The Heritage Insider: What Schlafly did for conservatives, a catastrophic man-made shortage, lessons from the Long War, rewarding hostage taking, myths about inequality

September 10, 2016

 

 

Phyllis Schlafly championed an idea that drives the Left nuts: that men and women really are different. There’s a shortage that’s killing people and Congress could do something about it—if it wanted. Fifteen years on from 9/11, it’s time to note some lessons learned. It didn’t take long for Iran to decide that taking hostages pays. Concern about inequality is fueled in part by the false idea that the wealthy didn’t really earn their wealth. Visit InsiderOnline.org to see what else the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, and doing to win battles for liberty.

 

 

Schlafly was ahead of her time. Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, died on Monday at the age of 92. George Neumayr writes that she was prescient about many, many issues: “‘A lot of people don’t understand what feminism is. They think it is about advance and success for women, but it’s not that at all,’ she once said. ‘It is about power for the female left.’ It is not concerned with the good of women, she said, but with pushing an ideology that amounts to a ‘fight with human nature’ that falsely calls differences between men and women ‘just a social construct.’

“As America reels in disorientation from the new world of transgender bathrooms, gay marriage, and women in combat, the wisdom of her lonely and successful struggle against the Equal Rights Amendment deserves newfound appreciation. She saw it all coming and delayed it for decades while many Republicans sat on their hands. In Republican politics, she threw out an anchor that stopped the drift of the party toward an embrace of abortion rights. The sturdiness of the party’s pro-life plank is due in no small part to her persistence.” [The American Spectator]

 

We have a catastrophic man-made bone marrow shortage on our hands. Explains John Fund: “When accidents happen and kill people, it’s a tragedy. But when Congress creates the equivalent of a legislative accident that kills people, it’s an outrage. Every single year, between 2,000 and 3,000 Americans die after failing to find a matching donor for bone marrow. One reason is that a 1984 law — the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) — bans people from being compensated for donating bone marrow. The ban is nonsensical. The law makes it legal to compensate someone for giving blood, sperm, eggs, or other ‘renewable tissues’ while prohibiting compensation for nonrenewable organs such as kidneys. At the last minute, a ban on compensating bone-marrow donors was thrown in, probably because it sounded like it involved an organ. But bone marrow — like blood plasma — is renewable, meaning donors ultimately lose nothing but their time. Bone marrow is the only renewable tissue for which compensation is banned.

“This is a problem for the 20,000 Americans who contract leukemia or other blood diseases treatable with bone marrow annually, and face big hurdles in finding a genetic match to begin with.” [National Review]

 

Lessons from the Long War. Sunday is the 15th anniversary of 9/11. Steve Bucci, who was in the Pentagon on that day, offers 10 lessons learned since then. Here is one that’s pretty important: “America is not perfect, but its people, and frankly the rest of the world, do believe it is exceptional, and expect it to act the part. Gen. Mike Hayden has said that America’s retreat from leadership in the last seven and a half years has been like the classic film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ where the despairing hero gets to see what the world would be like if he had never lived. Hint: it’s not good. The world without America’s leadership is a lesser place. Americans are not better than everyone else, but our country has been called to play a role that flows from the principles that the Founding Fathers built into the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. America is exceptional, and it must lead.” [The Daily Signal]

 

Rewarding hostage taking incentivizes hostage taking. And we didn’t have to wait to long to see evidence. Michael Rubin writes: “Regardless of any aspect of military relief as a direct or second-order effect of recent US deals with Iran, the Iranian perception that the Obama administration was willing to incentivize hostage taking has led to additional Iranian hostage taking. In the days and weeks after the delivery of the $400 million, Iranian security forces seized at least a half dozen more American, Canadian, and European hostages in Iran, leading the US State Department to issue a new travel warning for Iran highlighting the heightened risk of detention. ‘Foreigners, in particular dual nationals of Iran and Western countries including the United States, continue to be detained or prevented from leaving Iran. … Iranian authorities continue to unjustly detain and imprison U.S. citizens, particularly Iranian-Americans, including students, journalists, business travelers, and academics, on charges including espionage and posing a threat to national security,’ it declared.” [American Enterprise Institute]

 

Myths about inequality. Michael Tanner debunks five of them, including the notion that the really wealthy didn’t really earn their wealth: “Surveys vary, but it can be said with a fair degree of accuracy that the overwhelming majority of the rich did not inherit their wealth. For example, a study of billionaires around the world finds that fewer than 3 in 10 American billionaires got to that position by inheriting their wealth, and that ‘the share of self-made billionaires has been expanding most rapidly in the United States.’ And while that represents the richest of the rich, the slightly less wealthy may be even less likely to have inherited their wealth. A report from BMO Financial Group found that two-thirds of high-net-worth Americans could be considered self-made, compared to a mere 3 percent who inherited the majority of their wealth. Interestingly, this study also found that nearly a third of these people are either first-generation Americans or were themselves born elsewhere. Among these wealthy ‘new Americans,’ 80 percent reported that they earned, rather than inherited, their wealth.” [Internal citations omitted.] [Cato Institute]

 

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