Thanks to the diligence of Instapundit, I bring you two fine essays. Make time to read them, as you’ll be smarter when you have done so.

The first is by Kenneth Anderson, who looks at the legal and moral/philosophical basis for rival options for other countries intervening in Libya militarily or otherwise. Elegant, generous to different viewpoints, perceptive and everything else a superb article about law and policy should be.

It finishes on a fascinating and profound note (my emphasis)

[Humanitarianism] may require neutrality as a condition of its very existence. But that hardly means that neutrality is the highest virtue, the most admirable moral position, in conditions of conflict. 

While neutrality may make humanitarianism possible, it will always be a derivative virtue in a world containing evil, a deliberate and knowing suspension of public moral judgment for the sake of another moral good, such as the relief of suffering.

But if evil is not to triumph, we cannot all be neutral. Someone must fight for what is right: If there is to be a Red Cross, there must also be a Churchill.

… When the US government says that the Qaddafi regime has lost its legitimacy, that might not be an endorsement of the rebels as a government — but it is far more than simply asserting a humanitarian concern.  

If a no-fly zone were to be imposed, that is not merely an action in support of humanitarian action; it is an attack upon a side in a conflict, and — objectively speaking, as we residual marxists say — in support of the other side.  It is often better to acknowledge one’s commitments to one side or at least against the other openly, and not hide behind an anodyne “humanitarian” concern.

Second, try this majestic effort by Walter Russell Mead on where society is heading as computerisation starts to gnaw away not only at boring ‘lower’ jobs but also at professional skills:

The problem isn’t that this or that piece of the blue social model is breaking down and needs to be fixed so that the rest of the model can go on working well. 

It’s not that the university system is broken and that if we fix that the model still works.  Ditto the public sector unions or the situation of the labor movement as a whole. Mandating an expensive new set of health care entitlements at a time of looming insolvency won’t help either.

The problem with the blue social model today is systemic.  It’s not a problem with one piece or another.  The pieces are all falling down and breaking apart at once.

Piling on more costs to save dying systems is doomed to fail, he says. (This means you, UK Uncut.) The systems need radically re-engineering:

It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college.  Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED?

And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster?  Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?

… As higher education becomes more skill-based (and the liberal arts portion is increasingly delivered in smarter ways), it is likely to become much, much cheaper — the modern college lecture is using a teaching technique invented in Greco-Roman times when students listened as teachers read scrolls, and not much has changed since.

So you won’t have to save up for a generation to send your kids to college — and they won’t have to spend a generation paying off the loans to cover the rest. 

… Nobody has a blueprint for the post-industrial world, and the pessimists and doomsayers will always be with us.  The porters’ union probably once fought the wheel and predicted mass unemployment and falling living standards if those crazy things ever caught on.

How would honest porters earn a living if everybody used those new-fangled wheelbarrows?  And if the porters are out of work, what about all the shopkeepers and tavern owners who depend on the porters as customers?  Alas, oh woe and alackaday!

Ban the wheel!

The article shows that we need to start talking about completely different things, swimming to a different shore and not staying becalmed, clinging on to the wreckage of the Titanic and ‘demanding’ that our unborn children pay to rescue us:

Krugman and many of his colleagues at the Times are, I think, blinded by how good things once were.  This is understandable; I felt that way for many years myself and it was only slowly and painfully that I gave up on the blue social model that once looked so good.  But the country and the times we live in demand more than angry and ultimately despairing nostalgia from our thinkers and opinion leaders.

Food for thought indeed.