Link Banana

On the topic of equality in America… Ross Douthat, on the heels of McCain’s attacking Obama for trying to speard the wealth around, agrues that it’s silly for conservatives to oppose all redistribution. 

In other words, a conservative welfare state would eliminate our current network of universal entitlement programs, and replace them with cheaper, means-tested programs that, well, spread the wealth - that spend your tax dollars to provide temporary assistance to the unemployed, underwrite health care costs for the aged and very poor, set an income floor underneath American seniors, and so forth, rather than taking money from the middle class with one hand and giving it back to them with the other. 

In case you had doubts about the United State being one of the least equal “developed” countries, The Economist has a simple chart for you.

This image — presented excellently by Mr. Kleon — from Colin Powell’s appearance on Meet the Press made me cry:

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That’s not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president? Yet I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion that he is a Muslim and might have an association with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel particularly strong about this because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay, was of a mother at Arlington Cemetery and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone, and it gave his awards - Purple Heart, Bronze Star - showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death, he was 20 years old. And then at the very top of the head stone, it didn’t have a Christian cross. It didn’t have a Star of David. It has a crescent and star of the Islamic faith.

And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. And he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was fourteen years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he could serve his country and he gave his life.

There is now greater equality of happiness in America than there was in the 1970s. Eduardo Porter considers why:

Still, it is not surprising that happiness among blacks rose in the years after the civil rights law outlawed segregation and discrimination on the basis of race. Mr. Wolfers speculates that the gay-straight happiness gap is also likely to have declined over the period, for similar reasons. Changes in family life might also help. Married people are happier than unmarried people, on average. Still, later marriages and more divorces might have winnowed out the unhappiest marriages. And while the shift to two-earner families brings to mind the stressful rush from work to pick the kid up at day care, it also has empowered unhappy stay-at-home moms.

Speaking of the rule of law… Noah Feldman says that much of the appeal of Shariah in Muslim countries is based on the idea that it offers justice for all.

The upshot is that the system of Islamic law as it came to exist allowed a great deal of leeway. That is why today’s advocates of Shariah as the source of law are not actually recommending the adoption of a comprehensive legal code derived from or dictated by Shariah — because nothing so comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history. To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else. It means establishing a legal system in which God’s law sets the ground rules, authorizing and validating everyday laws passed by an elected legislature. In other words, for them, Shariah is expected to function as something like a modern constitution.

In school, I was told that “the rule of law” was good for stability and good for economic growth. What exactly “the rule of law” was I was never completely sure of. Turns out there are essentially two definitions:

Thick definitions treat the rule of law as the core of a just society. In this version, the concept is inextricably linked to liberty and democracy. Its adherents say a country can be spoken of as being ruled by law only if the state’s power is constrained and if basic freedoms, such as those of speech and association, are guaranteed. …

Thin definitions are more formal. The important things, on this account, are not democracy and morality but property rights and the efficient administration of justice. Laws must provide stability. They do not necessarily have to be moral or promote human rights. America’s southern states in the Jim Crow era were governed by the rule of law on thin definitions, but not on thick.

Making a case similar to Mr. Brilliant’s, The Economist argues that the situation in the world’s better than most think, and still improving.

Indeed, for a great many people the way things are is pretty rotten: Burmese monks, for instance, or the Luo in Kenya. Life is not too bright for investors at the moment, either. But is the broader proposition true? Is the world really becoming worse for the majority of mankind? We argue that it is not.

To some extent, our qualified optimism is borne out by impartial data. In this article we look at three pieces of evidence: the underlying social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation over the past decade; and the incidence of wars and political violence. By those measures the world seems to be in rather better shape than most people realise.

The story linked in the title shouldn’t shock anyone, but it’s an excuse for me to link to an old story that I still harbor some affinity for. Rebecca Traister’s assertion that all liberal Democrats really love Mr. Kucinich should not be missed.

You are lying to yourselves. In a quest for an “electable,” “not insane” presidential candidate, you are willfully overlooking the candidate who actually comes closest to representing the things in which you really believe: justice and peace and the basic freedoms that should be afforded to every American, regardless of race, class, religion, gender, sexual orientation or galactic origin. In an effort to distance yourself from the squish of the Birkenstock and the stench of the patchouli, you have convinced yourself that compromise and pragmatism light the path to the White House. And you are correct. But still, before walking listlessly down the aisle toward our impending union with tepid centrism, let’s rip our clothes off for one final, ill-advised fling with ideological honesty:

Dennis Kucinich is our man! If he can’t do it, well, that’s because we’re all chickenshit and condemned to a future of our own making. Yay, Dennis!