New and Classic Books
By Brendan Conway, John Attarian, Steven Vincent

THE BIG FIX

The 2% Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love By Matthew Miller Public Affairs, 320 pages,$26

 

Imagine if one of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls claimed he could return the federal budget to pre-Reagan levels if elected, while cleaning up inner-city schools, enacting a universal health care plan, and creating tens of thousands of jobs for poor Americans. That’s precisely what former Clinton administration budget adviser Matthew Miller contends the next American President can do. In The 2% Solution, he claims his plan will “help us make dramatic inroads on some of the nation’s biggest domestic problems in ways that are broadly acceptable, pragmatic, and just”—and at a reasonable cost.

 

How does he hope to accomplish all of this? With an agenda only liberals can love: It cancels the remaining Bush tax cuts, hikes the gas tax, limits health tax exclusions, and curbs defense spending. Indeed, the book’s tantalizing promise to limit government spending while solving social ills turns out to be something of a statistical ruse. With a cost of$220 billion—a full 2 percent of GDP—Miller’s platform is far more ambitious than anything on offer from the Democratic candidates.

 

For Miller, spending measures “[aren’t] meaningful without being compared to the size of the economy.” It’s all relative, he says: Economic growth frees up GDP for greater public sector spending. Thus, Bill Clinton’s government was “smaller” than Ronald Reagan’s, because it only spent 18.5 percent of GDP, while Reagan, pre-siding over a military buildup and a stagnant economy, spent 22 percent.(In absolute terms, Clinton’s government was nearly twice the size of Reagan’s.) Miller thus argues that a modest spending boost commensurate with economic growth would keep government “smaller” than Reagan’s was. So much for fiscal moderation.

 

At least some of this book’s policy proposals are innovative. Take Miller’s “millionaire teachers” idea, which would tackle the talent flight from the public schools by raising teacher salaries in the worst schools by 50 percent. “People who can’t get jobs elsewhere come here,” says the former president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union. Miller would fix this by making millionaires out of teachers of poor children over the course of a career. “The troubling part is a 50 percent boost for just showing up for work, with-out any reference to whether anybody you teach learns a damned thing,” says school reform advocate Chester Finn. Fine, says Miller; let’s introduce performance-based compensation and real accountability for underperformers.

 

Miller proposes choosing three or four metropolitan school districts for a school voucher trial. To assuage liberals who see in vouchers a conservative plot against public education, the schools would receive a 20-30 percent per pupil funding increase, at a price of$1-2 billion a year. The government would guarantee funding for up to 15 years to assure would-be educational entrepreneurs that investments would not be stranded. “William Bennett told me he would take this deal in a second,” Miller reports. What about the Left? “I don’t have a problem with that at all,” NAACP president Kweisi Mfume reportedly told Miller. The program would gradually expand to school districts across the country.

On health care, Miller proposes a tax credit that subsidizes individuals buying coverage from private plans. The cost:$80 billion, about $25 billion more than a leading Heritage Foundation proposal, but one that retains fundamental market mechanisms, unlike most Democratic proposals. Such a compromise says Miller, “requires Democrats to accept the existence of a private insurance industry and Republicans to accept the need to help everyone buy a decent policy.” Bush administration budget chief Mitch Daniels says: “As an advocate of limited government, this doesn’t necessarily bother me because arguably it is less intrusive, less complicated than what we do now.”

 

Some of Miller’s other ideas are far less promising. “Patriot dollars,” a campaign finance scheme, would, at a cost of $3 billion, allocate voters $50 apiece to donate to the candidate or PAC of their choice. “Before long, coffee shops and bars might be filled with folks debating how to use their Patriot dollars wisely,” Miller writes. But one could just as easily imagine mass electoral corruption when citizens barter away their allocations.

 

Things are even worse on defense. Miller sketches only the broadest outlines of a modest military policy that limits spending to $400 billion. As justification, Miller takes Dwight Eisenhower’s latter-day anti-military cue: “Every gun made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Key questions such as homeland security, the preemptive strike doctrine, or whether to negotiate with North Korea go wholly untreated. Not to mention the disingenuousness of promising defense spending cuts despite costly future commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Miller is deeply cynical about American democracy because he thinks the country has lost its desire to ensure “a minimally decent life for citizens of a wealthy nation.” “Our founding fathers designed a government of diffused powers whose natural tendency is gridlock,” he writes despondently. That pessimism and disillusion is the final word in Matthew Miller’s view of America.

Brendan Conway is associate editor at The Public Interest.

TEACHERS VS. EDUCATION

By John Attarian

The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education By Peter Brimelow HarperCollins, 320 pages, $24.95

America leads the world in spending on public education, yet our students perform dismally. Financial journalist Peter Brimelow addresses this paradox by unmasking the pernicious role of teachers’ unions. About 85 percent of teachers belong to the American Federation of Teachers or the National Education Association; Brimelow focuses on the latter. The NEA boasts 2.6 million members and annual revenues of$1.25 billion. Public- sector employees were once forbidden to unionize. Only in the 1960s did the NEA and AFT become genuine labor unions—and often militant, self-serving, and rapacious.

 

Applying an economics perspective, Brimelow treats education as an industry, focusing on output (learning attained by high-school seniors) and input (amount of spending to attain it).Today’s educational quality is unimpressive, but the worst problem, Brimelow maintains, is quantitative: “Hoggish consumption of ever-increasing resources to do, at best, the same job.” In 2000 dollars, annual spending per pupil was $275 in 1890 and $7,086 in 1999-2000,far outpacing the growth of real gross domestic product.

 

This happens, Brimelow argues, because the unions practice what economists call “rent-seeking”: using a privileged position to get more money than a competitive market would pay, thereby making society worse off. That’s why the quality of public education collapsed even as the cost exploded—indicating that the unions’ real goal is not better education, but higher income.

 

Brimelow makes a persuasive case. Most of his book is a well-researched, richly detailed account of the NEA’s self-serving conduct. Along the way, he explodes several myths, e.g., contrary to the continuously repeated belief, today’s student-teacher ratio is quite low:16.5 students per teacher in 1998,versus 37.6 in 1870.

Teachers ’unions weaken education, Brimelow reveals, by making it almost impossible to fire incompetent and even sexually predatory teachers. Unions consistently oppose merit pay and higher pay for qualified new teachers. And their salary rapacity starves other needs such as textbooks.

 

Teachers’ unions are increasingly involved in politics: funding candidates for school boards and city councils, lobbying for higher education budgets, and lavishly contributing to the Democratic Party. Union members send campaign flyers home with students (unethical) and use school facilities for political agitation (illegal).The payoffis rich. Executives in state teacher unions command six-figure salaries plus opulent benefits.

 

Education reformers often advocate school vouchers: giving parents tax money to spend on the schools of their choice. Brimelow supports vouchers because they would “force the suppliers of education to improve their services or go out of business.” But teachers’ unions hate vouchers, for fear they will aid non-unionized private schools. Brimelow admits that vouchers have drawbacks. Some libertarians fear that vouchers will abet government regulation of private schools. The “fundamental and unspoken problem, however, is race.” Wealthy suburban schools are de facto segregated. “To many suburbanites in these areas, vouchers just look like a new word for busing.” For Brimelow, the problem with public schools is that “there is no market” (his italics). Accordingly, he advocates applying antitrust legislation to the unions; overhauling state collective bargaining law to eliminate the unions’ bargaining monopoly; enacting right-to-work legislation; toughening anti-strike laws; opening up teacher certification to eliminate barriers to entry; and abolishing the federal Department of Education.

 

Though it doesn’t address all problems (we won’t cure politicized Deweyite “education” by making it cheaper),this is a meritorious and valuable book. Brimelow has smoked out a gluttonous, fanged worm. His proposals are certainly worth implementing. If anyone can figure out a way around the NEA.

John Attarian is the author of Social Security :False Consciousness and Crisis.

 

 

ISLAM’S OTHER HOLY BOOKS

By Steven Vincent

Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam By Ram Swarup Prometheus Books, 258 pages, $22

Nineteenth-century French scholar Ernest Renan wrote that, unlike the founders of other world religions, Mohammed “was born in full light of history.” If so, history’s illumination is not always flattering to the warlord-prophet: How many people know that Mohammed claimed he “stood at the gates of Hell and saw that the majority of those who entered were women”? Or that he believed “filling the belly of man with pus is better than stuffing his mind with poetry”? Or that he flushed his nasal passages with water three times each morning because “the devil spends the night in the interior of the nose”?

 

You won’t find these anecdotes in the Koran. Rather, these and thousands of other stories are found in the hadiths—accounts of the Prophet recorded by his earliest companions and passed down through succeeding generations. I n the ninth and tenth centuries, Muslim scholars collected these stories, weeded out the obviously forged, and organized the rest into six massive texts. With the Koran, these volumes form two mutually illuminating pillars of Islamic devotion: If the Koran deals with the commandments of God revealed through His Prophet, the hadiths (or hadis) depict, through Mohammed, the ideal ways to perform those commands. Fascinating, absurd, sometimes comical and horrific, the hadiths are essential to understanding Islam—and why the religion so easily lends itself to superstition, despotism, and eschatological violence.

 

Recently reissued, Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam, is an attempt by Indian scholar Ram Swarup, who died in 1998,to present a streamlined version of one particular hadith collection: the Sahih Muslim, compiled by the Sunni scholar Muslim ibnu’l-Hajjaj (819-875 A.D.) and translated into English in the 1970s.Reviewing each of the Sahih Muslim’s 42 books, Swarup selects several hundred of its traditions and places them in a historical context, adding his own comments supplemented by the Koran and Western sources. We learn that, according to Mohammed, the three gravest sins are to “associate a partner with Allah”(i.e., deny His unitarian nature),murder one’s children, and commit adultery with a neighbor’s wife, in that order. The Prophet also decreed that the person most deserving of “good treatment” is “your mother, again your mother, and again your mother”—though he consigned his own polytheistic mère to Hell. As for Mohammed’s mission on earth: “None of you is a believer until I am dearer to him than his child, his father, and the whole of mankind.”

 

Beginning as a Gandhi-influenced leftist in the 1940s,Swarup became a committed anti-communist during the Cold War before taking up the banner of Hindu revivalism in the late ’70s.In 1983 he published this book, under the more provocative title Understanding Islam through the Hadis: Religious Faith or Fanaticism? Indian authorities deemed the book so inflammatory they banned the Hindi translation in 1990.Despite the new milder subtitle, Swarup’s text remains laced with acerbic comments. He likens the tone of some hadiths to the “atmosphere obtained under the communist regimes of our own time” and dwells at length on Mohammed’s supervision of the beheading of 700 unarmed Jewish men. “Those who follow the Prophet must become new men with a new conscience and new loyalties,” Swarup observes. “They must be hardened in the difficult school of Islam [and] become participants in its blood-rites.” Swarup does note the Prophet’s belief that Allah will reward Muslims who free slaves; and even through his prism of muscular Hinduism, he allows the various characters integral to the legend of early Islam—such as Ali, Abu Bakr, and the irrepressible Aisha—to come alive.

 

But in general, Swarup draws from the hadiths to depict the Prophet as a kind of cross between Jim Jones and Tony Soprano—a man who launches surprise attacks on shepherds, “marries” the wives of unbelievers slain in battle, and commands the killing of dogs because they affect eyesight and cause miscarriages. The hadiths are indeed filled with the Prophet’s autocratic decrees, covering everything from how Muslims should pray to how they should wipe themselves after defecating.

How seriously does Islam take the hadiths? Judging by the number of Muslims with dogs, not very. Many Islamic scholars and clerics repudiate these volumes, concerned they provide ammunition for critics of Islam. But some Muslims take inspiration from them—such as Mohammed’s oft-quoted “The gates of Paradise lie under the shadow of swords.” Despite its own biases, Swarup’s book is a good place for Westerners to begin to understand the hadiths’ role in forming the mindset of Islamic fundamentalists. As one jihadist says to a group of like-minded clerics in a videotape made soon after 9/11:“I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no God but Allah and his prophet is Mohammad.” That line comes from the Bukhari hadith. The speaker was Osama bin Laden.

Steven Vincent is a New York City writer formerly with the Wall Street Journal.