New Biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt

The New York Times reviewer snarks his way through the column (you'd expect something else?), but this new biography by T.J. Stiles of the great Cornelius Vanderbilt sounds like a helluva good read.

“His admirers saw him as the ultimate meritocrat, the finest example of the common man rising through hard work and ability. ... His critics called him grasping and ruthless, an unelected king who never pretended to rule for his people.” But Mr. Stiles plainly gets a charge out of Vanderbilt’s raw nerve.

Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up on Staten Island, the son of a modest farming family. He attended school for only a few months, developing what Mr. Stiles calls “a lasting contempt for the conventions of written English.” He was born in the right place at the right time.

“Unlike most country folk,” Mr. Stiles writes, “the Vanderbilts lived within sight of the place of the most densely concentrated possibilities in North America: the city of New York.”

As a young man, Vanderbilt began working on ferries and schooners and then, with their increasing popularity in the 1820s and ’30s, steamboats. He made a name for himself in business for his “elbows-out aggressiveness.”

He made a name for himself, too, with his imposing appearance. A contemporary described him as “a man of striking individuality, as straight as an Indian, standing six feet in his stockings and weighing about 200 pounds.” Frugal and abstemious, Vanderbilt had one vice: the constant presence of a lighted or unlighted cigar.

The most flat-out enjoyable sections of “The First Tycoon” are those that deal with New York’s great steamship wars of the first half of the 19th century. Vanderbilt began to build and operate his own fleet, picking up the nickname the Commodore in the process. He engaged in price wars, cutting fares until competitors went out of business or paid him to go away. He slowly developed a chokehold on commerce.

By the late 1840s, Mr. Stiles writes, “almost everyone who traveled between New York and Boston took a Vanderbilt boat or a Vanderbilt train.”

Naturally, there is the requisite 'robber baron' bashing:

Mr. Stiles is clear-eyed about his subject’s nearly amoral rapacity. He writes that Vanderbilt “exacerbated problems that would never be fully solved: a huge disparity in wealth between rich and poor; the concentration of great power in private hands; the fraud and self-serving deception that thrives in an unregulated environment.”

But it's generally not too hard to separate the wheat from the feces in these types of biographies.

More after I've read it...

Scary Stats and Good Advice

From an Arthur Brooks editorial in the WSJ (who have obviously been stealing my material):

The scary stats --

Voices in the media, academia, and the government will dismiss this ethical populism as a fringe movement -- maybe even dangerous extremism. In truth, free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship are still a majoritarian taste. In March 2009, the Pew Research Center asked people if we are better off "in a free market economy even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Fully 70% agreed, versus 20% who disagreed.

Free enterprise is culturally mainstream, for the moment. Asked in a Rasmussen poll conducted this month to choose the better system between capitalism and socialism, 13% of respondents over 40 chose socialism. For those under 30, this percentage rose to 33%. (Republicans were 11 times more likely to prefer capitalism than socialism; Democrats were almost evenly split between the two systems.)

So, clearly, the only solution is to kill everyone between 10 and 30, wait ten years for the females to mature, then get busy to help make up for the population dip. (I know a few middle-aged guys who will go for this idea.)

But, there is hope, because Mr. Brooks has been reading my blog for good advice:

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It's also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don't have without regard for our children's future.

Enterprise defenders also have to define "fairness" as protecting merit and freedom. This is more intuitively appealing to Americans than anything involving forced redistribution. Take public attitudes toward the estate tax, which only a few (who leave estates in the millions of dollars) will ever pay, but which two-thirds of Americans believe is "not fair at all," according to a 2009 Harris poll. Millions of ordinary citizens believe it is unfair for the government to be predatory -- even if the prey are wealthy.

If true, and I'm inclined to be skeptical here, there may be hope for America yet. Otherwise, a lot more than just the 10-30 crowd are going to have to go.

The EPA and Humor, Maybe

George Reisman has posted a comment on the EPA's recent ruling of CO2 as a pollutant, subject to control under the Clean Air Act.

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger are reportedly preparing a joint statement citing the legitimacy and inevitability of taxes on CO2 emissions in general and on human exhalations of CO2 in particular. Humans emit CO2 into the atmosphere and thus contribute to global warming every time they exhale, in other words, every time they let out their breath. Some studies have estimated that taking all human beings together their exhalations account for as much as 8 per cent of all human-caused CO2 emissions. This is more than the proportion emitted by all privately owned aircraft in the world and is thus an important and fruitful target for reduction.

That I am not 100% sure whether or not the estimable Dr. Reisman's essay is sarcastic humor or straight reporting is the worst condemnation of the EPA action (and the entire issue, not to mention today's culture overall) that I can imagine.

Rare Hellenistic Sculpture on Public View

A rare look at a hidden masterpiece...

[T]he 16th Palazzo Giustiniani, which houses the offices of the President of the Italian Senate, and was the site of the signing of the Italian constitution in 1947, is a government building and is normally off limits. But until May 16 the palazzo is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. to showcase a Hellenistic Greek bronze statue of a boxer that is usually housed in the Palazzo Massimo near the train station. The Palazzo Massimo is one of several buildings that together constitute Italy’s national collection of Roman art.


[Archivio fotografico Ufficio Stampa / Senato della Repubblica, reprinted by the New York Times]

The boxer was discovered on the Quirinale hill in 1885, during a vast building campaign undertaken whilst Rome was in full transformation as the capital of the relatively new Italian state. Originally, the statue, which various archeologists have dated to around the end of the fourth and the second century B.C., probably decorated the Thermal Baths of Costantine.

He’s depicted naked, in repose after a fight, his face bruised and battered, his nose squashed, his right eye bloody, his ears swollen by repeated blows. Drops of blood, or sweat, have dripped onto an arm and his right leg. The wounds and drops were originally inlaid in copper. it’s an uncommonly realistic statue.

Magnifico.

TARP and Fascism

At one time in pre-history, all of about six months ago, people were (rightly) concerned that banks would not repay TARP funds. Forget that the administration at the time forced many of them to accept the money in the first place. Consider that now some want to repay/return the money, not wishing to be controlled (even more than they are) by the Federal Government.

And the Feds are refusing to, get this, allow them to give back the money. Why, you might reasonably ask, is this something the government should be allowed to decide?

Label it an extreme view if you like, but an examination of the history of Italy during the 1930s shows this to be fascism, pure and simple.

Tea Party Slogans I Wish I'd Thought Of

"Obama Economics, Chains You Can Believe In" [Seen on a sign at a protest.]

Update:

"You can't fix stupid, but you can vote it out."
[From Michelle Malkin's fine column on the Tea Party movement.]

'Right Wing Extremism' - Call Me Crazy

John Hindraker of Powerline has an excellent smack-down of the recent ludicrous DHS report on 'right wing extremism'. Apart from leaving that term vague, as does the DHS report, he carefully examines several of the claims and finds them to be arbitrary and groundless.

Here's an excerpt:

Another of the report's themes is that conditions today resemble those in the 1990s, when militia activity was a concern:

"The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers. ...

"Growth of these groups subsided in reaction to increased government scrutiny as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and disrupted plots, improvements in the economy, and the continued U.S. standing as the preeminent world power."

In 1995, the economy was booming. Nor is there any obvious similarity between the "political climate" now and in the 1990s, except that we have a Democratic administration in power. I suspect that's what the authors are really worried about, although they never quite come out and say so.

The Homeland Security report lists the possibility of restrictions on firearms as a driving force behind extremist recruitment:

"Proposed imposition of firearms restrictions and weapons bans likely would attract new members into the ranks of rightwing extremist groups, as well as potentially spur some of them to begin planning and training for violence against the government."

On its face, this is pure speculation. It's true that firearms sales have increased, but what evidence is there that those buying guns are "planning and training for violence against the government"? None that the report discloses.

The authors describe "rightwing extremist chatter" on the internet:

"Rightwing extremist chatter on the Internet continues to focus on the economy, the perceived loss of U.S. jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and home foreclosures. Anti-Semitic extremists attribute these losses to a deliberate conspiracy conducted by a cabal of Jewish 'financial elites.'"

That's pretty sinister, all right: focusing on jobs and the economy. As far as anti-Semitism is concerned, you'll find much more of that on left-wing sites (including many that are considered mainstream) than on right-wing sites. That, though, must be the subject of another report.

Whoever wrote the report seems deeply hostile to conservatives' opposition to the agenda of the Obama administration. For example:

"Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment."

Millions of Americans--not just "rightwing extremists"--are concerned about the administration's positions on immigration and many other issues. Note that wherever possible, the authors slip race into the discussion, as with the reference to "expansion of social programs to minorities." I'm not aware of a single social program that the Obama administration has proposed to "expand to minorities." But the authors' assumption is, apparently, that anyone who opposes the expansion of social programs must be a racist. Once again we see the assertion that right wing extremists are "galvanized" and are "leveraging" these issues as "drivers for recruitment." But is recruitment up, down, or stable? The report doesn't say, and its authors evidently don't know.

What he doesn't mention, though he does assert that the report is probably (ha!) politically motivated, is that this sort of thing is exactly what one would expect when a Progressive government is in power. For such people, truth is subjective and the only thing that counts is keeping and enlarging that power. For that purpose, no smear is too outlandish, no support for it too ephemeral.

There is more evidence for my view in an editorial in the LA Times by Marc Cooper, where he calls the Tea Party protests "insane."

It's filled with the usual left-wing lies about the protests. He suggests the participants are "outraged, simply infuriated, by the marginal tax rate rising 3% for millionaires". That's a deliberate distortion and typical of the entire editorial.

He also claims the protests are primarily against the current administration, and therefore "Republican." Well, it is the current one, after all. Then he goes on to assert "[t]hese same conservatives, however, were mum when George W. Bush erased our budget surplus and put us deep in the red by drunken spending on a pointless war in Iraq and by, yes, granting massive tax rollbacks for the loaded country clubbers who fund the GOP".

Either the author is woefully ignorant of the diversity of political opinion on that subject from all points on the political compass, or it's another deliberate distortion. That George Bush's approval ratings were so low by itself signals that there were more than just Democrats who disapproved of the effort. Also, the tax rollbacks were for all income brackets and the highest still pay 40% of the total.

Again, this type of smear job is exactly what one would expect from a Progressive. So to claim, as this 'right wing extremist' does that the media is biased in support of the Progressive policies of the current Federal government would hardly fall in the realm of insanity.

Of course, to a Progressive, believing in the value of individual freedom, and believing that your money belongs to you, really are crazy notions.