"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Buckminster Fuller

Well this is easily the best news from last week: Virginia Postrel is emerging from her bout with breast cancer with "no evidence of disease." I know from my own personal experience with Lance Armstrong disease that this is the closest the medical community will ever come to stating that one has been cured; "total remission without further evidence of disease" is the exact phrase I remember. Cancer in general is still technically "incurable," so the word "cure" is never uttered by the profession with regards to cancer.

Anyway, congratulations Virginia, rock on with your bad self! Is it just me, or does anyone else out there feel that liberal capitalism itself has just dodged a bullet?

It's been a while since I Googled "liberal capitalism," so today I did a few searches and found some interesting tidbits around the web. First up is an unfinished, undated site by one Fred Zimmerman, who uses premises based in game theory to argue that the combination of American political egalitarianism and free markets are responsible for America's success:

America’s egalitarian economic policies have encouraged the distribution of wealth and the rise of the middle class as much as the Industrial Revolution. In modern times this policy has been further optimized using the mathematical modeling of game theory. Game theory views economic activity as a game with players in categories defined as consumers, labor, investor and business. Each player takes on individual strategies to optimize their game performance. Game theory modeling proves the principle that equal economic players operating on a level playing field have the highest long term economic growth. Liberal Capitalism is the philosophy that government must be proactively involved to keep the playing field level, to act as an impartial referee if you will. Government’s goal is to keep the minority of players from pursuing predatory strategies with minimum interference with the majority of players’ normal competitive strategies.

Although Fred proposes some policies which I believe to be wrong-headed, such as higher minimum wages imposed by government, he's definitely on the right track. I hope he reads some Hayek and finishes his site.

Next is a shiny new blog by a fellow named Matt, The Liberal Capitalist. Although he's only been blogging since the end of February, he has some informative posts up regarding inflation and oil prices:

Oil in terms US dollars has increased in price by 275% since March 21, 2003. Oil in terms of Euros has increased only 166%. Therefore, at least 34% in the increase in the price of oil in the United States can be explained by the dollar losing value relative to other currencies.

So far it seems that Matt's liberal capitalism is very nearly what we're pursuing here at LiberalCapitalist.com, so we're looking forward to seeing more from Matt.

And finally I found an excellent article from last summer in what very well may be Australia's version of Reason Magazine, Policy:

In earlier ages, the struggle between liberal capitalism and competing ideologies revolved around the question of which could best provide for the prosperity and economic growth of society.

History has delivered an unequivocal verdict on this question. Over the last two hundred years, the societies that have surged ahead in economic development have been those adopting liberal capitalist systems and open trade. The argument that central planning and government intervention are needed to promote growth has been comprehensively defeated—so comprehensively, in fact, that stubborn proponents of competing ideologies have been forced into an embarrassing U-turn. It is perhaps the ultimate testament to the success of liberal capitalism that the only way its opponents can now muster an objection is to spurn and condemn prosperity itself.

Definitely read the rest; this document may well belong in our Canon. And speaking of which, if you're a liberal capitalist and you've written about something you think is important or helpful to the liberal capitalist cause, email it to admin (atsymbol) liberalcapitalist.com and we'll consider publishing it on this site.

Well it seems that very few politicians from either of the two major parties can pass up an opportunity to buy votes from the public:

The Senate, voting 81 to 16, slightly expanded the House plan to include payments for some 20 million Social Security recipients and 250,000 disabled veterans who would not have qualified because they do not earn income. The final measure also specifies that illegal immigrant workers not receive payments.

I especially like the gratuitous dig at illegal immigrant workers. It's gratuitous because there really isn't a way illegals could get the rebate anyway, unless the government were to send vans full of government checks out to the Home Depot parking lots and lettuce fields of the nation.

Wait! Here comes Santa Claus! Here comes Santa Claus!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a rare joint news conference featuring all four Congressional leaders and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., declared: “We are making history. What has passed the Congress in record time is a gift to the middle class and those who aspire to it in our country.”

Got it? A gift. A gift of our own money, returned to us. Way to let us eat cake, Nancy. But I digress. The real joke is here:

“This plan is robust, broad based, timely, and it will be effective,”

That's our President George W. Bush talking. He's telling us that a one-time tax rebate equating to about 1% of GDP is going to forestall a recession, in spite of the fact that there's no 168 billion dollar spending cut to offset it. So not only will we receive a gift of our own money, we'll have to pay it back in the future—with interest of course. But to be fair to our economically illiterate leaders, the timing of the payout—May or June—couldn't be more fortunate. Why? Because that's when Spring Spike will be in full force, and if this year's predictions of four dollars a gallon come true, we're all going to need that money to fill up our cars and buy groceries. By the way, have you ever heard of alkylate? Don't worry, you will.

But all of this gives me an idea, or a pipe dream, take your pick. If the government really wanted to give the economy a break without lighting a fire under the deficit, they could suspend summer blend gasoline requirements for this year. Doing so could have multiple benefits, the first being little or no spike in the fuel prices which have been driving inflation and eating away at our wages for the last two years. Second, suspending summer blend requirements wouldn't fuel the deficit. A third benefit, and perhaps the biggest, would be a chance to collect pollution data that would allow us to factually determine if these fuel blend requirements are having any real positive effect on air quality for the billions of dollars it costs us every year.

Back when these regulations were adopted by Congress, most vehicles on the road had carburetors and mechanical ignition timing. Summer blend requirements were aimed principally at two sources of pollution: the higher quantity of unburned fuel emitted from tailpipes in warmer weather and the ozone producing organic compounds created when summer heat causes a higher rate of gasoline evaporation. But these days things are different. Most of the vehicles on the road use fuel injection, making their fuel systems completely closed, and computers which optimally determine most fuel and ignition parameters in real time, greatly reducing emissions. The predominance of closed fuel systems and computerized engine management may have therefore mooted the original intended environmental benefits of these gasoline regulations. Presuming it's politically possible to roll back a monstrously expensive environmental regulation that does nothing for the environment, this type of liberal capitalist stimulus could be a real economic "gift" to the country, and one that keeps on giving.

Frankly, the internet could use more sites like this: Climate Debate Daily. It's an independent website presenting two columns, pro and con, of links to articles concerning climate change.

Many sites on the Internet, including some of those listed at the far left of the page, take firm views for or against the threat of anthropogenic global warming. As a matter of editorial policy, Climate Debate Daily maintains a studied neutrality, allowing each side to present its most powerful and persuasive case. Our object is to allow readers to form their own judgments based on the best available information.

No spin, no agenda, just sweet, sweet reason in a head-to-head, hand-to-hand, bare-knuckle format. Can't beat it with a ton of carbon. Hat tip: Ginny at Chicago Boyz.

Cross-posted at A Second Hand Conjecture.

It’s all up to the crackers now. Fred Thompson has left the building, leaving Rudy Giuliani the only candidate in the Republican race potentially capable of prevailing in November against either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama—or both. But Rudy may well have made a strategic error: having been the polling frontrunner for almost a year, Giuliani and his captains decided to forgo the smaller early state contests and focus on high-delegate states, beginning with Florida on January 29th. Giuliani's people have been bivouacked there for months. The effort has kept the candidate with a double-digit lead in the Sunshine State—until now.

Enter Duverger’s law, which states that district-based plurality elections favor a two party system due to voter polarization between the frontrunner and the strongest challenger. In the contests he skipped, Rudy finished most often in fourth or fifth place, with single-digit percentages. With John McCain and Mitt Romney now being perceived as the the top two candidates, Giuliani’s poll numbers have been plummeting in Florida, California, New Jersey, and even New York, the very delegate-rich states that he was counting on to elevate him to the nomination. In Florida, the latest polls now have Rudy in a three way tie for first place at best and losing to both McCain and Romney at worst.

But what makes it impossible to write Rudy off yet is the following: historically up to a third of Florida voters have taken advantage of the state’s liberal absentee/early voting rules to cast their ballots prior to actual elections. Giuliani’s team knew this going in, and assembled early voting and absentee voter “chase” teams that have been operating since before Iowa urging Rudy supporters to vote early. No other candidate has done this. With this being a four-way race, it's possible Rudy can absolutely stink on Tuesday yet still win due to early/absentee ballots cast for him back when he was fab.

What's more, given that the media has all but ruled it out, a Rudy win in Florida would turn the press upside down, making McCain's comeback in New Hampshire appear small and uninspired by comparison. The very trend that makes the chances of a Giuliani nomination currently appear hopeless contain the same forces required to make his big-state strategy work by making him the lead story one week before Super Tuesday. Duverger can giveth as well as taketh away.

America is the "land of the free." Not "land of the free if you're male like me," and not "land of the free if you're white like me," and not "land of the free if you pray like me," and not "land of the free if you have sex like me." America is the land of the free...period. Well, actually, comma. We're also supposed to be "the home of the brave."

The Liberal Capitalist Party believes that America could be braver. We could give homosexual Americans their civil rights due, their freedom of association, by allowing them to legally enter into the household-forming contract of marriage.

Time to brave up, America. In the eyes of the government, all marriages should be civil unions, equal and the same, for everyone.

Supporters of Fred Thompson aren't taking the results of yesterday's South Carolina primary very well. John McCain took a third of the vote, followed up by Mike "get thee behind me" Huckabee coming in second with a quarter of the vote. Big Fred only managed about 15% in spite of the fact that the SC primary was the first state contest in which he actually tried to get votes.

Dailypundit's Bill Quick is fed up enough that he's soliciting ideas for a conservative third party. I don't know if he's ever stumbled upon this site, or what he might think of it if he has. But ironically, this site was in no small part inspired by the American Liberty League, a web initiative of Quick himself from a few years back. Still, I don't know that the Liberal Capitalist Party would be Bill's cup of tea. We tangled last year in the comments section on his site over an immigration topic, and it wasn't difficult for me to glean from the exchange that he has a lot of powerful emotions concerning his restrictionist positions. The Liberal Capitalist position of allowing labor markets to determine a level of orderly entry into the US would probably be a deal-breaker for him, even though we probably agree on most everything else.

So out of respect for a fellow (95%) liberal capitalist, and out of gratitude for the original inspiration he gave me, I invite him and his readers to dig into the site and use whatever ideas you can find that might be useful for creating the American Conservative Party Bill envisions. For instance, I actually put together an idea for an internet-based party modeled on the Request for Comments (RFC) system used to develop the internet itself. It's untested in politics as far as I know, but I still believe the idea has potential. And look through the FAQs and essays. There's all sorts of stuff in there.

It's also interesting that Steven Den Beste did a flyby and dropped the Duverger's law bomb in the comments section on Bill's new site. I posted about Duverger's law last year, here. These days I've been more or less persuaded that the odds of establishing a successful third party without the help of approval voting reform are infinitesimal. Even with approval voting Duverger would hold, we'd still have a two-party system, but at least it would loosen the institutional kung-fu grip™ that the Republicans and Democrats have on the first party and second party positions.

This is what we get when we quit:

And this is what we get when we don't quit:

It really is exactly that simple. Any questions?

Read Bobby Jindal's victory speech. 

Can Bobby Jindal get Katrina reconstruction on track? Can he do something—anything—about the state's failed school system? Can he loosen the grip of corruption that's been at Louisiana's throat since Napoleon sold the joint? Can this Rhodes Scholar keep the Saints in New Orleans? I, for one, believe he can, if only because Jindal himself seems to be crazy enough to believe he can.

That's one small step for Louisiana, and one giant leap for Louisiana-kind.

I generally enjoy Megan McArdle's commentary and find myself in agreement with her far more often than not, but this post is just, well, ignorant:

The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.

Here's a table comparing dollars of government subsidy per 1000 passenger miles for different modes of transportation. Unfortunately it only goes to 2002, but I doubt much has changed since then.

Although government does subsidize auto use with road construction, these subsidies are offset by vehicle and fuel taxes paid by drivers. In fact you'll notice in the linked table that for most automotive modes, the government subsidy is actually negative because of these offsets, whereas transit subsidies are over a hundred dollars per thousand passenger miles since at least 1990. In 2002 it comes out to fifteen to twenty cents per passenger mile. It's clear that when Megan speaks of "massive subsidy provided to drivers" she is obviously either making her own false presumption or simply repeating a line from the leftist eco-narrative on transportation.

A real solution would entail:

1. Designing road systems to move traffic. For example, it's the year of Our Lord 2007; is there any sane reason that every traffic light in America isn't synchronized? This is especially important for the environment as a car moving at 45mph down the freeway creates a tiny fraction of the pollution that a car idling in traffic does, and of course for less time over the same distance.

2. Legalize transit. Most metro areas have gobs of laws outlawing or monopolizing various forms of transit, from prohibiting private buses and jitneys to creating sovietized taxi regimes. These barriers not only need to be removed, they need to be replaced with a generic infrastructure framework such as a system of transit stops and rights of way that competing private transit companies can use to provide orderly systems. This also means deregulating fares and allowing transit providers to charge what the market will bear. All other deregulation can't work if price controls on all forms of transit aren't eliminated.

3. Throughout most of the metro areas in the country, home offices are actually illegal to some degree or another through various zoning restrictions. We need to reverse this, and remove local legal barriers to private telecommunications development and deployment.

4. Convert general toll roads and existing HOV lanes into free roads with High Occupancy/Toll lanes. Control traffic on HOT lanes using variable tolls.

5. And finally, after a few years of reform, sell off most public transit systems, bus by bus if necessary. The chart linked above says it all. Maybe someone facing marketplace imperatives and competition can figure out a way to run these systems efficiently.

UPDATE: Cool! Megan responds. And I riposte in her comments...

For reasons I've yet to fully articulate to myself, I signed this petition today:

And I also signed this one.

We, the undersigned, share the belief that nothing could be more inspiring to our people, or disheartening to our enemies, than Twin Towers, at least as tall as before in every respect, soaring above Ground Zero.

We believe that the devastation of September 11, 2001 clouded the picture long after the rubble was cleared away and that a thorough public examination of the rebuilding option is overdue and now required before proceeding on an unalterable course.

We recognize no financial or political roadblocks that cannot be overcome if rebuilding the Towers is the will of the people. And, we see no conflict between stunning Twin Towers and a noble Memorial, which belong together on this site that means so much to us all.

We submit that there is only one way to truly heal the skyline of Manhattan and the heart of America: Rebuild the Twin Towers. Doing anything less would leave a permanent scar on the face of New York and diminish a legendary city.

If it were up to me I would rebuild the towers along with a third tower, standing in front of the other two and between them from the ocean, that was 25% taller and golden. It is our imperative to demonstrate to this enemy and every enemy that any destruction wrought on America will only be seized by Americans as an opportunity to not only rebuild what was destroyed, but to make it bigger and better than it was before. By doing so we encourage ourselves and and all free peoples, and simultaneously bring despair to the hearts of our enemies.

Imagine there were no taxes on economic production: no income taxes, inheritance taxes, business taxes, corporate taxes, or excise taxes. Imagine instead that America's taxes were paid solely at the cash register in the form of sales taxes, with exceptions for food, rent and medical care.

Imagine how easy it would be to manage family finances when there were no more tax forms to fill out, no more receipts to save, no more tax professionals to pay, and no more budget-busting checks to write to the government. Families would have far more control over how much tax they paid in any given year by simply regulating their purchases instead of having to actually earn less money to ease their tax burden. What we earned would be ours, what we saved would be ours, period.

Imagine how much easier it would be to be self-employed, and to own and manage our own businesses. We wouldn't have to retain a payroll company to manage our employees' taxes like we have to do today even if we employ only a hand-full of people. No more intentional mis-allocations of resources and financial acrobatics would be required to avoid even greater tax losses. And there would be no more having to predict future income or being forced to prepay future taxes for those of us who employ ourselves, allowing a new Entrepreneur Society to be fully born.

Imagine ultra-full employment as firms from the world over flocked to the US to invent, produce and trade in a vastly simplified and cheaper business environment. The massive new competitive pressures of demand for labor would permanently keep the unemployment rate as close to zero as possible, and force wages to lead the inflation curve instead of follow it. In the United States, employees would cost less in spite of being paid more.

Imagine lower, fairer prices for just about everything we buy when businesses and corporations no longer have to imbed the cost of their taxes in the prices they charge us for their goods and services. Competition would force producers to pass the cost savings to consumers, and sooner rather than later. For many things this would mean lower actual cost even after additional sales taxes are factored in.

And lastly, imagine it no longer being in the government's interest to track the incomes and economic behavior of businesses and individuals. Imagine financial privacy actually being legally possible, with the government having no reason now or in the future to use the computer and communications technology already available to essentially catalog every one of our market transactions, monitoring (and eventually regulating) our economic lives.

It's called freedom, folks, and unlike most things we imagine, we can actually have this if enough of us come together and punch it into the national political narrative.

Over at Q&O, McQ has posted some video from 1991 in which then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney explains why the United States didn't overthrow Saddam during the Gulf War. And to be fair, the first Bush Administration made what few would disagree was a rational decision. In The first Gulf War, Arab League forces made up 40%+ of the coalition's ground forces that pushed Saddam out of Kuwait. For all we knew at the time, these guys could have started shooting at our guys if we had moved on Saddam. We should also remember that the 1991 war was far more politically tentative here at home, with the Congressional authorization to go to war passing in the Senate by a single vote.

Still, I bet we can all agree that if Bush Sr. had gone in and knocked off Saddam, the 2003 war, approved by a Congressional super-majority, would have never happened, and there would be 3600 American soldiers and countless Iraqis still alive today as a result.

With 20/20 hindsight, it's now obvious Bush Sr. should have secured at the get-go a commitment from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, et. al. to finish the job. in 1991 we had virtually destroyed Iraq's entire military, there was no Saddam Fedayeen, Al Queda was in it's infancy, Muqtada al Sadr was eleven years old, and there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis Saddam had yet to slaughter who most likely would have helped us.

As much as I'd love to say "oh well, live and learn," unfortunately I can't, because frankly it's still an open question whether we've learned anything from allowing Saddam to remain in power.

Jon Henke and MichaelW seem to think the idea of a bloggers' union is some sort of non sequitur.

Jon:

Collectively bargain with and receive health insurance from who? Who would they go on strike against? To whom does the blogger “shop steward” talk? What constitutes "management" for an independent blogger?

MichaelW:

But what of Jon’s question? Who is supposed to pay for these medical benefits and who would the union bloggers bargain with? Very few bloggers get paid as it is, so I don’t understand how forming a union will increase that number, much less wring benefits from the currently non-existent employers.

Why, The Man™ of course, you ignorant running-dog scabs. It's The Man™ with his boot to our throats, keeping us down. Why, if it weren't for The Man™...

You know the old saw about when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail? Well all the left has is The Man™, which of course is simply shorthand for power : economic power, political power, what have you. To the left, every social outcome, good or bad ("just" or "unjust") is determined by power. Unfortunately this premise tacitly forces the leftist world-view into an intentionalist box: when good things happen it's because good power—unions, left-wing activist groups, leftist politicians.—prevail over bad power—George Bush, greedy corporate management, neocons—otherwise bad things happen just as bad power intends them to.

When your world is this black and white, creating a "just" social institution like a bloggers' union makes perfect sense if bloggers want good things like job security, "fair" wages, and medical insurance, even if there is no readily identifiable The Man™ working to keep bloggers unpaid and uninsured. To the intentionalist left, it is sufficient for just power to intend it in order to have it, and if it still doesn't happen, well, it's because some unjust power must have thwarted it.

To me, that's the saddest aspect about life on the political left, being forced by their own logic to live in a world of imagined evil.

Although the supporting article focuses on a hypothetical Bloomberg candidacy, here are some astonishing numbers from a weekend USA Today/Gallup poll:

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday, 58% say the two major parties are doing "such a poor job" that a third party is needed. Just a third say the established parties "do an adequate job of representing the American people."

Wait! There's more:

43% of those surveyed in the new survey identify themselves as independents—significantly more than call themselves Democrats or Republicans. That proportion hasn't been higher in close to a decade.

And finally, the coup de grace:

Neither side now gets high marks from the public. President Bush's disapproval rating reached a high of 66% in the July Gallup Poll, and the June Poll put Congress' disapproval rating even higher, at 71%.

Disapproval ratings. Yow...

Brink Lindsey and I simply see the same world around us and that's all there is to it. His latest book, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture, is on it's way to me as I type this, so I will soon be able to gauge the depth of our common vision, but after reading his supporting pieces in Reason Magazine and now this month's lead essay at Cato Unbound, to say that I'm startled is an understatement. His "soft libertarianism" is my liberal capitalism, and we both see it everywhere. Lindsey does us the additional favor of advancing a well-supported narrative of the social cataclysms that have brought us to where we are now, at the end of end of the American left-right political era.

Of course the political question left to us is: now what? Lindsey notes that the Libertarian Party is a "fringe operation." Will that change? Will the Democrats or the Republicans evolve? Or can another party emerge?

Back in December Lindsey seemed to be placing his bet on the Democrats, but since then their Congress has descended even farther in the polls than Bush. Certainly we've seen both parties evolve and evolve again over the generations, but can they jettison their twentieth century baggage and evolve at the same increasing speed as our social and political cultures?

Q: What is socialism?

A: The longest road from capitalism to capitalism.

Like all of the best jokes, this one kind of makes you want to laugh and cry and the same time, doesn't it?

As with so many policies produced by left-right Washington, the compromise immigration bill that the Senate effectively scuttled today was a lose-lose proposition from the beginning. It contained a one-time benefit for a chunk of our current illegals, but it didn't address the ongoing issues that compel Mexican laborers to stream over the border in the first place. It also contained billions of dollars worth of the same dubious enforcement measures that are currently failing, not the least of which was hundreds of miles of mostly symbolic fencing and a truly disturbing national employee verification system that would have increased the cost of every job in America and made the Federal government the final arbiter of every employment decision made in this country.

Although entrepreneurship is at an all-time high in the US, most of us still work for someone else, and so when the government comes along with a new scheme that demands businesses hand over yet another right to the government, too many Americans think little of it. And then a few years later, when the depressing effects of the new regulations come home to roost, the same Americans get angry and demand yet another government scheme to address it. It's pretty obvious that freedom loses in every revolution of this cycle, and when freedom loses, we all eventually lose.

It would be great if conservatives would realize that the market doesn't care one bit whether the expensive regulation imposed upon it is intended to protect us from Mexican labor or to protect some sub-sub-species of nematode, and thus there is no practical or moral difference between the two, but I just don't see this happening, with immigration nor anything else. Unfortunately for America, as this immigration bill demonstrated, when both of their policies are wrong-headed, any compromise between the two sides of the aisle simply compounds their error instead of counterbalancing each other, and thus the best we can hope for under the current state of affairs is that they both fail. In other words, under the Democrats and Republicans, progress = the status quo. Not very inspiring for the future, is it?

First Whittle, then Rachel Lucas, then the Frogman, and now the best pure blogger ever, Michele Catalano, is back. What a glorious month it's been!

Hat-tip: Cranky-d 

During the Republican presidential debate hosted by CNN a couple of weeks ago, Congressman Ron Paul made a remarkable statement:

“We in the past have always declared war in the defense of our liberties or go to aid of somebody,” he said. “But now we have accepted the principle of preemptive war — we have rejected the Just War theory of Christianity.

“We have to come to our senses about this issue of war and preemption and go back to traditions and our constitution and defend our liberties and defend our rights,” he added.

This is a lovely thought, as evidenced by the 250 supportive comments to the CNN post. It's also factually incorrect:

Are we really to believe that this country never before waged war even though our national security was not being directly threatened? What then was the first of this republic's wars, its war for independence? That colonial rebellion, which would last eight long years, began as a disagreement over tax policy, not because our security was threatened—directly or indirectly.

Skipping lightly over the undeclared naval war with France (1798-1800), the same could be said of the War of 1812, which was a war of our choice. Indeed, at the time it wasn't easy for Americans to decide whether to go to war against France, Great Britain, neither or both.

The Mexican-American War needn't have been fought if this country had been willing to recognize Mexican claims. It, too, was a war of choice, not necessity.

And what about the Spanish-American War? Our national security was scarcely threatened by the decaying Spanish empire, much of which we soon made our own. Nor did we have to put down the Philippine Insurrection that followed — for years.

There was considerable hesitation before the United States chose to enter the First World War, too, under a president who had just campaigned for re-election under the popular slogan, He Kept Us Out of War.

Nor did American involvement in the Second World War begin, as it does in the movies, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. For the United States was being drawn into that conflict long before war was formally declared.

Back during the run-up to the Iraq war, there were a handful of blogs I frequently read which helped me anchor my confidence in my own world-view. But the war turned out to be a go, and a year or so later after everyone realized that Iraq wasn't going to be a drive-by, an almost suspicious number these bloggers either experienced life issues, or became simply burned-out from fighting the good fight on the front lines against the left-wing anti-American narrative. Some of these bloggers let their blogs go dormant, some quit them altogether, and some quit blogging about the war and politics and started blogging about some other, less controversial topic.

Dissident Frogman was one of those blogs that just sort of stopped. Thankfully, it now appears the Frogman's hiatus was only temporary, because he's back up and running. Written by an anonymous pro-American Frenchman(!), this blog is big-time funny, occasionally poignant, and very original, including original graphic artwork and animated gifs. He belongs on every liberal capitalist's blogroll and bookmarks collection. Seriously, it's that good, and the new layout is beautiful. Welcome back Frogman! I'll get you on my blogroll as soon as I can remember the password...

It seems House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have written President Bush a stern letter claiming that the US troop "surge" in Iraq is a failure—you know, the troop surge that was scheduled to actually start in full-force right about now.

The borders of the United States are completely controllable. They're just not controllable in the way we've been trying to control them for the last eighty years. But the first thing we have to do in order to start thinking clearly about the problem is to make an honest, open-eyed appraisal of what is actually going on here. Number one, the term "illegal immigrant" is an oxymoron. An "immigrant" to the US wants to live here permanently. That in itself implies a desired legal status in the definition of the term. Who in heaven's name would want to permanently move to another country and spend the rest of their lives living underground, unable to ever fully participate in their community lest they be detected and deported at a moment's notice? What would be the point? Even if your homeland is an impoverished, oppressive mess, what would be the point of exchanging that for a life on the lam? You could never own a house, take a steady job, indeed, you could never stay in the same community for very long without risking being detected and deported or jailed. And as far as I know, here in the US, if you're ever caught here illegally you can never obtain legal residency in the future. So essentially, if you want to spend the rest of your life in the United States, sneaking across the border and living and working here clandestinely is about the worst imaginable way to go about it.

But that millions of Mexicans are here illegally is indisputable so how can this be? Because they're not here seeking to immigrate, they're mostly here for something else. We are not witnessing a massive wave of immigration as many reactionary social conservatives assert, what we are actually seeing is capital—in this case labor capital—seeking its highest rate of return. Most of the Mexicans illegally in the US today have no intention of remaining here. Most are here to make a quick buck to invest back home in Mexico. About half of all illegal Mexicans are very young single men, many of them looking to put together sufficient savings to establish themselves enough back home to take a wife and start their families. But regardless of what they want money for, they're illegal workers, not illegal immigrants, and this distinction is important to our understanding.

So everyone needs to calm down, please. America is not being "invaded" by Mexicans or anyone else. This is not to say that our border isn't currently broken, but by understanding what we're really facing, we can alter our law to radically change the situation. By creating a legal vehicle by which Mexicans can legally enter the US and work in the numbers demanded by the US labor market, an irresistible pressure—the pressure of supply and demand—will be neutralized at the border, permitting normal border measures to be sufficient to control them. Gone will be the mobs of border jumpers that have overwhelmed our border defenses for years. Instead they will all be waiting patiently in a quick line to pay their admission, be fingerprinted and photographed and issued an identity card that enables their movements to be tracked. The few people left with reason to try a border jump will be easily interdict-able by our current enforcement regime. We won't need Federal employment verification systems, national ID cards or pernicious hiring regulations. We won't need hundreds of thousands of border patrol agents...and we won't even need a 2000 mile-long wall.