Category Archives: Essays

After a full and fair trial, abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was convicted this week on three counts of first-degree murder in the killing of three babies whose necks he “snipped,” as well as involuntary manslaughter in the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar. Gosnell, who performed hundreds of gruesome and macabre abortions out of his Women’s Medical Society Clinic, managed to skirt the death penalty when he agreed to forego an appeal in exchange for a life sentence. The sentencing brings to end a trial that revealed the gruesome practices of Gosnell and his staff. But more disturbing is the grotesque oversight and inaction of the bureaucrats who knew what was happening, and whose responsibility it was to protect the women and infants Gosnell murdered and maimed.

Gosnell spent nearly forty years running his clinic. According to the grand jury report, during that time he performed hundreds of abortions on women who were well past the legal gestational stage, inducing labor and snipping the spinal cord of babies that were born alive. The procedures were messy, frequently botched, and sent dozens of women to the emergency room with severe infections that left some near death. Anesthetics were frequently overused, which is what led to Karnamaya’s eventual overdose and death. The list of horrors goes on and on, but we’ll spare you the gory details. Continue reading →

Of the Big Five questions facing America today, the most pressing and urgent is the question of jobs. This is more than the problem of recovering from the last economic slump; it is more than the impact of globalization and automation on manufacturing jobs. The American economy is shedding jobs, especially long-term, well-paying jobs with good benefits, and the jobs that replace them are often less secure and less well paid. The relentless transformation of the American labor market is changing the nature of American life, calling into question some of the basic assumptions and building blocks of the last fifty years, and generating a complex mix of political and social pressures that will shake the country to its foundations.

Essentially, the problem is this: automation and IT are moving routine processing, whether that being processed is information or matter, out of the realm of human work and into the realm of machines. Factory floors are increasingly automated places where fewer and fewer human beings are needed to transform raw materials into finished products; clerical work and many forms of mass employment in business, government and management are also increasingly performed more economically by computers than by trained human beings. Continue reading →

So far, 2013 has been a bush league year in American politics. Gay marriage, gun control and amnesty for illegal immigrants are hot button emotional issues and they have a lot of practical importance for a lot of people, but the republic will not stand or fall based on lesbian prenups, gun background checks or green cards for those immigrants formerly known as illegal. Similarly with the sequester; if the country is headed toward fiscal bankruptcy the cuts are too small to save us and if the cuts are unnecessary they are neither large enough to precipitate a depression or so savage and stringent as to take us back to the social conditions of the 19th century.

So the headlines this year have not, exactly, been much ado about nothing, but it’s a lot of ado about nothing much. That wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have serious issues to deal with.  In quiet times we could let media cover politics the way the Weather Channel covers storms, inflating Winter Storms Chutney and Magpie into major world historical events. But we don’t live in bush league times. The United States has urgent business before it today and until and unless we get the big things fixed, we’re going to stagger from one ill-tempered squabble to another even as our underlying problems become more severe. Continue reading →

What does it mean for the euro that, on paper at least, Spaniards, Italians, and Cypriots are much wealthier on average than Germans? That’s the question Wolfgang Münchau tackled in a must-read column in the Financial Times, and it’s one that VM readers would do well to spend some time thinking through.

Here are the outlines of his argument. A new survey by the European Central Bank has concluded that median German household wealth ranks among the lowest in the entire Eurozone. The median German family is worth €51,000 whereas the median Cypriot household is worth €267,000. Those are eye-popping figures, and the German press is apoplectic over them. Münchau cautions that the median is not the best measure in this case. But even if one were to look at the mean, Germans are worth €200,000 per household, while Spanish net wealth is somewhere around €300,000. There’s another correction to take on board; Germans haven’t bought into home ownership the way many Europeans (and Americans) do. But put in all the caveats and corrections you want, and the numbers are still striking and, to many Germans, infuriating. Why should German households be paying tax money to bail out rich Cypriots?

But anybody who’s traveled in Europe understands that these numbers have something wrong with them. Germans are significantly richer than Italians and Greeks. The answer, says Münchau, must be that varying price levels across the eurozone are responsible. Continue reading →

Many Republicans don’t like to admit this out loud, especially the power establishment that was close to the Bush administration or served in its upper echelons, but the Bush administration was a first class political disaster for the president’s party. Until Republicans find a way to talk about what went wrong and how future Republican administrations will do better, the GOP will face a stiff headwind of well-merited public distrust.

I don’t agree with the professional Bush-bashers and am perfectly willing to give the Bush administration its due. Not every decision the President made was bad, and the circumstances of his administration were difficult and harsh. President Bush was, is, a decent and honorable man who did his level best in the world’s most difficult job.  The Democrats who ran against him might have done considerably worse. Some of the things that went wrong were not his fault and more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood. Many of the failings of those years were due more to execution than to vision and to tone more than substance. It was also true, and brutally true at times, that the press corps did everything it could to shine the brightest possible spotlight on every pimple on the face of the Bush administration. There was no wart, no scar, no stretch mark on the Bush administration that didn’t get its full fifteen minutes of fame.

But make every allowance you can, discount the press bias and polish up the accomplishments as much as you like, and the conclusion still cannot be evaded: George W. Bush’s presidency was not a success and its result was to diminish the credibility of the ideas he professed and to damage the brand of the party whose standard he bore.
Continue reading →