named after the late Walter Wriston: capital (meaning both money and ideas), when freed to travel at the speed of light, "will go where it is wanted, stay where it is well-treated."

By applying Wriston's Law of capital and talent flow, you can predict the fortunes of companies (and countries). All predictions about future performance must start with this most basic question: Do companies (and countries) attract money and talent, or repel it?

America's success for most of its history owes to Wriston's Law. Ambitious people and investment capital have always wanted to come here. America was a place where merit and investment could be rewarded–not just economically, but socially too. The rise of the American meritocracy after World War II coincided with the decline of Northeastern WASPs in America's social hierarchies. In the early 1980s, writer Tom Wolfe predicted that Silicon Valley would usually beat Boston's Route 128 in technology showdowns because Silicon Valley culture elevated the engineer and entrepreneur to higher social status. Thus Silicon Valley was a better magnet of talent.

America beat Germany to the atomic bomb in the 1940s because America welcomed talented immigrants–many of them Central European Jews–and Germany repelled them. It is appalling to think what might have happened if Germany had developed the bomb in 1943. The thousand-year Reich lasted only 12 years because Hitler rejected atomic science as a figment of Jewish minds.

America beat the Soviet Union to the moon in 1969 and then 20 years later to the Cold War's victor's podium because America had the immigrant X-factor. The Soviets did not.

The 25-year economic boom of 1982 to 2007 was built at the intersection of capital and talent. Lower tax rates on capital gains and income caused a miraculous reverse alchemy. Capital emerged from the dead hand of tax shelters and precious metals and began flowing to talented entrepreneurs in high technology. The capital flow from past to future acted as a magnet for the most talented entrepreneurs in the world, who came to the U.S. for the opportunity to build companies and get rich.

The reason for bringing up Walter Wriston and the late, great 25-year boom of technology, entrepreneurship and investment that was built on Wriston's Law is–very sad to say–that America has reversed course.

On immigration, America has made it harder for educated and skilled foreigners to enter the country and become citizens. As immigration policy goes, it should be a no-brainer to hand out green cards to foreigners who get college degrees in the U.S.

As for capital, well, America's tax burden is rapidly catching up to Europe's. I like Europe as well as anyone–as a place to drink coffee and loaf. I really enjoy watching this year's Tour de France on the Versus HD network on my 60-inch flat panel TV. France is really lovely, isn't it? But France is not where global free agents go to build tomorrow's dynamic companies. France rejects Wriston's Law, and so it repels capital and talent.

Not so very long ago, America was the destination for capital and talent. Now America is just one country among many competing for these precious resources. Our relative advantage in the world is declining. Nothing I see coming out of Washington is helping matters. Quite the opposite. Capital and merit are under attack.

lots of this kind of thing popping up

She’s like the ex-girlfriend they’re SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about — really, it’s O-ver — but they just can’t stop talking about her.

Liberal: Ha, ha … Sarah who? She’s over, she’s toast, a future Trivial Pursuit answer, nothing more.

Normal person: Whatever. How about the North Korean missiles?

Liberal: Can you believe she just resigned the governorship like that? What a quitter!

Normal person: Speaking of quitting, how’s work?

Liberal: Did you hear she might get a TV show? There’s no way Sarah Palin’s getting a TV show! No way! I can’t believe stupid Sarah Palin could get her own stupid TV show now. Well, I’m sure not gonna watch it — that’s for sure!

Normal person: Have you seen all the Michael Jackson coverage on TV?

Liberal: How does she think she can run for president in 2012 if she can’t finish her term as governor of a Podunk state? She’s finished.

Normal person: OK, then! You won’t have to vote for her.

Liberal: I was never going to vote for her! But now I’m not going to vote for her twice. And I will never watch her TV show. I am so over her.

William A Jacobson makes an interesting observation: There is something strange about the Obama administration's diplomacy. We speak softly to our enemies, but use a big stick against our friends.  

read the whole thing here:http://legalinsurrection.blogspot.com/2009/06/heads-they-win-tails-we-lose-diplomacy.html

and don't skip the comments!

Way back in 1988, Michael Dukakis blew a question about the death penalty when asked about whether he’d want it if his wife Kitty had been raped and murdered.  Dukakis said no, but addressed it clinical legalese rather than absorbing the opportunity to address the emotional impact of violent crime, and his candidacy cratered.

Obama recently went the other way with what SHOULD be just as bad a result.  Dring the ABC infomercial for Obamacare last week Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a neurologist and researcher at the New York University Langone Medical Center, said that elites often propose health care solutions that limit options for the general public, secure in the knowledge that if they or their loves ones get sick, they will be able to afford the best care available, even if it’s not provided by insurance.

Devinsky asked the president pointedly if he would be willing to promise that he wouldn’t seek such extraordinary help for his wife or daughters if they became sick and the public plan he’s proposing limited the tests or treatment they can get.

The president refused to make such a pledge, though he allowed that if “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.

Not hearing about it until now?  Wonder why?

From Glen Reynolds: Caligula sent a horse to the Senate. Minnesota is just sending part of the horse.

that applies to so MANY things, most of them being undertaken by Obama and the Democrat Congress:

"When was the last time human beings modernized our energy sources by making older power sources more expensive?" he asks the interns. "And, of course, by now you probably know that the answer is never."

Personal computers didn't take off because there was a tax on typewriters, he says. And the Internet didn't sprout up because the government made telegraphs more expensive.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105834436

Not really.  Simply commiting them again.

Robert Samuelson has a good article here.

in part he writes: 

The U.S. welfare state is weakening; insecurity is rising. The sensible thing would be to decide which forms of public welfare are needed to protect the vulnerable and to begin paring others. Our inaction poses another dreary parallel with GM. It was obvious a quarter-century ago that GM the auto company could not support GM the welfare state. But the union wouldn’t surrender benefits, and the company acquiesced. Inertia prevailed, and the reckoning came.

The same cycle, repeated on a national scale with sums many multiples higher, would be correspondingly more fearsome.

A lot of Friedrich Hayek’s work is really about whether or not a society consumes or misallocates or squanders its capital and suffers a consequent lose of general welfare, or whether a society instead  invests and innovates and coordinates it capital utilizing relative prices, sound money, and a competitive system and thereby enjoys the consequent bounty of an ever expanding general welfare.

Hayek fought the Keynesians, the socialists, and the unions because each of these groups represented in effect a conspiracy against the expansion and coordination of capital production — both though a complex of false scientific ideas, and through their massive influence on legislation and the administrative state.  The Keynesians were the enemy of sound thinking about increasing output through the lengthening of capital production, and also the enemies of sound thinking about the effect of monetary expansion on the capital structure across time.  The socialist were the enemy of sound thinking about the role of relative prices in the coordination of production and the role of competition in the advance of innovation and productivity and consumer satisfaction.  The unions were the enemy of sound thinking about the rule of law and the effects of price controls and government mandates on income, output, productivity and personal choice , and they used their muscle to legally priviledge themselves in the political process and in the economy, to the detriment of everyone else — most especially the next generation.

Hayek warned about all this and more — and now Obama and the American government seem dead set on putting the pedal to the metal as America goes blasting off headed straight for a brick wall.

originally from Pam Geller:

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Obama's silence in the face of the violent and brutal Islamic crackdown on the Iranian people peacefully demonstrating for freedom is in keeping with Obama's previous silences: 1.  Silent on the Black Muslim Riverdale bombers. 2.  Silent on the release of the Black Panthers voter intimidation case. His department of justice ordered the case dropped. 3.  Silent on the murder of Private William Long by a Black Muslim -  Issued a very weak statement, though he loudly condemned the Tiller murder. 4.  Silent on the French plane that crashed in the ocean, possibly blown up by the two Muslim terrorists on board. 5.  Silent on Iran - Issued a weakly worded statement. added by RWK: Silence on Hondura except for siding with Castro and Chavez against the Honduran people, Constitution and rule of law On the other side of the coin we have: 1.  Obama's bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia. 2.  Obama's pro Islam speech in Cairo, with many fabricated platitudes about the history of Islam. 3.  Obama instructing Eric Holder to issue a memo stating that Muslims were not to be discriminated against. 4.  Releases Muslim terrorists from Gitmo to Bermuda, so that they can go into the restaurant business and hang on the beaches there. 5.  Eliminating the phrase "war on terrorism" and replacing it with "overseas contingency operation" and "terorists" with "man made disasters". There is a definite pattern in the behavior by Barack Hussein Obama toward the worldwide ummah (in keeping with being raised a Muslim in Indonesia). hat tip Jonathan Galt