Stromata Blog

Morning in Baghdad

Knowing that the world didn’t need my amateur commentary on the election in Iraq and that following the returns minute by minute would lead to sleep deprivation (by contemporary standards, I would be a torture victim!), I spent the weekend watching plays off-Broadway, with no greater access to the news than that provided by the streamers near Times Square. Thus I got the voting story all at once upon my return home, and quite a good story it was, too (better than the plays, though they weren’t a waste of time and money either).

The election held four great risks for the anti-terrorist cause:

1. The Iraqis might sullenly stay home from the polls, showing that they regarded themselves as a people under alien occupation, determined not to collaborate with their oppressors. That was the outcome predicted by the fevered fringe of anti-liberation zealots, as well as by the cynics who think that Arabs prefer tyrannical rule to democracy.

2. Despite their desire to vote, most of the electorate might have been frightened away from the polls by the prospect of violence, thus demonstrating that the terrorists hold a majority of the country in their psychological, if not physical, grasp. That scenario was, it appears, what most of the mainstream media anticipated, and most were candid enough to concede in their headlines and ledes that it had not come to pass.

3. The voters might turn out in force to vote in a religiously intolerant, anti-Western government patterned on the Iranian mullarchy. That danger had already receded before election day, when the major “religious” parties declared that they wouldn’t include clerics on their lists of candidates and rejected the notion of a setting up a theocracy.

4. All might go well on the ground, but the Western media might nonetheless find only bad news to report, à la the false but devastating coverage of the Tet Offensive in 1968, where Walter Cronkite and his echo chamber declared the war “unwinnable” immediately after a smashing victory that tore the heart out of the Viet Cong.

At the moment, it looks like not even the last (and most likely) of those fears came true. Certainly there could be no better proof than the turnout at the polls that al-Zarqawi’s “bitter war against democracy” is a pinprick assault, tragic for those whom the Islamofascists murder but too sporadic and ineffective to intimidate the great mass of the population. It is not too hard for a few hundred thugs, well-furnished with left-over weapons and cash from the Saddam Hussein era, to carry out random killings, particularly when the forces of law and order consist of inexperienced policemen backed up by soldiers who don’t speak the local language. That kind of thuggish “insurgency” cannot, however, win military victories. If it also cannot instill fear, its failure is irredeemable and its demise just a matter of time.

The great hope of the terrorists was always that America would lose either interest or nerve and pull out, effectively leaving the fate of Iraq to the neighboring dictatorships. In the aftermath of January 30th, there are signs, faint but visible, that a portion of anti-war opinion is beginning to look on the Iraqi campaign as an overall success and to prefer nurturing a nascent democracy to scoring points against President Bush. While the other portion will continue to cavil – its new shibboleth seems to be, “The patient got well, but the operation was a failure” – its plaints ring hollower and hollower. When John Kerry says on Meet the Press, “[W]hat the administration does in these next few days will decide the outcome in Iraq, and this is – not maybe – this is the last chance for the President to get it right”, what does he mean? He prefaced that remark by alluding to a speech that he made last April. It’s enlightening to note what he then said was essential (“Here is how we must proceed”) if we were “to build a stable Iraq”.

First and foremost, Senator Kerry wanted “to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share to risk and reduce the burden on our own forces. That is the only way to succeed in the mission [emphasis added] while ending the sense of an American occupation.” President Bush didn’t follow that advice (and the vision of “a political coalition of key countries, including the UK, France, Russia and China” was almost certainly unattainable), yet somehow Senator Kerry’s way didn’t turn out to be “the only way”.

Second, the Senator wanted a U.N. High Commissioner, “charged with overseeing elections, the drafting of a constitution and coordinating reconstruction”, to take over the leading role in Iraq from the United States. Somehow, again, the country staggered through without the guidance of such a luminary.

Finally, “We need a massive training effort to build Iraqi security forces that can actually provide security for the Iraqi people. We must accept that the effort to date has failed: it must be rethought and reformed.” And the Kerry version of rethinking and reforming began and ended, as one would have expected, at “partnership with other nations, not just on our own”. But we went ahead, pretty much “on our own”, and the Iraqi police, by all accounts, did a superlative job of keeping terrorists away from the polling places.

It isn’t clear whether Senator Kerry still believes that his prescription is the one and only tonic for Iraqi democracy. If he has a new plan, he didn’t disclose any particulars. What is clear is that defeatism in Iraq has lost its plausibility. If leading Democrats cling to it, they will exile themselves to the political fever swamps. That will be bad for democracy in America – de facto one party systems swiftly tend toward misrule – but good for the prospects of liberal (in the true sense of the word) reform in Baghdad and, indeed, throughout the Middle East.

BTW, on Meet the Press, Senator Kerry referred to his “very clear, four point plan for precisely how we could be successful”. The plan that he described in his speech had three points. I guess that it is fair to say that he had a “secret plan”, or a quarter of one anyway.

Goals and Timetables in Iraq

The Spot Formerly Known as Kerry, normally on the clear-headed side, thinks that “it would be good to have a flexible set of benchmarks” for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, along the lines of “when X goal is achieved, we can reduce the coalition troops in the country by Y number”.

That sounds so reasonable but misses the point of the Iraqi campaign. Our troops are in Iraq as part of a global war. How many remain there for how long depends on how rapidly we make the world unsafe for Islamofascist terrorism. That could require keeping 150,000 men in Iraq indefinitely as a watchdog over Syria, Iran, Saudi-controlled Arabia and the Palestinian pseudo-state. Or unexpectedly favorable political developments in those countries might make it prudent to reduce the American presence to nearly zero. Or, as is most likely, conditions may demand something in between. Setting goals and timetables based solely on the internal situation in one country would be a genuine distraction from the overall conflict.

Naturally the people who prefer to treat terrorism as a trivial nuisance, the Kennedys and Boxers and Kerrys, want to narrow the debate as much as possible. From their point of view, the ideal point-scoring posture is one where they can say, if there is trouble in Iraq, “Bring the troops home; we’re spending too much money and blood”; and, if there isn’t, “Bring the troops home; Iraq doesn’t need them.” Their “solution” remains constant, regardless of what the “problem” may be.

One doesn’t wish to sound uncharitable toward fellow Americans, but I can see no point in conceding any kind of dialogue to the anti-war crowd. Their bad faith and determination to see their country fail are becoming more evident every day. Even if they are United States Senators, they deserve the same silent treatment that we give to cranks in other areas of life. Meanwhile, the rest of the country can discuss how best to achieve victory.

When the World Was Going to End in Ice

Chris Silvey has collected a cento of nostalgic-inducing quotes about the environmental dread of the 1970’s, viz., the coming Ice Age. For example, there was this application of the Precautionary Principle in a book entitled The Cooling, a best seller in 1976:

Suppose we assume, as did weather scientists interviewed by writer Nigel Calder, that the chances of continued cooling and of an Ice Age dawning within a century are one in ten, odds likened by one scientist to Russian roulette. The odds are in our favor, but consider the stakes being wagered: if the cooling continues, we can reasonably calculate that potentially two billion people could starve to death or die of other symptoms of chronic malnutrition by the year 2050. Potentially, we could all die if global famines and embargos on scarce resources, both caused by the cooling, lead to a world war. We simply cannot afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we should ignore the evidence and the theories suggesting Earth is entering a period of climatic instability are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored.

The author of that warning has since converted to skepticism about ecological alarmism, but not so the ineffable Paul Ehrlich, who proclaimed on Earth Day 1970, “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

I’m reminded, too, of an account that I heard from Jerry Pournelle of a panel on which he appeared with Jimmy Carter’s National Science Advisor. The latter offered as an objection to underground storage of nuclear waste the near certainty that there would be major glaciation within the not-too-remote future, which would unbury the radioactive detritus – evidently a possibility that people would worry about as mile-high ice sheets descended on their front lawns.

That the Ice Age forecasts were mistaken does not prove, of course, that Global Warming alarms are also wrong. Climatology has presumably progressed during the past quarter century. Unfortunately, it is hard to ascertain whether it has progressed enough to make predictions that can form a prudent basis for massive alterations in human behavior. No less will be required if our actions is to have any noticeable impact on long-term climate trends. We know that drastic cutbacks in energy usage would consign billions of human beings to shorter and harsher lives. We don’t know how much suffering, if any, would be averted by reduced emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases in accordance with the Kyoto Treaty or any other regime. It’s instructive, as a thought experiment, to ponder what might have happened if the world’s governments had acted to avert Global Cooling.

Recognizing, as we must, that there no route leads to absolute, assured safety, isn’t this a case where caution is wiser than precaution?

Wishful Thinking on the Left

Via The Volokh Conspiracy comes the news of a leftist group’s claim that the German government intends to arrest Don Rumsfeld and various other U.S. government officials and try them for human rights violations, should they set foot on German soil. As corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative, the “source” adds that Herr Schröder has steadfastly resisted American pressure to call off the impending prosecutions, leading Secretary Rumsfeld to cancel his planned attendance at a conference in Munich.

This tale is an obvious fabrication, but it certainly tells us a bit about the mentalité (pardon my French) of a certain segment of the anti-war Left. These guys would be happier yet, I’m sure, if they thought that Germany was about to declare war on the United States and send panzers to rescue Saddam Hussein. Without further comment, I leave them to wallow in their delusions.

Zarqawi and the Liberals

Do you remember when liberals championed democracy throughout the world. Government of the people, by the people, for the people was the best conceivable arrangement for everyone on Earth. Those who thought that popular sovereignty might require preparation or that there were virtues to traditional forms of governance were purblind reactionaries.

How times have altered! The President of the United States has just proclaimed that “the great of objective of ending tyranny” is the raison d’être of our nation’s foreign policy, American troops are fighting in Iraq against a terrorist chieftain whose slogan is “bitter war against democracy and all those who seek to enact it” – and liberal opinion by and large scoffs at the one while wishing to leave the other unmolested to disrupt forthcoming elections.

Liberals proffer, I realize, excuses for their reluctance to see democratic principles flourish in Iraq: Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD’s, and the United Nations Security Council didn’t authorize his overthrow, and only about 30 countries supported us, and 1,300 American soldiers have been killed, and the war costs a lot of money, and – What it all amounts to is that the violation of Iraqi national sovereignty involved in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime fatally taints any benefit that democracy might confer on the Iraqi people.

There also was a time when liberals regarded the nation-state as an evanescing institution whose pretensions to absolute dominion within its borders were as foolish as they were obsolete. That notion lingered through the Clinton Administration, with its interventions in Haiti and the Balkans; now it is gone. Today the United States Senate heard a chorus of leading Democrats denouncing Condoleezza Rice for excessive zeal in opposition to despotism. Their principal complaint was that she and the Bush Administration failed to extend a presumption of innocence to Saddam Hussein. So what if he was a murderous thug? His position as head of state should, one infers from the rhetoric of Senators Kennedy and Boxer and Dayton and Bayh, have shielded him from attack except upon proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that he directly threatened American soil. Shooting at our aircraft, subsidizing suicide bombers in Israel and murdering Iraqis didn’t count.

The end of the Left’s infatuation with democracy and universal human rights comes at an inopportune time. It would be useful if Americans on both sides of the ideological divide could rally against Islamofascism. Instead, a great many liberals find themselves weighing George W. Bush against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and adopting a stance of judicious neutrality. Some have an obvious motive: They have convinced themselves that the President is a dangerous religious fanatic who is on the verge of throwing dissenters into torture camps as a prelude to imposing theocracy on as much of the world as he and the sinister neoconservatives can conquer. But what about the less demented, who can tell the difference between Bush and Hitler? Why haven’t they emulated conservatives during World War II, who preferred fighting Hitler and Tojo under the leadership of the unbeloved FDR to not fighting them at all? Why do we hear so few sentiments along the lines of, I don’t like Bush, but he’s the enemy of my enemy until the terrorists are crushed?

I don’t have a comprehensive theory, but it seems clear that liberalism has lost touch with the notion of democracy as a moral imperative. During the decades when liberals regularly won elections, majority rule was a virtue in its own right, albeit not the only virtue. Then the electoral tide turned, and the Left grew critical of “majoritarianism”. Not many are as candid as this speaker at an anti-war rally:

Then there was the pooh-poohing of elections — any elections. Former soldier Stan Goff (supposedly of the Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) spoke at length about the evils of capitalism and declared, “We ain’t never resolved nothing through an election.” This drew loud, sustained applause.

Still, much more moderate leftists than Stan Goff nowadays prefer judges to voters as society’s ultimate decision makers and display their indifference to democratic practice by taking a casual attitude, at best, toward ballot box fraud. If democracy isn’t all that central to American government, why get excited about its absence in Iraq or anywhere else?

It sounds cynical to suggest that liberals have turned against democracy because it hasn’t recently been an instrument for enacting liberal prescriptions. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that, having once had too much faith in “the People” and suffered disillusionment, they now have too little. When the populist medicine failed as a panacea, they threw it out as a poison. The liberal idealists of the 1930’s and 40’s, all of whom would have cheered the introduction of democratic rule in Arab lands, thus may bear a share of the blame if their political descendants foil the experiment and leave the Middle East under the thumb of men like Zarqawi.

A Private Enterprise AFV

When I first saw the Amazon page for the JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, I hastily concluded that it was a very clever hack that had been integrated seamlessly into the Amazon Web site. Maybe it is, but the giveway that I thought that I detected (a phony URL) turned out to be a figment of deteriorating eyesight. If the item is a joke, it is one that the Amazon staff is helping along.

So, for those of you who have $20,000 (plus shipping) to spare, here is what you can get:

The JL421 Badonkadonk is a completely unique, extremely rare land vehicle and battle tank. Designed with versatility in mind, the Donk can transport cargo or a crew of five internally or on the roof, and can be piloted from within the armored shell or from an exposed standing position through the hatch, thanks to special one-way steel mesh armor windows and a control stick that pivots up and down to allow piloting from the standing or seated positions.

There is, however, no mention of armament. Can main guns and missile launchers be found elsewhere on Amazon?

Further Treasure from Herculaneum?

From the Times of London, which has belatedly ceased hiding its Web site behind an impenetrable registration wall, comes the most hopeful story of the new year, and it has nothing to do with contemporary political squabbles.

One of the greatest recent examples of the application of science to the humanities is the decipherment of 1,800 badly scorched scrolls excavated from Herculaneum (destroyed, like Pompeii, in the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.). Over two hundred years after their discovery, they were made legible through a technique that distinguishes the spectral patterns of ancient inks. Thirty thousand pages of ancient writings, almost all from works lost since antiquity, have been recovered in this manner over the past 20 years. The only discouraging side to this amazing story is that most of them are treatises by Epicurean philosophers. Happy as one is to be able to peruse first hand the writings of Philodemos of Gadara, who served as a philosophical ornament to upper class Roman households, most scholars would probably be willing to exchange all of his suave popularizations for a single one of the lost dialogues of Aristotle, not to mention a few of the hundreds of classical tragedies and comedies that are known to us only by title.

According to the Times, a considerable number of scholars now believe that more scrolls are waiting to be found and have begun a drive to renew excavation of the villa where the surviving cache was discovered in 1752. The site was sealed two centuries ago, after everything that appeared worth taking had been removed.

But last week a group of the world’s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance — “quite likely”, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it — that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be uncovered. . . .

Most of the work on the Philodemus texts was carried out by the late Professor Marcello Gigante of the University of Naples: a small (despite his surname) and dynamic figure, he gradually became convinced that the 1,800 rolls so far discovered represented perhaps only one half of the books that the villa contained. Certainly it does seem unlikely that Piso [Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (d. c. 44 B.C.), Philodemos’ patron and the probable owner of the site] — an educated man who was joint ruler [sic; the writer means “consul”, of course] of Rome in 58BC — should have confined himself to this one, narrow collection. Or that his heirs, equally highly educated, would not have added to it over the decades.

In the 1990s, on Gigante’s initiative, an abortive attempt was made to reopen the old 18th-century excavations. The project was eventually abandoned when its funding ran out, but not before the archeologists had established that the villa was larger than had been thought.

It seems that it was built on two or possibly three levels, terraced down to the sea. It also appears that slaves were in the act of carrying crates of books to safety when they were overwhelmed by the eruption. These lower storeys, with their mosaic floors, frescoes and painted ceilings — clearly an integral part of the house — all lend support to Gigante’s theory that the villa had at least one other library.

Gigante died in November 2001 but his campaign for renewed excavation, far from dying with him, gathered strength. Eight of the world’s leading scholars of ancient history, including professors from Harvard, Oxford and London, wrote to The Times in the spring of 2002 demanding action: “We can expect to find good contemporary copies of known masterpieces and to recover works lost to humanity for two millennia. A treasure of greater cultural importance can scarcely be imagined.”

The signatories have now formed a pressure group, The Herculaneum Society, which convened in Oxford last weekend, and moves have begun to raise the $20m (£10.6m) or so needed to dig.

The Friends of the Herculaneum Society accepts donations but unfortunately has yet to discover PayPal.

There is, one must pessimistically observe, a disappointingly high chance that the contents of the “second library”, if it existed at all, may have been destroyed beyond reconstruction or discarded by the original excavators. To the casual eye, the scrolls look like lumps of coal. Many were in fact thrown out before their true nature was realized. Still, the remains of Greek and Latin literature as so fragmentary that, as Professor Fowler puts it, “So long as there is a chance of finding the rest of the library — and everyone admits there is a chance, however strong or weak they rate it — we owe it to the world to dig.”

Update (2/14/05): Cronaca reports that philanthropist David W. Packard has offered funding for renewed excavations of the Villa of the Papyri and provides further speculation (optimistic and pessimistic) on what is likely to be uncovered.

Dynastic Double Standards

Everybody knows that Jeb Bush can’t run for President in 2008, and perhaps not ever, because his doing so would raise the specter of a “Bush Dynasty”, which Americans would find abhorrent. It is interesting, then, to read the political news from Governor Bush’s state, as reported by the invaluable (at a mere $3.95 a month) OpinionJournal Political Diary:

The Florida Democratic Party is showing obvious signs of desperation by floating talk that their candidate for governor next year to succeed Jeb Bush will be the closest thing they have to a political celebrity: Anthony Kennedy Shriver, son of former 1972 vice-presidential nominee Sargent Shriver and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, as well as the brother of Maria Shriver, California’s first lady. . . .

The Miami New Times, an alternative newspaper, says local Democrats make no pretense that Mr. Shriver, who has never held office, would be anything more than an gamble that the fading charisma of the Kennedy family would somehow rescue them from continued political impotence. “It’s not hard to see the 39-year-old Shriver’s appeal. He has his family's trademark cheekbones, white picket-fence teeth, and tall, commanding presence,” the paper gushed. It also noted he currently runs a high-profile mentoring organization for young people and that his wife was born in Cuba, an important calling card in courting the Hispanic vote.

Mr. Shriver isn’t dismissing any of the speculation. “I don't want to rule out anything,” he told the New Times. “It’s obviously a great opportunity to serve in a really important job. . . . When you talk to Arnold [Schwarzenegger] about why he ran, he really felt that at that point in California, it would make an enormous difference if he was the guy who took that job.” Given that it’s not hard to convince a member of the extensive Kennedy clan to run for office, Mr. Shriver sure sounds like a man who is talking himself into becoming a candidate.

Now there is a dynastic candidate for you: a guy whom no one would tout for anything higher than state assemblyman, were it not for his genealogy. Of course he’s hardly the only Kennedy kinsman without visible qualifications to seek elective office. Governor Schwarzenegger was the odd man out; he was probably hurt more than helped by the family ties. Otherwise, the descendants of Joe Kennedy represent the bad side of family influence: candidates running on the strength of somebody else’s charisma. (Luckily, the voters catch on to most of them after observing them in action for a term or two.)

It’s hard to see the same factor at work on behalf of the Bushes. Senator Prescott Bush was moderately successful in Connecticut politics (twice elected to the Senate in big GOP years after losing two earlier bids), but one doubts that he had many admirers in Texas, where his son entered politics. George H. W. Bush, in turn, was hardly the most popular politician in his adopted state (remember how he performed against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary?), was elected President in the Reagan afterglow and lost for reelection. Outside of Yale Club lounges, there is no legion of GHWB fans to swoon over any candidate who carries his genes.

George W. and Jeb started their political careers with a well-known surname but not an especially popular one. To attribute their elections to the governorships of two major states to a Republican version of the Kennedy cult is so ludicrous an idea that only the mainstream American media could entertain it. Just as ludicrous as the notion that Anthony Kennedy Shriver ought to be a serious contender for governor of Florida.

Not Drinking Is Good for You, Too

When I expressed my solidarity with the President by retiring from drinking on January 20, 2001, several friends were concerned about the health risks involved. As evidence mounts that a glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away more efficaciously than a bushel of apples, it becomes clear that teetotalers have adopted a risky lifestyle that threatens to raise their insurance rates, steepen their declining years and delight any greedy next of kin.

Naturally, I have occasional doubts about the prudence of defying sound medical advice out of motives that may strike many people as arbitrary or even absurd. Nonetheless, in the darkest days of November 2000, when it seemed almost certain that the Florida Supreme Court was going to override the voters of Florida and hand the Presidency to Al Gore, I vowed that, should George W. Bush be inaugurated, I would abstain from alcohol, except for communion wine and Mory’s cups (which barely qualify as alcoholic, unless ginger ale is ale in more than name), for the duration of his Presidency. Regardless of the peril to my personal well-being, I feel bound by that oath, which may, for all I know, have played some minuscule role in keeping a raving moonbat out of the White House.

Hence, it is a great relief to read this item in the current issue of New Scientist:

Some cancers are caused by heterocyclic amines, DNA-damaging chemicals found in cooked meat and fish. When Sakae Arimoto-Kobayashi's team at Okayama University in Japan fed these chemicals to mice, the DNA damage to their liver, lungs and kidneys was reduced by up to 85% if the mice drank non-alcoholic beer instead of water. [emphasis added]

While the real stuff will probably turn out to be more effective yet, I now look forward to four more years with greater personal equanimity.

Social Security: What Is a “Crisis”?

At the risk of sounding Clintonian, I think that the dispute over whether Social Security is in a state of “crisis” can be rescued from sterility by closer attention to the meaning of words.

“Crisis” is vulgarly used as a synonym for “imminent peril”. By that standard, the current financial state of the Social Security system is not a “crisis”, for it collects substantially more in taxes than it pays out in benefits, and may never deserve that moniker. At least, the burden imposed by a steadily increasing ratio of retired to active workers may not reach the point where the latter cannot fulfill the promises made to the former. Taxes will have to rise, or other expenditures be cut, but a moderate optimist can forecast, without being absurd, that Social Security obligations will not “bankrupt America”. Well, not as fast as they will bankrupt the European Union and Japan. One could say that there is no crisis so long as we can look forward to being the last cripple standing.

The real meaning of “crisis” is, however, the moment when a decision must be made. Munich was a crisis, because the English and French governments had to choose the path that they would follow in confronting Nazi aggression. The panzers were only on the outskirts of Prague, not Paris. But, when they reached Paris, the situation was past being a crisis; it was the consequence of the democracies’ failure at the moment of crisis to judge wisely.

In that sense, saying that Social Security is “in crisis” is not hyperbolic. Reform – the substitution of private savings for public liabilities – is a generation-long process, one that will grow more daunting as the population ages and the transitional generation grows smaller in relation to the retirees who rely on it for support. The window for fashioning a structure that will serve the real needs of the elderly, rather than simply mimic the state of the art in retirement plan design c. 1930, is closing rapidly.

Suppose that, way back in 1953, when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, they had enacted Social Security reforms along the lines that President Bush now seeks, channeling younger workers’ payroll taxes into private accounts while maintaining promised benefits for those who were nearing retirement. From the 1950's through roughly the 1970's, Social Security would have needed supplementary funds to offset the taxes retained by their payers. In hindsight, it is a safe presumption that the government would have run a bigger deficit. In the long run, the additional borrowing would have been insignificant: the increase in on-budget liabilities would have been matched by a decrease in off-budget Social Security obligations. In the short run, there would have been more than zero impact, but it would have been a mere blip in budgetary math. By now Social Security would be predominantly a capital accumulation program, and liberals would doubtless be claiming it as their own invention, just as they now claim to have been in the forefront of fighting the Cold War.

As demography grows less favorable, switching from the system cobbled together on an emergency basis in 1935 to anything else will become steadily more difficult. What could have been done almost painlessly in the 1950’s will take a palpable effort in the 2000’s. By the 2020’s, the transition may well be too onerous too undertake. Inaction will have led to an irreversible decision: that a major part of the retirement income of most Americans will forever depend upon the willingness (and ability) of the next generation to support them.

Self-sufficiency for senior citizens ought to be among the most uncontroversial of aspirations. The reactionary liberals who murmur “no crisis” are not themselves ready to renounce it. In time, though, their resistance to reform can make it impossible to achieve.