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.
The jury still seems to be out as to what the ultimate fate of the Southeast USA will be as far as the big oil spill in the gulf goes. No oil seems to have creeped ashore yet, and I am sure all the coastline residents are praying that it moves somewhere else.
I have noticed a bunch of interesting things about the story of the Deepwater Horizon. Feel free to chime in or make your own observations on the story.
Apparently the man who tried to blow up Times Square is a Pakistani immigrant, rather than one of those violent Tea Party activists as so many of us initially suspected. Who could have known?
Wait. Do we know for a fact that he isn’t also a Tea Party activist? All responsible journalists must look into this possibility at once.
How did this come to pass? How did it happen that adversaries like Iran and Syria are able to shape US strategy, so that we have failed to win in Iraq and will fail in Afghanistan and have deterred ourselves from taking action against the Iranian nuclear program, and have jammed up our strategic alliance with Israel? It is because American leadership of the last two administrations failed to act against those states that have attacked our troops, allies and interests. We did we not win in Iraq because states like Syria and Iran did not pay a price for the acts of force they used to shape political effects to their own advantage; when we failed to do so we abandoned our Middle East policy to the mercy of our enemies, who, as we are repeatedly told, can ruin Iraq and Afghanistan whenever they decide to take off their gloves. We did not win because our leadership, abetted by Washington policy intellectuals, is more interested in political effects in Washington than strategic victories in the Middle East. Seen in this light, the only American victory in the region is a pyrrhic one, the bitter harvest of which we may well be reaping for many years to come.
(There’s more commentary at Belmont Club.)
Smith’s argument applies also to some extent to our dealings with North Korea, where China and North Korea have used our reluctance to confront the Kim regime to control us.
Bush erred by not bringing the war directly to the Syrian and Iranian regimes. Maybe he thought we were stretched too thin in Iraq and Afghanistan or that he couldn’t pull it off politically, or maybe it was a failure of vision. Either way we are going to pay for this mistake by continuing to suffer Iranian-backed attacks on our forces, or in a future war with Iran or its proxies, or by being forced to accommodate a resurgent Iranian empire armed with nuclear weapons. Obama is compounding the error by doing nothing and pretending that everything will be OK if we pull the covers over our heads. Sitting back while gangster regimes arm up, or (at best) attempting to delegate our defense to third parties whose interests do not entirely overlap ours is going to get us attacked, repeatedly, until we decide to confront our enemies and make them pay a price for their aggressions.
ADDED: “If the Iranians get the bomb, we will not be entering an era of containment but leaving it.”
Obama advisor and confidante Valerie Jarrett, speaking about the President:
He knows exactly how smart he is…He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.
Strangely, it would appear that Jarrett believes that the above statement reflects positively on Obama.
In reality, individuals who are exceptionally intelligent–at least those who are possessed of any degree of creativity–are rarely bored. Rather, boredom is the domain of the spoiled brat, the overprivileged aristocrat, and the person with the flat and empty interior landscape.
And many individuals who are exceptionally intelligent–especially those who have leadership aspirations and abilities–have in fact spent a considerable amount of time “doing what ordinary people do,” and have learned a great deal from the experience.
The people now running the White House are a very strange crew indeed.
This article suggests that the trucking industry may soon face a serious driver shortage…that although capacity to handle increased freight may appear to be there based on the number of trucks available, it isn’t really, because there is no one to drive them. Some laid-off drivers have certainly gone on to doing other things, and federal regulations for the qualifications of commercial drivers have become more stringent.
This is interesting to me as a railroad investor since it suggests an additional factor helping to move long-haul freight from road to rail. More generally, though, it points to limitations in the accuracy of capacity estimates for the overall economy. When economists look at the available capacity of the trucking industry, as part of their capacity estimates for the overall economy, I doubt that they are looking at the impact of prospective driver shortages. This kind of thing matters, because these capacity estimates are used to project the potential for future economy-wide price increases.