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Bob Novak writes: During George W. Bush’s keynote address to the 40th anniversary black-tie banquet of the American Conservative Union (ACU) last week, diners rose repeatedly to applaud the president’s remarks. But one man kept his seat through the 40-minute oration. It was no liberal interloper but conservative stalwart Donald Devine. As ACU vice chairman, Devine was privileged to be part of a pre-dinner head-table reception with President Bush. However, Devine chose not to shake hands with the president. Furthermore, he is one of about 20 percent of Republicans that polls classify as not committed to voting for Bush’s re-election.

The conventional wisdom portrays the latest Zogby Poll’s 81 percent of Republican voters committed to Bush as reflecting extraordinary loyalty to the president by the GOP base. Actually, when nearly one out of five Republicans cannot flatly say they support Bush, that could spell defeat in a closely contested election. When Don Devine is among those one out of five, it signifies that the president’s record does not please all conservatives.

Actually, I think 19 percent not being committed to a sitting President is shockingly high. That’s NOT including people like me, who left the Republican party because of its lack of commitment to its professed ideals. But Novak is right to point out what may be the president’s political salvation – Kerry may be even less popular among Democrats. There’s nothing quite so timely as a self-destructing opponent on a day when you aren’t on your A game.

Marcotti writes on SI:BAD WEEK: For Real Madrid, which lost its fourth straight game. It’s the first time in the club’s history that this has happened. So much for the Galacticos, the Zidanes y Pavones and the rest of the smoke chairman Florentino Perez tried to sell. Many, including yours truly, predicted it would all ends in tears. And it did.

It never ceases to amaze me that coaches and managers in every team sport manage to forget that a team is more than a collection of individuals. My high school soccer team had only about two-thirds the talent that my younger brothers’ team had – they had two 30-goal scorers, I think our leading scorer racked up about 12 – but we finished third in state while they were upset in the second round of regionals.

I was so disappointed for my brothers, who were crushed, but unsurprised. The team plays against its alumni every year, and while my team had simply abused the alumni, theirs didn’t take the game seriously and lost 3-1. It’s a bad sign when a team doesn’t mind losing, especially games they should win. I’ll take eleven players with mediocre talent who hate to lose over a squad of Galactic Superstars who think they deserve to win just by showing up every single time.

It’s just so fitting that once it became clear they couldn’t win La Liga or the Champions League, the Real Galacticos would give up and finish the season by embarrassing their historic club.

As some of you know, I write a bit of fiction as well as the occasional column. And as Nate has already gleaned, the CAVE is close to opening for perusal, not that there’s a whole lot there now. Anyhow, as some people have expressed an interest in my novels, I wanted to find out how many people think they might be interested in acquiring said books before ordering a box from the publisher. There’s three in all, one sci-fi, two fantasy. I’m not asking for a firm commitment, just trying to estimate if I need ten or one hundred.

Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to sign them since they won’t ever pass through my hands. Of course, if you’d ever seen the painful, quasi-legible scribble that passes for my signature, you wouldn’t think it was much of a loss.

I am frequently asked why I am so utterly dismissive of socialist economics. The reason is that its foremost variant – Marxian socialism – is constructed upon a foundation that is completely out of date. This foundation is the Labor Theory of Value, presented by Marx and Engels in Das Kapital.

The question of value is one of the most important in economics, as it lies at the heart of all supply and demand. The value inherent in a given object was, in the nineteenth century, generally considered to consist of its cost. This cost was comprised of the capital that had gone into the means of production plus the labor required to put the object together. This seemed fairly obvious, as something that demanded a great deal of material and a lot of labor, such as a palace, was of much greater cost, and presumably, value, than something that required little capital and little labor, such as a loaf of bread.

Marx’s clever sleight-of-mind was to posit that capital was nothing more than what had previously been skimmed off underpaid workers. If a baker underpaid his employees, then used that “surplus value” to buy a new oven, what looked like capital was really labor. Therefore, if value was capital + labor, and all capital was expropriated labor, value was labor. Or, to put it another way, value is abstract labor time.

Now, the flaw in this is immediately obvious. Value is not objective. A glass of water is essentially worthless to a man who lives by a lake, but is more precious than diamonds to man dying of thirst in the desert. Furthermore, it is quite clear that labor cannot be used as a viable means of determining value even when one examines a product that is nothing but pure labor. Is a musical work on which a team of five musicians have labored for two years of inherently more value than a little piece that a single man dashed off in an hour? By the labor theory of value, the answer is yes. Few who have listened to Mozart or Bach would agree.

The labor theory looks particularly outdated in the information age. When digital bits are worth more than physical objects, when robots are constructing billions of dollars worth of automobiles, it becomes hard to imagine that all that value is being expropriated from the mass of clerical workers who are doing little but moving information from one place to another. Either we are all expropriating the value of those few Atlasas who are still engaged in what Marx would recognize as labor, or the theory is absurd.

The reason that socialists cling, however unknowingly, to the labor theory, is that accepting any notion of subjective value is tantamount to utterly destroying the entire basis for distributionism – a philosophy of which socialism is only a subset. Mises explicated the impossibility of socialist calcluation* in 1920, predicting the very shortages of goods and services that have been seen in every historical socialist society**. Central planners face a tremendous challenge in simply replacing known capitalist market mechanisms, but adding to that the concept of capricious value determinations on every single product by every single actor makes the task utterly impossible, since there is no way of knowing these independent valuations, much less taking them into account.

Furthermore, if the laborers are not having their surplus value expropriated by the capitalists, there is no need to expropriate from the expropriators, and no need for a vanguard to establish a more equitable system of distribution.

A few years after graduating from college with a degree in economics, I called my old history professor and asked him how my old Marxian professors were handling the increasingly obvious fact that the labor theory of value had no relevance to modern economics. “They’re in denial”, he said, chuckling. Then he added “But really, what choice do they have?”

*”The paradox of “planning” is that it cannot plan, because of the absence of economic calculation. What is called a planned economy is no economy at all. It is just a system of groping about in the dark. There is no question of a rational choice of means for the best possible attainment of the ultimate ends sought. What is called conscious planning is precisely the elimination of conscious purposive action.” – Von Mises, HUMAN ACTION

**”Not one of the 170 essential sectors has fulfilled the objectives of the Plan a single time over the last 20 years … this has brought about a chain reaction of hardship and imbalance which has led to ‘planned anarchy'” – Pravda, May 1988

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, a newborn baby recently was left on the doorstep of a Catholic church in Boston. The priest took in the baby girl, and immediately thought of a childless married couple in the church who were desperate to adopt. But when the priest called the social-services agency, the baby was shipped off to two homosexual men in the western part of the state. By design, this girl will never know a mother’s love.

I blame the priest. This demonstrates precisely the problem of a crippled mentality conditioned to turn to the state for help. He had the baby, he knew the couple, so, naturally, he called social services. Stupid. It’s like when you have ten dollars in your pocket, you see someone in need holding out his hand, and you proudly remind yourself that you’ve paid your taxes so you’ve done your part.

Never, ever expect the government to do the right thing. It occasionally may, but the odds aren’t high. If something needs doing, do it yourself. Let the bureaucrats pick up the pieces and clean up the mess later, that’s all they’re capable of anyhow.

I suspect that most of you did not get the chance to hear either of my two appearances on the Northern Alliance Radio show. I’ve just received both MP3s, courtesy of 1280 Patriot, and should have them available for everyone by the weekend, along with a few other things that have been requested in the past. Just in case anyone’s interested.

As a part of their annual fund drive – which always seems a little strange coming from a conservative organization, I might add – NRO is going to be auctioning off one of the superflous letters from Ramesh Ponnuru’s last name. As I am a fan of NRO, I’m thinking of bidding on it.

I’m trying to decide on which letter I want. Voxu Day or Vox Nday. I think I’m leaning towards the latter.

“How do you pronounce that?”

“The three is silent.”

“Oh, ah.”

Simmons vs. Wiley. Simmons is quicker and more verbose, Wiley has the benefit of actually knowing what he’s talking about. But the edge goes to the Sports Guy, not because the Sports Guy’s encyclopedic knowledge of all things Hollywood gives him what Wily admits is a leg up, but because Wiley’s ability to rip in good humor can’t keep up with Simmons.

“Thanks for the nice words, although I think Mahorn is crazy with jealously right now.” Good times, good times.

Tonya’s spousal unit writes: I vote NO on the Vox picture thing. We already know that he can lift a bus with his pinky and leap tall buildings, etc. We already know that there are no super-models left that have not been notched on his bedpost…(prior to meeting SpaceBunny of course)… and that he can fold space with his awe-inspiring intellect.

That’s space-time, do try to get the details straight. As for the rest, the reason there are no other pictures of me is that special cameras are required, along with a particle accelerator. I’m not a vampire per se, but as I have not emerged from my lair for lo, these many years now, I have apparently evolved the ability to blend seamlessly into the background.

It’s a theory, anyhow. It might just be that my snowy complexion merges insensibly with the white walls, I’m not sure. What kind of doctor do you consult when your image begins mirror-fading?

There’s been a lot of talk about Kerry’s daughter’s dress and the enthusiastic response to Michael Moore’s new film. I have no doubt that the film is another dishonest piece of propaganda, but it’s a clever title, anyhow. But honestly, the only thing that really registered with me was the supersizing of the filmmaker himself. Holy Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man! Are they remaking Ghostbusters?

If I was an interviewer, I’d be careful to stay a good ten feet away from him at all times. Probably best to keep a pizza or three in between you and the insatiable maw too, just to be safe.