hundreds of American lives and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilian lives, retarded the stabilization of the new Iraqi government, and offered encouragement to FascIslamists worldwide.

Scarborough cites the opinions of unspecified “government officials” who in interviews “said midlevel personnel increasingly think that the IED [improvised explosive device] threat will never be defeated unless the flow of foreign suicide bombers, primarily via Syria, is stopped.
“The analysts also believe the U.S. must start identifying the foreign fighters as invaders, which would better justify the redeployment of American and Iraqi forces along the border with Syria, aided by more use of spy drones and satellites to watch for incursions 24 hours a day.

“‘Until the invaders are stopped or the traffic reduced, there will always be violent people willing to sacrifice themselves to advance the schemes of others,’ said a defense official who has brainstormed the problem with analysts in the U.S. intelligence community. ‘I think the trick is to dry up the source of those willing to commit acts of unspeakable violence.’”

Even now, unfortunately, there is a great reluctance by some to exercise force against the recalcitrant and uncooperative Syrians. But “Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, an author on counterterrorism, agrees that the U.S. should step up counterterrorism operations on the Syrian border. He would take it one giant leap forward by conducting air strikes inside Syria at terrorist staging areas and by sending special operations forces across the border to attack would-be invaders.

“‘I would clearly up the ante for Bashar Assad,’ he said, referring to the Syrian leader and head of the ruling Baathist socialist party . . . .” The measure is long, long overdue.

Myths often have the power to induce massive social change. Consider what is now the dominant religious faith of the media and political elite in America, the dogma of disastrous global warming through human agency. Despite the mantra that no doubt could possibly remain, no dissent could be sustained against the “evidence”, the truth is that not one of the trinity of terms immanent in this idol has been proven. The rhetoric grows more intense with each passing year, at ever higher decibel levels.

But perhaps the most intriguing consequence of the now dominant conventional wisdom of GWTHA is the practical policy dilemma it creates for those among its fervent converts who have yet retained some measure of their sense of reality. If you accept the faith, there is but one corollary you must also accept. As James Lovelock, one of the founders of Greenpeace, declaimed “Only nuclear power can halt global warming.”

The Economist recently examined the nuclear option in “The Shape of Things to Come?”. They discern a powerful shift in public attitudes and consequent policies. Prospects, they suggest, have “brightened for the nuclear industry. In Asia, which never turned against it in the way the West did, the prospects are excellent. China already has nine nuclear reactors, and is planning to commission a further 30. New capacity is being built or considered in India, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Russia has several plants under construction.

“Now western governments are increasingly looking anew at nuclear energy. A few weeks ago TVO, a Finnish consortium, started work on the first new nuclear plant to be built on either side of the Atlantic in a decade. Pertti Simola, TVO's chief executive, proclaims that, ‘Finland has opened the door to a new nuclear era! Many western countries will come behind us.’

“France’s parliament has recently given its approval for a new nuclear plant. Guillaume Dureau of Areva, the world’s largest nuclear supplier, captures the dizzy mood that has overtaken vendors: ‘We are pretty convinced of a nuclear revival and [we] need to prepare for it. We need to hire 1,000 engineers.’”

The impetus behind this renascence ? “The main reason for the shift is climate change. As it has risen up the political agenda, so the impetus for a nuclear revival has grown.

“More, and more respected, voices have been making the case that nuclear energy is essential if the rate of change is to be slowed. As a result, there is an unlikely alliance between the nuclear industry and many environmentalists, as a growing number of greens have come to believe that nuclear energy is the best way to reduce carbon emissions.”

Certainly, the other “alternatives” are delusional. “Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientist, recently argued that one further generation of nuclear power stations is needed (in Britain at least) to buy time, in order to keep down emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, while new carbon-free non-nuclear technologies are developed. He thinks that renewable sources of energy are not currently up to the task: ‘We need another generation of nuclear-fission stations.’ Others agree. The World Nuclear Association, an industry body, dismisses its green rivals in a recent report: ‘the potential scope for renewables contributing to the electricity supply is very much less because the sources, particularly solar and wind, are diffuse, intermittent and unreliable.’”

Not that universal accord or a new consensus has yet been achieved. “Such opinions have caused consternation among nuclear energy’s long-standing opponents, notably Europe’s green movement. Anti-nuclear sentiment was so strong in Germany at the end of the 1990s that the ruling socialist-green alliance banned new plants. Sweden was the first country to turn against nuclear plants, in a referendum back in 1980; at the end of May it shut down its second nuclear plant. Yet in both countries opinion polls suggest waning public opposition to the nuclear option. Indeed, Germany’s Christian Democrats now say they may overturn the ban if they win the forthcoming national election. In Finland, says TVO’s Mr Simola, concern about climate change was the chief reason why his country pushed ahead with the new power plant.

“In America, although the Bush administration remains hostile to any mandatory action on slowing global warming, it is keen to boost nuclear power. That has led some greens to take the view that a nuclear revival is better than doing nothing much about climate change. Leaders of respected environmental outfits such as Environmental Defence and the World Resources Institute have recently made positive noises about nuclear power as part of a response to global warming.”

The Economist continues, exploring several of the key considerations of operating expense, construction cost, waste disposal, standardized design, and, ever so briefly, proliferation questions, while ignoring others, such as reducing dependency upon imported fossil fuels from nations which fund the terror war being waged against us. All these other dimensions are worth your perusal. But none of them is quite so intriguing as the ironic prospect that it may be environmentalists’ panic at their own contemporary bogeyman which leads them to embrace their bogeyman of old.

In a breathless report yesterday London’s Mail On Sunday declared that “Britain and America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq – despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region . . . . A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later.

“The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush’s pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq’s own forces are strong enough to take control of security.”

The Mail claims that “the document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced” and implies that this contradicts “the British Government’s public position is that UK troops will stay until newly trained Iraqi forces are ready to take control of security. Less than a fortnight ago, Mr Blair said it was ‘vital’ the US-led coalition stayed until Iraq stabilised, and Mr Bush endorsed his comments.”

In particular, they report, the memo describes “a commitment to hand over to Iraqi control in Al Muthanna and Maysan provinces [two of the four provinces under British control in Southern Iraq] in October 2005 and in the other two, Dhi Qar and Basra, in April 2006” and observes that “this in turn should lead to a reduction in the total level of UK commitment in Iraq to around 3,000 personnel by mid 2006.” Moreover, the document claims that “there is a strong US military desire for significant force reductions.

“Emerging US plans assume 14 out of 18 provinces could be handed over to Iraqi control by early 2006, allowing a reduction in [Allied troops] from 176,000 down to 66,000. There is, however, a debate between the Pentagon/Centcom, who favour a relatively bold reduction in force numbers, and the multinational force in Iraq, whose approach is more cautious.”

But there are substantial reasons to doubt the Mail On Sunday’s Simon Walters’ interpretation of this leaked document.

First, as the story’s twelfth paragraph admits, “Mr Reid states that his proposal is not yet a ‘ministerially endorsed position’ – or Government policy – though he clearly believes it should be.” Not policy, advocacy.

Second, while “the Ministry of Defence last night confirmed the leaked document was genuine” nevertheless “Mr Reid said: ‘This is but one of a number of papers produced over recent months covering various scenarios. We have made it plain we will stay in Iraq for as long as is needed. No decisions on the future of UK forces have been taken.

“‘But we have always said it is our intention to hand over the lead in fighting terrorists to Iraqi security forces as their capability increases. We therefore continually produce papers outlining possible options. This is prudent planning.’” Contingency planning for possible, perhaps even probable scenarios, but not a decision.

Third, the author tips his hand decisively when he asserts that “the memo leaves little doubt that the British plan to take their lead from the White House, where an increasingly unpopular Mr Bush is under huge pressure from the US public to bring American troops home fast.” This is absurd. To characterize the prevailing opinion in the United States this way is either willful and blatant misrepresentation of recent opinion polls, or utter ignorance of the facts. There is no “huge pressure from the US public” for immediate withdrawal, and to describe the president as “increasingly unpopular” is a falsehood.

Consider in this context the Herald of Scotland’s more expansive and illuminating reporting:

“Mr Reid confirmed he had drawn up the leaked paper, but insisted it was merely one of many laying out a wide range of possible options facing America and Britain in Iraq.

He said: ‘We have made it absolutely plain that we will stay in Iraq for as long as is needed. No decisions on the future force posture of UK forces have been taken. But we have always said that it is our intention to hand over the lead in fighting terrorists to Iraqi security forces as their capability increases. We, therefore, continually produce papers outlining possible options and contingencies.’

“He added: ‘This is but one of a number of such papers produced over recent months covering various scenarios. This is prudent planning. I stress again that no decisions on the future force posture of UK forces have been taken.’

“However, the leaking of the document comes just days after the secretary of state dropped a strong hint that at least some British troops might leave Iraq in the near future.

“While he quoted a point made by Donald Rumsfeld, his US counterpart, that it might be some considerable time before terrorism was defeated in Iraq, he told MPs last Monday: ‘It may be a much shorter timescale before the Iraqis themselves can take the lead in combating that terrorism. So the timescale he envisaged is not necessarily the timescale during which our troops would have to be there.’

“He added: ‘I look forward within the next year to the Iraqis beginning to take over, in some of the 18 divisions of Iraq, the lead role in counter-terrorism.’”

Rather than the precipitous and panicked retreat implied by the Mail, the reality would appear to be planning based upon a measured weighing of the evolving capabilities of Iraqi troops in training.

In this context, the Reuters “news” service concludes its dispatch (in Calcutta’s Telegraph) with the observation that “cutting back to 66,000 troops would leave manpower for just two full US divisions. Enough, probably, to prevent Iraqi militia from contemplating all-out sectarian war, but not enough to participate in day-to-day patrolling of most of the country.” But of course, precisely this objective has been an inherent facet of the ongoing training of Iraqi troops and police forces. Not only are they linguistically and culturally more attuned to the demands of patrolling the country than our forces could ever hope to be, but also once they have met qualifications in equipment and training they will certainly produce superior results and engender less resentment.

As the BBC’s Paul Reynolds phrases it in “Hopes and Problems of Iraq Drawdown”, “the politics require that Iraq be controlled by Iraqis as soon as possible. This has always been the intention if not the current reality. A reduction would also help both Mr Bush and Mr Blair domestically. But full withdrawal, as carried out by Spain and hoped for by Italy, is not on the horizon.” In other words, “the memo does not indicate that basic policy has changed or will change. This is that the troops will be there ‘as long as is needed.’

“But the plan is that not so many will be needed.”

Moreover, he observes, “a reduced Iraq commitment would help the UK to find 3,000 more troops for Afghanistan next year. They are needed both to man the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps HQ, which is to be deployed there under British leadership, and to add troops to the fight against the Taleban and the heroin trade.”

What are we to conclude? This is not, as the Calcutta Telegraph described it a “Timeline for Iraq Withdrawal”, but a planned response, in accord with declared policy, to transfer responsibility to the sovereign nation of Iraq’s own forces as they grow increasingly capable of independent but supported action. Not retreat, progress. If not accomplished, anticipated.

(For more see Tom Regan’s commentary on the Christian Science Monitor’s site. He includes the comments of leftist Juan Cole, whose nearly invariant record of misinformation, distortion and error is almost legendary.)

With oil prices hovering around $60 a barrel, the price for petroleum is over 50 percent higher now than it was last year. Energy affects every part of an industrial economy, from manufacturing and transportation to services. Petroleum is also the source from which we create plastics, adhesives and light-weight composite materials.

High oil prices have occurred in large part because of a tightening supply and increasing demand. China and India alone account for the majority of the increase in world demand. Consumers in the United States are feeling the effect of higher energy prices worldwide because we are increasingly dependent upon imports. The American Petroleum Institute’s latest data shows we depend on imports for 64.3 percent of our petroleum needs. In 1973, when an OPEC oil embargo hammered the U.S. economy, we were importing 28 percent of our oil.

Petroleum imports are rising because our domestic production is declining. New fields are no longer being drilled, existing fields are aging and consumption is rising. Helping offset these trends has been increased energy efficiency in the United States. According to various sources, including the Energy Information Agency, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product rose 32.2 percent in the 10-year period from 1994 through 2003 and our population rose 13.1 percent, yet our total energy consumption rose by only 9.6 percent. While most regions of the world show an upward trend in per-capita energy consumption, in the United States, it has declined slightly since 1980.

Although America is becoming more efficient, we are facing growing exposure to changes and disruptions in the international energy markets, particularly involving petroleum. This is why our passage of the energy bill is vital for our national security.

The importance of a comprehensive energy bill cannot be overstated. It provides us a roadmap for achieving greater energy independence which will make us less vulnerable to price swings. The bill encourages domestic production, improves conservation efforts and promotes renewable sources of energy. This is good for consumers, for businesses and for the environment.

To boost domestic production, the bill streamlines oil and gas development on existing federal lease sites to bring fuel to market sooner. It seeks to diversify our sources of energy to give us flexibility and adaptability. It does this by stimulating use of clean nuclear power, providing incentives for solar, wind and geothermal energy. It establishes a federal loan guarantee program to encourage the design and development of clean innovative technology and new energy sources. The bill requires fuel manufacturers to use eight billion gallons of ethanol in gasoline by 2012.

An ambitious program to design and use clean coal burning technologies will help America use its 250-year supply of coal in environmentally safe power plants. A program researching the use of clean-burning hydrogen in cars is included in the legislation as well as provisions and mandates to encourage utilities to expand, modernize and improve the reliability of the electric power grid.

The energy bill is strong on conservation, too. It requires the federal government to devise a plan to save one million barrels of oil a day by 2015.

This legislation also provides help in dealing with environmental problems. The bill included the Coastal Impact Assistance amendment which I co-sponsored to ensure that Texas will get federal assistance for handling energy problems which may occur in areas with offshore oil exploration. The bill will provide funding for wetland restoration and coastal restoration.

I have long argued that our nation needs a coherent energy policy. I am gratified that the Senate has, at long last, passed this important and necessary bill.

The incipient contretemps over the naming of a successor for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has mesmerized the pundit class. Barrels of ink and billions of bytes have been consumed even before President Bush has presented the Senate with a nominee. It is likely that the volume and intensity of the verbiage will increase throughout the dog days to come. One opportunity that should not be lost amid the sturm und drang is the chance to evaluate the role and organization of the court from a broader philosophical perspective.
Two interesting recent articles, one from the National Center for Policy Analysis’ Bruce Bartlett, the other from Ann Althouse writing in the New York Times, address two of these broader systemic questions about the Supreme Court that ought to be debated.
In “‘Electing Justice’: The People’s Court”, Althouse reviews “Electing Justice: Fixing the Supreme Court Nomination Process,” by Richard Davis, professor of political science at Brigham Young University. Davis contends that the system is broken and “argues that the process of selecting Supreme Court justices, originally intended as an elite interplay between the president and the Senate, has become so politicized that we ought to cast off the remnants of elitism and simply hold elections for justices.”
“But,” Althouse asks, “what, exactly, is broken? Davis describes how the press exhaustively investigates each nominee, and how interest groups pressure the president and senators and try to influence the public. The public, for its part, has come to believe it has a legitimate opinion about who is qualified to serve on the Supreme Court. But why is any of this a problem? In arguing for the election of justices, Davis contends that the various political players, seeking advantage and influence within the structure laid down by the Constitution, have changed the procedure, and that ‘the formal outline of the process should conform to what the process actually has become.’
“Yet Davis only dimly envisions how an electoral scheme would work. He notes that states have judicial elections, but he does not acknowledge the widespread belief that the federal judiciary is superior to the state courts, or the utter novelty of any sort of nationwide voting procedure in the United States. (The president is chosen by an aggregation of state-by-state elections.) Where would the candidates come from? Davis suggests the president could nominate a slate of candidates, and he imagines the Senate holding hearings and issuing reports. But what would the campaigns look like? And what would stop these elections from degenerating into referendums on, say, abortion?
“One searches vainly in the pages of this book for any discussion of the changes elections might work on the Court’s own conception of its role. It is already accused of being too political. Currently, at least there is an effort to appoint highly qualified jurists who will uphold the rule of law. Even if political ideology underlies the process, the nominee is still generally someone steeped in the legal culture who is going to profess faith in legal principles. Electing justices would not just change the selection phase, it would reshape how justices thought about their role. What would happen to the culture of law once the justices had their own constituents?”
In essence, Althouse argues that Davis has failed to make even a prima facie case for his radical proposal. “Perhaps there is no problem to be solved. Perhaps we need only learn to love the process that practice has created. Maybe the politics that have crept into the procedure over the years have worked an improvement on the framers’ elitist plan.” Worse, the likelihood is that the alternative Davis envisions would exacerbate rather than remedy the ‘problem’ he perceives. “Change the process to make it even more political than it now is, however, and matters would likely drift too far in the wrong direction. Justices might become so politically responsive that we would wonder why we should have them at all. Why tolerate nine elected officials with life tenure — or 18-year terms, according to one of Davis's proposals — reviewing legislation produced by larger bodies of more recently elected officials? If we really thought constitutional formalities needed to change to reflect real practice — Davis’s bedrock assumption — we would have to argue for the abolition of judicial review altogether.”
In “Life Tenure and the Supreme Court”, the NCPA’s Bruce Bartlett addresses the question of politicization of the court from a different angle. “A key reason for the intensity of fights over Supreme Court appointments is that they are made for life. This will be the one and only opportunity anyone will have to get it right. A mistake or error of judgment might still be with us 30 or 40 years from now.
“Because the court has become so politicized, many justices now time their retirements to suit their politics, often delaying retirement until a president of their party or philosophy is available to nominate their replacement. Given that three of our last four presidents served two terms, this can often force justices to hang on far longer than they would rather have done.” Indeed, he suggests, Justice O’Connor “probably would have retired last year if it hadn’t been an election year.”
Because of this politicization, Bartlett argues, “tenure on the court has increased over time and turnover has fallen. According to Northwestern University law professors Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren, since 1971 the average tenure in office for a justice has increased from 12.2 years (1941-1970) to 25.6 years. The average age of a justice upon leaving office has risen from 67.6 years to 78.8 years between the same periods. And the average number of years between appointments to the court has almost doubled from one every 1.67 years to one every 3.27 years.” And in fact the present court would have set a record for the longest unaltered court in American history if no justice had resigned (or perished) this year – and will still break the previous record if the battle for O’Connor’s replacement extends past the start of the term in October, since her resignation becomes effective only upon the naming of a successor. (No new justice has been named since Clinton’s appointment of Justice Stephen Breyer in 1994.)
In consequence, writes Bartlett, “growing numbers of legal scholars have concluded that life tenure for the Supreme Court should be abolished. They note that only the Rhode Island state supreme court has life tenure and no other democratic nation has it. In lieu of life tenure, they either limit terms to a fixed number of years — as it is with the presidency — or impose mandatory retirement at a certain age.”
Bartlett anticipates the most likely objections to this proposal and offers some preliminary refutation.
“The Founding Fathers quite rightly wanted to insulate the court from partisan politics,” he admits, “and they thought that life tenure would achieve this purpose, well expressed in Federalist No. 78, written by Alexander Hamilton. Of course, the Founding Fathers also saw no need to limit presidential terms. But Americans generally support the 8-year limit that was adopted in the 22nd amendment to the Constitution, and according to a 2004 poll 60 percent say it is time to limit court terms as well.”
But it isn’t merely that the question polls well among the public. There is also an “consensus [that] has developed around a constitutional amendment that would limit justices to terms of 18 years, staggered so that there would in theory be an opening every two years. This means that every president who serves a full term would likely have two appointments to the Supreme Court.” (One wonders what would happen to the members of the present court. Would they be allowed to serve until they retire or die? Would they each be allowed to serve a maximum of eighteen more years before the staggered terms kick in? Should they all be compelled to step down immediately, with Bush appointing 9 justices with terms of 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16 and 18 years respectively?)
Despite such outstanding questions, however, Bartlett expresses the conviction that the “elimination of life tenure, through this scheme or another, would greatly reduce the intensity of Supreme Court appointment battles because the stakes would not be so high. Both sides would know that if they failed this time around, they would probably have another chance within two years.
“If justices are prohibited from reappointment, there is no reason to believe that limiting them to 18 years, longer than most justices have served historically, will make them any more susceptible to political pressure than they are now. Members of the Federal Reserve Board, another institution that demands insulation from politics, have always served 14-year terms and this has been sufficient to ensure their independence.”
Two interesting debates, with potentially extraordinary long term consequences. They deserve our considered thoughts.

Is the American tradition of self-reliance disappearing?

That’s a painful question for conservatives to ponder. After all, we’re dedicated to reducing the role of government and promoting individual freedom and opportunity. But the facts, while sad, are clear: More Americans today depend more heavily on government than ever before.

We’ve long sensed that was true, but now we have proof. Recently, The Heritage Foundation created an objective measure called the Index of Dependency, and it paints a frightening picture. Since 1980 – the year that Ronald Reagan’s election seemed to signal a coming shift in public policy – our reliance on government has doubled.

The Index tracks five main categories of government programs – housing, health care, retirement, education and farm subsidies. In each category, the federal government’s role has grown in recent years. That growth has crowded out more traditional support structures such as churches, families and local charities.

For example, before World War II, Americans of modest means usually got their health care and health insurance through community institutions and fraternal organizations. But insurance through those groups is long gone, replaced by publicly provided health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

Meanwhile Social Security, set up to provide a retirement income floor, is the main source of support for most retirees. And various government programs now provide much or all of the income in poor households.

It’s time to ask whether we’ve reached a national crisis. As Heritage economist William Beach, points out, “A citizenry that reaches a certain tipping point in dependency on government runs the risk of evolving into a society that demands an ever-expanding government that caters to group self-interests rather than pursuing the public good.”

Consider welfare programs. Since the 1960s, the country has spent more than $8.5 trillion on food, housing, medical care and social services for the needy. All told, we’ve spent $1.45 on welfare for every $1.00 we’ve invested in national defense.

Many thought Congress had fixed welfare in 1996, and indeed child poverty has come down and employment among single mothers has increased because of that reform. But the welfare system is still far too expensive and intrusive. Worse, it’s still growing.

Another example is the jump in farm subsidies. These payments provide a perfect example of a vested interest hijacking public policy.

Two-thirds of all farm subsidies go to 10 percent of farms, most of which have annual household incomes greater than $130,000. If it wanted to, Congress could assure every farmer a decent income for a “mere” $4 billion per year. Instead, lawmakers use subsidies.

The massive farm bill passed in 2002 will cost an estimated $180 billion over 10 years. That just goes to prove Beach's point – once an interest group realizes it can convince the government to support it, the subsidies are virtually impossible to kill off. Last year’s maximum amount becomes this year’s minimum, and dependence on government grows.

It’s still possible to break the chain of dependency, but doing so will be difficult. It’s a matter of public policy. During the 1960s and 70s, when people seemed to want activist government, Congress embraced policies that made the Index shoot up. But dependency grew much more slowly during the 1980s and 90s when voters signaled their desire to return to a more prudent and conservative public policy.

In the years ahead, lawmakers will debate further welfare reform, education policy and health care. Conservatives must work to make sure the government does the right thing on each of these issues. We need less government intrusion and more individual freedom. That’s the only way to get the Index to start going down – which is what Americans really need.

Ed Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation.

In sharp contradistinction to the hysterical rhetoric of yesterday’s New York Times editorial concerning the impending appointment of a new Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor (see War of the Worlds immediately below), the Times’ Week In Review section today featured a more measured analysis by Jeffrey Rosen, law professor at George Washington University and legal editor for the New Republic (“So What’s the Right Pick?”).

Rosen eschews the hyperbole employed by such as David M. Shribman in “Showdown at the Supreme Court Corral” (“The O’Connor resignation is no longer the fire next time. Forget the 2006 midterm congressional election. Forget the 2008 presidential election. This is the most important political fight of our time.”) and instead poses an important question that is unlikely to be examined in depth by the “mainstream” media:

“When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her intention to resign from the Supreme Court, President Bush promised to nominate a successor who would ‘faithfully interpret the Constitution.’

“He is widely expected to appoint a judicial conservative, but the crucial question for the country is what kind of judicial conservative.”

Unlike the incurious mainstream media, Rosen understands that “judicial conservatism, after all, is not a monolithic movement: It is a catchphrase for very different approaches to constitutional interpretation that often lead to dramatically different results in cases ranging from affirmative action to abortion and states’ rights.”

Agreeing reflexively with Howard Dean’s appraisal that all conservatives are of necessity ‘white, male, wealthy, racist religious fanatics’ or some similar variation on that theme, the MSM could hardly be expected to discern that the Republican majority is ideologically far more diverse than the simplistic left. Ideas, not “message”, matter more to Republicans, and the Republican coalition is therefore inevitably more nuanced.

Rosen discerns five distinct variants of judicial conservative”: “originalist conservatives”, “libertarian/constitution in exile conservatives”, “traditionalist conservatives”, “pragmatic conservatives”, and “deferential conservatives.” The categories are reasonably sound and the definitions Rosen offers for each are fair, though a bit “judgmental.” One might well quibble with his interpretations, but it’s only on occasion that he seems irrational – for instance, when he appears to characterize Justice Stephen Breyer as a pragmatic conservative. (This, by the way, is the category in which he places both O’Connor and Chief Justice William Rehnquist).

Most of what we will be hearing, reading and seeing over the next several weeks, perhaps months, as this “succession crisis” evolves, will be “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Nearly all of it we can safely ignore, except for continually assessing the political impact of the rhetoric. But we would be wise to evaluate President Bush’s appointment in terms which are similar to, if not identical with, Mr. Rosen’s rubrics.

As if it weren’t already true before Justice Sandra Day O’Connor decided to offer her resignation from the Supreme Court this past week, I am now supersaturated with commentaries, analyses, threats, promises, evasions, diatribes and just plain nonsense about what the “mainstream” media seem determined to pitch as the coming judicial Armageddon.

“[T]he political heavens are surely going to fall in her wake,” pontificates Andrew Cohen in the Denver Post’s “What’s next for Supreme Court?”

In the July 11 edition of Newsweek, Howard Fineman and Debra Rosenberg declare ex cathedra that “The Holy War Begins:
Bush must choose between the big tent or the revival tent. Inside his Supreme Machine.” They faithfully report the Manichaean consensus: “‘This is probably the most significant Supreme Court resignation and nomination we’ll see in our lifetimes,’ said Jay Sekulow, counsel of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice. His counterpart at the liberal Alliance for Justice agreed. ‘The stakes are now enormous,’ said Nan Aron.”

This millennial hyperbole is most evident from among the ranks of the sinistral extreme. “In the coming weeks the president and Senate will decide whether we have a Supreme Court that will preserve the social justice achievements of the 20th century, or whether we will retreat to a 19th century interpretation of the Constitution, with individual rights given far less protection against state power and corporate irresponsibility,” screeches Ralph Neas, president of the ironically named “People for the American Way.”

Many of these murmuring shamans discern fateful omens. “O’Connor Resignation Creates Ominous Court Vacancy” asseverates a Planned Parenthood press release. “The resignation of Justice O’Connor creates a devastating and dangerous moment for reproductive health care and women’s rights,” adds Planned Parenthood’s Interim President Karen Pearl. “Her departure places women’s health at risk, endangering the future of reproductive rights in this nation.” Similarly, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s President Nancy Keenan expostulates that “we’ll look back on Justice O’Connor as someone who put reason ahead of ideological fervor, which stands her in sharp contrast to many of the judges who might replace her if the radical right gets its way.”

Much of the ostensibly objective analysis about “what is expected to be a tumultuous fight” is delivered with a dire warning [my emphasis]:

“There are huge risks for Bush no matter which way he moves. He faces enormous pressure from the right to appoint someone more conservative than O’Connor. But such a move risks a potentially bruising battle with Senate Democrats and a backlash among voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum, who may worry about the GOP’s social and cultural agenda.” Yes, exactly, it’s all those middle of the road types, Kennedy, Leahy, Trotsky, moderate guys who worry about that vicious, loathsome and repugnant agenda sure to condemn us to a living hell. Sounds objective to me.

The editorialists of the New York Times captured the sentiment admirably yesterday, explaining that “Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement is going to trigger an enormous political collision”, unless, of course, the forces of evil relent [again, my emphasis]:

“So President Bush now has a choice to make. Will he satisfy the right wing of his party and nominate a candidate for O’Connor’s spot that is far more conservative than she? Or will he be content to select some of the many fine moderate-right voices in the law, men and women who are more in the O’Connor mold and not then as likely to generate a big fight on Capitol Hill?”

Who, you may ask, would be an example of such fine moderation? Why, of course, the ever-courtly David Souter.

“She was more of a centrist, after all, like her old friend Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who was on the court when O’Connor arrived in Washington, and like the courtly David H. Souter is today. But the reason no one sings odes to Souter – he is probably even more despised by the right than is O’Connor, even though he was appointed by the first President Bush – is because centrists, whether they are legal or political, are these days a hunted and diminishing breed. That’s a shame, of course, because what both the country and the court desperately need right now are precisely what they both are most unlikely to get: moderation.”

“We are, in fact, beginning to miss her already as we envision the bitter confirmation battle that will take place if President Bush nominates a hard-line conservative to replace her. Senate Democrats, who have been willing [!] to block ideologues nominated to the lower courts, will certainly do everything they can to prevent a right-wing ideologue from joining the nation’s highest court.

“Before that fight begins, Mr. Bush should ask himself whether Americans want to live in a country where the handicapped cannot find a champion in the law, where women are stripped of all abortion rights, where universities are barred from offering a hand up to deserving minority students. [But what about his program for reviving slavery and genocide?] Then he should ask himself how much of his own party’s current success has been due to Justice O’Connor’s ability to save the right wing from the worst consequences of its extremism.” How fortunate that these dangerous fanatics have been protected from themselves. If only we could institutionalize them all, and give them treatment.

So now we know what the essence of this Armageddon really is: “The War of the Worlds”. Because these guys are from an alien planet.

While this would be the MCA’s third appropriation, the program has existed for about 18 months and has just begun to disburse funds. Indeed, while there are 17 countries eligible for MCA funding, only Cape Verde, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Madagascar have finalized negotiations with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) on the specifics of their aid “compacts.” These compacts total $610 million, out of the $2.5 billion appropriated for the MCA in 2004 and 2005.

Many in Congress have asked why the Administration is asking for $3 billion in additional funding when the MCA has not spent what has already been appropriated? The answer is that proposed compacts with countries that are eligible for, but not yet receiving, MCA funding will cost more than the $2.5 billion appropriated in 2004 and 2005, making the 2006 budget request vital if the MCA is to meet its objectives.

Why the MCA Is Necessary

America’s national security and economic interests are served by helping poor countries to develop. Only by creating long-lasting opportunities for their people can countries experience economic growth and reduce terrorist and other security threats. Moreover, as the U.S. economy and per capita income have grown, trade has become a greater portion of gross domestic product (GDP). Helping to encourage economic growth in developing countries enhances trading opportunities and bolsters the U.S. economy.

Evidence and economic analysis indicate that development assistance is not sufficient to spur economic growth in recipient countries. The U.S. has tried to spur economic development through development assistance — with little success. Between 1980 and 2003, among countries for which per capita GDP data are available, over $116 billion (in constant 2002 dollars) in U.S. development assistance went to 89 countries classified as low-income (per capita income below $765) or lower-middle-income (per capita income between $766 and $3,035). Yet these recipients often experienced poor — even negative — per capita economic growth. Of these 89 countries, 37 experienced negative real annual compound growth in per capita GDP, 20 experienced minimal growth of 1 percent or less, and 32 experienced growth of over 1 percent. Half of these recipients in sub-Saharan Africa saw a real decline in GDP per capita.

Over the past 45 years, nearly $1.5 trillion (constant 2003 dollars) has been spent on development assistance with few development success stories — none clearly attributable to provision of development assistance. This situation led the Bush Administration to propose a new development assistance program — the Millennium Challenge Account — that targets assistance toward low-income and lower-middle-income countries with a demonstrable record of investing in people and promoting policies that promote economic growth and bolster the rule of law.

This new approach is supported by economic studies indicating that aid is most effective in countries that embrace policies that create incentives for people to behave more productively, thus encouraging growth. As noted by President Bush in 2002, “When nations close their markets and opportunity is hoarded by a privileged few, no amount of development aid is ever enough. When nations respect their people, open markets, invest in better health and education, every dollar of aid, every dollar of trade revenue and domestic capital is used more effectively.”

The MCA is designed to show countries how to enhance their prospects for economic growth and development, with the overarching goal of helping countries graduate from the need for foreign assistance.

What Has the MCA Done?

While some have criticized the slow pace of compact negotiations by the MCC, they should instead applaud the organization’s prudence. The MCA is a departure from traditional development assistance. The MCC does not just quickly disburse money to countries, nor does it dictate to recipients how they must spend the grants. Instead, a country must first propose a comprehensive development strategy that is to be funded by MCA grants and demonstrate how that strategy would improve economic growth and reduce long-term poverty.

Recipient countries possess an unusual degree of influence over the proposals and are primarily responsible for implementation. The MCC requires eligible countries to submit proposals because these countries know the weaknesses in their economies and their needs far better than do aid donors. While the MCC will monitor implementation, progress toward targets, and fiscal accountability measures, the hands-off approach requires careful analysis in the initial stages to ensure that the proposals are correctly implemented, are designed to facilitate economic development, and possess adequate oversight.

Since beginning operations in January 2004, the MCC has hired experts and staff and has selected countries that meet the criteria established by Congress. On May 6, 2004, the board of directors announced 16 eligible countries for 2004 (Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Cape Verde, Georgia, Ghana, Honduras, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Vanuatu) and dispatched teams to educate these countries about the MCA and the proposal process. On November 8, 2004, the MCC identified 16 eligible countries for 2005. (Morocco was later added, and Cape Verde was dropped because its per capita income exceeded the legislated threshold.)

Compacts totaling $610 million with Cape Verde, Honduras, Madagascar, and Nicaragua are complete and funds are being disbursed. Compacts are being negotiated with the 13 other countries eligible for MCA funds. If these countries negotiate $152.5 million compacts — the average amount of the four compacts already approved — the MCA will exhaust the funds appropriated in 2004 and 2005.

This projection covers only the countries currently eligible for MCA funding and does not take into account any new countries that might qualify in 2006. Nor does it include grants to “threshold” countries that do not meet MCA criteria but are eligible for MCA assistance based on their commitment to “the reforms necessary to improve policy performance and eventually qualify for MCA assistance.” Currently, 13 countries have been identified as threshold countries.

The bottom line is that the MCA will need additional resources if the MCC is to provide aid to eligible countries in the future.

By focusing assistance on countries that are committed to policies conducive to economic growth and development, the MCA represents a fundamental shift in development assistance. Compared to traditional foreign aid, the MCA would be a far more effective means of providing assistance because it would create incentives for poor nations to adopt economic freedom, the rule of law, and good governance — policies that are the key to economic growth and development with or without foreign assistance. Congress is off-target in cutting the funding for the MCA. It is traditional foreign aid, with its proven record of failure, that deserves trimming — not the MCA.

Brett D. Schaefer is Jay Kingham Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Center for International Trade and Economics at the Heritage Foundation.

Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was right when she wrote in her dissent to Kelo vs. City of New London that now “the specter of condemnation hangs over all property.” She was also quite correct to note that the decision undermines an important Constitutional protection that all Americans had taken for granted over the past two centuries.

When the 13 states voted to adopt the Constitution in 1791, they appended to the original document ten amendments guaranteeing certain basic rights to protect ordinary citizens from the depredations of an overreaching government. Among those rights was the Fifth Amendment protection of private property from unlawful seizure by government. Known as the “takings clause,” Americans’ property rights have been secured, until recently, by the phrase “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.”

Though this is viewed as one of the most important protections underpinning both our freedom and economic vitality, there was nothing particularly novel or innovative about the Founding Fathers’ including the takings clause in the Constitution. Property rights and protections had long been a foundation of English common law and were taken for granted as fundamental. Typical was the robust declaration of such rights made by William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, in a 1763 speech to the House of Lords in regard to the Excise Bill then before that body:

“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter — but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”

But that was then and this is now. On June 23, 2005, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court that private property can be taken by government for the purpose of economic development. Where Kings of England were once forbidden, the threshold is now open for a mere director of economic development to come crashing through, evict the poorest man, seize his cottage, rip it down, and sell what’s left to corporations and wealthy home buyers.

Eminent Domain Not the Only Abuse of Property Rights

Although many of the subsequent expressions of concern have rightfully focused on the broadened powers of eminent domain and the ease with which private property can now be seized by government, the decision’s collateral damage will extend in many directions. There is a chance that the decision will adversely influence the increasingly severe land use restrictions that many states and communities have been imposing on property owners over the past decade in the name of “smart growth.” This is unfortunate because voters in several communities have had some notable recent successes in thwarting and reversing these regulatory efforts to restrict property rights and limit development. The prospect for more gains was promising, as opportunities emerged to unify contending sides of the growth debate around a more liberal interpretation of property rights.

Reflecting this trend, the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, published an important report, “Whatever Happened to Smart Growth,” in June 2005. The report describes and discusses several of the notable legal and electoral setbacks that advocates of the more extreme and coercive forms of smart growth and new urbanism have recently suffered in several parts of the country where they had once reigned unchallenged. Authored by Jane Shaw and Ken Orski, the paper reviews the most recent legal developments in states and communities once viewed as paragons of smart growth virtue — Maryland and Oregon, and Loudoun County, Virginia — but where concerned citizens used the ballot box to overturn or substantially modify harsh restrictions on private property.

In each of these places, laws and directives that had been established to limit or discourage population growth and development were either altered or simply ignored in order to allow for more growth and building than would otherwise have taken place. As significant as these losses were to the growth control movement, the more moderate wings of the smart growth and new urbanist movements have suffered even worse recent defeats at the hands of zoning boards across the country as a consequence of the imposition of increasingly onerous land use regulations that often make it impossible, if not illegal, to build communities based upon smart growth concepts.

Advocates of smart growth and new urbanist practices encourage developments with higher population density (more people and houses per acre), less reliance on cars and more on walking and transit, and greater proximity of houses to jobs and shopping. But like any broad movement, there are important differences that divide smart growth advocates. At one end are more extreme elements that believe smart growth solutions should be imposed on people and the typical suburban development be prohibited. The moderate wing, however, believes that smart growth communities should be offered as a choice and should compete on an even playing field with traditional suburban developments.

Such differences in approach often spill over into land-use restrictions. While Oregon’s growth boundary forced development into increasingly crowded urban areas, Maryland’s vague policies achieved little measurable change. Loudoun County’s plan actually encouraged sprawl by establishing minimum lot sizes of 5, 10, and 25 acres depending upon the plot’s location in the county. Thanks to Loudoun’s harsh regulations, suburban development in Washington, D.C., has since leapfrogged into West Virginia.

In a rational world, counties in West Virginia would not be suburbanizing — they are simply too far away from employment centers. Yet they are growing rapidly as middle-income households are forced to seek affordable housing farther away from the regional core because of land-use restrictions in closer in communities. Workers in these distant communities confront 4-hour daily commutes, which add to transportation expenses.

Referred to as “downzoning,” Loudoun’s approach to growth control substantially reduced density and, with it, the number of potential residents. But since such growth controls do nothing to deter overall population growth and, thus, the demand for new housing, these restrictive regulations mean that more raw land must be used to house a given population. If a community’s zoning laws allow no more than one house per five acres — as Loudoun’s did in its western half — a square mile of land can accommodate only 128 households, or about 333 people. These severe restrictions on the supply of land for development caused median home prices in Loudoun and other Virginia suburbs to increase by more that 80 percent in the past four years, and homes in once affordable Loudoun now have a median price of $420,000.

But very few people want (or can afford) to live on five acres or more. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, nationwide less than 8 percent of American households live on lots of five acres or more, and many of those lots are probably farms. The average lot size for single family homes in the U.S. (excluding apartments) is about one-third of an acre, not the three to five acre mandatory minimum becoming common in suburbs.

Emerging Opportunities for Cooperation

While the recent election results in Maryland, Oregon, and Loudoun County marked a setback for the most primitive kinds of growth control, the more significant losses to the moderate wing of the smart growth/new urbanist movement are occurring in the zoning boards and planning commissions where proposals to construct higher-density “smart growth” communities are routinely rejected.

Typical of this trend are a string of recent rejections in Virginia, where 7 of the Nation’s 100 fastest growing counties are located and where sprawl and growth control are hot political issues. In just one month in late Spring 2005, three of four new urbanist-style developments proposed for the Washington, D.C., suburbs were rejected by public officials, and the fourth — more appropriately characterized as a market-based, transit-oriented development — is under attack from the community and an influential member of Congress

In sum, high-density developments are almost universally rejected by those who would have to live near them, and regulations give that rejection force of law. Conversely, in a free market where consumer choice is encouraged and capitalistic acts between consenting adults are permitted, developers would be allowed to provide the homes that families want to buy. But instead, the law prohibits much high-demand development, and the developer could be subject to ruinous fines and court-ordered coercion if he attempted to satisfy that demand.

As a consequence, ironically, the moderate wing of the smart growth/new urbanist movement can be counted among the major losers from the diminution of property rights. Some within the movement believe that a restoration of those rights would lead to more new urbanist communities than the present system allows. Indeed, in reaction to Kelo, John Norquist, President of the Congress of New Urbanism, endorsed Justice O’Connor’s harsh assessment: “I think that’s the potential. It’s shocking, really. The founders of the country put the word ‘public use’ in the Fifth Amendment for a reason, because they wanted property rights to be part of our democracy.” Unfortunately not all New Urbanists agree with Norquist. Leading New Urbanist architect Andres Duany, for example, admitted on the same day as the decision that he would use any means available — including eminent domain and government regulation — to achieve the desired result of more New Urbanist communities.

A National Backlash Could Restore Rights

There may be a silver lining in all of this: Kelo is not merely a bad decision, but one so utterly repellent that it has flamed a firestorm of anger and rebellion across the nation. Concerned citizens now know that, thanks to Justice Stevens and his colleagues, when the wealthy and powerful covet their property, they are without any protection, stripped of their basic Constitutional rights. Distilled to its essence, Justice Stevens’s ruling has not just entitled the rich to prey upon the poor, but it also supports a process that encourages them to do so and thereby grants planners the resources and violence of the state to facilitate their acquisitive interests. Perhaps not since Dred Scott have the weak been so abused by the nation’s highest court.

So what to do? To his credit Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has lit the match of rebellion with the introduction of the “Protection of Homes, Small Businesses, and Private Property Act of 2005” to prohibit the transfer of private property without the owners’ consent if the transfer is for economic development rather than public use. And House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) will introduce the “Private Property Rights Protection Act,” which is intended “to restore the property rights of all Americans the Supreme Court took away on June 23.” But more needs to be done, and the Court has handed President Bush an extraordinary opportunity to stand tall in defense of the ordinary people who have stood with him throughout his presidency.

To your side, Mr. President, summon some of the hundreds and thousands of Americans from around the country who have been dispossessed of their homes and businesses by the powerful businesses in search of a better location to sell their soap and socks. Tell these people that you share and embrace their hopes and aspirations to fulfill the American Dream, and promise that you will stand by them and guarantee them equal protection under the law.

Include with theses dispossessed homeowners Susette Kelo, who has struggled for 7 years against all odds to preserve her home in New London, Connecticut. Invite Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) to join you on behalf of his constituent, and tell the world that this shall not stand. Tell them, too, that you are asking the U.S. Congress to enact emergency legislation to stay the Court’s destructive ruling and allow her to stay in her home. And once her home is secured, work with Congress to enact a comprehensive package of legislation to restore to the American people the property rights they once enjoyed under the protection of the Constitution. You should also urge Congress to extend similar protections from the increasing abusive land use restrictions — imposed under the guise of smart growth principles — that are making homeownership unaffordable for moderate-income families.

Set the fire, Mr. President, and let the American people have their Tea Party against corporate privilege.

Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

Tony Blair arrived recently in Washington to ask President George Bush to increase substantially U.S. aid to Africa. His visit came a few months after Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs unveiled his own plan to end extreme poverty around the world by 2025. In “The End of Poverty,” Mr. Sachs argues rich countries should commit themselves to transferring some $1.5 trillion over the next decade to the poorest nations – primarily in Africa. But, in truth, foreign aid is unlikely to succeed, because most of Africa’s problems are internal.

In the 1960s, many developmental economists believed in the “vicious cycle of poverty” theory, which argued poverty in the developing world prevented accumulation of domestic savings. Low savings resulted in low domestic investment and low investment was seen as the main impediment to rapid economic growth. Foreign aid, therefore, was intended to fill that apparent gap between insufficient savings and the requisite investment in the economy.

And so, between 1960 and 2005, foreign aid worth more than $450 billion, inflation adjusted, poured into Africa. Result? Between 1975 and 2000, African gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined at an average annual 0.59 percent rate. Over the same period, African GDP per capita fell from $1,770 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to $1,479.

In contrast, South Asia performed much better. Between 1975 and 2000, South Asian GDP per capita grew at an average annual 2.94 percent. South Asian GDP per capita grew from $1,010 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for PPP to $2,056. Yet, between 1975 and 2000, the per capita foreign aid South Asians received was 21 percent that received by Africa. The link between foreign aid and economic development seems quite tenuous.

Foreign aid to Africa has also enabled government officials to embezzle large amounts of money and misspend much on loss-making projects. In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, “Corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence.” Large debt is all most Africans have been left.

As a result of the widespread corruption among politicians in Africa and other parts of the developing world, development economists began emphasizing good governance as a solution to underdevelopment. The focus on internal conditions in poor countries was not welcome news for the foreign aid lobby in Western capitals, which relies on foreign aid to keep it afloat.

Thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) derive their funding from aid. Many NGOs, therefore, focus on “externalization” of African problems, blaming Africa’s poverty on an unfair trade system and colonial legacy. Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute observes that calls to massively increase foreign aid look like “giant conflicts of interest.”

Mr. Sachs, however, seems to dismiss thorough internal reform as a prerequisite for African economic growth. As he recently said in a New York Times interview, “The poor are blamed for their problems. We say the poor are poor because they are corrupt or because they don’t manage themselves. But in the past two years I’ve seen exactly the opposite. . . . The idea that African failure is due to African poor governance is one of the great myths of our time.”

But evidence is not on Professor Sachs’ side. African corruption has been getting worse, not better, over the last few years. Each year, Transparency International publishes its Corruption Perception Index (CPI). The CPI defines corruption as “abuse of public office for private gain.” It is measured on a scale from 0 to 10. The higher the number, the lower the corruption. In 2000, the average African CPI was 3.24. By 2004, the African CPI fell to 2.87.

With the African CPI score on the decline, how can Mr. Sachs claim to have “seen exactly the opposite”? Perhaps he confuses the growth of African democracy with the reduction of corruption. Indeed, Africa today has more democracy than ever before. Between 1960 and 2004, Africa had 198 leaders. Only one, the prime minister of Mauritius, was voted out of office between 1960 and 1989. Things changed thereafter. Between 1990 and 2004, 23 African heads of state were voted out of office.

The spread of democracy enables more Africans to vote corrupt governments out of office, and that surely is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, elected officials’ behavior in power has not appreciably changed. Many Africans continue to see participation in the government as a means of becoming wealthy, and weak institutions allow them to succeed.

“Very few people believe that it is possible to reform the system,” says Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist. “They do not believe that they can ever have a clean government. And because they do not believe it, they think the rational thing to do is to try to get their own people into office and then try to get them to steal as much money as possible and distribute it among their kinfolk.”

The truth is there are no quick fixes to African poverty. Like so many times in the past, the grand utopian visions of well-meaning Westerners are likely to crash on the hard rocks of African reality. In the end, Africans will get it right and prosper, but they will not succeed by seeing foreign aid as a panacea or hoping someone else will solve their problems for them.

Marian L. Tupy is assistant director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty at the Cato Institute. This article originally appeared in the Washington Times.

President Bush plans to increase spending to combat malaria in Africa, where the mosquito-borne killer claims over a million lives each year. But increased funding will have little impact when the methods used to fight malaria do not include the most effective agent of mosquito control, the pesticide DDT.

Tragically, malaria’s horrific death toll is largely preventable. The disease was nearly eradicated decades ago, but it resurged with a vengeance after DDT was effectively banned worldwide – banned not because of scientific concerns about its safety, but because of environmental dogma.

The environmental crusade against DDT began with Rachel Carson’s anti-pesticide diatribe “Silent Spring,” published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence – Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson’s book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT’s crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.

Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation – alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures in public opinion to this day.

But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began – with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT – yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature “has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome.” Indeed, in a 1956 study human volunteers ate DDT every day for over two years with no ill effects then or since.

Abundant scientific evidence supporting the safety and importance of DDT was presented during seven months of testimony before the newly formed EPA in 1971. The presiding judge ruled unequivocally against a ban. But the public furor against DDT – fueled by “Silent Spring” and the growing environmental movement – was so great that a ban was imposed anyway. The EPA administrator, who hadn’t even bothered to attend the hearings, overruled his own judge and imposed the ban in defiance of the facts and evidence. And the 1972 ban in the United States led to an effective worldwide ban, as countries dependent on U.S.-funded aid agencies curtailed their DDT use to comply with those agencies’ demands.

So if scientific facts are not what has driven the furor against DDT, what has? Estimates put today’s malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year. If this enormous toll of human suffering and death is preventable, why do environmentalists – who profess to be the defenders of life – continue to press for a global DDT ban?

The answer is that environmental ideology values an untouched environment above human life. The root of the opposition to DDT is not science but the environmentalist moral premise that it is wrong for man to “tamper” with nature.

The large-scale eradication of disease-carrying insects epitomizes the control of nature by man. This is DDT’s sin. To Carson and the environmentalists she inspired, “the ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.” Nature, they hold, is intrinsically valuable and must be kept free from human interference.

On this environmentalist premise the proper attitude to nature is not to seek to improve it for human benefit, but to show “humility” before its “vast forces” and leave it alone. We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead “a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.” If the untouched, “natural” state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.

Carson’s current heirs agree. Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: “Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”

In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died. This is the life-or-death consequence of viewing pestilent insects as a “necessary” component of a “vibrant biosphere” and seeking a “reasonable accommodation” with them.

To stop this global health catastrophe, the ban on DDT must be rescinded. But even more important is to reject the environmental ideology on which the ban is based.

Keith Lockitch is a Ph.D. in physics and a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California.

President Bush still may wrangle a Social Security victory from the jaws of defeat.

While Democrats “just say no” to his voluntary personal retirement accounts, Republicans are making them an offer they may be unable to refuse: Help the GOP stop raiding the Social Security Trust Fund, or vote to continue Uncle Sam’s biggest swindle.

Senator Jim DeMint (R- South Carolina) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) lead this effort. They would create “Growing Real Ownership for Workers” accounts that would be voluntary, personally owned, and inheritable. While these GROW accounts would be smaller than those President Bush advocates (4 percentage points of each participant’s 12.4 percent employer/employee payroll tax) — they would be financed by the Social Security surplus, namely taxes collected above and beyond the system’s benefit payments.

Americans may believe this money is conserved for the future. Sorry. It vanishes as quickly as Congress sees it. To understand how, try this experiment:

Open your wallet. Remove $100. Buy a new T-shirt, some socks, a decent lunch, two movie tickets, and beers with a friend afterward. Now, place in your wallet a slip of paper that reads: “I owe me $100 when I retire.”

Social Security is financed similarly.

In fiscal year 2005, for instance, the Social Security system will collect $496.7 billion in payroll taxes, $14 billion in taxation of benefits, and $83.6 billion in congressionally appropriated interest. Of this $594.3 billion, seniors will receive $433.7 in benefits, while $6.5 billion will cover administrative costs. This $154.1 billion balance is the Social Security surplus.

This money is not invested in stocks, real estate, or even Picassos. Since 1983, Congress has spent $1.67 trillion of this cash on Food Stamps, Cruise Missiles, the Space Shuttle, Amtrak, etc. In its place, non-traded Special Issue Treasury Notes sit in the so-called Social Security Trust Fund, a filing cabinet in Parkersburg, West Virginia. These pieces of paper obligate future Congresses to collect taxes tomorrow to finance Congress’ bipartisan spendaholism today. There are no underlying, marketable assets involved — just the anticipated political will of future elected officials to shake down citizens who currently populate America’s K - 12 classrooms.

This is legalized Enron accounting. DeMint, Ryan, and their co-sponsors would end this spectacular fraud and, as the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Moore says, “place this money in 140 million individual lockboxes across the country.”

Once Americans under 55 who so wish deposit their shares of this money into their GROW accounts, Congress cannot use those funds simultaneously to mask its addiction to spendahol.

“Ever since I came to Congress, I have been fighting to stop the raid on the Social Security surplus,” Rep. Ryan stated June 22. “This puts us on a path to do just that.”

GROW accounts would ignore the portion of payroll taxes dedicated to today’s Social Security benefits. So, seniors can relax. Their checks will stay untouched.

While these accounts initially would contain marketable Treasury bonds, in 2008, participants could choose to diversify into stocks and index funds. The Social Security Administration assumes modest management expenses of 0.3 percent of account balances.

According to the SSA, a 44-year-old earning $36,600 would retire with an account worth $9,783 to $13,096, depending on his preference for bonds or diversified investments. A 34-year-old earning $58,600 would retire with $19,117 to $30,606. Come 2017, surplus payments would end, but this roughly $1.2 trillion in accumulated private property would keep growing. These nest eggs would help finance each owner’s retirement benefits.

While this would generate real wealth for working Americans, Democrats remain unsatisfied. Like a 21st Century Bonnie and Clyde, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Democratic chief Harry Reid of Nevada seem comfortable with Congress’ annual Trust Fund heist.

“There’s nothing wrong with Social Security lending money with the prospect of returning it,” Pelosi told Congress Daily. Reid called DeMint-Ryan “a transparent political gimmick.”

President Bush should push to “stop the raid and start the accounts,” as this idea’s supporters chant. As for Bush’s opponents, “Democrats claim they only want to spend Social Security funds on Social Security,” Senator DeMint said June 22. “Let’s see if the party of ‘No’ can say ‘no’ to stopping the raid on Social Security.”

New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and an advisor to the Cato Institute Project on Social Security Choice.

Do you know where your Social Security taxes are? Some of them went to pay for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The same monies helped the State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines pay for the development of exhibits for the World Food Prize. And we should all be happy that some of our Social Security surplus funded a study of mariachi music for the Clark County (Nevada) School District.

As we know by now, Social Security is facing many problems that will require long-term, comprehensive reform. But before a doctor operates on a patient, the first step is to stop the bleeding. And the first step toward Social Security reform should be to stop Congress from spending Social Security money on anything except workers’ retirement.

The basic problem is that the way Social Security is currently set up, workers don’t own their Social Security funds. Because workers don’t own their money, Congress treats that money like its own: free to spend on whatever the members choose. And spend it they do, on everything from the war in Iraq to the International Fertilizer Development Center. In return, the Social Security Trust Fund is given a bond, essentially an IOU, which will eventually have to be repaid out of future taxes.

It’s the ultimate insult. Congress spends our Social Security taxes then expects us to pay more taxes to repay its borrowing. To date, Congress has borrowed and spent more than $1.7 trillion of Social Security taxes. This year it will borrow another $60 billion.

This has been going on for more than 20 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Members of both parties have resisted all attempts to keep their hands out of the Social Security cookie jar. In fact, some seem to be proud of what they are doing. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says, “There’s nothing wrong with Social Security lending money with the prospect of returning it . . . There is a surplus in Social Security, and under the law Social Security can lend that money to the government for other purposes.”

As long as politicians have that attitude, the only real way to keep Congress from spending Social Security taxes is to get that money out of Washington. If Congress is going to insist on spending like a drunken sailor, then it’s time for an intervention.

Now, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), Representatives Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), Sam Johnson (R-Tex.), and others have proposed legislation to put the whole federal government back on the wagon. Their plan would rebate Social Security surpluses to workers in the form of contributions to personal accounts. The money would belong to the worker, in an account with his or her name on it.

This proposal would represent a true “lockbox,” devoting that money solely to the worker’s retirement. No politician could touch it.

The plan would have other benefits as well. Because workers would own the funds in their accounts, when they die they could pass money on to loved ones. And, without Social Security surpluses to hide behind, Congress would have to face up to the choices of running higher deficits, raising taxes, or, hopefully, spending less.

That’s bad news for Mississippi catfish health research, but it’s good news for Social Security reform.

Michael Tanner is director of the Cato Institute's Project on Social Security Choice.