L'Affaire Wolfowitz

L'Affaire Wolfowitz

If there is any group that should be disqualified from passing judgment on how World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz handled the conflict of interest with his girlfriend/subordinate, it is the bank's executive board.

That would be the same board that shirked its duty to resolve the issue in the first instance, as Wolfowitz requested.

The same board that for years has been positively profligate in doling out salaries, perks and promotions.

And the same executive directors who, having for years turned a blind eye to corruption, are suddenly possessed with concern that the anti-corruption efforts will suffer irreparable harm because of Wolfowitz's single instance of petty self-dealing.

If the board feels the urge to confront hypocrisy and profligacy at the World Bank, perhaps it ought to consider investing in a mirror.

Patent Law Comes Back to Earth

For years now, patent law has been a case study in what happens when a specialized bar and specialized magistrates get hold of an area of economic activity: Common sense gives way to precedent, and public interest gives way to private.

Now the Supreme Court has stepped in to restore patent law to its original purpose: rewarding and encouraging innovation, not stifling it. The unanimous decision will make it harder to obtain and defend patents for obvious "innovations" such as combining two medicines into a single pill or creating a "send me a confirmation" button on an Internet sales site. It overturns decades of precedents that any reasonable person -- but apparently not a patent lawyer or judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit -- would have known had outlived their usefulness.

The argument is often made that these areas have become so complex and technical that they can be handled by only specialists. Perhaps the reason they become so complex and technical is that they have been left to people who do little else.

The Changing Middle-Class Job

The template for a new pay and benefit package for Detroit's auto industry is in the final stages of being hammered out behind the scenes at Delphi, an auto parts company in bankruptcy protection. The investment bankers who are offering to pay more than $3 billion to buy the company out of bankruptcy are demanding a starting wage for new workers of $12 an hour. That will probably be supplemented by General Motors, which made certain promises to workers when it spun off Delphi several years ago.

This would be a bitter pill for unionized autoworkers, who negotiated pay packages over the years that far exceeded the compensation of other workers with similar skills. And no doubt when an agreement is struck, union leaders and liberal commentators will be quick to note that such blue-collar jobs will no longer be a ticket to the American middle class.

What's surprising, however, is that anyone would think that the same job that supported a middle-class lifestyle in 1957 would continue to do so 50 years later. After all, the average job now requires higher skills and has more capital and technology behind it. And what is now considered a middle-class lifestyle -- a three-bedroom house, three color TV sets, two cars and an aboveground pool -- would have been viewed as upper class back then.

There are plenty of middle-class jobs all over the economy, including higher-skilled jobs at auto plants. But it is in the very nature of economic progress that the "middle-class jobs" of today will be different from those of a generation ago.