and nobody came? Due to demographics and, I presume, the weather which was cold and wintry mixy, we did not have a single trick-or-treater last night. It was rather sad.

Now my wife will be forced, totally against her will of course, to eat all the candy we purchased for the occasion. Fortunately, I had the foresight to purchase things that she liked.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last three months you cannot have escaped the torrent of negative campaign advertising that has been inflicted on us this election cycle. Here in Illinois incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn has run a relentlessly negative campaign against his Republican challenger, mostly complaining that his challenger is rich. If the cheerfulness of a campaign is an indicator of a successful one, Bruce Rauner will win in a landslide.

There is no clear consensus about what the effects of negative campaign advertising actually are. This metastudy suggests that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, negative ads don’t convince voters to vote for the candidate doing the negative advertising or depress the turnout of voters about whom the negative ads are run:

All told, the research literature does not bear out the idea that negative campaigning is an effective means of winning votes, even though it tends to be more memorable and stimulate knowledge about the campaign. Nor is there any reliable evidence that negative campaigning depresses voter turnout, though it does slightly lower feelings of political efficacy, trust in government and possibly overall public mood.

In other words if the purpose of negative campaign advertising is to produce a general mood of discouragement and futility, it’s working.

I do not believe that Matthew O’Brien, writing about the phlegmatic U. S. economy at the Washington Post knows the difference between “why” and “how”. The title of his post is “This is why the economy has fallen and it can’t get up”. His explanation for our economic doldrums is a shortfall in aggregate demand. His prescription is infrastructure spending:

In other words, the economy can’t recover on its own, and if it doesn’t soon it might never be able to. We need more inflation, more infrastructure spending, and less tut-tutting about the deficit that, unlike our anemic recovery, isn’t an urgent problem. We need to realize that just waiting for catchup growth is the new waiting for Godot—and we can’t afford for it to not show up.

Let me suggest an alternative scenario. No reasonably imaginable level of infrastructure spending will make up for the lack of aggregate demand as long as most of what we spend is on healthcare, housing, and imported goods. Due to globalization and the mobilization of rent-seeking in the modern United States it is the Keynesian multiplier that has fallen and can’t get up. Making up for the shortfall in aggregate demand would require $4.5 trillion in infrastructure spending without an enormous amount of help from the Keynesian multiplier. And that is not reasonably imaginable.

Reihan Salam articulates his case for limiting the number of new immigrants who come into the United States:

So if we want the Mexican and Bangladeshi immigrants of our time to fare as well as the Italian and Polish immigrants of yesteryear, we need to do two things. First, we need to spend a considerable amount of money to upgrade their skills and those of their children, as the world has grown less kind to those who make a living by the sweat of their brow. Because public money is scarce, this is a good reason to limit the influx of people who will need this kind of expensive, extensive support to become full participants in American society. Second, we need to recognize that a continual stream of immigration tends to keep minority ethnic groups culturally isolated, which is yet another reason to slow things down. No, this won’t suddenly mean that poor immigrants will become rich, and that well-heeled insiders will stop hoarding opportunities. But it will give us the time we need to knit America’s newcomers into our national community.

As regular readers here may recall I’m something of a geneaology buff. I’ve traced my ancestry back as far as I can for all lines including in the European countries from which my ancestors emigrated.

My most recent immigrant ancestors arrived in the United States just after the American Civil War 150 years ago. That may be why I don’t tend to romanticize the immigrant experience as is so common among the children and grandchildren of immigrants. To my eye our immigration policy is dominated by two conflicting strains: romanticism, as evidenced by the agonistic stories of the hardships faced by immigrants, and emotionless green eyeshade accounting which explains the Wall Street Journal’s open borders editorial policy. As long as those two factors dominate the national discourse on immigration I’m skeptical we’ll see a change for the better.

My sympathies lie more with those who are struggling to survive and whose great-grandfathers were born here, especially when their first immigrant ancestors were transported here unwillingly in the holds of ships.

One of the realities over which Mr. Salam carefully elides is something I’ve written about before. There are real differences among cultures. When immigrants arrive here, either legally or illegally, they tend not to bring their material possessions with them but they are equipped with their cultural, religious, and political beliefs and they will tend to maintain those in their new home. The express purpose of the public educational system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was to attenuate or eradicate those beliefs, replacing them with what has been called the “American civil religion”. That purpose is no more.

I would also suggest that the larger a segregated community of immigrants from a single country is the more stable that community is likely to be.

The overwhelming preponderance of our most recent wave of immigrants is from Mexico. The foreign-born comprise about 15% of the U. S. population and Mexican are more than a quarter of those. It will be interesting to see what aspects of Mexico’s political culture our new Mexican-American citizens will wish to preserve. Have no doubt, like the Irish, Swedish, and Eastern European Jews before them, there are aspects of the political culture of the Old Country they will wish to preserve.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its winners for last week.

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 2/3 votes!–Joshuapundit–Chickensh*t
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes –The Right Planet – No Gaslighting for Ottawa
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Simply Jews – Why we must talk to ISIS: please do tell…
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Noisy Room – The Ties That Bind Michael Bloomberg, Qatar and Radical Islam
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –The Independent Sentinel – Drudge Beware: FEC Joins Attacks on Free Speech of Conservatives
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote – Nice Deb – Why Does CNN host Carol Costello Still Have A Job?
• Fifth place with 2/3 vote – VA Right! – 2014 Senate Polls are All Skewed Up
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Bookworm Room – The American college application process reveals a bias against paid work
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – Rhymes With Right – More Proof That Wendy Davis Has No Shame

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 2/3 votes! – Sultan Knish –The Left’s Worst Crime in the Middle East submitted by The Noisy Room
• Second place *t* with 2 votes – Rebelpundit –Chicago Activists Unchained, Destroy Black Leadership submitted by Nice Deb
• Second place *t* with 2 votes – Seraphic Secret – The Redefinition of Marriage is Not About Marriage submitted by The Watcher
• Third place with 1 2/3 votes –The Other McCain – Never Forget Joe McCarthy Was Right submitted by The Right Planet
• Fourth place with 1 vote –The Contentious Centrist – The strange case of Obama’s problem with words submitted by Simply Jews
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –David Adesnik/Weekly Standard – Rand Paul’s Contradictory Foreign Policy submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Clark Bianco/Popehat – The Three Stages of Gamer Gate submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Andrew Michta/The American Interest – Europe’s Moment of Blinding Strategic Clarity submitted by The Razor
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Ian Tuttle/NRO – South Texas Democrats Leave Wendy Davis Off Voter Guidesubmitted by Rhymes with Right
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Clarice Feldman/American Thinker–Serfin’ USA submitted by Bookworm Room
• Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –Victor Davis Hanson – Crimes of Exactly What? submitted by Joshuapundit

The announcement post at the Watcher’s site is here.

A famous Illinoisan is said to have once said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. If Hillary Rodham Clinton can convince people that she’s an economic populist and anti-Wall Street, it will be a darned good trick.

I am not a liberal. I am also not a conservative. I think my politics are best described as “eclectic”. I like “pragmatic” but that term has become debased in recent years by being confused with opportunism or a lack of principles.

That having been said I took a certain amount of umbrage at Kate Batchelder’s Wall Street Journal op-ed listing “The Top 10 Liberal Superstitions”, not because I disagreed with them but because it was so one-sided.

I agree that there are certain things that are articles of faith among progressives that have little empirical support or little basis in human nature. For example, the belief in a straightline relationship between education and income. I think that’s a vast oversimplification. There are relationships between education and job protections via regulation and jobs protections via regulation and income but the relationship between education and income is not nearly so strong.

What bugged me is that it’s not as though conservatives don’t have their own superstitions. One of them is that cutting taxes will ipso facto result in economic growth. I think the evidence for that is actually pretty weak and at this point what is taxed is probably more important for economic growth than that you cut taxes.

Or that Ronald Reagan was what today’s conservatives would think of as a conservative but that’s treading on hallowed ground.

Consequently, I’m perversely accepting nominations for the top 10 conservative superstitions. To qualify a nominee would a) need to be something actually believed by many conservatives and b) demonstrably untrue or at least with substantial evidence that it’s untrue. Things about which there are merely differences of opinion don’t qualify.

The other night I received a telephone call from a person (remarkable, I know) asking my opinion of a higher state minimum wage in Illinois. It’s something that incumbent Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has made an important plank in his re-election campaign. She was audibly crestfallen when I replied that I didn’t support a higher state minimum wage here.

I think there’s a tenuous argument to be made in favor of an increase in the national minimum wage. It has too many misconceptions and makes too many unfounded assumptions for my comfort but I can see the argument. The argument in favor of an increase in the state minimum wage is much weaker.

Illinois’s geographical and economic configuration is that most of its population lives within thirty miles of the state border. Chicago adjoins both Wisconsin and Indiana. East St. Louis is just across the river from Missouri. Rock Island and Moline are just across the Mississippi from Davenport, Iowa. And so on. The states that border Illinois—Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin—all have lower minimum wages than Illinois. The taxes are higher here and if you think that the standards of living in the adjoining areas of our neighboring states are lower than the nearby areas of Illinois you’re living in a fool’s paradise.

A higher minimum wage for Illinois is likely to drive even more businesses out of the state, something Illinois, a state with a very high rate of business flight, can ill afford as it is. And then there are the employment effects.

The Watcher’s Council has announced its Weasel of the Week for last week. This week it’s CNN news anchor Carol Costello:

Although CNN News Anchor Carol Costello shouldn’t have a job after her disturbing antics, last week, she does deserve to be considered for the esteemed title of Weasel of the Week in my humble opinion.

In the shocking segment, Costello could barely contain her glee over hearing new audio of Bristol Palin describing her assault at a party in Alaska a few weeks ago. In fact, Costello called it “quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across.”

Costello then proceeded to describe the “massive brawl” and before playing the audio she told her viewers “so sit back and enjoy.”

My vote went to Erdogan but I can’t argue that Ms. Costello doesn’t deserve her award.