Matt Yglesias

The Case for More Police

Via Mark Kleiman, William Stuntz makes the case for increased federal assistance to local governments to hire police officers. He’s making the case in The Weekly Standard so it’s filled with a fair amount of somewhat annoying conservative rhetoric and framing, down to the use of the term “police surge” but he’s still right.

Among other things, staying strictly within the realm of things that count as “tough on crime” but increasing the number of prison beds and increasing the number of cops on the streets are effective at reducing crime. At boosting incarceration is considerably less humane and more socially destructive. Both police and prisoners are necessary, but we’ve gone from having twice as many police officers as prison inmates to having twice as many inmates as police officers. It’s not a beneficial switch.

Conservative Magazines Not For Liberty

Via Tyler Cowen, Daniel Klein offers up a study that proves the obvious:

Conservatives say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs. Besides many anti-liberty commissions, the magazines may be criticized for anti-liberty omission—that is, failing to oppose anti-liberty policies. Magazines investigated include National Review, The Weekly Standard, The American Enterprise, and The American Spectator. We find that National Review has had the strongest record on liberty on the issues treated, while the others have preponderantly failed to be pro-liberty or have even been anti-liberty.

I sort of doubt that anyone was genuinely confused about this, but now we have a real study to prove it. On the other hand, conservative do take the freedom of business enterprises to have a negative impact on the quality of the air you breath, the quality of the water you drink, and the stability of the climate you live in very seriously. They’re also pretty keen on the freedom of employers to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. These are important freedoms to many Americans.

Barnes Takes The Lead in “America’s Worst Columnist” Sweepstakes

Fred Barnes takes decisive action to recapture the lead from Charles Krauthammer in their long-running duel for the title of “America’s Worst Columnist.”

Two facts all but forced Republicans to adopt the zero option. Partisan zeal wasn’t one of them. Republicans were ready to be pawns in a bipartisan game. But Obama’s promise to bring the parties together played out in form (he courted Republicans) rather than substance (he declined to compromise). Republicans got nothing in the bill. That was fact number one. And after they objected to the cost of the House version ($819 billion, not counting the debt payments), the measure grew larger in the Senate. That was the second fact.

Democrats couldn’t hide their self-consciousness about the excesses of their own bill. Supporters made few TV appearances to defend it and rarely talked about specific spending items. Obama sounded like Al Gore on global warming. The more the case for man-made warming falls apart, the more hysterical Gore gets about an imminent catastrophe. The more public support his bill loses, the more Obama embraces fear-mongering. “The failure to act, and act now,” the president said last week, “will turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”

Yes, that’s right, hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts now count as “nothing.” And Barnes has (a) invented the fact that there’s no man-made global warming, and (b) invented a new meta-fact which claims that there’s growing evidence for his position. Normally when reading something like this you need to wonder if the writer is being stupid or being dishonest, but in Barnes’ case it’s usually safe to assume that the answer is “both.” Naturally, contributors to Barnes’ Weekly Standard—a publication that enjoys nothing more than misinforming people—will continue to be guests on cable television much more frequently than will contributors to progressive publications.

Goldfarb Endorses Terrorist Ethics

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb makes the case that it’s appropriate and praiseworthy for countries to deliberately target the wives and children of people they consider enemies. This kind of moral posture is not unheard of, of course. But it’s strange to see the ethics of Osama bin Laden being explicitly adopted by the organs of mainstream conservatism.

To be clear, he’s not saying that it’s sometimes okay to kill a bad guy’s innocent children as part of a military operation directed against the guy. He’s saying it’s better to kill his children than it would be to avoid killing them.

It’s really too bad John McCain lost the election so we don’t get to see this character in federal office.