As I’ve written before, I have a morning routine. Every morning I rise, take a 1-2 mile walk with Qila and Jenny, come home, prepare my breakfast, and then feed the dogs. While I’m preparing and eating my own breakfast I read Lileks’s Daily Bleat (there’s a link over in my blogroll). Then I take a quick look a Instapundit . There’s a link for Glenn in my blogroll, too.
I don’t want to birddog the poor old Arch-Blogger but I think he’s got the wrong end of the stick in two of his posts this morning.
In Glenn’s citing of Virginia Postrel’s NYT article he talks about the “surprisingly high benefits of free trade”. I certainly believe that’s true but there isn’t a great deal in Ms. Postrel’s article to support it. What she points to is significant one-sided benefits to Canada. And she ignores a significant point: there was a lot going on in the period being discussed besides free trade. For example, there was an unprecedented level of investment on both sides of the border in information technology and the growth of the Internet. Might that not have had just a little to do with the productivity increases that are being reported? That’s certainly the way they’re being explained over here. Sounds like the post hoc propter hoc fallacy to me. It also bears mentioning that we still have managed trade with Canada. Yes, it’s freer than it was but it’s still managed. Remember the flap not long ago about seniors buying Canadian pharmaceuticals? It was in all the papers. In an environment of really free trade that would have been a total non-issue. Or try sometime to exchange data with a Canadian firm electronically.
Glenn also links to this post from Iraqi blogger Hammorabi, which includes “the observation that the Iraqi example is already putting democratic pressure on its neighbors”. I think we should be little more careful to avoid a reductio ad elections. Not everything that happens in the Middle East happens as a result of Iraqi elections. As in the free trade piece there’s more than one thing going on. Compare, for example, Abu Aardvark’s observation from yesterday:
…shortly after Bush’s press conference, King Abdullah announced some vague plans to “introduce some limited democratic reforms in his kingdom.” His plans to establish elected councils to oversee development in Jordan – with unclear relations to the existing councils – sound nice enough. But a bit tangential to the whole crackdown on the press, tight control over public assembly, continued reliance on ‘temporary laws’ issued while Parliament was out of session, assault on the political role of the professional associations, gerrymandering a compliant Parliament, and so on and on.
Isn’t it just as fair a conclusion that Abdullah is responding to the unfavorable attention his crackdowns are receiving in the West as much or more than to the upcoming Iraqi election? Or that his crackdowns are his reponse to the upcoming Iraqi election? I’m not convinced that a hardening stance by monarchs and autocrats in the Middle East points to the kind of liberalization there we’d like to see in response to a democratic Iraq.
