Donald Rumsfeld Called Out for Bin Laden Hypocrisy That Wasn't

Donald Rumsfeld Called Out for Bin Laden Hypocrisy That Wasn't:

Over at
Politico, Glenn Thrush is
dismissing Donald Rumsfeld’s characterization of the decision
to kill Osama bin Laden as an “easy call” because of the former
Defense Secretary’s decision to call off a raid in Pakistan in
2005. Thrush writes that Rumsfeld’s reasons for canceling the raid
were “many of the same factors that Obama administration
officials [say] complicated the OBL mission.” What were the
reasons?
From the 2007 New York Times report
Thrush cites:

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had
ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A.
operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many
American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He
was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an
often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from
operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

The bin Laden raid, on the other hand, was conducted by a team
of about two dozen Navy SEALs under the direction of the then-CIA
chief Leon Panetta. As for the “rift with Pakistan,” it had begun
to grow significantly in the time period after the cancelled ’05
raid. From the 2007 Times article:

Details of the aborted 2005 operation provide a glimpse
into the Bush administration’s internal negotiations over whether
to take unilateral military action in Pakistan, where General
Musharraf’s fragile government is under pressure from dissidents
who object to any cooperation with the United States.

Unilateral military action in Pakistan, of course, was kind of a

lynchpin of candidate Obama’s foreign policy in 2008, by which
time General Musharraf’s government had been toppled and the
popular civilian opposition leader and Presidential candidate
Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. Her ineffective husband rules
in Pakistan to this day, though his grip on power is
tenuous at best. President Bush’s relatively limited unilateral
actions in Pakistan,, meanwhile, were ramped up by President Obama
nearly immediately, with a significant uptick in drone strikes
beginning in 2009.
With the Bush Administration’s professed concerns about
unilateral military action entirely dismissed by the Obama
Administration’s approach to Pakistan, a significant hurdle in the
2005 raid is cleared. The participation of a few dozen Navy SEALs,
as opposed to a contingent of several hundred military and CIA
personnel, and the targeting of Osama bin Laden and his potential
compound, instead of the potential Al-Qaeda meeting considered in
2005, rounds out the biggest differences between the 2005 decision
and the 2011 decision.

Nevertheless, Republicans’
attempts to deflect the bin Laden mission as an attack on the
Presidential campaign trail betrays their weakness on the foreign
policy front. Though Republican candidates may
talk a tougher kind of talk on issues like Iran, by embracing
the ideological underpinnings of the Bush foreign policy while
disposing of the inflammatory rhetoric, President Obama has been
able to neutralize the advantage Republicans have held on the who’s
got the more bloodthirsty foreign policy front. The bin Laden raid
may have been an "easy call," but the President's embrace of his
predecessor's foreign policy and the subsequent creation of a
bipartisan
consensus on the issue made it so.
All of which should mean more play for candidates like Ron Paul or Gary Johnson. Except,
of course, for Barack Obama’s
blinding cool factor.

How to Help Realign Someone's World View

How to Help Realign Someone's World View:

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The Paul vs. Paul debate

The Paul vs. Paul debate:
That’s Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman, the video and transcript is here, here are a few comments under the fold…
1. RP: I don’t understand RP’s claim “I want a natural rate of interest.”  Even gold standards allow for monetary influences (distortions? …depends on your point of view) on interest rates.  RP has not fully absorbed Myrdal (1930) and Sraffa (1932).
2. K’s response to RP: Numerous good points, but Christie Romer (!) has shown that economic volatility was not higher before WWII.  (Somehow that’s one Romer paper which isn’t discussed so much anymore.)  That’s a major hole in K’s argument.  Relative to the evidence, he is overreaching when a more modest point would suffice.
3. RP: The transcript may be garbled here.  In any case, the Fisher effect is imperfect and so inflation does to some extent tax savings, also through interaction effects with the tax system.  That said, I don’t see that two to four percent inflation has unacceptable costs, especially when AD is otherwise weak.  On Diocletian, via Matt, here is a good recent paper.
4. K’s response: Modern liberals have a bad and selective case of 1950s nostalgia.  Krugman is significantly overrating the role of policy here.  More overreaching.  He should stick to analyzing the “no bailout in 2008-2009″ scenario, and how much worse it would have been, including for RP’s preferred ends.  On earlier time periods, he should reread his own writings from around the time of The Age of Diminished Expectations.  There is very little in The Conscience of a Liberal which actually trumps or overturns the earlier book and its focus on productivity rather than politics.
5. RP: I don’t understand his discussion of the liquidation of debt.  Perhaps the transcript is garbled again.  He is correct that the massive spending cuts which followed WWII brought no depression but rather the economy boomed.  Keynesians have a hard time explaining that episode without recourse to Ptolemaic epicycles, etc., or without admitting the importance of real shocks.
6. K’s response: On Friedman, correct and on target.  That said, K’s blogged claim today — that Friedman misrepresented his own views — lacks a quotation or citation altogether; furthermore it is contradicted by this excerpt from Free to Choose, which was Milton at his most popular but still he represented the truth correctly (ignore the heading, which is not from Friedman).  K won’t address the WWII point, although he could if he revisited his earlier writings on changing rates of productivity growth.
7. RP’s response: The decline in the value of the dollar since 1913, or whenever, has not been a major economic cost.  No one has had such a long planning horizon, for one thing.  We don’t see much indexation, for another.
8. RP on the Fed: If we had “real monetary competition,” dollars still would reign supreme.  Who now is opening up U.S. bank accounts in other currencies?  Or using gold indexing?  It is allowed.
9. K’s response: Mostly I agree, though it is odd to think of shadow banking as “currency competition.”  It is more akin to “not explicitly regulated banking, with stochastic under-capitalization, and with bailouts in the background and largely driven by regulatory arbitrage.”  That makes it less of a counter to RP than PK is suggesting.
10. RP: Equating inflation with “fraud” is an excessive moralization of the issue.  The point remains that gentle inflation is usually a good thing, and that the money supply under free banking, or a gold standard, would be excessively pro-cyclical.  The best shot is to hope that a natural monopoly private clearinghouse would institute nominal gdp targeting in terms of levels and perhaps “targeting the forecast” too.
11. The exchange about Bernanke: I don’t know whether Krugman literally has “printing money” in mind, so this is hard to interpret.  They are stuck in the vernacular, when a more precise economic language would allow for more targeted commentary.
12. PK: Demographics, plus government gridlock and lower productivity growth, make a higher debt-gdp ratio more problematic than Krugman admits.
13. RP: Polemics from RP.
14. K’s response. Very short.  But if he likes the market so much, why does he so often seem to be pushing for much higher taxation and higher government revenue?  I understand why he wants single payer, but he also seems to favor direct government provision of health care itself.
15. RP: The discussion of debt doesn’t make sense, though it is correct to argue that eight percent measured unemployment underestimates the depth of our labor market problems.  I fear, though, that he may be holding an exaggerated version of this point.  U6 matters, but it should not be taken as the correct measure of unemployment.
16. RP: Seigniorage isn’t a major source of government revenue, and in general it is worth thinking about why corporate profits are so high and why the stock market, at least in recent times, has done OK.  Is it really all about policy uncertainty?  Lots of polemic here.  Still, RP raises the point that Fed purchases of T-Bills may be helping to keep rates artificially low.  This remains unproven, but it is also unrebutted.
17. RP (again): There is no credible alternative to the dollar as reserve currency today.  On Spain, it is nonetheless a good point that spending cuts in a dysfunctional economy don’t help very much if at all.
More RP: Doesn’t PK get to speak again? Did Austerians suddenly cut the funding for his part of the transcript?  (Had I watched the video, I wouldn’t have had time to write this post.)  In any case, pegging the dollar to gold in an era of commodity price inflation would be a disaster and lead to massive deflationary pressures or more likely a complete abandonment of the gold peg rather quickly.
In sum: There were too many times when RP simply piled polemic points on top of each other and stopped making a sequential argument.  He overrates the costs of inflation, including in the long term, and for a believer in the market finds it remarkably non-robust in response to bad monetary policy.  Still, given that Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in economics, and Paul a gynecologist, the score could have been more lopsided than in fact it was.

The World Needs More Canada

The World Needs More Canada:
Exceeding all expectations, Paul Romer convinced the Honduran government to authorize a charter city. Now Romer is encouraging Canada to export its institutions. Here is Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras, writing in Canada’s most important newspaper, The Globe and Mail:

http://www.crossed-flag-pins.com

With the near unanimous support of its Congress, Honduras recently defined a new legal entity: la Región Especial de Desarrollo. A RED is an independent reform zone intended to offer jobs and safety to families who lack a good alternative; officials in the RED will be able to partner with foreign governments in critical areas such as policing, jurisprudence and transparency. By participating, Canada can lead an innovative approach to development assistance, an approach that tackles the primary roadblock to prosperity in the developing world: weak governance.
…According to Gallup, the number of adults worldwide who would move permanently to Canada if given the chance is about 45 million. Although Canada can’t accommodate everyone who’d like to move here, it can help to bring stronger governance to many new places that could accept millions of new residents. The RED in Honduras is the place to start.
…By participating in RED governance, Canada can make the new city a more attractive place for would-be residents and investors.
…The courts in the RED will be independent from those in the rest of Honduras. The Mauritian Supreme Court [!, AT]  has agreed in principle to serve as a court of final appeal for the RED, but Canada can play a strong complementary role. Because the RED can appoint judges from foreign jurisdictions, Canadian justices could hear RED cases from Canada and help train local jurists.
Oversight, policing and jurisprudence are just a few of the ways in which Canada can help.
…The world does not need more aid. As the Gallup numbers show, it needs more Canada – more of the norms and know-how that lead to the rule of law, true inclusion and real opportunity for all.

Paul Romer is on an incredible run.

Ron Paul vs Paul Krugman

Ron Paul vs Paul Krugman:



The two debated on Bloomberg TV yesterday. Cowen scores the exchange:

There were too many times when RP simply piled polemic points on top of each other and stopped making a sequential argument.  He overrates the costs of inflation, including in the long term, and for a believer in the market finds it remarkably non-robust in response to bad monetary policy.  Still, given that Krugman is a Nobel Laureate in economics, and Paul a gynecologist, the score could have been more lopsided than in fact it was.

Krugman throws up his hands:

[Y]ou approach what is, in the end, a somewhat technical subject in a format in which no data can be presented, in which there’s no opportunity to check facts (everything Paul said about growth after World War II was wrong, but who will ever call him on it?). So people react based on their prejudices. If Ron Paul got on TV and said “Gah gah goo goo debasement! theft!” — which is a rough summary of what he actually did say — his supporters would say that he won the debate hands down; I don’t think my supporters are quite the same, but opions may differ.

Drum uses the exchange to bash debates as a whole.

Gay Mitt Romney spokesman resigns

Gay Mitt Romney spokesman resigns: A openly gay spokesman for US presidential candidate Mitt Romney resigns, citing personal reasons but amid criticism by anti-gay conservatives.

Marketplace takes a look at how the iPad is made and who, exactly, builds it

Marketplace takes a look at how the iPad is made and who, exactly, builds it:

The unique privilege of jumpsuiting up and prowling the Foxconn factory floor may be reserved for the likes of Tim Cook and Nightline's Bill Weir, but thanks to American Public Media's Marketplace, we can all take a peek at the iPad production line. The above video is part of Rob Schmitz' ongoing look at Foxconn's factory conditions. Schmitz is partially responsible for debunking Mike Daisey's "theatrical" deception, and now hopes to educate readers on the reality of Foxconn's Longhua facility.

"When I gave examples of some of the American media coverage of the working conditions at Foxconn, many workers laughed, telling me it's not really that bad" Schmitz writes. "But that doesn't mean the workers don't have complaints." Through a series of interviews, Schmitz unveils how workers feel about their supervisors, jobs, pay, family back home and their dreams for the future. So, how's that iPad made? Check out the source link below, and find out.

Marketplace takes a look at how the iPad is made and who, exactly, builds it originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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