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Yesterday, I read a bizarre article in the WSJ by Stephen Moore. He asked the question “why do Americans hate economics”, and answered it thus: “Because too often economic theories defy common sense.”

Now, this is certainly true. Some economic ideas are counterintuitive. But, Moore concludes that this is the fault of macroeconomists, specifically Keynesians, who are misleading people with their crazy, counterintuitive ideas. He then goes on to discuss various controversial economic phenomena such as “crowding out“, “Ricardian equivalence” and other ideas that most Keynesians have easy responses to.

Perhaps the most egregious line is the association of Henry Wallace’s 1930s-era agricultural price support program with mainstream Keynesianism. Really, though, the whole article is full of half-truths and insinuations.

But never mind the specifics just now; what I want to focus on is the fact that Moore appears to assume that things which are counterintuitive must therefore be untrue. Well, there are lots of confusing concepts in other sciences. For example, is light a particle or a wave? According to this logic, it’s neither. It’s a big glow-y thing, because that’s what common sense tells us.

It’s possible that a whole branch of economics is mistaken. There are many examples in history of a whole scientific field being deluded and unwilling to listen to the correct explanation. Ignaz Semmelweis was considered a kook by his medical colleagues because he thought doctors ought to wash their hands. It can happen. I’m just saying that the burden of proof rests with Moore’s side in this argument, and I don’t get his assumption that something that doesn’t make immediate sense to the layman is automatically wrong.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman, Noah Smith and David Glasner all have good responses to the Moore article. I like it when smarter people than me agree with me.

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Norman Podhoretz has a piece in the WSJ that reiterates all of the typical cliches which the Conservatives always deploy against President Obama: Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and so on and so forth. He then gives the following history of the “New Left”, which I point out because it is pretty well in agreement with what I would predict he would say. For instance:

“Despite Mr. McGovern’s defeat by Richard Nixon in a landslide, the leftists remained a powerful force within the Democratic Party, but for the next three decades the electoral exigencies within which they had chosen to operate prevented them from getting their own man nominated. Thus, not one of the six Democratic presidential candidates who followed Mr. McGovern came out of the party’s left wing, and… their policies were rejected by the American immune system. It was only with the advent of Barack Obama that the leftists at long last succeeded in nominating one of their own.”

I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but this kind of article inadvertently tells us quite a bit about the Conservatives. They always run, as Matt Taibbi once beautifully put it, “against the Sixties.”  It is the social, not economic, revolution of the 1960s that they oppose.The people Podhoretz describes here as “anti-Americans” are what we know as feminists, humanists and other varieties of social liberals.

That phrase “American immune system” is a bit weird; as it is a sufficiently vague claim that it papers over the fact that  none of the those Democrats have done anything so radical to the government as what FDR did in the 1930s.

(Also note that Podhoretz doesn’t really even try to explain why, if Obama is such a radical leftist, other leftists are so mad at him.)

In short, what we see here is the Nationalists demonstrating their hatred for such cosmopolitan ideologies as arose in the ’60s.

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Courtesy of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a New York Magazine article which quotes Dinesh D’Souza saying:

“For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history — that’s why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them.”  

Judging by what we’ve seen of Obama’s handling of radical Jihadists, I would have to say that D’Souza must be using a new definition of the word “solicitous”.

Even if we ignore this, Obama’s track record on fighting terrorism is better than that of his last two predecessors. But this is not the first time D’Souza has ignored key counter-evidence in trying to press his charges of “anti-colonialism” against the President.

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John Nolte, conservative film critic, decries an article about the new Captain America film:

“This approach to patriotism is all a lie, a ploy from the Left to turn what really is simplistic and lazy (nihilism, angst, irreverence, irony) into “art,” when just the opposite is true. What the Left despises about themes that lift the human spirit is that they’re more often than not, conservative themes — themes of self-sacrifice, selflessness, fidelity, manhood, bravery, and nobility. Whereas darker, simpler themes or a complete lack of theme, appeals to the all-about-me, chaotic narcissism that so defines the Left.” 

I love reading Nolte’s work–it reveals so much about the Conservative understanding of art. First of all, I think it’s quite telling that “manhood” is on that list of “good” themes, but that there is no corresponding female virtue. But secondly, I can almost hear Ayn Rand’s fury at the “self-sacrifice” and “selflessness” portion of the program.

What Nolte is describing here is strangely anti-individualistic in nature–I find that quite interesting. (Another example of this tendency in his artistic taste is his review of The English Patient.)

The truth is, the virtues he alludes to are not the virtues of a libertarian, but of someone who feels an actual sense of, dare I say it, community–specifically, nationalism. I only bring this up to point out that this is one more instance in which the inherent conflict between the Nationalistic and Materialistic sides of the group that calls itself “Conservative” appears.

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…I thought I’d share with you this amusing little piece from the conservative site American Thinker on what the author calls the “Global Warming hoax”. It may make fun reading during the coming heat wave.

I just don’t know what to say.

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Via Andrew Sullivan, a very interesting post by Amanda Marcotte about Sarah Palin’s Paul Revere comments:

“I think it helps to understand that, for right-wing populists, this thing we call “history” is less about real people who did real things in the real world, and more like just the Bible Part II. It’s a myth that can be manipulated to suit their purpose, which is usually to establish themselves as the only Real Americans. When Palin says she got it right, I believe she believes that, because her story wasn’t really about Paul Revere. Her story was a thinly veiled allegory of the Tea Party worldview.”

This is a very astute point, but also slightly misleading, I think. While they do manipulate the myth, it could also be viewed from the perspective that the “myth” is just the product of a Romantic (to use the term in its increasingly archaic sense) mindset. It may not be a propagandistic effort at all, but rather a manifestation of an idealistic Romantic nationalism.

UPDATE: As I thought about it, I realized this issue is sort of related to what I said in the last lines of this post. 

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A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog wrote in to him to complain about the Triumph of the Will/Undefeated line that I objected to last week. Sullivan’s response: “It was meant to be a joke.”

Well, I mean, I assumed that. What else could it have been? My point is I don’t really see how it’s a funny joke. I mean the joke is: This movie about a current politician is like another famous movie about a historical politician–who, incidentally, became infamous for committing innumerable hideous crimes against humanity.

This isn’t really that good, if I understand it right. There’s nothing particularly humorous about it as far as I can tell. If not for the fact that Nazis are involved, it would be an obvious statement: political propaganda films are like other political propaganda films. The only reason to bring it up that I can see is to compare Palin to the Nazis.

I have a confession to make: For some reason, I used to have trouble remembering the title of Barack Obama’s first book, which is Dreams from My Father. Jokingly, when I couldn’t recall it, I would call it “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Barack”, alluding to this. This isn’t terribly funny, but I submit that it is funnier than Sullivan’s joke, because it’s sort of bizarre comparing a fantasy/horror novella with a memoir, but it also has a funny near-coherence–the word “dreams” and the fact that Obama’s book is a sort of “quest” to find out about Barack Obama Sr.

So, not the stuff of great comedy, I freely admit. (But remember: I like Obama, so I wasn’t trying really hard to make something funny out of his book.)

At any rate, maybe I’m just too stupid to understand Sullivan’s joke here. I really can’t see it to save my life. Can someone enlighten me?

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Mike Huckabee will not be running for President. Instead, he is apparently going to devote some of his time to selling videos such as this to educate children about American history:

All I can say is that, when I was a lad, it would have been my natural instinct to rebel against any message conveyed in such an obvious fashion as that. Certainly, every children’s program I watched that had a message made me viscerally want to contradict it. (Most of the messages, incidentally, were what the Conservatives would likely call Politically Correct, Liberal messages.)

In general, I suspect kids aren’t quite as malleable as people think, and more than ready to resist ham-fisted techniques, regardless of the message. I suspect that such efforts as the one you see above will be counterproductive.

But, as the title suggests, these seem like such poor efforts that I almost wonder if it’s a joke…

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(Warning: This post links to the Wikipedia page about Che Guevara, which contains a disturbing image.)

President Obama has chosen not to release the photos of bin Laden’s body, although they will almost certainly be leaked by somebody, if they haven’t been already.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, there is a serious risk involved with releasing the photos. When the Bolivian government killed Che Guevara, they opted to display his body to the press. Bad idea. People started comparing it to famous depictions of the body of Christ for some reason. We don’t want to spark similar martyring impulses among the radicals. (Then again, why worry what fanatics will think?)

On the other hand, I don’t like the idea of the government withholding information from people. It’s a tough call.

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Conor Friedersdorf  has a good analysis of Rush Limbaugh’s somewhat, but not wholly, sarcastic opening monologue from his program yesterday.

For some reason, it made me think of the scene from the film Lawrence of Arabia when the calculating diplomat character, played by Claude Rains, says:

“[A] man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”