PostPartisan

If there were any question that mainstream economists will end up in the same circle of hell as Wall Street’s wizards, today’s “Breaking Views” column in the New York Times should dispel any lingering doubts. In the column, in which the Times repurposes the “independent financial commentary and analysis” that appears on the breakingviews.com Web site, former equity analyst Edward Haddas and former international merchant banker Martin Hutchinson opine that American workers are overpaid when compared to workers in other lands. The authors don’t specify which lands – American auto workers are actually paid less than their German counterparts, even though Germany exports its cars while we import ours. That Americans make less than their counterparts in China, Vietnam and Bangladesh is obvious. That American wages should fall to meet those nations’ level is a more problematic assessment.

What evidence do the authors provide that American workers are overpaid? The rise in unemployment! “The recession shows that many workers are paid more than they’re worth,” the authors note. This, of course, was the argument of pre-Keynesian economists who believed that the solution for the Great Depression was to cut wages and lay off workers (“Liquidate men,” in the words of Herbert Hoover’s Treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon). But the effect of Mellonomics was to reduce purchasing power to the point that fully one-fourth of American workers were jobless. Only by employing millions of Americans in programs like the WPA was the Roosevelt administration able to break the cycle of declining income, declining purchases, declining production and, again, declining income.

In the real world, median American household income actually went down during the years between the recessions of 2000 and 2008, precisely because virtually all income was going to profits and investment income rather than wages. Still, if the fearless economists of breakingviews.com are concerned about uncompetitively high wages, why don’t they volunteer to take a pay cut themselves? How much are breakingviews.com and the Times (the latter through its content-sharing agreement) paying for opinions they could get from any historically illiterate 17-year-old in the sway of Ayn Rand?

After reading the column I co-authored with Dan Blumenthal yesterday, a senior official called me to correct my understanding of the administration's "strategic reassurance" strategy toward China. I had focused on what I understood to be the American side of that equation: what the United States had to do to reassure China. The administration official explained, however, that the main thrust of the new policy focuses on what China needs to do to reassure the United States and the world, and in this sense, the official explained, is actually a toughening of the previous administration's concept of "responsible stakeholder."

Thus, the official continued, China must reassure the United States and its neighbors that it will not impair their security or seek regional dominance; that it will not use its economic clout to create a China-dominated economic zone; and that it will conduct itself in its domestic affairs, regarding human rights, in such a way as to give greater assurance to neighbors that its foreign policy and role in the world will not reflect a dictatorial approach. In return, the United States will welcome China as a player on the international scene.

If this is the meaning of "strategic reassurance," then I would indeed find much to support in it. I hope the administration does more to flesh out what it expects of China during President Obama's coming trip.

On his program "Washington Watch," Roland Martin asked Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Sunday what were the two issues that "speak to black voters that Republicans have a shot at." Steele replied, "Education and the economy. Education and jobs. Education and small business." Not bad. The accident-prone party chairman was doing well.

Martin then points out that he has long criticized the GOP because "white Republicans have been scared of black folks." Uh oh. This is a loaded statement. Surely, the first African American chairman (after six ballots) of the overwhelmingly white and increasingly Southern party will use some of those Heisman moves he displayed last week to sidestep Martin's assertion and reach for unity.

So, how does Steele defend his party's honor?

Not everyone can be saved. I believe that there are kids who, as a result of abuse and neglect, are so devoid of conscience and empathy that they will likely never become productive members of society. I say this with deep regret and anguish.

But how do we know who will mature, grow, learn and develop a conscience and who will stay stuck in their antisocial, violent and destructive ways? How can we make sure that we're not keeping the next Charles S. Dutton unnecessarily behind bars when he is ready and able to walk back into the world and give back something good, if not extraordinary?

When you push away all the legal mumbo jumbo, this was the question at the heart of yesterday's Supreme Court hearing over juveniles in the criminal justice system. Technically, the justices were asked to decide whether it is unconstitutional to sentence kids who have committed non-homicide crimes to life behind bars without the possibility of parole. In reality, the justices were weighing salvation. Is it okay to sentence a 13-year-old to a mandatory life term for raping a 72-year-old woman? How about throwing away the key for a 17-year-old involved in a series of burglaries? If it would be constitutional to hit an 18-year-old with a guaranteed life behind bars, why should someone just a month short of this landmark birthday be spared the same fate?

Can we please avoid a horribly polarizing and ultimately harmful debate over whether Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s interpretation of his Muslim faith played a role in motivating his alleged act of mass murder?

We need to be able to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time.

If there is evidence that Hasan was motivated by radical Islamic ideas and gave signs of this to his fellow soldiers, we need to know why the Army didn’t act earlier to prevent the Fort Hood catastrophe. If these are the facts of the case, we need to know why this happened so that it does not happen again. A commitment to religious liberty does not -- cannot -- require anyone to overlook threats to the country or to the safety of our men and women in uniform.

Words failed me. I was supposed to be leading a panel discussion of the gripping movie "Precious" with director Lee Daniels, actress Paula Patton and Becky Pringle of the National Education Association. But after watching the movie, I had trouble getting the program started -- I was literally speechless.

The story, for those who may not be familiar with it, is about Claireece "Precious" Jones, a 16-year-old, 350-pound, illiterate black girl in 1987 Harlem. And there's nothing precious about her life. The emotional, physical and sexual abuse she endures is gasp-out-loud shocking. The father of her two children (one of whom has Down Syndrome) is also their grandfather. Her monster of a mother, powerfully portrayed by actress and comedienne Mo'Nique, makes Joan Crawford look like a rank amateur. And although Precious begins to see green shoots of a better life through a class at an alternative school, "better" is relative and precarious here. Despite the smile on her face as the film ends, you know her fate is grim.

There are critics who say the film points primarily to how “little has changed in the inner city in the more than 20 years since,” as Raina Kelley wrote in Newsweek. Kelley argued that “Precious is a period piece that feels like a documentary.” She and others have a point -- up to a point. There are some key differences between 1987 and 2009. Just ask yourself what would happen today if:

Opponents of the various Democratic health-reform proposals spend a lot of time talking about how people should be free to purchase whatever kind of insurance they want. Except, it turns out, if those people are women.

Going into Saturday’s debate on the House health-care bill, the measure included provisions designed to maintain the status quo against federal funding for most abortions. It took steps to ensure that federal subsidies to purchase insurance wouldn’t be used to pay for abortion coverage. It required that every exchange include one plan that did not cover abortions, so that no one would be forced to subscribe to a plan that violated anti-abortion beliefs. That wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion crowd, including the Catholic bishops. So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was backed into a corner, facing the loss of anti-abortion Democrats unless she acceded to an amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that effectively prevents insurance companies participating in the new insurance exchanges from covering abortions. It passed, 240 to 197, with 64 Democrats voting in favor.

Under the Stupak amendment, no plan that accepts people eligible for federal subsidies is permitted to cover abortions. It’s hard to imagine a plan participating in the exchange that refuses to accept people with subsidies, since the vast majority of people in the exchanges will receive subsidies. Therefore, no abortion coverage in the exchange -- except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest. If you are a woman whose health is endangered by a pregnancy, you’ll have to pay for an abortion out of pocket. Same if you are carrying a fetus with severe birth defects.

Several of my colleagues have weighed in today on the fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago. I covered that event for The Post, and I have a graffiti-stained chunk of the wall to prove it. But to me the most interesting news today is not the anniversary gala in Berlin, but a smaller, more complicated yet still thrilling breakthrough in Baghdad: the passage by the Iraqi parliament of a law allowing national elections to go forward in January.

Sure, Iraq has had democratic elections before -- three of them since 2005. But the deal setting up this one, arrived at after months of haggling and several blown deadlines, broke some new ground. It mandates that the voting for the national parliament be done, as in this year’s local elections, according to an “open list.” That means voters will get to choose among individual candidates rather than selecting one party. The result should be less influence for sectarian coalitions that appeal to Iraqis to vote Shiite or Sunni or Kurd. An all-Shiite coalition took advantage of a “closed list” system in 2006 to gain a majority in parliament. Repeating that outcome has been a focus of Iranian diplomacy in Iraq this year.

Instead, Iraqi leaders already have been racing to construct “national” coalitions that span the sectarian divide. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who refused to join an all-Shiite ticket, has one, and there are two other important ones, headed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi and the current interior minister, Jawad Bolani. Both are secular Shiites who have allied themselves with leading Sunni politicians. Four years ago Iraqi Sunnis mostly boycotted the parliamentary elections; three years ago Sunni and Shiite were slaughtering each other in a virtual civil war. Now Iraq stands a good chance of forming a democratically elected government that will span sectarian divisions. Not just the Iranians but those who favored splitting Iraq into three parts, such as Vice President Joe Biden, will have been thwarted.

Several months after the Berlin Wall was breached -- 20 years ago today -- I stood at what remained of the wall with my teenage son and watched a stylishly dressed woman in a fur coat whack away at the thing with a hammer and a chisel. The wall then was a scarred mess. But on the western side -- East Berlin still existed -- my 18-year-old son was trying to figure out how it was possible that people had written graffiti all over the thing for decades and yet had not had the wit or the courage to simply chisel the wall into rubble. I had been to the wall a couple of times before, yet the question had not occurred to me. Finally, I said to him, “I think it’s because we, too, believed in the Wall. We believed.”

Ronald Regan did not believe.

I am not an across-the-board admirer of Reagan. I think he encouraged the American delusion in infinite natural resources, in the uselessness of conservation and in a general, mindless optimism that always left me pessimistic. But when it came to the Soviet Union and the aptly-named Evil Empire it constructed and maintained in Central and Eastern Europe, Reagan was not only right, he saw what too many others did not: It was destined to collapse.

I left the then-Federal Republic of Germany with my wife and three young children in the summer of 1969 firmly convinced that the 87-mile wall that encircled West Berlin, separating it from East Berlin and all of Germany, would be with us for the rest of our lives.

It’s still hard to believe that today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For me, the wall with its guard towers, barbed wire and police dogs graphically represented why the U.S. State Department posted me at the American Embassy in Bonn from 1966 to 1969. In buildings on the other side of the wall, East German secret police and their Soviet advisers plotted against the American embassy, U.S. consulates in West Germany and the U.S. mission in West Berlin. My job was to keep them from getting their hands on what they wanted most: U.S. secrets or, failing that, someone on the inside who could be recruited to surreptitiously bring those secrets out.

There was hardly a time when I flew into West Berlin on official business that I didn’t find time to visit the area of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, the location of Checkpoint Charlie, where foreigners and Westerners were allowed to cross into East Berlin. It was where East and West unsmilingly came face to face.

I also traveled, with my wife, Gwen, on the duty train that ran from Frankfurt through East Germany and into West Berlin. The operation was intended to demonstrate the West’s right to travel through the region. Even so, the train could run only at night, and we were asked to keep the blinds closed.

I thought President Reagan’s June 12, 1987, call, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” was a stirring challenge to the Soviet regime and a memorable rendition of "Cold War" rhetoric. But secretly, I believed that the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and, most of all, the Berlin wall would always be with us.

And to think, a piece of that infamous wall is here in Washington on display at the Newseum.