Lullabies for Little Criminals

A bullet must have passed through your heart when you were very young, causing you to bleed out slowly, over things and lovers and every white surface that you had ever come across.

Forward into the past

Meanwhile at a small Balkan country 

Argentine Drug Dealing: A Local Tour Of Hustlers, Cops And Politicians

Putting the 'organized' in organized crime, necessary for Argentina's efficient distribution of illegal drugs

By Jorge Ossona

In Argentina's big cities, drug-dealing operates in complex equivalents of distribution 'chains.' And yet as unstable and chaotic a world as it is, the illicit sale of narcotics may be ordered along two or three basic principles.

Cocaine trafficking constitutes the crux of activities that flow through an established hierarchy, from the top supplier to local-level "tips" (punteros) — your neighborhood dealer. These should not be confused with the classic political "dealer," drug dealers being in a different category even if both types recognize and interact with each other.

The dealer must inevitably have detailed information about everything happening in his or her territory, in order to formulate the widest range of solutions. Politicians usually tolerate local dealers — the "tips" — because they know they are running franchise operations conceded by the police and sections of the communal power structure. At the same time, members of their families or local supporters — indeed themselves — might very well be consumers, which is reason enough for interactive circuits to emerge between these two references of local life.

People merely perceive them differently in the neighborhood. Regardless of his or her style, the politician is considered a positive and universal mediator in the face of individual and collective emergencies, while the drug dealer is both feared and despised, being judged a "merchant of death."

Cracks and soldiers

In all neighborhoods there is a varying number of youth gangs including boys and girls who work and study, and "lazy" types — the familiarly termed "ni-nis" neither working nor studying — always party to a range of offenses. They consume considerable amounts of beer and wine at street parties, or other alcoholic beverages "blended" variously with mind-altering substances that circulate in a little-studied market.

The most compulsive of these, the "cracks" (fisura), are also small-time dealers.

Some of these can become "tips" or neighborhood dealers, for which they will need arms and vehicles — mainly motorbikes — and backers or garantors higher up in the drug hierarchy.

They must also have a parental structure that will give them the rationale they lack, through division of labor and a fixed domicile guarded by "soldiers." These youngsters' temerity is fed by showing off their cars, motorbikes, expensive phones and sophisticated weapons. Their group would eventually need an emblematic name that somehow expresses its "ethics" and the "destiny" it must live out without hypocrisy.

Above neighborhood gangs are the "wholesalers," a more silent level of suppliers who managed at some point to move up the difficult cursus honorum of drug dealing. Personal references are more important at this level than your family or group. The quantities sold here are greater than those of the neighborhood, so the only people arriving at the wholesaler's home are envoys of neighborhood dealers who are customers.

Cocaine is at the heart of the chain, but a dealer at this level can also sell marijuana independently, usually provided by Paraguayan dealers. Wholesalers have a defined jurisdiction and specific subordinates, with exclusive relationships that cannot be bypassed without breaking the professinoal "code."

Drugs and politics

Then there is the large-scale distributor, who confers the "seal" or label to the entire chain, and imposes minimum standards of quality on what neighborhood dealers sell in his or her name. The third-level trafficker's reputation and competitiveness are at stake in the neighborhood. Every week the entire chain pays those monies agreed on, with which they will pay their next-level Peruvian, Bolivian or Colombian suppliers living in luxury districts, but also "taxes" owed to the State in the zone where their franchise operates.

Situated in a comfortable position between the second and third levels is a middleman or "reference" (referente), a strategic figure ensuring that the entire chain functions. The "reference" handles total, gross quantities coming in from the third-level distributor and monies paid in by neighborhood "wholesalers." The middle man is the one who pays off the corrupt police "street chief" with what is referred to as the "toll charge."

This is taken to the commissioner who sends a portion of the booty onto a "communal godfather" who may be at the summit of the political pyramid. This last circuit almost always involves a territory's secretive political "dealers," who also negotiate with police the protection to be given for other crimes committed in their zone of influence.

Read more at:

http://www.worldcrunch.com/rss/culture-society/argentine-drug-dealing-a-local-tour-of-hustlers-cops-and-politicians/narc-dealer-traffic-distributors-punteros/c3s14708/#.UtluzNL8JD8

Time for a Cease-Fire In the War on Poverty

The poor would be better off without it

The typical fate of a big government program: it produced the exact opposite effect of what was officially 'intended' 

By Bill Boner

The unemployment numbers came out on Friday. They were worse than expected. Only 74,000 jobs added – about one-third of the consensus estimate. Meanwhile, the labor force participation rate – the amount of people either employed or actively seeking work – went from 66% to 62%. That's a loss of about 5 million from the available workforce … or about 100,000 a month.

In December, more people left the job market than entered it. So, the official "unemployment" rate went down. The bad news had little effect on stocks.

Investors thought it was good news, but they weren't quite sure. On the one hand, it seemed to point toward more EZ money from the Fed. On the other, even taking the effects of bad weather into account, it looks as though the economy could be weaker than commonly thought.

The 'War' Goes On

Meanwhile, the 50^th anniversary of the feds' "War on Poverty" came and went last week, without much notice. No flags flying. No speeches. Veterans on both sides took their money and kept quiet. But that didn't stop hands from wringing, hearts from bleeding and bellies from aching.

So, the "war" goes on.

But as in many other of the feds' wars, we don't know which side we should be on. We've got nothing against poverty. Then, again, we've got nothing against wealth either. People should be able to decide for themselves what they want out of life. But during the Johnson administration the rich got the idea that they should exterminate poverty … or at least gain a political advantage by appearing to try to do so.

So it was that on January 8, 1964, LBJ declared war: 

“This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” 

That was 50 years and $20 trillion ago.

Jesus Christ warned us that eradicating poverty wouldn't be easy. "The poor will always be with you," he said. So far, it looks like he was right.

About 15% of Americans still live in poverty – roughly the same percentage as in the mid-1960s. And that's despite the government spending about $1 trillion a year on eradicating poverty!

A New Kind of 'Poor'

But wait. It depends on how you define "poor." What we take from the recent article in the Wall Street Journal by senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation Robert Rector, titled "How the War on Poverty Was Lost," is that the "poor" are too rich for their own good.

The feds spend $9,000 a year on each of the roughly 100 million recipients of their various means-tested welfare programs. That, and other sources of revenue, give the typical poor person a rather rich life. According to Rector, the typical American living below the poverty level: 

“… lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air-conditioning and cable TV. His home is larger than the home of the average non-poor French, German or English man. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.” 

Sound pretty good? Yes, but there's more to life than creature comforts. And by attempting to exterminate material poverty, the feds created a new kind of poverty that is far worse.

We have some experience of it: In the 1980s and 1990s we lived in a war zone – a "ghetto" in northwest Baltimore. There, too, there was plenty of money – at least, there was enough to buy gadgets and drugs. Everybody had a TV. And everybody had alcohol and drugs. There was a whooping party whenever the welfare checks arrived. But it was not a very nice place to live.

When you pay people not to do much, that is what they do. And then, after doing so little for so long, they can do nothing else.

Tales from Druid Hill

 The Druid Hill area of Baltimore, where we lived for about 10 years, was the front line in the War on Poverty. Few people had jobs. Instead, they hung around. Idleness begat disorder. And trouble. In personal lives, family lives and the life of the community. People slept at all hours … and stayed up late at night partying. Children were poorly tended – often out on the street in the middle of the night. The sidewalks were trashy and dangerous. Gunshots were frequent. Violent deaths were not uncommon. The red and blue lights of the gendarmes were never far away.

It had its charms. One of our neighbors had murdered another man in a drug dispute. He seemed like a nice fellow – at least as long as you didn't get him too mad. He and a few others formed a kind of glee club … singing Motown hits until they passed out drunk.

They could get drunk every night because they didn't have to get up to go to work in the morning. The work world imposes order. You have to get up in the morning. You have to get along with your coworkers. And you have to get the job done. Mother Necessity is a powerfully civilizing force. Take her out of a community, and the place goes to hell.

Marriage, too, comes with civilizing requirements. You have to get along with your spouse. You have to learn to live together. You have to take responsibility for other people … and cooperate to get the job done. But there were almost no marriages and no jobs in Druid Hill. Why?

The War on Poverty made them unnecessary. You didn't need to have a job to support yourself. And you didn't need to get married to support your children either. The feds would do it for you. Rector totes up the consequences: 

“In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today the number stands at 41%. As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home. [...] Children raised by a single parent are three times as likely to end up in jail and 50% more likely to be poor as adults.” 

The War on Poverty? The poor would be better off without it.

And as this chart shows, it didn't come cheap.

Read more at:

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=27971

2013: The Year the Arab Spring Died

In the Egyptian coup, democratic hopes were snuffed out

By TIM BLACK

Back in February 2011, as angry crowds thronged Tahrir Square in Cairo, calling for President Hosni Mubarak to call time on his 30 years of military dictatorship, Western political leaders, accompanied by an assortment of the nominally liberal and sort-of leftish, could barely contain their democratic urges. This wasn’t just the Arab Spring, it was Western politicos’ spring, too. In the jubilant overthrow of decrepit, hair-dyed tyrants, they saw a chance to pose as champions of democracy.

As Mubarak stumbled from power, American president Barack Obama beamed: ‘Egypt has changed, and its future is in the hands of the people. Those who have exercised their right to peaceful assembly represent the greatness of the Egyptian people.’ The European Union’s foreign-affairs chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, was similarly quick to pen her message of support. ‘I have called on the Egyptian authorities to embark on a transition towards genuine democratic reform, paving the way for free and fair elections’, she wrote in the Guardian. ‘The challenge is to lay down the roots of deep democracy; there, too, the EU stands ready to help.’ Even Mubarak’s mate, the ex-British prime minister, Tony Blair, was prepared to admit that ‘this is a moment of huge opportunity, and not just for Egypt’.

Pundits from the left side of the tracks were also eager to issue their undying approval of the Spring-time Arabs. A New York Times columnist wrote that ‘democracy is good for Arabs as it is for Israelis and Americans’. In the Observer, an op-ed began: ‘It must be bliss to be alive, young and Arab in this dawn of revolution.’ Laurie Penny, the faddish embodiment of middle-class leftism, enthusiastically proclaimed her solidarity with protesters in Tahrir Square. The difference between protesters overthrowing degenerate despots in the Middle East and 150 anti-cuts protesters stood outside Camden Council offices on Euston Road ‘is one of scale, not of substance’, she waxed.

But in June 2012, something terrible happened – at least in the eyes of Western politicians and pundits. The Egyptians, enjoying the freedom to vote in the first free presidential election in Egypt’s history, did something wrong. They voted for the wrong candidate, the one the West wasn’t keen on. The election of Mohamed Morsi of the conservative Muslim Brotherhood, with 52 per cent of the vote, was too much for those in the West who, just 16 months earlier, had been the biggest cheerleaders of democracy. The Arab Spring was no longer to their liking; democracy was not yielding the right results.

Yet the downbeat reaction to Morsi’s election was nothing compared with what happened in July this year. After days of anti-Morsi protests in Tahrir Square attacking the president for his Islamism and his economic failures, the army moved in and deposed Morsi. Morsi supporters launched counter protests, but they were crushed by the military. As it stands, hundreds of Morsi supporters have been beaten, tortured and killed, and Morsi now faces conspiracy charges and, if found guilty, he could be executed.

 Read the rest at:

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/2013_the_year_the_arab_spring_died/14447#.UriZddLPZ8E

Venezuela’s Playbook: The Communist Manifesto

Τhe Titanic called Venezuela might stay afloat for longer than you think

BY STEVE HANKE

It seems as though each passing day brings yet another piece of bad economic news coming out of Venezuela. For months, I have been tracking the decline of Venezuela’s economy and its currency, the bolivar. As if a collapsing currency, and the resulting inflation and empty shelves weren’t bad enough, Venezuela is now struggling with massive blackouts. Forget the Whig interpretation of history; Venezuela supports the schoolboys’ interpretation: “it’s just one damn thing after another.”

Venezuela’s downward economic spiral began in earnest when Hugo Chavez imposed his “unique” brand of socialism on Venezuela. For years, the country has sustained a massive social spending program, combined with costly price and labor-market controls, as well as an aggressive foreign aid strategy. This fiscal house of cards has been kept afloat—barely—by oil revenues.

But, as the price tag of the regime has grown, the country has dipped more and more into the coffers of its state-owned oil company, PDVSA, and (increasingly) relied on the country’s central bank to fill the fiscal gap. This has resulted in a steady decline in the bolivar’s value — a decline that only accelerated as news of Chavez’s failing health began to emerge.

Hugo Chavez died on March 5, 2013 — sending shockwaves through the Venezuelan economy. Not surprisingly, in the months since his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, took the reins as Venezuela’s new president, the Venezuelan house of cards has begun to collapse.

The black market exchange rate between the bolivar (VEF) and the U.S. dollar (USD) tells the tale. Indeed, the bolivar has lost 64.5% of its value on the black market since Chavez’s death.

This, in turn, has brought about very high inflation in Venezuela. At present, the implied annual inflation rate is actually in the triple digits, coming in at a whopping 297%.

Those Who Can't, Govern.

Don't just do something. Stand there.

by Mark Steyn
For much of last year, a standard trope of President Obama's speechwriters was that there were certain things only government could do. "That's how we built this country — together," he declared. "We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together." As some of us pointed out, for the cost of Obama's 2009 stimulus bill alone, you could have built 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges — or one mega–Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Boston to just off the coast of Ireland. Yet there isn't a single bridge, or a single dam ("You will never see another federal dam," his assistant secretary of the interior assured an audience of environmentalists). Across the land, there was not a thing for doting network correspondents in hard hats to stand in front of and say, "Obama built this."

Until now, that is. Obamacare is as close to a Hoover Dam as latter-day Big Government gets. Which is why its catastrophic launch is sobering even for those of us who've been saying for five years it would be a disaster. It's as if at the ribbon-cutting the Hoover Dam cracked open and washed away the dignitaries; as if the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to traffic with its central span missing; as if Apollo 11 had taken off for the moon but landed on Newfoundland. Obama didn't have to build a dam or a bridge or a spaceship, just a database and a website. This is his world, the guys he hangs with, the zeitgeist he surfs so dazzlingly, Apple and Google, apps and downloads. But his website's a sclerotic dump, and the database is a hacker's heaven, and all that's left is the remorseless snail mail of millions and millions of cancellation letters.

For the last half-century, Obama has simply had to be. Just being Obama was enough to waft him onwards and upwards: He was the Harvard Law Review president who never published a word, the community organizer who never organized a thing, the state legislator who voted present. And then one day came the day when it wasn't enough simply to be. For the first time in his life, he had to do. And it turns out he can't. He's not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. And Healthcare.gov is about what you'd expect if you nationalized a sixth of the economy and gave it to the Assistant Deputy Commissar of the Department of Paperwork and the Under-Regulator-General of the Bureau of Compliance.

Getting out of hell can be tough

Karina Aspires to be a Successful Prostitute

By Orlando Freire Santana

HAVANA, Cuba, November www.cubanet.org – Karina laments having come rather late to Havana from her native Santiago de Cuba. According to her, if her arrival in the capital had happened five or six years ago, the job of becoming a successful prostitute would have been much less work.

Because the competition here is huge, and the clients increasingly prefer younger girls. However, at 25, Karina still has hopes of being able to find her way through the intricacies of this craft to reach her great objective: hooking up with a “yuma,” as foreigners are called here, and getting out of this hell.

Back in Santiago, Karina left her mother and a five-year-old daughter. As a mid-level food technician, she held a job as an assistant in a seedy State snack bar, with a salary that wasn’t enough to feed her daughter. So Karina, and two other single mothers like herself, decided one day to take a train to Havana, without even knowing anyone in this city that could pave the way for them.

The first few days in the capital were difficult for the three girls, sometimes eating only once a day, and sleeping on benches at the train station. They continued that way until they met a man who sheltered them in his house. And at the end of several weeks, after earning the first fruits of her trade, Karina managed independence. Now she lives along in a rented room in Old Havana that she pays 50 CUC (about 50 dollars) for, and has already been able to send some money to help her family.

And what is more important, Karina has come to understand that she has several steps to reaching her goal. These days, still devoid of the material attributes that make it easier to trap the big game, Karina roams the areas of Havana where the cheapest prostitution is practiced, such as the doorways of stores on Monte Street, or the area around Fraternity Park. In these places almost all the customers are Cuba, and they generally pay five CUC for half an hour of rented love. Still, sometimes she’s lucky, hooking up with guys who offer as much as 10 or 15 CUC. Of course in these cases she has to really put herself into providing the service.

Self-fufilling beliefs of the left

Children taught that they’re disadvantaged, fail to achieve

By T. Sowell

Depressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people along different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. All may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England.

The Nov. 9-15 issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reported that among children who are eligible for free meals in England’s schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low-enough incomes to receive subsidized free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.

The Economist points out that in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.

These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled “Life at the Bottom” by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said among the patients he treated in a hospital near a low-income housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven.

Irresistible Immigration: The Lampedusa Dilemma

Television and the Kalashnikov

By Anthony de Jasay

Immigration is the joint effect of a push and a pull, though the relative strength of each can vary greatly. If one considers the great mass movements of the Western world, the first, peaking around the middle of our first millennium, was mainly a matter of "push", with one people chasing another from East to West and taking possession of its land. The second, also from East to West, was the slave trade carried on for nearly three centuries and which petered out early in the 19th century, where white slavers, usually with the complicity of tribal chiefs, caught and transported Africans to the Caribbean and the southern United States, where they produced sugar and cotton in exchange for their keep, such as it was. The main moving force was the "pull" of profitability. Its fruits were captured by the African tribal chiefs, the slave traders, and the plantation owners, but the slaves were excluded due to the weakness or lack of rules that would protect the freedoms of unarmed or poorly armed individuals. In the third major migratory wave peaking before World War I, Europeans settled North America. They were pushed by repeated periods of agricultural depression (itself partly the result of imports from the newly settled great grain producing areas of the U.S. Midwest and Canada), and partly natural calamities such as the Irish famine. However, the pull of fairly fertile land, to be had in freehold by squatting on it, was the dominant reason for crossing the Atlantic.

Migration in Europe since World War II has been too chaotic for a dominant trend to be discerned. Two of the early streams of Turks to Germany and Arabs to France, were mostly responses to the full employment opportunities in western Europe and were fully agreed to by the host countries. The flight from Soviet Russia and its satellites to the West was more due to what has come to be called "asylum seeking" than to economic calculus. It is probably fair to say that since the flood of refugees from Socialism has passed, there is practically no need for a European resident to seek asylum, and if there are still political refugees in Europe, they have come from the Middle East and Africa where the intrinsic turbulence of Islam and the inability of Muslim sects to coexist with each other or with non-Muslims unless forced to do so under some iron-handed dictator, is pushing large numbers to yield to the hostile push of religious zealotry and seek shelter in Europe. Today's migrants to Europe are of two types from the legal point of view. One type enters his target country with the latter's consent and a regular visa. They come as students, tourists, relatives of residents and other genuine reasons and false pretexts. Once their visa has expired, they remain in the chosen host country as "illegal" immigrants. They then apply for political asylum, a claim that neither they nor the authorities regard as more than a poor joke, but which both pretend to take for a genuine right. However, with ample facilities for appeals, such claims take two or more years to settle. Once rejected, the host country may expel the illegal immigrant, but appeals to human rights by a very vocal minority and the genuine compassion felt by many for hard cases make expulsion very difficult. In Britain, for instance, there is an estimated 600,000 pool of illegal immigrants with an annual intake of maybe 80,000, but the authorities succeed in expelling only about 15,000 a year. Those who remain mostly benefit from English tolerance and good faith and from their children being British-born.

The other type of today's European immigrations relies not so much on the abuse of visas, but on clandestine frontier crossings. "Illegal" immigrants to France and Germany both are around 60,000 annually. Besides the spurious claim of political asylum, compassionate grounds may be found for letting them stay. While vocal minorities make expulsion no less difficult than it is from Britain.

Puerto Rico might be a little too big to fail

Puerto Rico, with at least $70 billion in debt, confronts a rising economic misery

By Michael A. Fletcher

Boxes and wooden crates filled with household items bound for the U.S. mainland are stacked high in the Rosa del Monte moving company’s cavernous warehouse, evidence of the historic rush of people abandoning this beautiful island.

The economy here has been in recession for nearly eight years, crimping tax revenue and pushing the jobless rate to nearly 15 percent. Meanwhile, the government is burdened by staggering debt, spawning comparisons to bankrupt Detroit and forcing lawmakers to severely slash pensions, cut government jobs and raise taxes in a furious effort to avert default.

The implications are serious for Americans outside Puerto Rico both because a taxpayer bailout would be expensive and a default would be far more disruptive than Detroit’s record bankruptcy filing in July. Officials in San Juan and Washington are adamant that a federal bailout is not on the table, but the situation is being closely monitored by the White House, which recently named an advisory team to help Puerto Rican officials navigate the crisis.

The island’s problems have ignited an exodus not seen here since the 1950s, when 500,000 people left for jobs on the mainland. Now Puerto Ricans, who are U.S. citizens, are again leaving in droves.

They are choosing the uncertainty of the job market in Orlando or New York City or Philadelphia over what they view as the certainty that their dreams would be crushed by the U.S. territory’s grinding economic problems.

“We used to move a lot of machinery into Puerto Rico, and executives who worked in the pharmaceutical industry here,” said Neftaly Rodriguez, whose father founded Rosa del Monte. “Now we are packing people up to go out. Everybody is looking for a better opportunity.”

Puerto Rico lost 54,000 residents — 1.5 percent of its population — between 2010 and 2012 alone. Since recession struck in 2006, the population has shrunk by more than 138,000 to 3.7 million, with the vast majority of the outflow headed to the mainland.

The brutal combination of a long recession, a shrinking population and overwhelming debt has left Puerto Rico’s political leaders struggling to manage a conundrum: How do they tame at least $70 billion in debt while marshaling the resources to grow a shrinking economy and battle corrosive social problems, including a homicide rate that is nearly six times the U.S. average?

The crisis has left Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Javier Garcia Padilla juggling competing demands for budget cuts and other types of austerity demanded by Wall Street rating agencies, and the incentives and other spending needed to ignite growth.

“Sometimes, you are between the wall and sword,” Padilla said in an interview.

Inflation, Shortages, and Social Democracy in Venezuela

Venezuela’s economic policy is proving that economic intervention, leads to complete socialism and economic destruction

by Matt McCaffrey and Carmen Dorobat

The economic turmoil in Venezuela has received increasing international media attention over the past few months. In September, the toilet paper shortage (which followed food shortages and electricity blackouts) resulted in the “temporary occupation” of the Paper Manufacturing Company, as armed troops were sent to ensure the “fair distribution” of available stocks. Similar action occurred a few days ago against electronics stores: President Nicolás Maduro accused electronics vendors of price-gouging, and jailed them with the warning that “this is just the start of what I’m going to do to protect the Venezuelan people.”

Earlier this month, in another attempt to ensure “happiness for all people,” Maduro began to hand out Christmas bonuses, in preparation for the coming elections in December. But political campaigning is not the only reason for the government’s open-handedness. The annual inflation rate in Venezuela has been rapidly rising in recent months, and has now reached a staggering 54 percent (not accounting for possible under-estimations). Although not yet officially in hyperinflation, monetary expansion is pushing Venezuela toward the brink.

In such an environment, paychecks need to be distributed quickly, before prices have time to rise; hence, early bonuses. This kind of policy is nothing new in economic history: Venezuela’s hyperinflationary episode is unfolding in much the same way Germany’s did nearly a century ago.

Consequently, Venezuela’s economic policy is proving to be another example of Ludwig von Mises’s argument that economic intervention, if left unchecked, leads to complete socialism. The ever-expanding price controls testify to the fact that governments always search for new scapegoats in the market instead of admitting the failure of their own policies, and that it is always easier to increase government control than reduce it.

Maduro clearly knows the ropes when it comes to anti-market propaganda; like his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, he has placed blame for soaring prices on speculators and the “parasitic bourgeoisie.” But no witch-hunt for “price-gougers” will stop the eventual collapse of the economy that will result from further monetary expansion combined with crippling price controls. Inevitably, as Mises argued, “once public opinion is convinced that the increase in the quantity of money will continue and never come to an end, and that consequently the prices of all commodities and services will not cease to rise, everybody becomes eager to buy as much as possible and to restrict his cash holding to a minimum.”

The Physics of Party Government

Nothing that we, the ruled, do can bring back the America they have already destroyed

by Angelo M. Codevilla

It took Woodrow Wilson a century and a quarter, and help from Harry Reid. But America now has what Wilson said we needed in 1885: government by a majority party empowered to do whatever it wants to push the country along the paths of progress – just like in Europe. Harry Reid and the Obama Democrats’ unilateral change of rules to make the US Senate run strictly on majority votes simply capped a long process of growth in partisanship that has Europeanized public life in America without changing a word in the Constitution. This is not how Wilson wanted to do it, but the unlovely results are the same.

Wilson’s signature work, Congressional Government(1885) argued that the US Constitution’s authors had bequeathed to us a vehicle with too many brakes and steering wheels, but with no driver in charge and not enough horsepower. Whereas James Madison had seen our Constitutional system of checks and balances as means to “refine and enlarge the public view,” Wilson saw it as substituting endless argument and compromise for necessary univocal action. He wrote that our Founding Fathers had done us wrong.

Wilson wanted us to have a parliamentary system with “responsible parties.” Like in Europe, the party that won a majority of seats would vote in unison and wield the power, as the British Jurist William Blackstone had said of his parliament, to do “all that is not naturally impossible” and to test the meaning of that limit as well.

But constitutions and rules were never the main reason why America did not have “responsible parties.” That reason was the diversity of American political life. From the eighteenth century until very recently, all of our political parties were loose coalitions of people who represented countless different kinds of people and interests. Moreover, none of those interests was interested in imposing a comprehensive agenda on the rest. Given that, party discipline could not have existed regardless of legislative or constitutional language.

This began to change after the Civil War, when Southerners, a substantial sector of the Democratic Party, acted in unison to protect their peculiar, embattled model of race relations as well as other interests, and thus made it necessary for the rest of the House of Representatives to observe some degree of discipline. The Senate, by contrast, remained proud of its indiscipline – until now.

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” put America on the slope to Harry Reed’s imposition of rule by a disciplined majority party because it was the first instance in US history in which a political party tried to impose a new way of life on the whole country. That requires discipline on the part of the imposers and elicited the same from the opponents. Since that time, with few respites, the Democratic Party has presented America with ever-edgier, ever more urgent versions of the same agenda: “new freedom,” “new frontier,” “new foundation,” etc.

Each click of this ratchet required more unison on the part of those who tightened it. Why should anyone be surprised that it elicited a response from the people it squeezed? Newton’s Third Law Of Motion applies to politics as well as to physics. The US Constitution’s words count little against such forces, much less the rules of the US Senate.

Those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to know

Sheeple: Why You Should Feel Sorry For Them

by Brandon Smith

It is often said there only two kinds of people in this world: those who know, and those who don’t. I would expand on this and say that there are actually three kinds of people: those who know, those who don’t know, and those who don’t care to know. Members of the last group are the kind of people I would characterize as “sheeple.”

Sheeple are members of a culture or society who are not necessarily oblivious to the reality of their surroundings; they may have been exposed to valuable truths on numerous occasions. However, when confronted with facts contrary to their conditioned viewpoint, they become aggressive and antagonistic in their behavior, seeking to dismiss and attack the truth by attacking the messenger and denying reason.  Sheeple exist on both sides of America's false political paradigm, and they exist in all social "classes".  In fact, the "professional class" and the hierarchy of academia are rampant breeding grounds for sheeple; who I sometimes refer to as "intellectual idiots".  Doctors and lawyers, scientists and politicians are all just as prone to the sheeple plague as anyone else; the only difference is that they have a bureaucratic apparatus behind them which gives them a false sense of importance.  All they have to do is tow the establishment line, and promote the establishment view.

Of course the common argument made by sheeple is that EVERYONE thinks everyone else is blind to the truth, which in their minds, somehow vindicates their behavior.  However, the characteristic that absolutely defines a sheeple is not necessarily a lack of knowledge, but an unwillingness to consider or embrace obvious logic or truth in order to protect their egos and biases from harm.  A sheeple's mindset is driven by self centered motives.

So-called mainstream media outlets go out of their way to reinforce this aggressive mindset by establishing the illusion that sheeple are the “majority” and that the majority perception (which has been constructed by the MSM) is the only correct perception.

Many liberty movement activists have noted recently that there has been a surge in media propaganda aimed at painting the survival, preparedness and liberty cultures as “fringe,” “reactionary,” “extremist,” “conspiracy-minded,” etc. National Geographic’s television show “Doomsday Preppers” appears to have been designed specifically to seek out the worst possible representatives of the movement and parade their failings like a carnival sideshow. Rarely do they give focus to the logical arguments regarding why their subjects become preppers, nor do they normally choose subjects who can explain as much in a coherent manner. This is a very similar tactic used by the establishment media at large-scale protests; they generally attempt to interview the least-eloquent and easiest-to-ridicule person present and make that person a momentary mascot for the entire group and the philosophy they hold dear.

The goal is to give sheeple comfort that they are “normal” and that anyone who steps outside the bounds of the mainstream is “abnormal” and a welcome target for the collective.

B-H Levy and the destruction of Libya

Neither morality nor philosophy has much to do with Levy and his unending quest for war

By Ramzy Baroud 
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "the world's most influential Jew", Bernard-Henri Levy is number 45, according to an article published in the the Jerusalem Post, on May 21, 2010. Levy, per the Post's standards, came only two spots behind Irving Moskowitz, a "Florida-based tycoon considered the leading supporter of Jewish construction in east Jerusalem". 

To claim that at best Levy is an intellectual fraud is to miss a clear logic that seems to unite much of the man's activities, work and writings. He seems obsessed with "liberating" Muslims, from Bosnia to Pakistan, to Libya and elsewhere. However, this would not qualify as a healthy obsession stemming from overt love for and fascination with their religion, culture and myriad ways of life. 

Throughout his oddly defined career, Levy has done much harm by at times serving as a lackey for those in power, and at others leading his own crusades. He is a big fan of military intervention, and his profile is dotted with references to Muslim countries and military intervention from Afghanistan to Sudan and finally Libya. 

Writing in the New York magazine on Dec 26, 2011, Benjamin Wallace-Wells spoke of the French "philosopher" as if he were referencing a messiah that was not afraid to promote violence for the greater good of mankind. 

In "European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator", Wallace-Wells wrote of the "philosopher [who] managed to goad the world into vanquishing an evil villain". The villain in question is, of course, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who was ousted and brutally murdered after reportedly being sodomized by rebels following his capture in October 2011. 

A detailed analysis by Global Post of the sexual assault of the leader of one of Africa's most prominent countries was published in CBS news and other media. 

Levy, who at times appeared to be the West's most visible war-on-Libya advocate, has largely disappeared from view within the Libyan context. He is perhaps stirring trouble in some other place in the name of his dubious philosophy. His mission in Libya, which is now in a much worse state it has ever reached during the reign of Gaddafi, has been accomplished. The "evil dictator" has been defeated, and that's that. 

Never mind that the country is now divided between tribes and militias, and that the "post-democracy" Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was recently kidnapped by one unruly militia to be freed by another. 

Sex at Sunset

By 2020, in the Land of the Rising Sun, adult diapers will outsell baby diapers

by mark steyn
To Western eyes, contemporary Japan has a kind of earnest childlike wackiness, all karaoke machines and manga cartoons and nuttily sadistic game shows. But, to us demography bores, it's a sad place that seems to be turning into a theme park of P. D. James's great dystopian novel The Children of Men. As readers may recall from earlier citations in this space, Baroness James's tale is set in Britain in the near future, in a world that is infertile: The last newborn babe emerged from the womb in 1995, and since then nothing. The Hollywood director Alfonso Cuarón took this broad theme and made a rather ordinary little film out of it. But the Japanese seem determined to live up to the book's every telling detail.

In Lady James's speculative fiction, pets are doted on as child-substitutes, and churches hold christening ceremonies for cats. In contemporary Japanese reality, Tokyo has some 40 "cat cafés" where lonely solitary citizens can while away an afternoon by renting a feline to touch and pet for a couple of companiable hours. In Lady James's speculative fiction, all the unneeded toys are burned, except for the dolls, which childless women seize on as the nearest thing to a baby and wheel through the streets. In contemporary Japanese reality, toy makers, their children's market dwindling, have instead developed dolls for seniors to be the grandchildren they'll never have: You can dress them up, and put them in a baby carriage, and the computer chip in the back has several dozen phrases of the kind a real grandchild might use to enable them to engage in rudimentary social pleasantries.

P. D. James's most audacious fancy is that in a barren land sex itself becomes a bit of a chore. The authorities frantically sponsor state porn emporia promoting ever more recherché forms of erotic activity in an effort to reverse the populace's flagging sexual desire just in case man's seed should recover its potency. Alas, to no avail. As Lady James writes, "Women complain increasingly of what they describe as painful orgasms: the spasm achieved but not the pleasure. Pages are devoted to this common phenomenon in the women's magazines."

As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we're-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of the Observer in London filed a story headlined "Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?" Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact." For women, it was 45 percent.

World’s No. 1 Jailer

No other country on the planet puts more of its citizens in cages for life for nonviolent drug offenses than the USA

by Mark J. Perry

It’s been well-documented that the US is the World’s No. 1 Jailer, and imprisons far more of its people than any other country on the planet (716 per 100,000 population), including countries generally thought to be repressive like Myanmar (120 per 100,000), Iran (284 per 100,000), Syria (58 per 100,000), or Cuba (510 per 100,000). It’s also been documented that America’s cruel and failed War on Drugs, launched by President Nixon in 1971, is largely responsible for the country’s shameful status as the World’s No. 1 Incarcerator, see chart above.

A new report released this week from the American Civil Liberties Union ”A Living Death: Life without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses” examines a very disturbing trend that contributes to America’s notoriety as the World’s No. 1 Jailer – the increasing number of nonviolent offenders in the US who are being sentenced to life in prison without parole. As Reason.comreported “The ACLU found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the War on Drugs, mandatory minimums, and “tough-on-crime” policies are to blame” for the more than 3,000 prisoners in America serving life sentences without parole (LWOP) for nonviolent drug and property crimes.

Here are some highlights of the ACLU report:

This report documents the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by sentencing people to die behind bars for nonviolent offenses, and includes detailed case studies of 110 such people. It also includes a detailed fiscal analysis tallying the $1.78 billion cost to taxpayers to keep the 3,278 prisoners currently serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses incarcerated for the rest of their lives.

Using data obtained from the Bureau of Prisons and state Departments of Corrections, the ACLU calculates that as of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving Life without parole (LWOP) for nonviolent drug and property crimes in the federal system and in nine states that provided such statistics (there may well be more such prisoners in other states). About 79% of these 3,278 prisoners are serving LWOP for nonviolent drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses nationwide are in the federal system; of these, 96% are serving LWOP for drug crimes. More than 18% of federal prisoners surveyed by the ACLU are serving LWOP for their first offenses. Of the states that sentence nonviolent offenders to LWOP, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have the highest numbers of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent crimes, largely due to three-strikes and other kinds of habitual offender laws that mandate an LWOP sentence for the commission of a nonviolent crime.