Public Nuisances
Tyrrell, R. Emmett
Be As Wrong As You Like, Just Do It In A Good Cause -WASHINGTON t is very difficult to speak ill of those who supposedly do nothing but good. Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing...
...What has always absorbed me about Fidel's fans in the West is not that they settled their admiration on such absurd deceptions as communism's superior healthcare and-even more absurd-superior educational systems...
...Like me, he finds the increasingly feeble Fidel a feast for the eyes...
...Or as Lomborg says in The Skeptical Environmentalist,"Mankind's lot has actually improved in terms of practically every measurable indicator...
...It makes you wonder...
...Many old welfare hands do not want it renewed...
...Rather what intrigues me is his fans' terms of praise...
...In the 1960s, 1970s, and even the 1980s, they had been making progress in realizing their goal of a guaranteed national income and with it vast income redistribution.Their first step had been to nationalize welfare...
...In 1980 Ehrlich put money behind his claim that industry was pillaging the world's natural resources, making them scarce and expensive...
...The key to the success of the 1996 act has been the elimination of federal matching grants to the states...
...The procedure took an hour...
...At home they find them in Kennedys, Clintons, and other dynamic Democrats...
...Apparently there have been more people out there worthy of the public's admiration...
...In his new book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, he demonstrates just how wrong Ehrlich has been, and he throws in the Worldwatch Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, and all the other environmentalist alarmists as traffickers in error...
...Lomborg reminds us that most intelligent people are environmentalists...
...They are going to have a difficult time making their case, but they will have on their side some conservatives.There will be an alliance of welfare's most ardent opponents and welfare's die-hard advocates...
...That was an incentive to close down welfare while still assisting the very needy...
...Well, perhaps someone in our State Department knew that if we just waited long enough our medical science would develop that whiz-bang pacemaker cum ICI defibrillator that has returned the spring to the vice president's step...
...He questioned why the United States did not take Fidel's side, the side of progress...
...How can one possibly hold their many erroneous pronouncements and botched prophesies against them...
...He is honored today and Simon is forgotten, though Simon's predictions of the planet's happy longevity, free of starvation and depression, proved to be as accurate as Ehrlich's gloom proved to be wrong...
...So what will happen to Bjorn Lomborg...
...For instance, who out there would call Dr...
...Give Me A Pacemaker Or Give Me Death -WASHINGTON hat were you thinking during this summer's prodigal coverage of Vice President Richard Cheney's heart retooling...
...Sometimes they are aware of the misinformation they spread...
...It began with our conservationists a century ago...
...He was home by nightfall...
...Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern bounced around the Cuban countryside with Fidel in a jeep and survived to tell of it...
...Of all the forward-lookers of the last few decades, Fidel has been the most popular with the intelligentsia, except, perhaps, for the late Mao Zedong...
...They claim to be doing so much good...
...Mr.Valladares does not share the aforementioned Americanos esteem for Fidel...
...Meanwhile our vice president zips into George Washington University Hospital, takes off his shirt, and our old-fashioned, fee-forservices, docs pop a supercharged, twin-cam, new technology pacemaker into him...
...The conservatives are going to try to bring welfare back to Washington where they believe they can make its requirements more stringent.Welfare's advocates believe that bringing it back to Washington will give them the opportunity to kill off reform and advance to pure socialism...
...Said he of a man who even then was sending arms and soldiers around the world to support communist terror and oppose American policy, Fidel is "soft-spoken, shy, sensitive, sometimes witty.I frankly, liked him...
...Admittedly, he has been stupendously wrong about most of his environmental declarations...
...It does not need to be fixed...
...A critic, the late economist Julian Simon, bet him that by 1990 any five metals that Ehrlich considered headed towards extinction would actually become cheaper...
...According to the press, the old boy suffered "a fainting spell" while doing what he has done for years, yelling his way through the afternoon...
...Given the vagaries of the human mind, I can offer no single explanation...
...Among the very poor, marriage is increasing and employment is up...
...Conservatives who want to centralize welfare in Washington ought to remain true to their federalist principles and leave welfare to the states.This system is not broken...
...Not long ago he wrote a book depicting as a scoundrel the soon to be beatified Mother Teresa.Yet, I can think of no one else successfully engaged in such arduous undertakings...
...Ehrlich took the bet, chose the metals, and lost on all five...
...His readers flourished buttons reading "Famine `75...
...Instead they now receive block grants for dealing with the very poor at the local level where the needs of local poor are better understood...
...Lomborg-a former Greenpeace member and avowed leftist, incidentallydemonstrates that the global warming statistics used, for instance for the Kyoto accords, are based on falsehoods...
...Welfare Commissioner in 1973...
...Rescue Welfare Reform From The Welfare Reformers -WASHINGTON he Welfare Reform Bill of 1996 is now widely recognized to be a tremendous success...
...Hence, the public admires and forgives him his errors and the occasional nervous breakdowns they have caused among the environmentally sensitive...
...Since its failure, the tide began to run out for welfare...
...Bjorn Lomborg, a 36-year-old Danish political scientist and statistician from the University of Aarhus...
...For years he has been a marvel of health and intellect, causing intellectuals and politicos alike to say the most extraordinary things...
...In poor neighborhoods there has been a substantial decrease in crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and the incidence of unwed mothers heading households...
...Yet, back in Havana, the man who for decades thrilled progressive intellectuals with his forward-leaning plans is in moth balls...
...Castro's been known to snow people but he didn't snow me," Weicker asseverated...
...What happened next is explained by Robert Carleson, Governor Ronald Reagan's welfare director who went on to become U.S...
...It has made welfare able-bodied and self-sufficient and reduced the anti-social conditions that come with welfare dependency...
...He spoke of Fidel's "enormous intellect and idealism" yes, "idealism...
...I can recall that similar virtues were attributed to all the past century's dictators, even Hitler for a time...
...Thus, I worry about the fate of Dr...
...Christopher Hitchens, the left-wing controversialist (and regular contributor to these pages) manages it with flair...
...Thus allow me to render a prophesy...
...Paul Ehrlich, president of Stanford University's Center for Conservation Biology, a humbug or a fool...
...It has proved to be a success worldwide...
...I said education, not indoctrination...
...In his 1968 best-selling compendium of imminent catastrophes, The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted that "hundreds of millions" of people were going to starve to death owing to overpopulation and agriculture's inability to feed the masses...
...And Senator Lowell Weicker, the Republican ever on the prowl for a presidential nomination, launched this line certain to illuminate his presidential qualifications...
...It was becoming apparent that a guaranteed national income was catastrophically expensive, and evidence had accumulated that all the social pathologies associated with dependency and family break up would get worse.Welfare began to attract even more critics...
...Fidel has been sexy, witty, shy, kindly, idealistic, and on into the wild blue yonder of idiocy...
...The best book on the subject is Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs ofArmando Valladares...
...That was not sufficient, however, to reduce the steady growth of the welfare population, because the federal government up until 1996 paid grants matching the state's expenditure for welfare.Thus, if the state's cut welfare they lost federal money...
...P BLIC 1 B Y R. E M M E 96 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 SANCES R R E L L, J R. The Family Assistance Plan, devised by President Nixon's domestic policy adviser, Moynihan, was welfare's high watermark...
...Ehrlich or any of the other 1960s zealots...
...Perhaps that explains the enduring affection the world has for those famous false prophets who for forty years have almost always been wrong, the environmentalists...
...Will he slip into oblivion with Julian Simon...
...One other point, these are the attributes progressives never detect in, say, a George W Bush or a Ronald Reagan...
...His doctors say he can resume his exercise routine, his work schedule, and probably spend a night on the town with his wife doing the fox trot or whatever it is that Republicans on-the-town do at night...
...I did not see the speech, but given the photographs of his ashen countenance, the veins bulging from his skull, and the glassy eyes, I should like to know how his handlers discerned the "fainting spell's" beginning and end...
...When the 1996 bill was passed such students of welfare as Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted that the very poor would be removed from the welfare rolls and thrown into the street.That has not happened.What has happened is that the social pathologies associated with welfare have diminished, hence, the applause from observers left, right, and center...
...Throughout this fall, we shall hear ululation throughout the Republic: poor children at risk, unwed mothers in grim straits, people living under conditions that only Charles Dickens could describeall because of the Welfare Reform Bill of 1996.The reason we can expect this is that the very successful Welfare Reform Bill is up for renewal in 2002...
...With the new program," Carleson explained in the Washington Times,"a state that required work and removed nonneedy families from the rolls would get to keep the money saved instead of losing it...
...Moreover, the American environmental movement did not begin with Dr...
...One is more admired for claiming to do good than for proving to be right...
...Be As Wrong As You Like, Just Do It In A Good Cause -WASHINGTON t is very difficult to speak ill of those who supposedly do nothing but good...
...It is perfectly understandable that welfare advocates want to end welfare reform.These supposedly compassionate reformers want a return to the pre-1996 system, in which welfare was a stepping stone to their ideal society with a guaranteed income for all...
...Maybe others recognized that people can have fine medical services without secret police, political prisoners, and really appalling torture...
...Can one really have education without freedom...
...Call me unpatriotic, but I was thinking of Cuba's President Fidel Castro...
...Unfortunately, as the vice president smiled through his medical procedures, I could not rid my mind of last week's photographs of Fidel wilting at the dais...
...My guess is that they know the Washington bureaucracy better than the conservatives...
...Yet because he was wrong in a good cause, he went on to become widely admired...
...Cuba's supposedly excellent state-provided medical service invariably gets mentioned...
...Frankly, Fidel looks ghastly...
...Moynihan was wrong...
...He accuses the environmentalist hysterics of basing their hysteria about scarce resources on selective short-range studies that ignore reassuring long-range studies of environmental improvement...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 97...
...Upon becoming president, Reagan, through Carleson, managed to tighten welfare requirements and permit work for benefits...
...Now why would one say such things about a brutal dictator, who made no effort to conceal his hatred of the American system of government and economics, a system that in its worst moments still was infinitely superior to Fidel's communism...
...Perhaps he should have paid the Vice President's a visit, notwithstanding the bills...
...Possibly he should have spent more time with his world-renowned doctors...
...Yet, protecting the world from famine and depletion is a noble thing...
...The 1996 reform based on twenty years of steadily experimenting with welfare has allowed money for those in dire need...
...and "the typical cure of early and radical fossil-fuel cutbacks is much worse than the original affliction...
...Almost everyone wants a healthy environment...
Vol. 34 • September 2001 • No. 7
