The American Prospect

"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to avoid being deceived by economists."-- Joan Robinson, Cambridge University

On page one of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith illustrates the central principle of his economics with an example taken from, in his words, a "very trifling manufacture": the making of pins. Smith goes to some effort to describe the process. "One man draws out the wire," he writes, "another… more

If you start to read the policy proposals of the Democratic presidential candidates and the mainstream Democratic think tanks, you will quickly get the impression that, while Democrats see lots of problems, there’s always just one solution: a tax credit.

John Edwards proposes an "American Dream Tax Credit" -- up to $1,000 a year for five years to help buy a first home. Barack Obama has a new tax credit to promote fatherhood. Outside of the candidates, competition for the tax-credit… more

When I was in college, during Ronald Reagan’s "Morning in America," I had a classmate who is the person I always think of when I try to imagine the young George W. Bush. (Although the comparison is terribly unfair to this person, since unlike Bush, he has considerable accomplishment to show for his first 45 years on this planet.) This guy had a little motto, typical of the privileged-punk campus conservatism that was then just taking hold, and that would… more

One lesson of the 2006 vote was so obvious that Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times was able to write about it two days before the election: the return of the swing voter. Karl Rove’s strategy of mobilizing a conservative Republican base while ignoring the flippable voters in the middle "lay shattered in pieces," exactly as pollster Stan Greenberg told Brownstein it would.

It is with a sense of relief that we welcome back the swing voter. The craziness is… more

Defeat in Iraq will be bad, but defeat in Afghanistan would be a catastrophe. If U.S. and NATO troops eventually leave and the Taliban return to power, it would mark the utter failure of American strategy in the country where the "war on terror" all began.

Outright defeat in Afghanistan still seems a long way off. But as Sarah Chayes’ beautifully written, highly illuminating memoir makes clear, Afghanistan is at best "drifting sideways." Hamid Karzai remains little more than the mayor… more

Just about everyone understands the importance of Iraq to the Democrats’ success in the 2006 midterm elections. Far fewer, we suspect, understand that the Democrats owe a good chunk of their 2006 success to an issue that has historically been one of their strongest: the economy.

Throughout the campaign, polls regularly indicated that the economy was the second most important concern of voters (behind Iraq); polls taken in the last weekend by Pew, ABC News/Washington Post and Newsweek confirmed this.… more

In novels, films, or real life, There’s really only one Washington story: Newcomer comes to town, full of idealism and ready to change the country, but soon encounters the permanent government that defines what you can’t do and whom you have to deal with if you want to try. The permanent government might be octogenarian committee chairs, ruthless staffers, or -- more recently, as the power of the committee chairs has waned -- the lobbyists.

It’s the story of the Carter… more

Internet utopianism can seem so 1998. The future was silicon in the late Clinton years, when government was flatlining in petty scandal and technology stocks seemed to rise exponentially. Not only was anything possible: If you believed the mavens of Wired magazine and assorted other cyber-prophets, pretty much anything was inevitable. Soon, they assured us, people would spend more time in virtual communities than in "meatspace." Politics would be transformed by the universal pamphleteering of Netizens. Oh, and some of… more

The crowning disgrace of this country’s five-year experiment with one-party Republican rule was surely the passage of a bill on September 29, that sanctioned abusive treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror," banned habeas corpus claims for those identified as "enemy combatants," and allowed the president to place that designation on anyone, including U.S. citizens.

Even with their president’s approval ratings at Nixonian levels, and their own sinking below that, congressional Republicans were able to muster one last grand gesture… more

It is conventional wisdom that the new democratic activists of the "netroots" are strong on political tactics but don’t have much to contribute to the war of ideas. Matt Bai, writing in The New York Times Magazine, charged disparagingly that "leaders of the netroots... will tell you that Big Ideas are overrated."

This isn’t entirely fair, but let’s take the point: The better-known lefty blogs are indeed weighted toward the tactical. They argue that the liberal establishment of think tanks and… more