John Burns has an article in today’s New York Times basically making it clear how untenable the U.S. position in Iraq has become. Super-hack Andy McCarthy links to the article only to use it as a pretext for grinding axes against other unnamed Times reporters he doesn’t like. Jonah Goldberg, by contrast, at least acknowledges that since Burns is for some reason (he seems good to me, too, and it’s not obvious to me what his special appeal to conservatives is supposed to be) a rightwing-approved foreign correspondent, his article is especially “despression”.

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As you may have heard, the world is scheduled to run out of fish in about 50 years. I don’t generally recommend libertarianism as an ideology, but it has very smart things to say about fisheries management and the management of economically valuable natural resources generally. Thus, I think John Tierney’s column on this subject was pretty good and he’s basically correct — the problem here is that we need to assign some property rights. Owners of fish (or of fishable patches of ocean) have incentives on both sides — they can make money by killing fish, but they can enhance the value of their property by growing fish stocks. That’s the right incentive structure — some fish come to market, but not so many fish as to destroy the fish stocks. Under a no property regime, the incentive is always to kill more fish.

In principle, regulatory caps could make a no property scenario work, but in practice regulatory capture keeps making these schemes fail (see also the new Economist blog’s item on this).

That said, Tierney’s claim that “You can get all the beef — or buffalo meat — you want from Western ranchers” isn’t really true. You can certainly get all the beef you want, but at this point pure-bred American Bison are extraordinarily rare. What’s available is “beefalo”, a cattle/bison hybrid. So I think his fatalistic optimism on this score is a bit off-base. It’s true that America eventually solved the tragedy of the commons that superficially seemed headed toward a meat-less plains, but this happened rather late — too late to really save the classic buffalo. Similarly with the fish. We can be fairly confident that seafood won’t actually disappear. But a lot of specific fish species actually might go extinct unless people take action to implement some kind of system of property rights in time to prevent that from happening.

You know the situation’s getting desperate when the GOP decides it needs to point to allegedly strong economic performance as its main election argument. The idea here is supposed to be that a Democratic congress, by partially reversing George W. Bush’s tax policies, would wreck the bountiful prosperity we’re all currently enjoying.

This is, on its face, fairly absurd. By what measure has economic performance during the Bush years been better than it was before his policies were implemented? Jobs aren’t being created at a higher rate. Wages are going up faster. The poverty rate isn’t declining. The stock market isn’t growing faster. What is it about the pre-Bush economic status quo that we’re supposed to be afraid of? I don’t see this working at all. The old GOP argument was that the economy was doing well enough that voters should focus on Republican national security policy and its vital role in keeping the country safe. Now it turns out that Republican national security policy is a bad joke and voters are supposed to be quaking at the prospect of a return to Clinton-era economic performance? I don’t think so.

On Monday the Army Times will be publishing an editorial calling on Don Rumsfeld to resign. Of course, as we’ve seen, Rumsfeld has no intention of resigning and Bush has no intention of asking him to resign. The only way he’s going out of office is if the Democrats win the midterms, are able to implemenet some oversight, and thereby manage to uncover further information that makes his job untenable. One could imagine, in other words, him getting dragged out of the Pentagon in handcuffs. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen.