A Great Essay On The "Ownership Society"
by Gary D. Halbert
February 8, 2005

A Great Essay On The “Ownership Society”

IN THIS ISSUE:

This week, I am reprinting an excellent, thought-provoking essay published last week by Karl Zinsmeister of The American Enterprise Online www.taemag.com. With the current brou ha ha over reforming Social Security, this is an article that all Americans should read.

President Bush has revived the term “ownership society” which refers to a country where the citizens own most of the assets, versus a socialist state in which the government owns virtually everything. This essay makes a compelling case for the former and illustrates why the trend toward an ownership society is already well underway in America, and why some groups want to stop it.

Due to space limitations, I omitted the first apprx. one-third of the essay, which is merely an historical reflection on how we got to where we are today in government entitlement programs. A link to the entire essay is included at the end if you wish to read it all.

I hope you read the following, share it with others and think about it seriously.

[Editor’s Note: the bold emphasis that you see in the text below is mine, not the author’s. For those of you who also read John Mauldin’s weekly E-Letter, you will recall that John quoted a few paragraphs from this same essay last week. I actually sent the article to John last Friday morning. I want my readers to see much more than just a few paragraphs.]

QUOTE:
“Take Ownership

… Do you want to base your security in old age on a program engineered at the same time as the Model A and the vacuum-tube radio? Has work changed much since the era when slopping pigs for Auntie Em was a typical job? Does the boundary between state and individual look different now that the USSR has gone from progressive polestar to oppressive flop? Has American finance advanced from the decades when the only choices for ordinary savers were the passbook, the mason jar, or the mattress? Are the retirement goals of Americans still the same as in the days when the Bambino retired? Or is it time for Social Security to enjoy a major-league update?

The answer, I think, is obvious. Nothing but a government welfare program could ever last this long in unimproved form. Our transportation networks, our medical services, our economy are all light-years better than they were in 1935. So why are we still stuck with a gramophone/Hupmobile/fountain pen system of public pensions?

Two reasons: First, sentimental Democrats have flatly refused to let go of their FDR/New Deal glory days, and have repeatedly gone nuclear on anyone who suggested we could do better than blue paper cards, musty claims offices, $420 monthly checks, and payroll taxes headed over 20 percent. Reactionary, backward-looking politics has been reform blocker number one.

Reform blocker number two has been the ability of crafty administrators and legislators to prevent the public from understanding the demographic and economic contradictions that doom old-style Social Security in a modern era. Apologists have shamelessly employed dishonest terminology (from "Trust Fund" to "insurance" to "employer contribution" to "lockbox"). They have relied on repeated tax increases (from 2.0 percent of the worker's first $3,000 in the early years to 15.3 percent of the first $90,000 today--with all of that withheld from your paycheck before you even see it, so what's to miss?). They have used a succession of "blue ribbon commissions" to paper over problems rather than face them (I know--as a junior staffer I worked with the Greenspan Commission that cobbled together the 1982 Social Security patch).

But the days of being able to punt Social Security's glaring faults to the next political generation are nearly at an end. With the aging Baby Boomers due to start collecting checks in just three years, Social Security's finances will soon head south in a big way. And then, just a few years later, an even worse hemorrhaging commences in the other half of the Social Security Act: the Medicare program that pays the doctor and drug bills of America's oldsters.

All right, some of you are saying, don't give me scare tactics, give me specifics. How big a hole are we talking about? Is this a real problem, or just the latest alarm of the month? A mountain or a molehill?

Alas, this mess is a real mountain. The unfunded entitlements of the New Deal and Great Society are collapsing on themselves. For perspective, start with the fact that our officially acknowledged national debt, source of much caterwauling, currently totals $7.6 trillion. Unfortunately, the government's promises of future Social Security checks and Medicare reimbursements are not counted in our official debt. Those obligations pile up off the books, out of sight, and out of mind. But they are real obligations that will have to be paid. And when economists sit down and do the math on those commitments, the totals are staggering: The retirement checks promised to today's population add up to $10 trillion more than the payroll-tax revenues slated to flow in over the next generation.

That dwarfs our on-budget debt. Put together our official debt and our unfunded Social Security obligations and you have a sum larger than the entire value of all the companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Our Social Security deficits are real, scary, and unsustainable, no matter what Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid may say.

And our entitlement problem is actually worse than that--because the most out-of-control part of the Social Security program, mushrooming much more dangerously than even the retirement portion, is Medicare. Do you realize that taxpayers will pay $9,000 per senior citizen next year for Medicare, a figure rising every year at double-digit rates? As a result, Medicare's unfunded liabilities over the next lifetime come to a staggering $62 trillion. That's the equivalent of a hidden half-million-dollar mortgage piled on the back of every household in the U.S.

A few years ago, the levels of red ink in the Social Security program and the Medicare program were about the same. But adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare increased its unfunded costs by approximately as much as the total Social Security shortfall. And medical costs continue to skyrocket. As a result, our Medicare hole is now several times deeper than our gaping Social Security hole.

The root of this is very simple--and it is an accident of history. During World War II, while strict wage controls forbade companies from paying higher salaries, firms short on labor grew desperate for ways to attract and keep badly needed workers. They discovered the government would let them pay the health costs of employees as a kind of backdoor substitute for increasing their wages. And health benefits, unlike wages, weren't taxed, a loophole that made them even more attractive to both workers and companies than cash wage increases. Employer-paid health benefits soon became universal and permanent.

The unforeseen side effect was that it became uneconomic for Americans to buy health care for themselves. Why pay your own doctor and insurance bills with after-tax income when your employer can do it with pre-tax dollars? Soon health care seemed like a "free" entitlement to average Americans. Given that something like 80 or 90 percent of our health care costs are now picked up by someone else, it's no wonder that medical expenditures in the U.S. have soared to 15 percent of our national income (roughly twice the level of countries like Japan, the U.K., and Italy).

What if those World War II employers had offered instead to pay the grocery bills of their workers? Imagine if today hardly anyone handed his own cash to checkout ladies, but instead a food co-op or insurance company selected by your boss covered the costs of whatever food you consumed. You can be sure that 1) You'd be spending a lot less carefully (and a lot more) on groceries today. 2) You'd have much less individual control over your diet. 3) The grocery and food-provision business would be far less efficient and varied and competitive and cost-controlled--almost certainly it would be one of the more troubled sectors of the U.S. economy.

The explosion of costs, and crimps on choice, within our health-care system can be repaired if we gradually free and reform the sector so that it operates more like the rest of our market economy. The authorization of individual Health Savings Accounts last year was a good start. In just the first few months, Americans opened a million such accounts, and many more consumers and companies will migrate in that direction in coming years.

Much more work remains, however. Ending the preferential tax treatment of employer-provided health care might be a nice item to add to President Bush's wish list for tax reform later this year. Until buying medical services becomes more like buying food or legal services or housing, it will be a problematic part of the U.S. economy.

One of the best ways we can prepare ourselves for the looming health-care crisis is by fixing the easier half of today's entitlement mess--Social Security. Let's put our pensions on solid footing so aging Americans at least don't have to worry about their living allowances when the nation starts miring down in the Medicare swamp.

Fixing retirement is a comparatively simple task. Straightforward measures can rein in today's uncontrolled spending spiral: The age of retirement (early retirement especially) should be raised, gradually, to reflect today's extended life spans. And the current rules that dictate annual benefit increases at rates considerably faster than inflation should be modified. ‘Nothing is more important than ending the automatic growth of these programs,’ argues economist Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute. ‘Every generation needs to have control of its own destiny. It's as if President Taft created a budget 100 years ago that determines what we spend today.’

The key to making these small trims attractive and fair to future retirees is to give them something in return. We must tap the power of long-term saving and compound interest to create individual accounts that will supplement Social Security's base payments. Even under cautious rules and conservative assumptions, average-income workers could build up as much as a million dollars over their working life in a personally owned, worker-controlled, inheritable investment account.

The public is not allergic to this. Gallup polls show that 82 percent of Americans under 30 (the group that will be most affected by Social Security reform) want personal accounts. Over the last two decades, Chileans, Argentineans, Mexicans, Poles, Russians, Swedes, Aussies, Germans, Brits, and others have all migrated to improved retirement systems that employ personal accounts. We too can use savings to build a better safety net. We can do it in a matter of months, if Congress shows some will.

‘Entitlement reform is the most important financial challenge facing the country.’So said 368 of the nation's leading economists, including six Nobel laureates, in an October 2004 open letter. Social Security modernization would eliminate trillions of dollars of looming, currently hidden public debt. It would reduce income inequality and give millions of modest-income families a chance to become stakeholders in capitalism. It would soften and enrich old age for legions of Americans. And the savings that would build up in individual accounts would be very good for our overall economy.

Yet many Democrats and plenty of Republicans resist. As journalist Michael Barone observed recently, ‘John Kerry, the darling of the self-regarding intelligentsia, called for the brain-dead policy of no change in a Social Security regime that any sensible person understands is in the long run unsustainable.’ Kerry and other political shirkers would stick with the increasingly threadbare retirement garments they've inherited, rather than exert themselves to make a new set. Given that the Baby Boom generation is about to commence an arduous climb into the mountain snows of retirement, this is a dangerous negligence.

Two more honest politicians, Democrat Bob Kerrey and Republican Warren Rudman, warned the nation a couple years ago where this would lead: ‘Suppose a member of Congress introduced legislation called the Social Security Do Nothing Act. Under this bill, promised retirement benefits would be cut...by 35 percent for today's newborns. Alternatively, payroll taxes would go up by roughly 40 percent.... These are the choices under the Do Nothing Plan.’

In their minds if not their hearts, most congressmen know this. Why, then, do they continue to dither? For those wedded to the political status quo, the answer is simple: The broad program of ownership now being promoted by President Bush is a potentially revolutionary platform. As it elevates individual opportunity and responsibility, it would speed a shrinkage of government's power and relevance. For Democrats in particular--whose use of the government to dole out goodies brought them 70 years of political power--this is profoundly threatening.

But all the trends are running toward individual sovereignty anyway. America was a majority homeowning country by 1950, and today fully seven out of ten families own the house they live in. More recently--about the year 2000--a majority of Americans became owners of stock (up from just one sixth in the early 1970s). If Congress establishes personal Social Security accounts, the fraction of Americans owning stock could quickly rise as high as 80 percent.

Other forms of ownership are also soaring. More than 10 million Americans are now self-employed. They own their personal livelihood. The number of small businesses in the country has tripled over the last three decades--to around 23 million.

The average family in the U.S. increased its net wealth by more than 50 percent between 1989 and 2001, according to the Federal Reserve. Even low-income Americans now own lots of value: Among the poorest fifth of our population, 41 percent own their own home, and 57 percent own at least one car. Those rates beat the average level of ownership in most European countries. The last quarter-century in the U.S. marked the biggest wealth boom in history. More wealth has been created on our shores since Ronald Reagan's inauguration than in all of previous American history.

So today's chatter about a new era of ownership is not just rhetoric. A genuinely new dynamic is dawning. Families and individuals are gaining much more economic authority than they ever enjoyed in the past.

The most important aspect of ownership is not that it makes you rich, but that it makes you free. Ownership gives you independence, choices, a measure of control over your own life. Possessing property can liberate you from capricious bosses and suffocating government alike. Opponents of the Ownership Society completely fail to understand that, as this little excerpt from a recent James Lileks column illustrates quite amusingly:

'I can remember as a little boy my widowed grandmother with eight children,' Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid recently told 'Meet the Press.' 'She lived alone, but she felt independent because she got every month her old-age pension check. That's what this is all about. The most successful social program in the history of the world is being hijacked by Wall Street.'

Ah yes. Old Granny again, re-animated to drag a nineteenth-century idea into the twenty-first. You could use the same granny to advocate for the return of the WPA, or the reinstatement of the sarsaparilla subsidy.

Reid channels the tropes of yore, when the simple yeoman of the fruited plain was whipsawed by the machinations of shadowy, oyster-eating financiers in New York banquet halls. 'They are trying to destroy Social Security,' Reid said, 'by giving this money to the fat cats on Wall Street, and I think it's wrong.'

It's the same old Chicken Little screed: The Republicans don't want to reform public education or Social Security or the high holy tax code, they want to destroy it for the nefarious enrichment of money men and Jesus freaks. Naturally you don't engage these maniacs on the issues. You simply oppose them out of hand.

But no one's proposing we go back in time, revoke Granny's benefits, and let Rockefeller spend her check on a pearl-handled cane so he can walk down Fifth Avenue and thrash beggars in style. The proposed changes in Social Security, after all, only affect the future. We're talking about letting younger workers have control over a small portion of their government-mandated contributions. 'Choice,' to use the hallowed word.

The drive to replace government entitlement with individual ownership is an attempt to give a new kind of autonomy and security to average citizens--to ‘little guys.’ The irony is that Franklin Roosevelt's ‘party of the people’ is kicking and screaming in opposition. As a practical reality, it is only Republicans and a few conservative Democrats who are sticking out their necks in an attempt to establish a new set of rules where regular Joes can build independent wealth.

This connects to a subject I wrote about back in our October/November 2004 issue--the fact that our two major parties have effectively flipped positions on the divide between elites and ordinary citizens. As whole blocs of ‘little guys’--ethnics, rural residents, evangelicals, cops, construction workers, homemakers, military veterans--have moved into the Republican column, Democrats have quietly become the white glove and top hat party.

Software millionaires, entertainers, academics, heiresses, journalists, Wall Street barons, trial lawyers--these and most of the rest of our controlling elites outside of business are now likelier to be Democrats than Republicans. And those individuals have already made it up the economic ladder. They've got theirs. They see salesmen and engineers moving into McMansions not as a blessing but as a blight. They're not keen on having the nouveau riche bid up the price of weekends at Nantucket and Palm Beach and Jackson Hole. It strikes them that their kids already have enough trouble getting into Brown and USC without having to battle the children of firemen and Indian-immigrant motel owners newly empowered with educational and personal retirement savings accounts.

Many liberal Democrats have lost their attachment to--and faith in--common people.We saw this in their dripping disdain for the majority of Americans ‘stupid’ enough to return George Bush to office (review pages 10-11 of our January/February 2005 issue). We see it in today's commonplace Democratic argument that if ordinary workers were given control of their own retirement accounts, they would screw them up. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and company much prefer that their gardeners and glass-polishers get their Social Security benefits ladled out by Washington functionaries.

Likewise, when it comes to health care, Democrats argue for more programs run by government experts. Helping households find their own answers via medical savings accounts, tax credits, and other decentralized initiatives is an abomination to most Democratic politicians. Even more hated by Democrats are school choice programs that would allow parents to find the best institutions for their own children. Schooling is too important to be sorted out by families, apparently--that's a job for Ph.D.s and education mandarins only.

Democratic devotion to top-down social engineering was clear in the last welfare reform. Democrats in Congress insisted that expecting welfare recipients to stay in school or work was unrealistic and cruel. But welfare recipients turned out to be much more competent and self-reliant than Democrats imagined--once pried from the grasp of state social workers, more than 7 million Americans worked their way off the dole in just a few years.

The Democrats' paternalism is summarized in their attitude toward taxation. Letting families keep more of their own money is no way to solve problems, Democrats insist. Whether the issue is day care or housing or college tuition, the automatic reflex of Democratic politicians is intervention by credentialed bureaucrats, using money pulled out of workers' pockets.

Democrats called it ‘Camelot’ when they first suggested, back in the 1960s, that our nation should be steered by Harvard technocrats. A generation later, many Americans think of this intrusive nannying from above as more like a ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’--and they are tired of being patronized. It's time to put more trust in everyday citizens.

The next moment a Democratic politician tells you that school choice, and individual Social Security accounts, and worker-owned medical savings plans are ‘dangerous,’ I suggest you answer with four simple words: Power to the People.” END QUOTE

Very best regards

SPECIAL ARTICLES

Karl Zinsmeister’s “Take Ownership” essay in its entirety.

Copyright © 2005 ProFutures Capital Management, Inc. All Rights Reserved

By Condoleezza Rice
Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A21

The al Qaeda terrorist network posed a threat to the United States for almost a decade before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Throughout that period -- during the eight years of the Clinton administration and the first eight months of the Bush administration prior to Sept. 11 -- the U.S. government worked hard to counter the al Qaeda threat.

During the transition, President-elect Bush's national security team was briefed on the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with al Qaeda. The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the president and his national security principals. In response to my request for a presidential initiative, the counterterrorism team, which we had held over from the Clinton administration, suggested several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted. No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.
We adopted several of these ideas. We committed more funding to counterterrorism and intelligence efforts. We increased efforts to go after al Qaeda's finances. We increased American support for anti-terror activities in Uzbekistan.

We pushed hard to arm the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle so we could target terrorists with greater precision. But the Predator was designed to conduct surveillance, not carry weapons. Arming it presented many technical challenges and required extensive testing. Military and intelligence officials agreed that the armed Predator was simply not ready for deployment before the fall of 2001. In any case, the Predator was not a silver bullet that could have destroyed al Qaeda or stopped Sept. 11.
We also considered a modest spring 2001 increase in funding for the Northern Alliance. At that time, the Northern Alliance was clearly not going to sweep across Afghanistan and dispose of al Qaeda. It had been battered by defeat and held less than 10 percent of the country. Only the addition of American air power, with U.S. special forces and intelligence officers on the ground, allowed the Northern Alliance its historic military advances in late 2001. We folded this idea into our broader strategy of arming tribes throughout Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban.

Let us be clear. Even their most ardent advocates did not contend that these ideas, even taken together, would have destroyed al Qaeda. We judged that the collection of ideas presented to us were insufficient for the strategy President Bush sought. The president wanted more than a laundry list of ideas simply to contain al Qaeda or "roll back" the threat. Once in office, we quickly began crafting a comprehensive new strategy to "eliminate" the al Qaeda network. The president wanted more than occasional, retaliatory cruise missile strikes. He told me he was "tired of swatting flies."

Through the spring and summer of 2001, the national security team developed a strategy to eliminate al Qaeda -- which was expected to take years. Our strategy marshaled all elements of national power to take down the network, not just respond to individual attacks with law enforcement measures. Our plan called for military options to attack al Qaeda and Taliban leadership, ground forces and other targets -- taking the fight to the enemy where he lived. It focused on the crucial link between al Qaeda and the Taliban. We would attempt to compel the Taliban to stop giving al Qaeda sanctuary -- and if it refused, we would have sufficient military options to remove the Taliban regime. The strategy focused on the key role of Pakistan in this effort and the need to get Pakistan to drop its support of the Taliban. This became the first major foreign-policy strategy document of the Bush administration -- not Iraq, not the ABM Treaty, but eliminating al Qaeda.

Before Sept. 11, we closely monitored threats to our nation. President Bush revived the practice of meeting with the director of the CIA every day -- meetings that I attended. And I personally met with George Tenet regularly and frequently reviewed aspects of the counterterror effort.

Through the summer increasing intelligence "chatter" focused almost exclusively on potential attacks overseas. Nonetheless, we asked for any indication of domestic threats and directed our counterterrorism team to coordinate with domestic agencies to adopt protective measures. The FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration alerted airlines, airports and local authorities, warning of potential attacks on Americans.

Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack airplanes to try to free U.S.-held terrorists. The FAA even issued a warning to airlines and aviation security personnel that "the potential for a terrorist operation, such as an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States, remains a concern."

We now know that the real threat had been in the United States since at least 1999. The plot to attack New York and Washington had been hatching for nearly two years. According to the FBI, by June 2001 16 of the 19 hijackers were already here. Even if we had known exactly where Osama bin Laden was, and the armed Predator had been available to strike him, the Sept. 11 hijackers almost certainly would have carried out their plan. So, too, if the Northern Alliance had somehow managed to topple the Taliban, the Sept. 11 hijackers were here in America -- not in Afghanistan.

President Bush has acted swiftly to unify and streamline our efforts to secure the American homeland. He has transformed the FBI into an agency dedicated to catching terrorists and preventing future attacks. The president and Congress, through the USA Patriot Act, have broken down the legal and bureaucratic walls that prior to Sept. 11 hampered intelligence and law enforcement agencies from collecting and sharing vital threat information. Those who now argue for rolling back the Patriot Act's changes invite us to forget the important lesson we learned on Sept. 11.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the president, like all Americans, wanted to know who was responsible. It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Because of President Bush's vision and leadership, our nation is safer. We have won battles in the war on terror, but the war is far from over. However long it takes, this great nation will prevail.

The writer is the national security adviser.

At a school board meeting this week, angry teachers, students and district residents criticized the decision by administrators at Kenowa Hills Public Schools.

"Is this how you treat people that defend your country?" Tom Lovett, a teacher's spouse and district resident, asked board members.

Barry Bernhardt, a middle school science teacher and a National Guard reservist for at least a decade, started serving two weeks of active duty in Italy on Monday, the day of the school board meeting.

During the 10 days Bernhardt will be gone from the classroom, he will use two personal days and two compensation days during his time off.

For the remaining six days, Bernhardt must pay the district $74 per day for the substitute teacher filling in for him and turn over the $78 in salary that he will receive each day from the National Guard, The Grand Rapids Press reported.

"The district missed a golden opportunity to reflect on the patriotic duty of all Americans to, in our own way, celebrate the accomplishments of the service not only of Barry, but of all the men and women who stand for our country," said Ron La Fave, a Kenowa Hills teacher.

Superintendent Jim Gillette said the district was following the law when it crafted its agreement with Bernhardt. A similar agreement was drawn up on one other occasion, years earlier, when Bernhardt was assigned to Bosnia during a tour of duty.

In most previous years, Bernhardt has fulfilled his military assignments while on vacation, Gillette said.

"It's inaccurate to say we didn't do anything for him. We did provide significant assistance," the superintendent said, adding that the district continues to provide Bernhardt with all his other benefits during his absence.

In the end, the teacher will receive $573 more than he would have after the two-week military leave, Gillette said. Bernhardt will give the district only six days' worth of his military pay, and he also will receive a military housing allowance.

When compared to employees of private companies, the district is doing what it should to protect Bernhardt's financial stability, Gillette said.

"It's a fact that he's not losing money, that he's making money. Whatever way you look at it, he's still making money," he said.

In neighboring Grand Rapids Public Schools, teachers called to duty receive two weeks of unpaid leave but are not required to pay for a substitute teacher.

As a result of Bernhardt's situation, Kenowa Hills school board members now are likely to create a specific policy covering employee military leave.

"In the future, he's not going to get out that well," Gillette said.

WASHINGTON -- Howard Dean is no fool. He is, however, not much of a thinker. His talk flows as rapidly as a mountain brook, but is no deeper than one of those.

He is the candidate of America's professorate and others whose strongest passion is as much aesthetic as political -- intellectual contempt for George W. Bush. But Dean's bantam-rooster pugnacity is not unlike Bush's shoulders-squared jauntiness that critics consider an enraging swagger. Bush's imperturbable certitude infuriates Dean's supporters because they believe it arises not from reflection but from reflex. Actually, Dean really resembles his supporters' idea of Bush.

Appearing on ``Hardball'' with the human Gatling gun, Chris Matthews, Dean said that in terms of legal rights there is no practical difference between same-sex civil unions and marriages. Matthews: ``So why are we quibbling over a name?'' Dean: ``Because marriage is very important to a lot of people who are pretty religious.''

So, the argument about the public meaning of marriage is merely a semantic quibble important only to the ``pretty religious''? Dean has said of his faith that ``I don't think it informs my politics,'' and that he became a Congregationalist ``because I had a big fight with a local Episcopal church about 25 years ago over a bike path.'' Fine. His faith, whatever it is, is his business and no disqualification for the presidency. But his qualifications supposedly include a searching intellect. Where is the evidence?

Asked by Matthews whether he supports state right-to-work laws protecting the right of workers not to join a union, Dean said no. But he also said ``I very much believe that states ought to have the right to recognize -- to organize their own laws. So I'm not likely as president ... to order states to change them.'''

Order states? Imagine the media derision if Bush ever suggested such an understanding of federalism.

In his next breath, Dean said that if Congress sends to his presidential desk legislation denying states that right that he ``very much'' believes they ought to have -- the right to have right-to-work laws -- ``I'd sign it in an instant.'' This is the intellectuals' candidate?

If Osama bin Laden is captured, Dean says ``it doesn't make a lot of difference'' whether he is tried in America or the International Criminal Court. After all, ``we are allowing the Bosnian war criminals to be tried'' in the Hague. Question: Is it relevant that the Bosnians' crimes were not committed in America?

Dean promises ``to break up giant media enterprises'' -- General Electric, News Corporation, etc. -- because there is ``information control'' that ``is not compatible with democracy.'' Question: Given the Internet and other new media, and the consequently declining importance of broadcast networks and other traditional filters of information, has there ever been less reason to use ``information control'' as an excuse for expanding government regulation of information media?

Asked to name his favorite philosopher, Dean named Lao-Tse because ``my favorite saying is, `The longest journey begins with a single step.''' That might make a better bumper sticker than anything David Hume said, but if that measures the depths of Dean, he and his supporters should take a sabbatical from deriding Bush's supposed shallowness.

America needs what Dean seems intellectually and temperamentally ill-equipped to provide -- truly thoughtful opposition in an election that should turn on two huge issues. One is: How do we guarantee economic growth sufficient to generate tax revenues to finance a welfare state whose entitlement menu is being substantially expanded just as 77 million baby boomers are about to retire? The second is: Can America's security be attained without adopting foreign policy goals of unattainable grandiosity -- nation-building, regional transformations?

Dean has provided no reason to expect from him especially elevated reasoning about these things. He seems to be an Everett Wharton. ``The Prime Minister,'' one of Anthony Trollope's parliamentary novels, introduces Wharton, who was, Trollope wrote, ``no fool'':

``(He) had read much, and although he generally forgot what he read, there were left with him from his reading certain nebulous lights, begotten by other men's thinking, which enabled him to talk on most subjects. It cannot be said of him that he did much thinking for himself -- but he thought that he thought.''

Dean seems like that, which is not surprising or disqualifying: Most political leaders are not people of reflection, but of ambition-dictated action, living off borrowed intellectual capital. Given the accumulating evidence, the professors' pin-up should dismount his intellectual high horse.