This is something I found while I was looking for the original of Edmund Burke’s quote about  loving “the little platoon we belong to in society,” recently quoted by Matthew Richer in his Rhode Island piece:

“A man that breeds a family without competent means of maintenance, encumbers other men with his children.” Edmund Burke, Speech on the Repeal of the Marriage Act, 1781

As part of the savage personal attacks on Sarah Palin and her family,  normal people have been asked by what Mark Shea calls “freakish enemies of the normal” why we approve of the Governor of Alaska having five children, while worrying about Hispanic demographics, and why we don’t have any particular criticism of the pregnancy of Governor Palin’s daughter Bristol, who is engaged to be married (to a young man who can presumably support her.)

Leon Wieseltier wrote that according to Christian conservatives

The fecundity of Bristol Palin is a windfall for Jesus, but the fecundity of black girls is the doom of the republic.[TNR, September 24, 2008]

He didn’t actually cite anyone who actually felt like that, but for the benefit of Mr. Wieseltier, the differences are the difference between married and unmarried, and the difference between “self-supporting” and “a charge on the public purse.”

As in the 2006-2007 Amnesty Wars, the House Republicans yesterday heroically confirmed their emergence as America’s Third Party–the Patriot Party–by rejecting the bipartisan bailout Bill. The resulting caterwauling and the simultaneous stock market crash caused me to look up something I wrote for a British, non-financial audience, after the Crash of 1987–almost exactly 21 (aargh!) years ago.

Rereading it, I am stuck by the similarities with the current situation. Then, as now, there was real panic and the Democrats were using the opportunity to advance their long-standing agenda–then more taxes, now more regulation. Then, as now, the panic took no account of the enormous gains the market had made in the preceding few years. Then, as now, there was little sense that the market, and the economy, can absorb tremendous blows. (As it did).

Unlike in 1987, the stock market has been arguably overvalued and trying to break for a couple of years–anyone who is interested in this mundane subject can read my MarketWatch columns here. Bottom line (as we say in the trade): the House Republicans shouldn’t be blamed for yesterday’s rout, any more than they should be credited for today’s rally. (But somehow no-one seems to be doing that).

Making A Meal Of The Market, By Peter Brimelow, The Times [London, England], October 31, 1987)

NEW YORK—The lot of a financial journalist is not, totally, a happy one. The subject is inherently intractable. None of your colleagues want to read about it. Your audience of specialized business troglodytes usually know more than you do. They don’t hesitate to say so.

How very different is the professional life of the political writer—courted by hostesses, fawned on by elected officials and, indeed, actually more influential than most of them. Adding insult to injury, those of us labouring in the financial field periodically look up from our tasks to find our humble corner invaded by these glamorous creatures. They grandly strikes poses amid the potatoes and trample down the turnips before departing amid cries of self congratulation on there versatility.

In the second week since the Wall Street crash, ["Black Monday," October 19, 1987] this posturing is all-pervasive. The intrusion is all the more noticeable in America because the financial and political capitals are so far apart. New York and Washington are rarely talking about the same thing—the Iran-Contra agitation excited little comment here—and it is therefore peculiarly irritating when the latter starts to tell the former what financial market movements really mean. Particularly when this hidden meaning turns out to be something the Washington establishment and its media allies have been proclaiming for a decade—the imperative need to raise taxes.

My own conclusion, after years of writing about the stock market, is that no one knows what its tergiversations signify. In a general sense, the market reflects economic prospects, but its particular fluctuations are too wild to be satisfactorily related to anything other than themselves. Even its long-term movements can be anomalous—no one has explained why the American stock markets lagged behind inflation throughout the 1970s before exploding upward in 1982.

Listening to what active traders say is the most useless tactic of all. Notwithstanding their professional assurance, traders live by their viscera, not their intellect, and will abandon even the most fervently offered rationalization at the drop of a price. “In general, run quickly,“ wrote Bernard Baruch, one of the greatest of them, in a memorandum to himself about his experiences in the 1929 crash. It applies to ideas as well as investments.

(more…)

A reader has put together a helpful video mashup of George W. Bush’s wonderful 2002 speeches on lowering mortgage credit standards for minorities along with snark comments.

Let me suggest a conceptual distinction to make things clearer.

Economically, we face two related but distinguishable problems.

First, due to post-modern financial engineering, Wall Street has created vast upside down pyramids of leverage that are so intricate that nobody is sure what financial instruments are worth anymore, with frightening implications for the whole system, which could cause a lock-up of all lending.

Second, we have a fundamental problem, which is that a lot of those highly leveraged complex instruments really aren’t worth much because the basic assets they balance on top of have declined sharply in value. Essentially, in this decade home prices (primarily in a small number of states, most notably California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida) inflated to absurd levels, generating trillions in new wealth on paper. Those gains are now gone and won’t come back for decades because they were always stupid: there was never enough human capital in California to earn enough money to pay for those houses.

Now, that doesn’t sound so bad: easy come, easy go. For some homeowners in California, the nominal doubling and subsequent halving of their home values had no effect on their economic behavior. My family took our vacation in a tent in pre-bubble 2001 and again in bubblicious 2007. Unfortunately, lots of Californians spent their increased paper wealth on crud, like fancy rims. (And the salesmen who sold the rims purchased fancier tattoos. And the tattoo artists …) And now the economy and standards of living are going to have to contract as this orgy of real world spending of paper profits is slowly paid off.

Rob Oden, the current president of Carleton College, my undergraduate alma mater, recently emailed the college’s diversity news to all of us alumni. Here is the core of his glad tidings:

Our campus community has been working on initiatives and challenges related to diversity for some time, with alumni input. In 2006, Carleton’s Diversity Initiative Group (DIG) composed a Diversity Statement for the College, a statement those of us on DIG knew we needed in order to shape a plan to most proactively address the diversity-related challenges and opportunities on our campus. Last year, DIG decided that before we determined where we needed to go, we needed to learn where we are. This led to the hiring of diversity consultant Professor Sue Rankin, who worked with DIG to create and administer a survey to inform us on where we are today.

When I was a student there, such a statement would have been classified as “fatuous blather,” but I understand that for today’s Carleton, this is serious business. Indeed, googling the college’s website yields 3,450 hits for “diversity.”

I wrote back to Oden (addressing him by his first name, since if he’s my elder, it can’t be by much):

Rob,

The content of your message is a perfect example of why I stopped contributing to Carleton about seven years ago. I’d previously stopped contributing to Grinnell for the exact same reason. This was after I’d steadily contributed — at non-trivial levels — to both colleges ever since my graduation. (I attended Grinnell for a year and a half before transferring to Carleton and graduating, on-time, in 1970. I loved both places. Now I would steer prospective students away from both.)

Later, I similarly cut off the University of Chicago, my graduate school (PhD, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1978), when they submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of never-ending affirmative action in the University of Michigan cases of 2003.

These days, I contribute, instead, to Hillsdale, although I’ve never even been near its campus. I contribute to Hillsdale because their focus is on educating about Western civilization — and for its survival. Carleton and Grinnell, in contrast, are founts of diversity-babble, which really amounts to a world view based on the devil theory of white people. In doing this, Carleton and Grinnell (along with the thousands of others peas-in-a-pod that make up 99.9% of the contemporary American academy) are busily helping destroy the society and culture that made their existences possible.

Given the seemingly unreflective content of your message to us alums, this may be a forlorn gesture. But I place before you a brief piece by Thomas Sowell, one of our towering public intellectuals (and, in case you didn’t know this, he’s black) and a longer one by Jared Taylor (less known than Sowell) that both speak to this diversity mania in which you’ve allowed yourself to be enmeshed.

Read those and then let’s talk.

So far Oden is keeping his counsel. But in the meantime I’ve checked out the diversity statistics for Grinnell (2,760 hits) and Hillsdale (151 hits).

Besides their relative scarcity, it’s clear that many of those Hillsdale hits are for diversity-skepticism and, thus, quite in keeping with a paragraph out of a recent fund-raising letter to us donors from college president (and Claremont Institute co-founder) Larry Arnn:

Rest assured that we do not follow the trends promoted by the Department of Education (…). We do not teach multiculturalism or global citizenship. Hillsdale College teaches the classical liberal arts. We require students to enroll in a core grouping of courses that covers the Great Books, Western civilization, American heritage, the natural sciences, and the U.S. Constitution. Hillsdale is one of the few non-military colleges in the nation to require a semester of study on the Constitution.

How does Hillsdale escape ethnic bean-counting and the concomitant diversity mania? Along with a few other intrepid colleges, Hillsdale accepts no federal or state funds — no research or facilities grants, no student scholarships or loans, no nothing — which explains Arnn’s reference above to the federal Department of Education. As a result, the college has to raise the scratch to cover all its operating needs, all on its own. Presumably there are many “friends of Hillsdale” like myself — “refugee” alumni from other colleges — who help out a little or a lot. (The only way the feds can get back at Hillsdale would be to make donations non tax-deductible. I know this is a possibility that concerns the college.)

Whether or not you throw over your own alma mater and support Hillsdale, by all means sign up for a free subscription (by mail) to Imprimis, the monthly digest of speeches delivered in the course of the college’s various programs. For samples of what you’ll find in Imprimis, check out a couple of archived issues on Hillsdale’s website. Here’s John Marini, writing about Roosevelt’s or Reagan’s America? A Time for Choosing, and here’s Edward Erler on Birthright Citizenship and Dual Citizenship: Harbingers of Administrative Tyranny.