From City Journal:

William Voegeli

The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm

California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks.

In 1956, the economist Charles Tiebout provided the framework that best explains why people vote with their feet. The “consumer-voter,” as Tiebout called him, challenges government officials to “ascertain his wants for public goods and tax him accordingly.” Each jurisdiction offers its own package of public goods, along with a particular tax burden needed to pay for those goods. As a result, “the consumer-voter moves to that community whose local government best satisfies his set of preferences.” In selecting a jurisdiction, the mobile consumer-voter is, in effect, choosing a club to join based on the benefits that it offers and the dues that it charges.

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Adrian Blomfield of the neocon Daily Telegraph does a great job of giving the Ft. Hood shooter’s Palestinian cousins in Ramallah in the West Bank (Ramallah is the capital of the Palestinian National Authority) enough rope:

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is the suspected shooter at Fort Hood U.S Army Post where according to authorities 12 people were shot and killed and 31 other were wounded Photo: EPA

Speaking from their home in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Hasan’s relatives painted a picture of a man cornered into an act of “lunacy” by the repeated discrimination of his peers and an attempt by the army to force him to serve in Afghanistan.

“They discriminated against him because he was a Muslim,” Mohammed Mohammed, one of Hasan’s cousins, told the Daily Telegraph. “We’re not trying to make excuses for him but what we were told was that he was under a lot of pressure.

“What we imagine is that he could not take this bad treatment and gave vent unfortunately.” …

In the house next door, Hasan’s brother Anas had locked himself indoors with his wife, refusing to speak to anyone, including his relatives.

According to his cousins, Hasan was badly scarred by the deaths of his parents in 1998 and 2001. Along with his two brothers, he became increasingly devout, they said.

“They became very religious after their mother died,” Mohammed Hasan said. “They were very observant. They prayed a lot.”

Yet the two cousins insisted that the major’s religion was not tinged with political fanaticism, although they said he had become increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative in recent years.

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Now that I think about it, I realize I always had a gut feeling that, somehow, it was all Malcolm’s fault. If only I’d trusted my instincts, like he told me to in Blink … Imagine how much money I could have made shorting the stocks of companies that had hired Malcolm to give speeches!

The newspapers are talking about the new study saying only 1 in 4 youths is eligible to enlist in the military. Of course, the study doesn’t break it down by race, but the information is readily available.

A 2007 Rand Corporation report prepared the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth: Obstacles and Opportunities, has a lot of interesting information (although nothing, so far as I can tell, on whether devout Muslim majors are likely to shoot up Fort Hood):

Hispanics are underrepresented among military recruits. In 2007, Hispanics made up 17.0 percent of the general population (ages 18 to 40) but only 11.4 percent of Army enlistment contracts and 15 percent of Navy enlistment contracts. While the trend is upward (in 1994, 6.6 percent of Army contracts and 8.9 percent of Navy contracts were Hispanic), Hispanics are still underrepresented.

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Actually, there are a lot of examples of environmental policies working. You don’t hear much about them, though. For whatever reason, nobody ever promotes environmentalism by referring to past successes.

Ozone layer — Saved by getting rid of certain chemicals, although their replacements might be causing global warming.

Acid rain — Better scrubbers on smokestacks have largely fixed this problem. It turned out that the technology wasn’t as costly as it seemed.

Smog in LA — About an order of magnitude better than when I was a kid, although the cost in poorer miles per gallon must be huge. You may recall that there used to be two different MPG ratings from the government on cars, one for California and one for the rest of the country, with the California one about, I don’t know, one-tenth worse. Now, everybody has the California smog-fighting equipment on their cars, so that must increase our oil bill by many billions annually.

Lead — Here’s where one environmental improvement caused another improvement. The catalytic converter (invented by GM and given free to other car companies — thanks, GM!) would be ruined by leaded gasoline, so unleaded gas was introduced.

Redwoods — Saved by the Save the Redwoods League, co-founded by Madison Grant.

Pelicans — Very rare at the beach when I was a kid, now plentiful due to ban on DDT, which makes eggshells brittle

Bald Eagles — Not plentiful, but they’re back. (This is one you occasionally hear about, because people like large vicious animals.)

You might think that environmentalists would promote an image for themselves that says, “Trust us. We fixed problems in the past and we know how to fix them now,” but, instead, apocalypse and misanthropy seems to sell a lot better.

From Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve, a report by Mission Readiness, a group run by retired generals and admirals:

The Pentagon reports that 75 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 cannot join the United States military – 26 million young Americans. …

Three Crucial Reasons Why Young Americans Cannot Join the Military:

Although there may be multiple reasons why an individual is ineligible to serve in the military, the three biggest problems are that too many young Americans are poorly educated, involved in crime, or physically unfit.

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Over at Taki’s Magazine, my new Wednesday column gets around, after last week’s preliminary throat clearings, to finally telling you what I think of the TV serial Mad Men:

Mad Men, the upscale drama about an early 1960s Madison Avenue advertising agency, is a sort of Brideshead Revisited for heterosexual American grown-ups. For Baby Boomers, it’s hard to watch Mad Men without enviously exclaiming: Our parents had it better!

Read it there, and comment upon it here.

The dogs that haven’t barked for the last six months have been the Obama Youth, who turned out in large numbers for him in 2008. If you can trust the exit polls (which you can’t, but what else do we have to go upon?), in the two gubernatorial races tonight, both won by Republicans in states Obama carried in 2008, the under-30 share of the vote fell to about half what it was last year.

New Jersey
2008: 18-29 year olds cast 17% of votes, 67% for Obama
2009: 18-29 year olds cast 9% of votes, 57% for Corzine

2008: 73% white, 49% for Obama
2009: 73% white, 34% for Corzine

Virginia
2008: 18-29 year olds cast 21% of votes, 60% for Obama
2009: 18-29 year olds cast 10% of votes, 44% for Deeds

2008: 70% white, 39% for Obama
2009: 78% white, 32% for Deeds

Would Obama have had more legislative success if he’d kept the Kids interested by first emphasizing Saving the World through carbon capping instead of something boring and unsexy and will-never-happen-to-me like health care?

Or are young people always bored with day to day politics?

Or was Obama just a fad, like how my generation decided in 1982-83 that Men at Work was the greatest band in history?

From Slate:

What Ever Happened to the Amazon Rain Forest?
Did we save it or what?
By Brendan Borrell

We used to hear so much about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but lately not a word. So what happened—did we save it or not?

We didn’t save it, but we haven’t stopped trying. Environmentalists fret over the fate of the Amazon for good reason: It contains more than half of the planet’s remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world’s biodiversity. Saving all this was once a rallying cry for green activists, and a few early triumphs made that goal seem likely. But attention soon shifted away from the rainforest to issues like climate change and organic agriculture, and now the Amazon is disappearing at about the same rate it was in the 1980s.

They should have, like, Retro-Environmentalism, where everybody watches old Captain Planet episodes.

From the Associated Press:

Maine voters repealed a state law Tuesday that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed, dealing the gay rights movement a heartbreaking [no bias here!] defeat in New England, the corner of the country most supportive of gay marriage.

Gay marriage has now lost in every single state - 31 in all - in which it has been put to a popular vote. Gay-rights activists had hoped to buck that trend in Maine - known for its moderate, independent-minded electorate - and mounted an energetic, well-financed campaign.

Yet, you know we’re going to end up with gay marriage anyway, no matter what the voters wan