Roundup: Media's Take

Richard Parker: Nationalization is not un-American. We have a long history that proves it.

[Richard Parker is a lecturer in public policy and senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He has worked as an economist for the United Nations Development Programme and is a cofounder of Mother Jones Magazine.] ... The truth is that the United States has a long and overlooked history of "nationalization," starting with the Northwest Ordinance of 1789, and then the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Both acts put vast amounts of American

George F. Will: How Congress Trumps Darwin

"Descended from the apes!" exclaimed the wife of the bishop of Worcester. "Let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known." An American majority resists such an annoying notion, endorsing the proposition that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years." Still, evolution is a fact and its mechanism is natural selection: Creatures with variations

Ann Pettifor: It's Japan Again, Stupid

[Ann Pettifor, author and analyst of the global financial system (debtonation.org), and a co-author of the Green New Deal...My books include Real World Economic Outlook - the legacy of globalization, debt and deflation, and The Coming First World Debt Crisis, both published by Palgrave Macmillan. ] Everyone should just calm down and get a grip. The problem is not the fiscal stimulus. It is not pork barrel politics. It is not the banks. Nor is it those parasites, the bankers. It's no

Daniel Gross: Decline? I'll Decline.

The dumb, willfully blind optimists who dominated the late boom have been evicted—and the ardent declinists, the bears and the prophetic historians have moved in. They've come armed with copies of Gibbon and Malthus, and with data. If this is the typical financial-crisis-induced recession, economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff conclude, unemployment could spike to double digits through 2011, and the housing and stock markets won't rebound until the end of 2010. As the government

Ann Banks: Don't underestimate the power of storytelling. It got folks through the Depression.

[Banks is the editor of "First-Person America," an anthology of oral histories collected by the WPA's Federal Writers' Project. She lives in New York City.] If my grandmother Blanche were around to read the headlines today, I know just what story she would tell: in the mid-1920s, at the height of the Florida land rush, she was working in a real-estate office in Palm Beach. Times were flush and sales were booming. This exuberance was on display in a showy mosaic map of Flor

Ben Stein: What needs to be done to fix the economy?

... What is the solution? With the greatest respect to President Obama, it is not necessarily to hire men and women to build more wind-power windmills, or “21st-century classrooms.” These plans may have merit in and of themselves. But they do not get at the central problem: credit. The International Monetary Fund just issued an opinion to the same effect: that the United States economy and the world economy will not revive until the credit crisis is resolved. The solution is to lend

NYT Editorial: Those Who Ignore History ...

... The beggar-thy-neighbor policy-making that spread in late 1920s and early 1930s should provide a bleak warning. The United States first sparked depression across the world when it started raising interest rates in 1928 to curb stock-market speculation, forcing other countries, whose currencies were fixed under the gold standard, to do the same to stem an exodus of reserves. But it spread and deepened as the United States and other countries responded to slower growth and falling exports by e

Buz Teacher: Bridges and Books ... Bring Back the Federal Writers Project

[Stuart (Buz) Teacher graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. degree in psychology and sociology, and attended the graduate program at the Wharton School's Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law. In 1972, he co-founded Running Press Book Publishers, one of the largest independent book publishers in the United States, with offices in Philadelphia, New York, and London.] I love books and that's a problem. I've had a really great time working in publishing

William Kleinknecht: Happy Birthday Ronald Reagan (Thanks for Ruining America)

[William Kleinknecht is the author of The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, coming from Nation Books next week.] Ronald Reagan's 98th birthday is being celebrated today at a time that should be a cause for soul searching among his admirers. The conservative revolution that Reagan unleashed upon the nation and much of the world lay in ashes, and Washington is embarking on a new epoch of government intervention to eradicate the excesses of

Con Coughlin: Is Britain no longer special to America?

[Con Coughlin is a British author and journalist.] One minute, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is waxing lyrical about the enduring strength of the special relationship between Britain and the United States. The next, he finds himself with his back to the wall in the House of Commons trying to defend Washington's latest bully-boy tactics. Earlier this week, Miliband had enjoyed the enviable diplomatic distinction of becoming the first foreign envoy to meet with H

Christopher Beam: He's Lincoln! No, He's FDR! No, He's Polk!

Presidential comparison isn't the most rigorous form of political analysis. Bill Clinton was the next JFK, until he was Warren G. Harding, and then Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush was Teddy Roosevelt until he was James Buchanan. And Barack Obama, if you believe everything you read, combines the best of every single ex-president, except perhaps Millard Fillmore. The most common comparisons, of course, are between Obama and Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy.

Arthur Herman: The Return of Carterism?

[Arthur Herman is the author most recently of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age (Bantam Books). His articles in COMMENTARY include “Why Iraq Was Inevitable” (July-August 2008) and “Who Owns the Vietnam War? (December 2007).] ... For a little historical perspective, it might be useful to look at the last President who embraced exactly the same analysis of America’s foreign-policy problems and enacted exactly the same strategy for resol

Jonathan Cohn: The Big-Picture Reasons The U.S. Needs Reform, Daschle Or No Daschle

At first blush, the findings of a study group called the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care might not seem particularly surprising. It's no longer news that millions of American families face financial ruin or physical catastrophe because they have no way to pay medical bills. Nor is it a great revelation that, as a committee staff member put it, "[v]ery few of these families are indigent in the accepted meaning of the word. They have a home, they buy their own food and clothing and pay

George Will: DC to get voting reps in Congress?

One answer is: Six rows of stars -- the top, third and fifth rows with nine; the second, fourth and sixth rows with eight. The question is: How might the nation reconfigure its flag to acknowledge a 51st state. Or "state." The question is pertinent, or it would be were Congress inclined to adhere to the Constitution. Both the House and Senate are moving toward pretending, as part of a disgraceful bargain with Utah, that the District of Columbia is a state. The

Dick Morris: Keynesian fallacy

There are very few economists who really buy into Keynesian theory anymore. Instead, the idea of "rational expectations" has taken its place. The difference between the two approaches is essential to understanding why Obama's stimulus package won't work. Keynes felt that people would react automatically to a few dollars in their hands. Consumers would run out and buy new products, and businessmen, seeing the uptick in sales, would rush to open new plants and hire new worke

Dick Armey: Washington Could Use Less Keynes and More Hayek

[Mr. Armey, a former economics professor and former majority leader of the House of Representatives, is chairman of FreedomWorks Foundation.] ... President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats (very few of whom likely have read Keynes's 1936 book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money") have dug up the dead economist's convenient justification for deficit spending in defense of their bloated stimulus legislation. But none ask the most important question:

Chris Gay: Are we smarter about economics than we were 80 years ago? Yes, but …

[Chris Gay is a writer and editor living in New York.] It's widely thought that another Great Depression is impossible these days because monetary-policy makers and other policymakers simply know more, and have better tools, than their predecessors did 80 years ago. But is that wishful thinking? What, exactly, do we know now that we didn't then, and how could knowing it prevent a depression? Of course, there is no precise, universally accepted definition of a depression

Judea Pearl: Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil

[Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding.] This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of our son, former Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. My wife Ruth and I wonder: Would Danny have believed that today's world emerged after his tragedy? The answer does not come easily. Danny was an optimist, a true believer in the goodness of

Sam Tanenhaus: Conservatism Is Dead ... An intellectual autopsy of the movement

[Sam Tanenhaus is editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review and is at work on a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.] In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the

Norman Solomon: Why Are We Still at War?

[Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. For recent TV and radio interviews with him about President Obama and war policies, go to: http://www.normansolomon.com .] The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to av