It's the End of the Year Special Edition!

Subject: It's the End of the Year Special Edition!

From: The Weekly Standard <editor@updates.weeklystandard.com>

Date: 12/21/11, 13:50

To: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com>

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The Weekly Standard <r-hfbbwfzsqcmzmgsjqwflqcjdswlpjqcwfrbbljjbbbbd@updates.weeklystandard.com>

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December 21, 2011

By Matthew Continetti

COLD OPEN

One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes is "The Opposite," in which Jerry tells George that, "If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right." George starts behaving against his better judgment, and before long he's landed a job with the New York Yankees and secured a date with an attractive woman.

Sometimes I feel as though my commentary on the 2012 Republican primary is a replay of "The Opposite." Everything I felt would happen in the race did not. I thought that, on paper, Tim Pawlenty was the best combination of conservatism and electability. He didn't last beyond the Ames straw poll. I thought Rick Perry had one of the best debuts of any candidate. He collapsed shortly afterward. I was convinced Paul Ryan would enter the race. Ryan has no desire to run for president.

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Michele Bachmann, I believed, had the capacity to become a strong conservative leader in the tradition of Margaret Thatcher. Silly me. I suspected Newt Gingrich could successfully bridge the gap between college-educated Republicans and members of the white working class. But Gingrich hasn't been able to defend his relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. As a result, he's fading fast.

Throughout it all, Mitt Romney has been steady. He doesn't inspire, but he does not repulse. He's changed his positions, but he has also been consistently conservative since he began running for president in 2006. He seems insincere on television, but everyone who knows him personally says he is one of the most decent men on the planet. He has a reputation for caution, but has also embraced Medicare reform. He is a managerial technocrat running for the nomination of an increasingly populist party. My instinct tells me he couldn't win in a year like 2012.

But as Jerry pointed out, if every instinct I've had is wrong, the opposite would have to be right.

SOME HIGHLIGHTS FROM TWS IN 2011

"Another Triumph for the Greens," by Jonathan V. Last, January 31, 2011
"Understanding Reagan," by Andrew Ferguson, February 7, 2011
"Lower Education," by Joseph Epstein, March 21, 2011
"Miami Vice," by Matt Labash, May 9, 2011
"The Crash of 1993," by Jonathan V. Last, June 13, 2011
"Semper Fly" by Matt Labash, June 20, 2011
"The Last Shuttle Launch," by P.J. O'Rourke, July 25, 2011
"The Old Ball Game," by Joseph Epstein, August 8, 2011
"Vodka Nation," by Victorino Matus, August 15, 2011
"The End of the New Deal Order," by Matthew Continetti, September 5, 2011
"€gads!" by Christopher Caldwell, September 26, 2011
"Hidden Persuaders," by Fred Barnes, November 7, 2011
"George's God," by Andrew Ferguson, November 21, 2011
"Anarchy in the U.S.A." by Matthew Continetti, November 28, 2011
"Lies, Damned Lies, and Factchecking," by Mark Hemingway, December 19, 2011

That should get you through winter break.

LOOKING BACK

"At the heart of conservatism's argument with liberalism is its rejection of the notion of human perfectibility, with or without technology. That is the other guy's game (and why his failures, when juxtaposed with his promises, appear doubly abysmal). Conservatism can't be revolutionary in anything but the more limited 'negative' sense of radically stripping away the encumbrances of the welfare state. Conservatives do not need a more 'positive' vision other than the faith that, with these encumbrances removed, native American genius will flourish, and civil society, freed from the grip of the state, will renew itself. What new society this will yield, we do not know. Conservatives believe such things unknowable."

—Charles Krauthammer, "A Critique of Pure Newt," from our September 18, 1995, issue.

Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.

'Live the Values'

Foreign-policy experts urge Obama to act on Syria

Cause of Death

Kim Jong Il died of 'fatigue.' Isn't that how Elvis died?

BEST OF 2011 (IN MY OPINION)

I keep a document on my computer desktop where I list the books, music, and movies I enjoy over the course of a given year. And I have to say, looking over the most recent list, that 2011 was not a high point in the annals of culture. Other than George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons—and a few other things—most of what I enjoyed during the last year wasn't released between January 1 and December 19. I suppose that, as a conservative, I'm obligated to point out that this proves the old is better than the new. Here are my picks:

Books: Will Durant's Story of Philosophy; anything by Michael Connelly; Andrew Ferguson's Crazy U; Michael Lewis's The Big Short and Boomerang; Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative; George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire; Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends and Breaking Ranks; Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom; Hadley Arkes's Natural Rights and the Right to Choose; Joe Lieberman's The Gift of Rest; John Crowe Ransom's God without Thunder; Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History and What is Political Philosophy?; and Gertrude Himmelfarb's People of the Book.

Music: Fitz and The Tantrums, Picking up the Pieces; Queens of the Stone Age, Queens of the Stone Age; Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring for My Halo; The National, High Violet; Daft Punk, Tron: Legacy: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (believe me, it's good!); and John Adams, Harmonielehre.

Film: Crazy Heart (2009); My Darling Clementine (1946); The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962); The Searchers (1956); and on television, Fringe (2008-present).

FROM THE DESKTOP

Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011
Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011
New photos from the Ardennes Forest in World War II
The trouble with Hitchens
How Obamacare violates natural rights

QUOTE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR!)

"Ecotheology, like all dominant religious narratives, serves the dominant forms of social and economic organization in which it is embedded. Catholicism valorized poverty, social hierarchy, and agrarianism for the masses in feudal societies that lived and worked the land. Protestantism valorized industriousness, capital accumulation, and individuation among the rising merchant classes of early capitalist societies and would define the social norms of modernizing industrial societies. Today's secular ecotheology values creativity, imagination, and leisure over the work ethic, productivity, and efficiency in societies that increasingly prosper from their knowledge economies while outsourcing crude, industrial production of goods to developing societies. Living amid unprecedented levels of wealth and security, ecological elites reject economic growth as a measure of well-being, tell cautionary tales about modernity and technology, and warn of overpopulation abroad now that the societies in which they live are wealthy and their populations are no longer growing."

—Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "Evolve," Breakthrough Journal, Fall 2011.

LOOKING AHEAD

We'll have articles on Baby Boomers, Vaclav Havel, and of course the race for the Republican nomination in upcoming issues of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

HITCHENS ON AMERICA

"What can I say? I was happy there [in New York City]. The work and the conversation were worthwhile. And there was something more: the crucial four words in the greatest of all documents. The pursuit of happiness. Just to name that is to summarize and encapsulate all that is detested by the glacial malice of fundamentalism and tribalism. That's what they can't stand. They confuse it with hedonism and selfishness and profanity, and they have no idea. No idea at all."

—"For Patriot Dreams," collected in Love, Poverty, and War (2004), p. 221.

PARTING SHOT

Since the onset of the Great Recession, I've argued that a cut in the payroll tax would help spur the economy. As part of the tax bill that the last Congress passed in December 2010, individual payroll taxes were reduced to 4.2 percent from 6.2 percent. That cut is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. Democrats want to extend the lower rate for only two months. Republicans want to maintain the lower rate for another year. Each side wants to paint the other as cynical and willing to raise taxes on American workers. But has the tax cut actually worked?

It's good that a worker gets to keep a larger piece of his paycheck. But every policy comes with tradeoffs. One of the theories behind the payroll tax cut was that it would give people more money to spend at the mall, thereby boosting demand. Look at this chart, though, and you see that consumer spending has remained within the same range for the last two years. Either the additional money in our paychecks isn't noticeable, or we are using it to reduce our huge private debts.

What the economy really needs is torrential growth to raise employment and incomes. But we can see here that growth was moribund in the first three quarters of 2011. Unemployment has been on a downward trajectory for the last several months, but that is partly a consequence of individuals leaving the labor force. In any case, the correlation between the tax cut and the lessening of unemployment does not necessarily imply causation.

Since 2008, the U.S. economy has received an extraordinary amount of fiscal and monetary stimulus. The measures seem to have prevented the collapse of the banking system and the onset of mass unemployment. But it's hard to call current conditions an economic "recovery." Huge deficits, targeted tax cuts, short-term boosts in demand like Cash for Clunkers, and extraordinarily low interests rates have not taken us to where we want to be.

I increasingly suspect that it is the debt itself that holds back economies like Japan and the United States. Our long-term entitlement obligations loom as a huge future tax increase on the economy, and our individual mortgage, student, and consumer debt limits savings and investment.

There are three ways governments reduce debt: spend less, tax more, or decrease the real value of debt through inflation. The payroll tax cut may have helped families reduce their debt—not by much—but by increasing public debt it failed truly to address the problem. Whatever Congress does, I doubt we would see major changes to the economy if the tax returned to its 6.2 percent rate. That's not because I want taxes to increase on labor. It's because the American economy has been in the doldrums for years, and nothing we have tried so far has stirred it.

This is the final newsletter of 2011—and, as it happens, the last one that will have my name on it. The newsletter will recommence in January under the watchful eye of one of The Weekly Standard's senior writers, who will continue to provide commentary and previews of upcoming issues. I can't wait to read what they come up with.

Have a happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year. And don't forget that you can write me—and, starting in January, my successor—at editor@weeklystandard.com.

—Matthew Continetti

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