Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Go here and click on “Multimedia.” There are two slideshows with audio. The accompanying article is pretty good and adds some information to the slideshows.
If the NYT concentrated on this kind of straightforward war reporting it might be selling more papers.
Taranto is generally entertaining and often merely partisan. Tonight he concludes with a fact that radiates. It comes amidst a time that has been compared to Tet by those of different opinions about both Tet & Iraq. Whatever optimism Iraqi elections had brought, the apparent chaos & increasing death toll seem a cold front moving in. But maybe we aren’t reading the clouds well. In his “Births of a Nation”, Taranto notes:
“In the face of relentless violence, political chaos, economic uncertainty and nightly curfews, Iraq’s maternity wards are experiencing an unlikely baby boom,” the Washington Times reports from Baghdad:
Despite the obstacles, the birthrate in Iraq actually has increased since the U.S.-led invasion 43 months ago, according to the country’s Health Ministry. The rate of births in the country has jumped from 29 births per 1,000 people in 2003 to 37 per 1,000 last year, according to government figures.
In neighboring Iran, the birthrate is half that–21 per 1,000 population, while the average birthrate in the Middle East is 25, according to the World Bank.
As the 19th-century Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore observed, “Every time a child is born, it brings with it the hope that God is not yet disappointed with man.” It seems the Man upstairs isn’t yet ready to cut and run from Iraq.
As I think many of us find the failure of Europe to both reproduce and defend itself as deeply & sadly important; perhaps the Iraqis, otoh, are building a desire to defend as well as reproduce themselves.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Iraq might turn into a second Somalia within a year if the situation is allowed to keep descending the way it’s doing now. The Islamic Sharia courts are ruling now in Somalia while in Iraq they function undercover and it’s still in our hands to stop them from extending their influence and from becoming the rule instead of the exception they are today.
This post has become a WSJ editorial.
If you want to understand the real enduring strength of America as a nation, look at the Dow Jones industrial average. Not the record 12,000 level reached this month � that may last no longer than a day or a week. Look instead at the 30 companies that make up the Dow index. Only two of the original 30 companies in the index in 1930 � General Electric and General Motors � are still there today. Most of today�s Dow components � the Microsofts and Intels � weren�t even around 50 years ago.
If you look at the relevant stock market indices for Germany, France or even Britain, you will find them dominated by companies that have been around for generations. America by contrast, has mastered the art of creative destruction. This vast competitive openness, combined with entrepreneurial spirit, keeps the country constantly innovating and regenerating.
Gerard Baker, Iraq is just a comma, not a death sentence
We often hear of the security that dictators enforce – with Mussolini the trains ran on time, with Franco anyone could walk in the streets at night, with Stalin. . . But Iraq the Model notes what we sometimes forget but really know, peace is not an absence of crime but the presence of a deeper order. He considers the question: “Is dictatorship a guarantee for keeping the leash on those extremists?” And his answer is swift:
Absolutely not, dictatorship will not and cannot guarantee limiting the growth of extremism because extremist groups are the children of those regimes and a natural outcome of the way those regimes ruled these countries.
Dictatorships have all the lust for power and dirty mentality required to ally with the extremists against their enemies whether those are their own people or the west and its ideas of reform and liberty.
A peace enforced by a dictator is mere appearance, it is not the peace of a community in which citizens have (for the most part) internalized good behavior.