CORRESPONDENCE
CORRESPONDENCE Sound of Broken Glass Stephen Moore's article "The Laffer Curve Strikes Again" in the September issue commits the "broken pane" fallacy. In the "broken pane" story, a home run...
...The effect wasn't as large as the Democrats predicted, but it's still there...
...Or imagine that the cops would enforce a 10 MPH lower speed limit on any delivery company not owned by the chief of police...
...However, one would not know it from the September "On the Prowl," which managed to completely misstate the meaning of the term...
...Going back to the road analogy, imagine if Sam's Delivery Company could buy special license plates that let them drive in a special high-speed lane...
...The harm done by Diamond's revisionist history is more than an assault on logic that college students must endure...
...Tyrrell could hold a remedial English class for (I suspec0 a staffbecoming ever younger each year...
...It is unlikely that the Sun God's peasants, if they had somehow discovered some coal and learned how to use it, could have inaugurated the Industrial Revolution, founded colleges, built ocean-going vessels, colonized the globe, and outpaced the West...
...Darcy is the antiBrummell, with little interest in clothes or personal popularity...
...Henry A. Kissinger COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Read book excerpts at www.colurnbia.edu/cu/cup P R E S S, Refer to us NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9...
...In 1996 a junior associate Amitav Hajra admitted falsifying research dealing with acute leukemia, causing Collins to retract five published science papers...
...By borrowing money, the federal government takes savings that could have gone to purchase goods or finance investments and redirected them to suit its purposes...
...In the "broken pane" story, a home run hit in a game of backyard baseball breaks a neighbor's window and the armchair economists watching announce that the act will stimulate the economy by providing income to the suppliers of window panes and the repairmen...
...STEIN Arlington, Virginia Miss Bennet's Beau Beau Brummell was "the model for...
...Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence also does not deny Western success, but attributes it to chance-the theory in this "history" book is that England and China were equals in 1850 and only the "lucky" discovery of abundant coal let England pull ahead...
...Little attention is given to the two Opium Wars ofthat periNOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 CORRESPONDENCE od in which the English had seized the island of Hong Kong, received freedom to propagate the Gospel throughout the Empire, gained trading and navigation rights on the Yangtze, and won the right to settle, trade, and maintain military forces in 17 Treaty Ports including Shanghai...
...That's great for Yahoo, and great for everyone who uses Yahoo's service...
...Abandoning net neutrality would also mean that if Comcast wanted to run a streaming video service, they could let their own service run at full speed while crippling competing services from other providers or even blocking them entirely from the Comcast network...
...And yet, The Great Divergence was awarded the 2000 Fairbanks Prize, was co-winner of the 2001 World History Association Book Prize, and was one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Books of 2000...
...So, it appears Collins's critical judgment may be questioned, but he has admitted his deficiencies in this affair...
...A more complete discussion of the issue can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net ~neutrality...
...we just deferred them for our children to pay...
...Possibly the senior is not even there much of the time, being offtalking about the new research instead...
...If economic history is to serve some purpose it should be to apply essential lessons from the past, to make things better for the living, not to justify intellectual abstractions such as multiculturalism and anti-Western resentment...
...The homeowner is worse off because he has lost a new pair of shoes in order to restore his windowpane...
...Also, we cut no taxes...
...Such was the unequal status of China and the West at that time...
...That is in fact the way the Internet works now...
...DAVE LUKASEK Bokeelia, Florida Stuck in Neutrality The subject of net neutrality is complex, and cogent arguments exist both for and against...
...A typical DSL broadband line to a house carries a maximum of 768,000 bits per second...
...Please have the culprit taken out behind the woodshed, as it were...
...If anything, Mr...
...Perhaps his new book contains other imperfections needing critical review, but review by Gage or other fervent "Intelligent Design" devotees is not really helpful, as Gage's criticaljudg'ment also is at issue...
...Gage properly notes Collins's major work in genetics but does not reveal that Collins can be duped by associates...
...Net neutrality" means that all data is treated alike during its complete travel through the Internet...
...When a noted senior scientist is rolled by a junior associate it is usually because the senior likes the evidence given him by the junior so much that critical judgment maybe compromised...
...His arguments should be considered in light of his prior education and accomplishments...
...Google's connection to the Internet has to be able to carry millions of bits per second-and they are charged accordingly...
...As long as the roads are big enough, it doesn't matter-you can travel at top speed without being impeded by other cars...
...The broken pane will cost the homeowner the money he would have spent on other goods, such as a new pair of shoes...
...The line from Google to the Internet is like your driveway-it's for the exclusive use of you and your guests...
...Moreover, Collins's notion on such matters as the Big Bang, origins of life, and evolution may be imperfect, but they are his...
...Darcy," writes Florence King ("True in His Fashion," TAS, September 2006...
...The Empress had to pay the British to defend her remaining palace from the rebels...
...Unfortunately Diamond's book is not an exception...
...Far worse, it has been the widespread reliance on such absurd economic history that has doomed the people of underdeveloped nations to continued misery...
...Perhaps Mr...
...LELAND L. SMITH Austin, Texas Rough Diamond Victor Davis Hanson does afinejob of deflating the politically correct theories presented in Jared Diamond's two award winning books on economic history ("The New Old Eco-Pessimism" TAS, October 2006...
...Theywere already 700 years late on universities and 400 years late on ships and colonies...
...BILL GREENE Lancaster, New Hampshire Artistic License Horror of horrors...
...Contrary to what the article would lead one to believe, Google pays quite a bit for using large amounts of bandwidth...
...At the same time the Peasants' Revolt was threatening the palace of the Sun God who ruled the land with a totalitarian grip...
...I keep seekingbalanced unemotional analysis of"Intelligent De6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 CORRESPONDENCE sign" in The American Spectator, but to no avail...
...Once your car reaches the street, however, you are corn8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 CORRESPONDENCE peting with all the other cars for the use of the road network...
...An important but brief part of Hanson's critique is the statement that "Western-style modes of production have brought a chance at prosperityto 2 billion of the Third World...
...They saw the immediate benefit of the broken pane to a few, but not the larger picture or longterm results...
...Were gravity and a bunch of other things slightly different, so would our world be different...
...The issue involves what happens after the data moves from Google's servers to the Internet...
...The AmSpec staff has been infected with the virulent Apostrophitis bug...
...Bias is so obvious...
...Or mayhap the senior is simply not providing the supervision of work conducted in his laboratory, supervision essential to sound science...
...The larger picture for the Bush tax "cuts" is that they increased the deficit, and hence borrowing by the federal government...
...The Pulitzer Prize that Diamond's book received may be compared to the one conferred on Walter Duranty for his reports in the 1920s and 1930s praising Stalin's stunningly effective communal programs for the Ukrainian peasants-both have endorsed not only grossly inaccurate facts and conclusions, but, worse, can only contribute to the misery of untold ordinary people at the bottom...
...Surely you can find a qualified scientist to present material without the blatant bias...
...While there has been some progress in that regard, improvement has been severely retarded by those who deny the reasons for Western success...
...If Brummell had any influence on the characters in Austen's novels, look for it among the wastrels and reprobates...
...Rick Perlstein, author of Before the Storm Annihilation from Within The Ultimate Threat to Nations Fred Charles Ikl~ "With an engrossing interpretation of our history since the Modern Age, Fred Ik16 explains this new era where the survival of leading nations will be threatened from within...
...TARAS WOLANSKY Kerhonkson, New York The Education of Ronald Reagan The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatisim Thomas W. Evans "The first satisfying account of how Reagan evolved into a conservative...
...chance is too chancy...
...Good economists examine the larger picture and long-term consequences...
...Thus, the problem is not wholly those academics who pander to the environmental and multicultural pandemic, but resides in the larger publishing and educational establishments that seek to misinform American students and deny them the opportunity to study any balanced view of history...
...More serious thoughts provoke other conclusions, that we are indeed all victims of chance...
...While you're at it, please purge any staffers afflicted with the strain of Tourette's syndrome in which the two word phrase "sort of" is uttered about every third sentence as is the case with a couple of the Fox News onair personalities...
...Such ideological opposition to free market solutions has resulted in the waste of trillions of dollars in foreign aid that was squandered on grandiose central programs instead offreeing up the energy of the people in impoverished nations...
...Clearly, King has not read Pride and Prejudice in a long time...
...I refer to the October cover drawing with the leffmost microphone being labeled "Myth's" in lieu of the correct "Myths...
...But if the roads become clogged, you slow down...
...It just means they can't give their own data a better level of service than that afforded to the competitors...
...The book review by Discovery Institute's Logan Paul Gage (TAS, October 2006) of Francis S. Collins's The Language of God rambles on about Collins's notions and appears to demand "Intelligent Design" not only for our physical world but also for our biological world...
...Jane Austen's Mr...
...All is by design...
...ROGER D. MCKINNEY Broken Arrow, Oklahoma Collins Mixed Once again we see The American Spectator obliquely supporting "Intelligent Design" as explanation of our world...
...All I see are the biased partisan articles from the Discovery Institute that cannot do justice to the topic as rational inquiry...
...As the great economist Friedman has said, spending is taxing, regardless of what you call it...
...Net neutrality does not necessarily mean that Comcast can't run a video service to compete with Google or anyone else...
...That's not so great for the Spectator.org website, nor for those of us who want to read it (unless, of course, AmSpec pays the extra bucks for priority passage through the network...
...Abandoning net neutrality would mean that ISPs could let (say) Yahoo pay to give Yahoo's data higher priority than other data...
...So while the window pane company might benefit, the shoe sales company loses...
...MICHAEl...
...That would be the environment without "road neutrality," where all vehicles have equal access to the highways...
...Their arguments against the mechanics needed for free enterprise have dominated attempts to "help" the disadvantaged nations for the past 50 years...
...One wearies of the endless appeals to emotion on behalf of "Intelligent Design...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
