From the WSJ Opinion Archives
OUTSIDE THE BOX
2002 in Review
From the best (Bush) to the worst (the Baghdad Boys) to the silliest (the EU).
One of a columnist's annual rites is to look back over the past year and review for his readers the triumphs and failures, the wreckage and the hilarity of the year past before the bearded geriatric with the 2002 scythe leaves us forever.
George W. Bush gets credit for a very good year as president. His vision has been clear; his commitment to fight terrorism has not wavered; and his redefinition of America's foreign policy doctrines will change the way the world thinks about international aggression. The Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Rice team has helped Mr. Bush in just two years in office join a small group of outstanding foreign-policy leaders--Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher--in leading the world to a better understanding of what it means to be free, and how freedom must be defended.
On the domestic front, matters have been less successful. The economy has had three weak years; an effective growth strategy is the single most important domestic policy of 2003. Increasing the rewards and decreasing the penalties for greater work and creativity is the first and most important step in that process. Government spending restraint is the second.
Passing fast-track trade legislation was a triumph, but steel tariffs, a bloated increase in farm subsidies, and the McCain-Feingold assault on free speech were policy errors. The U.S. Supreme Court may correct the last, but Mr. Bush will have to undo the first two before he leaves the presidency.
The Supreme Court's decision in Zellman v. Miller upholding the constitutionality of school choice--even when parents choose a religious school--was the year's greatest educational achievement. A good education, and the need for much better public schools to provide it, are both well served by choice and competition.
The most interesting presentation of the year was the PBS series "Commanding Heights," a review of nearly a century of efforts by nations of many races and cultures to nationalize and manage their economies. Beginning with Soviet Russia's plan to eliminate money, abolish private property and nationalize the means of production, every socialist experiment failed--failed to create growing economies; failed to deliver food, medical care, hope or opportunity to people; failed to improve the quality of life or diminish poverty. They all failed on every count by any measure. Make one of your New Year's resolutions the viewing of this video vividly illustrating why only market economies can succeed.
A much shorter visual triumph was a single slide displayed on a huge screen in Martin Feldstein's economic courses at Harvard. All it said, in bold, black type, was "43.65 percent." That, says Mr. Feldstein, "is quite a remarkable number," for it is the average percentage that an American earning $35,000 a year pays in taxes on every additional dollar he earns.
Then there is the bad news of 2002. Terrorist attacks around the world--Moscow, Bali, the Philippines--leads the list of evils. And yet while President Bush wages war on terrorists, Reps. David Bonior and Jim McDermott--the Baghdad Boys--went to Iraq to tell the world that Saddam Hussein is more moral and trustworthy than President Bush.
Trent Lott's racially offensive remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party have to lead the stupidity list. Also on that list is the Florida statute requiring mothers who wish to give a child up for adoption and cannot identify the father to publish in the newspapers each week for four consecutive weeks the names, dates and locations of every sexual encounter that might have led to the pregnancy.
My personal most mystifying moment of the year followed a speech to high school seniors in which I disagreed with students at Princeton who marched just after Sept. 11 demanding "mediation" with the Taliban. "Must the rape victim counsel with the rapist to better understand his reasons for his criminal assault?" I asked.
One girl replied, "Why yes, she should meet with her attacker, to understand his culture and the reasons for his acts." Two other kids agreed with her.
The silliest of 2002 begins with a convicted Florida sex offender who fled to Bangor, Maine, in February and spent three freezing nights in the woods avoiding capture. The resulting frostbite cost him a few toes, so he threatened to sue the detective who failed to arrest him in time to avoid the damage. "If he had done his job properly I wouldn't be in the condition that I'm in right now," Harvey Taylor said. "I would have been in jail that very same day."
Meanwhile across the pond, the bureaucracy of the European Union goes about its Monty Python-like business as the Ministry of Silly Rules, decreeing just how many vegetable lumps a sauce may contain before it is classified as a vegetable instead of a sauce. Regulation 288/97 decrees the sauce is a vegetable if more than 20% of its content by weight fails to pass "through a metal wire sieve with an aperture of five millimeters, after rinsing in water of a temperature of 20C [68 degrees]." Why have such an inane rule? It turns out if a product is classified as a vegetable instead of a sauce, the tariff on its importation rises from 20% to as much as 288%. No wonder the EU bureaucracy loves it.
Then there was television as it was supposed to be--Celebrity Boxing. In the March bout between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones, the ice hooligan (sans blunt instrument) skated to an underwhelming third-round TKO over President Clinton's harassment target. It just doesn't get any better than that.
Well, maybe it does: Tom Daschle, Al Gore, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and others believe the Democrats lost the 2002 elections because the right wing now controls the national media. As the Red Queen said, "Why, sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
The Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel reports Census Bureau data concluding that "more people in this country went to watch truck and tractor pulls at least once a month than went to watch tennis matches," and "in 1999, the average American consumed more than 117 pounds of red meat, nearly 30 pounds of cheese, and 31.9 gallons of beer." I guess I have some catching up to do in 2003, but what a country.
Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is policy chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column will appear once a month in 2003.
