What are we hoping will come out of this presidential campaign?

George Will writes in the Washington Post,

Presidential campaigns inflate expectations that power wielded from government’s pinnacle will invigorate the nation. Thus campaigns demonstrate that creationists threaten the creative ferment that produces social improvement. Not religious creationists, who are mistaken but inconsequential. It is secular creationists whose social costs are steep.

“Secular theists” — economist Don Boudreaux’s term — produce governments gripped by the fatal conceit that they are wiser than society’s spontaneous experimental order. Such governments imposed order suffocates improvisation and innovation. Like religious creationists gazing upon biological complexity, secular theists assume that social complexity requires an intentional design imposed from on high by wise designers, a.k.a. them.

... Presidential campaigns inflate expectations that power wielded from government’s pinnacle will invigorate the nation. Thus campaigns demonstrate that creationists threaten the creative ferment that produces social improvement. Not religious creationists, who are mistaken but inconsequential. It is secular creationists whose social costs are steep.

“Secular theists” — economist Don Boudreaux’s term — produce governments gripped by the fatal conceit that they are wiser than society’s spontaneous experimental order. Such governments imposed order suffocates improvisation and innovation. Like religious creationists gazing upon biological complexity, secular theists assume that social complexity requires an intentional design imposed from on high by wise designers, a.k.a. them.

No one, writes Ridley, anticipated that when Gutenberg made printed books affordable, increased literacy would create a market for spectacles, which would lead to improved lenses and the invention of telescopes, which would produce the discovery that the Earth orbits the sun. No one planned that one particular book’s argument for the fecundity of freedom would bolster the case for limited government the way Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” did when published in 1776.

Read more here.

Climate fine-tuners

George Will writes at National Review,

...as the ink dries on the Paris gesture of right-mindedness, let us praise the solar energy source most responsible for the surge of human betterment that began with the harnessing of fossil fuels around 1800.

The source is, of course, coal, a still abundant and indispensable form in which the sun’s energy has been captured from carbon-based life. Matt Ridley, a member of a British coal-producing family and author of The Rational Optimist, notes that the path of mankind’s progress, material as well as moral, has been from reliance on renewable but insufficient energy sources to today’s 85 percent reliance on energy from fossil fuels.

The progression has been from reliance on human (often slaves’) muscles, to animal energy (first oxen, then horses), to burning wood and peat as stores of sunlight, to energy from water and wind, to, at last, fossil fuels. Sustained economic growth, a necessary prerequisite for scientific and technological dynamism, became possible, Ridley writes, when humanity was able to rely on “non-renewable, non-green, non-clean power.” Because “there appeared from underground a near-magical substance,” Britain’s landscape was spared: “Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million laborers. . . . The capacity of the country’s steam engines alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men.”

And cheap coal produced the iron for new labor-saving machines. The environmental toll from burning coal (it emits carbon dioxide, radioactivity, and mercury) has been slight relative to the environmental and other blessings from burning it.

In May 1945, Aneurin Bevan, a leading light among British socialists, said: “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.” Genius was not required. Socialism — command-and-control government of the sort that climate fine-tuners recommend for the entire planet — soon accomplished this marvel, with coal rationed and the price of fish soaring.

Read more here.

The Trump factor

Talk radio is still buzzing about Donald Trump's announcement that he wishes to be considered for the GOP presidential candidacy. Well, it's not his announcement, it's his comments about illegal immigration that are causing the buzz. Denver talk show host Dan Caplis says what is different about Trump is that he exudes strength. So many of the other candidates are nuanced and coached by political consultants and they come across as mushy compared to Trump. It is hard to know the other candidates.

Why isn't our border secure? Why did we the people allow this to happen?

Trump has drawn the ire of two Fox News commentators, George Will and Charles Krauthammer. Will called Trump a "bloviating ignoramus,"and Krauthammer said Trump deserves his high disapproval ratings. Trump fired back, calling Will the “dumbest (and most overrated) political commentator of all time,” and said Krauthammer was "one of the worst and most boring political pundits."

Candidates Rubio, Bush, and Perry have all criticized Trump for his comments about illegal immigrants. Trump responded by saying Perry needs new glasses (something I have long felt, and something which got an immediate chuckle from me.) As for Jeb Bush, Trump had this to say: “Today, Jeb Bush once again proves that he is out of touch with the American people,” Trump wrote Saturday. “Just like the simple question asked of Jeb on Iraq, where it took him five days and multiple answers to get it right, he doesn’t understand anything about the border or border security. In fact, Jeb believes illegal immigrants who break our laws when they cross our border come ‘out of love.'”

The conversation is clearly centering around issues articulated by Trump. Will more people now pay attention to the GOP debate because Trump is involved? Will Trump overwhelm the other candidates, or will one or more of them emerge as tough enough to take him on? If Trump does not get enough votes to win the GOP primary, will he bolt to a third party and give the election to the despicable Hillary Clinton as Ross Perot did to her husband Bill?

Candidates who insult our intelligence

Is it possible that the GOP will nominate a candidate in 2016 who will not insult our intelligence? One who would promise

“I will not ruin any more American evenings with televised State of the Union addresses. I will mail my thoughts on that subject to Congress ‘from time to time,’ as the Constitution directs. This was good enough for Jefferson and every subsequent president until Woodrow Wilson, the first president who believed, as progressives do, that the nation cannot function without constant presidential tutoring and hectoring."

“Finally, there have been 44 presidencies before the one I moderately aspire to administer, and there will be many more than 44 after it. Mine will be a success if, a century hence, Americans remember me as dimly as they remember Grover Cleveland, the last Democratic president with proper understanding of this office’s place in our constitutional order.”

Read more here.

Andrew McCarthy on terrorism

Andrew McCarthy nearly fell out of his chair watching a replay of a discussion between George Will and Charles Krauthammer, in which Will didn't see Boko Haram as a terrorist group. McCarthy defines terrorism:

Terrorism is the use and threatened use of mass violence in violation of the laws of war in order to coerce a government or society into policy changes or the acceptance of some ideological agenda.

A terrorist organization is distinguished from a militia by its failure to comply with the laws and customs of war—particularly, its intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. Al Qaeda has military objectives, too; so does every terrorist organization. The fact that a terrorist organization has “military objectives” is beside the point if it pursues those objectives through mass-murder attacks in conjunction (with) other operations distinguished by their extreme cruelty—like brutally murdering scores of school boys and turning young girls into sex slaves, as Boko Haram does.

Boko Haram’s official name is Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, meaning “People (or The Group) Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teaching and Jihad.” The short handle Boko Haram reflects a part of this overarching Islamic supremacist mission: “Western education is forbidden.” (Note the wishful thinking of progressives repeatedly peddled over the past few days: Boko Haram, we’re told, is not an Islamist group; they are just a backward-thinking political group opposed to education. In fact, what they oppose is Western education; they are all for Islamic education because they are an avowedly Islamist group.)

This jihadist ideology does not recognize national borders, so it is foolish to portray it as content to wage local wars for political control of this country or that. It sees the world as Dar al-Harb (the realm of war) versus Dar al-Islam, in which the latter must conquer the former. In fact, as I noted here at Ordered Liberty a few days ago—citing Tom Joscelyn’s Long War Journal partner, Bill Roggio—Boko Haram’s leader, Abubaker Shekau, explicitly threatened the United States (in sympathy with al Qaeda) in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather, jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Like al Qaeda, Boko Haram sees itself as at war with the West and non-Muslims generally, not just with the Nigerian government.

I will be presumptuous again regarding what George Will may be thinking because I have expressed a similar frustration for many years. I’ve always objected to the term “War on Terror.” My problem with it is not just that “terrorism” is a tactic rather than an identifiable group of people, and therefore that the term “War on Terror” conveys a reluctance to name the enemy we are fighting against. It is also that the imprecision of the term “War on Terror” easily lends itself to mission creep: You start out fighting jihadists who mass-murdered Americans and the next thing you know you’re in a (now) thirteen-year-old futile experiment to bring Western democracy to sharia societies—a mission that very few Americans would have supported using our troops for but one that slipstreamed behind the effort to fight “terror.” After a while, under the same spell of political correctness that produced the term “War on Terror” in the first place, the government is institutionalizing procedures that undermine liberty under the guise of combatting “terror”—e.g., intrusive, non-particularized, unreasonable searches of everyone who wants to get on a plane or enter a building, 99.999 percent of whom clearly pose no threat to anyone.

If what George Will is saying is that we should be clear in what we mean by “terrorism” so that we have an accurate understanding of who the real enemy is, he is right. But you do not advance your understanding, or your security, by failing to call real terrorists terrorists. Boko Haram jihadists are real terrorists and their organization should have been designated as a terrorist organization several many years ago.

Read more here.

The sound of tyranny

George Will brings to our attention a very scary situation in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny — fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cellphones and other devices.

Please read the rest here.

What happened to one immigrant family who bought a small business

Do you distrust the Obama Administration? Not enough, writes George Will. Mr. Will details the despicably outrageous behavior of the I.R.S. toward an immigrant family from Iraq, who bought a supermarket in Michigan. Read the whole thing here.