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| Stuart Hayashi |
While endlessly prattling about President Franklin Roosevelt's godly
virtues, my tenth-grade U.S. History teacher neglected to mention that, during the Great Depression, her hero's administration systematically bought farmers' output and then destroyed it before it could feed anyone, thereby raising food prices . . . as Americans starved.
Roosevelt, my instructor explained, was elected to four terms simply
because "he was that great a president." For her, it was that simple.
And Roosevelt's horrid agricultural policy has continued under every
succeeding presidential administration.
I've long enjoyed conservative writer Michelle Malkin's arguments
against such abhorrent outgrowths of FDR's de-facto socialist New Deal.
But now Malkin delivers apologias for that execrable presidency.
Malkin's newest book doesn't explicitly endorse Roosevelt's
welfare-statism, but it does try to justify what he did to
Japanese-Americans during WWII. The title: "In Defense of Internment."
When (il)liberals hurl mean-spirited insults at Malkin, I usually
defend her. This time, I cannot.
During WWII, U.S. officials suspected that the Japanese were capable
of bombing Pearl Harbor because they had agents in America. To stop the spies, the U.S. government indiscriminately placed 110,000
Japanese-Americans into camps.
This happened primarily because FDR signed the executive order
legalizing this race-based persecution. (My teacher blamed the U.S.
government in general for this without a peep about Roosevelt's role).
Even if one insists that FDR only "caved in to public pressure," he
was still ultimately responsible as chief executive. (Il)liberals'
excuse-making cannot mollify that fact.
California's then-Attorney General Earn Warren, who later became the
Supreme Court's Chief Justice, also pushed for internment. Today
(il)liberals laud him for desegregating schools and requiring police to read arrestees their rights.
Ironic, then, that his actions as Attorney General hypocritically
betrayed what (il)liberals love him for -- he carried out racist
impingements on civil liberties.
Malkin's book argues that wartime internment of Japanese-Americans
was justified because "the survival of the nation comes first," even at the expense of individuals composing that very nation.
First, Malkin skewers prevailing historical interpretations. She
cites the little-known fact that German-Americans were interned too. But as Bill O'Reilly says, "You can't justify bad behavior by mentioning otherbad behavior."
Malkin also pedantically says the government's goal wasn't to intern
- ALL* Japanese-Americans; just ones in a certain geographic area. Does that excuse anything?
She evades the nature of internment. Individual Japanese-Americans
were dragged from their homes when nobody proved they had violated anyone's rights or spied for Japan, and then they were *IMPRISONED*. If they resisted the government's manhandling, they could've been beaten or shot.
FDR's executive order for internment, like all enforced laws, was
backed by threats of violence against the noncompliant.
With half-assed sensitivity, Malkin states she isn't "arguing that
[Japanese-Americans] didn't suffer or weren't terribly inconvenienced."
Internment was "inconvenient" inasmuch as being kidnapped is,
because that's what internment, and what she calls "relocation," were -- mass abduction. The book's title should be "In Defense of Kidnapping."
"But any inconvenience ..." Malkin explains, "is preferable to being
incinerated ... by a flaming hijacked plane," referring to 9/11.
When Malkin advocated the infringement of Arab-Americans' civil
liberties in 9/11's wake, people told her that the government shouldn't do to them what it did to Japanese-Americans in WWII.
So, basically, Malkin asserts that Japanese-American internment was
justified, just so that she can "win" arguments for racially profiling Arab-Americans.
Lame.
Malkin claims that law enforcement singling out Japanese- or
Arab-Americans isn't racist, because it's not done out of visceral hatred but just as a precautionary measure.
She also says (elsewhere), "In high school, I read all of Ayn
Rand ..." Malkin "grew out [sic]" of that, though.
She should give Rand a re-read, as Rand wrote, "Racism ... is the notion of ascribing ... moral, social, or political significance to a man's genetic lineage." Law enforcement treating one ethnicity differently from another qualifies.
When Malkin says that national security justifies interning
individuals, she's arguing that individual rights can be morally sacrificed to the collective -- just what New Dealers preached.
FDR said some individuals weren't wise enough to save for their own
retirement, so the state had to collect money from everyone to bail them out. The result? A bankrupt social(ist) (in)security system, tax-financed and government-operated food-wasting, consequent higher food prices, and the modern welfare state.
Some (il)liberals promulgate that interment was a departure from
Roosevelt's "progressivism." But it's wholly consistent with his
collectivism . . . which, regrettably, Malkin sides with in this particular case.
Stuart K. Hayashi is Policy Analyst at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Hayashi is the founder of a news Web log, "The Fiftieth Star," at: http://50thstar.blogspot.com to be unofficially centered around activities at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His older editorials can be seen at: http://reason_club.tripod.com/stuart_editorials.html and he can be reached at: mailto:radical_individualist@hotmail.com
Related articles by Stuart K. Hayashi
"The Invisible Gun" http://tinyurl.com/6lx58
"The Propriety of Property" (in two installments) http://tinyurl.com/4g2ld
; http://tinyurl.com/54vqm
"Freedom Before Democracy"; http://tinyurl.com/6hza5
"Liberal Hypocrisy on the Unpatriotic PATRIOT Act"; http://tinyurl.com/6jcg3
"The 'Indigenous Peoples' Supremacy Movement" ;http://tinyurl.com/3mly9
"The Grown-Up Bullies of Democracy"; http://tinyurl.com/6zfd4
"Respecting the Selfishness of Others"; http://tinyurl.com/4htrb
Recommended Links:
Read President Franklin D. Roosevelt's executive order to intern
Japanese-Americans (there's no denying that, by his own free will, he put his name on it); http://tinyurl.com/4yrg8
Earl Warren's role in the Japanese-American internment;
http://tinyurl.com/4z83n
Michelle Malkin speaks up for the collectivists' sacrifice of the
individual; http://tinyurl.com/4vfdp
Michelle Malkin rails against immigrants in general but praises one of them specifically (Ayn Rand); http://tinyurl.com/7yp8f
Marc "Amritas" Miyake's commentary on Malkin's Defense of Kidnapping;
http://tinyurl.com/6uls3 ; http://tinyurl.com/6mfyc ;
http://tinyurl.com/4j56m
A war veteran's argument against Malkin and internment;
http://tinyurl.com/4zpru
Jason Sullum refutes Michelle Malkin on the sanctity of civil liberties;
http://tinyurl.com/5ce5k
Law professor Eric Muller's ten-part argument against Malkin;
http://tinyurl.com/56zfc ; http://tinyurl.com/54o9e ;
http://tinyurl.com/6bs83 ; http://tinyurl.com/5mw2r ;
http://tinyurl.com/7xodc ; http://tinyurl.com/4thfn ;
http://tinyurl.com/5zdkw ; http://tinyurl.com/5ep93 ;
http://tinyurl.com/4pt3r ; http://tinyurl.com/6yr8e ;
http://tinyurl.com/5v5tz
Columns by Michelle Malkin in which she contradicts her own message that the law should treat people differently according to race;
http://tinyurl.com/4v44d ; http://tinyurl.com/6jrhj
One of Michelle Malkin's all-time worst columns (on a different subject):
she sides with a crazy school official who wanted to "inspect" the students'
underwear; Malkin talks if the students' parents were the bad guys in that
situation instead of the official who obviously tried to violate privacy
rights; http://tinyurl.com/4clqp
This editorial is intended to provoke thought, discussion and an examination of issues. It does not reflect official policy of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. See the GRIH Web site at: http://www.grassrootinstitute.org/
HawaiiReporter.com reports the real news, and prints all editorials submitted, even if they do not represent the viewpoint of the editors, as long as they are written clearly. Send editorials to mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com
Offshoots
FEDERAL JOB TRAINING PROGRAMS DON’T WORK
Daily Policy Digest
WELFARE ISSUES
Monday, Aug. 23, 2004
The federally-funded Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 -- the primary legislation for employment and training programs at the U.S. Department of Labor -- is unproven and may be as ineffective as previous initiatives, according to the Heritage Foundation.
As part of the WIA bill, Congress mandated that the Department of Labor assess the effectiveness of the bill by 2005, but now, almost six years later, little evaluation has been done.
However, if the WIA bill works anything like the last federally funded job-training program -- the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) of 1982 -- the results may show that federal job-training programs fall short. According to researchers:
Job-training programs are designed to increase the skills, hence the hourly wages of workers; yet, the JTPA programs did not have a significant effect on adult wages (youth wages were not studied)
Job training programs may not be providing the skills needed in the workforce; a 2001 survey of manufacturers revealed that two-thirds of them could not find enough qualified applicants to maintain production levels and meet customer demand.
Job-training programs may focus on vocational training, but many trainees lack high school basics; the same survey revealed that one-third of job applications were rejected due to the applicant’s lack of basic reading and writing skills.
President Bush has proposed changes to the WIA program, but even with changes, no reliable data exists on WIA’s impact. Federally-funded job training programs, including WIA (which received $5.15 in FY 2004), should be phased out. Instead, Congress should wait until states and localities have evaluated their own programs to determine which services are needed.
Source: David Muhlhausen, and Paul Kersey, “In the Dark on Job Training: Federal Job-Training Programs Have a Record of Failure,” Backgrounder 1774, Heritage Foundation, July 6, 2004 and Larry L. Orr et al., “Does Training for the Disadvantaged Work? Evidence from the National JTPA Study,” Urban Institute Press, January 1996.
For text http://www.heritage.org/Research/Labor/bg1774.cfm
For more on Job Training http://www.ncpa.org/iss/wel/
Sprout of the Day
"Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual."
-Friedrich A. Hayek
Rooted in Common Sense
One doesn't have to be in farming in order to know what stinks. In this case it is farm subsidies. As Paul explains, the real problem is that we don't really know how much it they really entail. Even those who are supposed to know don't. Wonder who benefits from that fact?
http://www.termlimits.org/Press/Common_Sense/cs1161.html
Paul Jacob is Senior Fellow at http://www.termlimits.org and is on the Board of Advisors for GRIH.
