Is Hugo Chavez an idiot?

By William J. Dobson

When I was in Moscow last year, I paid a visit to Boris Nemtsov, one of the leading figures of the Russian opposition. Naturally, I had come to Nemtsov to discuss Russian politics. But the conversation quickly turned to, of all things, Venezuelan economics.

Nemtsov has no love for Vladimir Putin and his regime. The Russian government has arrested him and thrown him in prison, and it strangles the political movement he leads. But Nemtsov saw one bright side: At least he didn’t have to live under the economic policies of Hugo Chavez. “Putinism will survive if oil prices are huge. Frankly, it is the same with Hugo Chavez, but Hugo is more stupid than Putin. Chavez nationalizes industries. He establishes price controls. Putin looks cleverer. He doesn’t touch the real economy much . . . he doesn’t touch small, average businesses,” Nemtsov told me. “Economically, he looks closer to Chinese authoritarians than to Hugo. Because Hugo has no ideas about the economy at all. He is a real idiot.”

Ouch. Harsh words. But then again, Nemtsov has the numbers to prove it. Venezuela was the only country in South America to see its economy shrink last year. By many reports, it now suffers from the world’s highest inflation. In 2010, Venezuela was the only South American country to have a negative balance of foreign investment. (It dropped by $1.4 billion.) The International Labor Organization says that Venezuela wasone of only five countries in the region to see job growth fall. (The others were Barbados, Jamaica, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago.)Power outages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages have become common as state infrastructure crumbles. And, in perhaps the most stunning achievement, the state-owned oil company has reported falling profits — even as oil prices rise.

The West’s very own celeb terrorist

Whether he was droning on about climate change or consumption, OBL’s ‘ideas’ were born and bred in the West.

by Bill Durodié 

Soon after the death of Osama bin Laden had been announced to the world, 72-year-old Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir – the purported spiritual leader of the Islamist militant group Jemaah Islamiyah – issued a statement from his jail cell in Indonesia, where he faces trial for allegedly funding and organising terrorist camps. The statement, to the effect that ‘Osama’s death will not make al-Qaeda dead’, was designed to instill a sense of foreboding across south-east Asia.

But like all nobodies who hide their own uncertainties and weaknesses behind the words and deeds of supposed somebodies – in this case, behind the dread of al-Qaeda – Bashir simultaneously revealed his own lack of substance. This was apt, because bin Laden himself was always fond of citing Western commentators, academics and diplomats in seeking to legitimise his ostensible cause.

Sounding like any other contemporary critic of American policy, bin Laden droned on about a rag-bag of causes at different times: he lambasted the US for not signing up to the Kyoto treaty to control greenhouse gases; accused Washington of being controlled by a Jewish lobby; suddenly became concerned about Palestine after 9/11; suggested that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were simply money-making ventures for large US corporations; and even had the gall – for one in thrall to the Taliban – to argue that Western advertising exploited women.

''The 24-year-old Australian Ramazan ‘Ramzy’ Acar'' ??? Yea, right

The Facebook message was brief and chilling - ‘Bout 2 kill ma kid’.

It was posted by 24-year-old Australian Ramazan ‘Ramzy’ Acar before he plunged a huge Ninja-style knife into the body of his two-year-old daughter Yazmina.

As the girl lay dying, Acar posted another message, directed at the child’s mother, Rachelle D’Argent:
‘It’s ova - I did it.'

Chilling: Ramazan 'Ramzy' Acar allegedly posted the messages on Facebook before and after killing his two-year-old daughter

Then he posted another vengeful Facebook message to Miss D’Argent, from whom he was separated, reading:
‘Pay back, u slut.’

Sickening details of the murder of Yazmina were revealed in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court today as Acar - wearing an oversize dark suit, white shirt and tie - stared indifferently from the dock.

Glaring back at him were Miss D’Argent, her friends and family.

When he was asked if he pleaded guilty or not guilty to murder, Acar replied in a clear voice: ‘Guilty.’

The court heard that he and Miss D’Argent were estranged and that their daughter - known as Mimi - died after he picked her up from her mother last November.

He said he was going to take her to a milk bar to buy her a surprise - but instead he stabbed her a number of times before dumping her body in a park. His cruel Facebook messages were read later by his estranged partner.

Miss D’Argent wept as she listened to the brief evidence.

Our betters

United Nations Death Panel

Editorial of The New York Sun

One of the most startling news stories of the season is the dispatch on page one of yesterday’s the New York Times warning that there might be too many Africans. This came in an account of a new forecast on world population issued by the United Nations, which is now projecting that a global population that the Times reports was “long expected to stabilize just above nine billion in the middle of the century” will “keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100.” It predicts that the population of Africa could triple in this century to 3.6 billion — “a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.”

What in the world does the Times have against the Africans? Population density on the African continent, after all, is, at 65 persons a square mile, one of the lowest on the planet, according to About.com, whose figure we cite because About is issued by another unit of the New York Times Company. It reports that South America has 73 people a square mile, Europe 134, and Asia 203. It makes one wonder why the Times would begrudge the Africans the prospects for growth that are reported by the United Nations. If the continent is “already struggling to provide food and water for its people,” after all, maybe the reason is that it has not too many people but too few.
The error in the Times story is an example of how even the most intelligent of analysts can get into trouble on the population story. One famous example was a dispatch issued in August 2001 by the magazine Nature, which published a forecast that the 21^st century would be the one in which the number of people on the planet would likely stop growing. The authors — Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherboy — reckoned there was “around an 85% chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century.” The triumvirate concluded that “the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.”

An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter

By Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer -- and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer -- is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Another take on OBL

by Brendan O’Neill 

We’ve had VE Day and VJ Day – is VOBL Day next? Reading the excitable political commentary on the death of Osama bin Laden, I wouldn’t be surprised. The killing of the head of al-Qaeda has been treated as if it were a momentous occasion on a par with the Allies’ defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Some reports even point out that Hitler’s death was likewise announced on 1 May, while newspaper headlines tell us this is ‘A great day in American history’. Perhaps VOBL Day will become a national holiday across the West, when people will gather to recall and celebrate the assassination of ‘the world’s most evil man’ (in the words of the Sun) and the fact that our children can now sleep peacefully in their beds.

There is an extraordinary disconnect between the response to bin Laden’s death and the circumstances in which the death occurred. And it’s a disconnect no one seems willing to face up to. The death has been celebrated as nothing less than an historic turning point for humanity, inviting solemn-cum-joyous statements from everyone from Barack Obama to Ban Ki-moon to Silvio Berlusconi, who wax lyrical about the world now being a ‘safer and better place’. Yet all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organisation and whose political isolation from the Arab masses had only recently been brilliantly illustrated by the Arab uprisings. The headlines should read ‘Has-been jihadist dead’; instead they say ‘World rejoices’.

The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894

By Stephen Davies

We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend  X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, to quote a character from a famous British sitcom, “We’re doomed, I tell you. We’re doomed!” Unless, that is, we mend our ways according to the author’s prescription. This almost invariably involves restrictions on personal liberty.

These prophets of doom rely on one thing—that their audience will not check the record of such predictions. In fact, the history of prophecy is one of failure and oversight. Many predictions (usually of doom) have not come to pass, while other things have happened that nobody foresaw. Even brief research will turn up numerous examples of both, such as the many predictions in the 1930s—about a decade before the baby boom began—that the populations of most Western countries were about to enter a terminal decline. In other cases, people have made predictions that have turned out to be laughably overmodest, such as the nineteenth-century editor’s much-ridiculed forecast that by 1950 every town in America would have a telephone, or Bill Gates’s remark a few years ago that 64 kilobytes of memory is enough for anyone.

The fundamental problem with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption: that things will go on as they are. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of free exchange, people receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solve problems. The prophets of doom come to their despondent conclusions because in their world, nobody has any kind of creativity or independence of thought—except for themselves of course.

A classic example of this is a problem that was getting steadily worse about a hundred years ago, so much so that it drove most observers to despair. This was the great horse-manure crisis.

Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*

The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).

Weeding Out the "Socially Not Useful"

by Anthony de Jasay
... a service is profitable if Everyman, the businessman and the final consumer, buys it. Buying it is the one indisputable way he has to show that he wants it. But Superman is unimpressed by what Everyman wants. He wishes Everyman to get what he needs. For only what he needs is "socially useful" ...

In his classic essay "What is seen and what is not seen" (written in 1848 and published in July 1850) the shamefully underrated and neglected French economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)1 declares that what distinguishes a bad economist from a good one is that the bad one can only see what is to be seen, while the good one also discerns the as yet unseen consequences that are bound to follow the visible effect of an action. Present benefits must be painfully paid for in future costs, while present sacrifices tend to be generously rewarded in the future. The good economist must, of course, weigh up the merits of a law, a policy or an institution by taking account both of the effects he (and others) can see and the future consequences he foresees (and others do not).

Stated this way, there is a built-in test that makes it very easy to tell the good economist from the bad one: we only have to watch the consequences as they emerge with the passage of time. Events will show up what the bad economist has overlooked and what the good one has correctly foretold.

Killing a Man Does Not Testify to National Greatness

By Robert Higgs

Among the many objectionable aspects of President Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden had been killed, one in particular sticks in my craw. He said that “today’s achievement is a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people.”
First, I dislike the whole idea of “the greatness of our country.” Countries cannot be great. They are abstractions and, as such, they are incapable of acting for good or for evil. Individual residents of a country may be great, and many Americans are great, because, to borrow Forrest Gump’s construction, “greatness is as greatness does.”
The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great.  The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great.
But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.
Second, anyone can see that the U.S. government will use this particular killing as evidence of its dedication to and capacity for carrying out the noble service of protecting—and, failing that, avenging the deaths of—the American people. (Never mind that trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of deaths, untold destruction of property, vast human misery, and sacrifices of essential liberties in this country went into gaining the proudly proclaimed achievement of killing a single man.) The process has already begun, with former presidents and the mainstream media adding their voices to amplify the government’s official line. Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.

"Decline of Manufacturing"

... and yet the world is much better off because of it.

The chart above shows manufacturing output as a share of GDP, for both the world and the U.S., using United Nations data for GDP and its components at current prices in U.S. dollars from 1970 to 2009.  We hear all the time from Donald Trump and others about the "decline of U.S. manufacturing," about how nothing is made here any more, and how everything that used to be made here is now made in China, etc.  An underlying assumption here is that if the manufacturing base is shrinking in the U.S., there is an offsetting manufacturing gain that is captured elsewhere in the world.  In reality, the decline in U.S. manufacturing as share of GDP is a really a global phenomenon as the entire world becomes increasingly a services-intensive economy.  

As a share of GDP, manufacturing has declined in most countries since the 1970s.  A few examples: Australia's manufacturing/GDP ratio went from 21.3% in 1970 to  9% in 2009, Brazil's ratio went from 24.6% to 13.3%, Canada's from 21.7% to 11.3%, Germany's from 35% to 19%, and Japan's from 35% to 20% (I'll maybe create a chart with a more complete list).  

Bottom Line: The complaints about the "decline in U.S. manufacturing" are really a somewhat misguided acknowledgment of the global shift in production that has taken place since we entered the Information Age with the commercial introduction of the microchip in 1971 and gradually left the Machine Agebehind.  When we complain that "nothing is made here anymore," it's not so much that somebody else is making the stuff we used to make as it is the case that we (and others around the world) just don't need as much "stuff" any more in relation to the overall size of the economy.    

The standard of living around the world today, along with global wealth and prosperity, are all much, much higher today with manufacturing representing 16-17% of total world output compared to 1970, when it was almost twice as high at 26.7%. And for that progress, we should applaud, not complain

Senseless

The Therapeutic State

by Thomas Szasz

Do people really want to know why, on January 8, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner engaged in mass murder? I submit they do not. Politicians, psychiatrists, pundits, and the press univocally assert that Loughner’s deed is the “senseless” product of mental illness. This belief in a nonexistent mental disease causing mass murder is on a par with young children’s belief in Santa Claus. It is false but satisfies the believers. The great French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) sagely observed, “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.”

Before his shooting spree Loughner had produced a video he called “My Final Thoughts,” in which he said, “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.” On the morning of his massacre he posted a message on his MySpace account acknowledging his sense that he was at the end of his rope and his decision to let go: “Goodbye. Dear friends . . . Please don’t be mad at me.”

“War is a continuation of politics by other means,” said Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831). I suggest that, similarly, mass murder in plain sight, such as Loughner committed, is a continuation of suicide by other means. Sometimes it is called “suicide by proxy” or “suicide by cop.”

The Culture of Violence in the American West

The Not-So-Wild, Wild West
                               By Thomas J. DiLorenzo 

In a thorough review of the “West was violent” literature, Bruce Benson (1998) discovered that many historians simplyassume that violence was pervasive—even more so than in modern-day America—and then theorize about its likely causes. In addition, some authors assume that the West was very violent and then assert, as Joe Franz does, that “American violence today reflects our frontier heritage” (Franz 1969, qtd. in Benson 1998, 98). Thus, an allegedly violent and stateless society of the nineteenth century is blamed for at least some of the violence in the United States today.

In a book-length survey of the “West was violent” literature, historian Roger McGrath echoes Benson’s skepticism about this theory when he writes that “the frontier-was-violent authors are not, for the most part, attempting to prove that the frontier was violent. Rather, they assume that it was violent and then proffer explanations for that alleged violence” (1984, 270).

In contrast, an alternative literature based on actual history concludes that the civil society of the American West in the nineteenth century was not very violent. Eugene Hollon writes that the western frontier “was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today” (1974, x). Terry Anderson and P. J. Hill affirm that although “[t]he West . . . is perceived as a place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life,” their research “indicates that this was not the case; property rights were protected and civil order prevailed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved” (1979, 10).

Twins?

Gold and Economic Freedom

by Alan Greenspan - 1966

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense — perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.
In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.
Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.
The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.
What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term "luxury good" implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.

The New Colonialism

by Paul Craig Roberts
What we are observing in Libya is the rebirth of colonialism. Only this time it is not individual European governments competing for empires and resources. The new colonialism operates under the cover of "the world community," which means NATO and those countries that cooperate with it. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was once a defense alliance against a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Today NATO provides European troops in behalf of American hegemony.

Washington pursues world hegemony under the guises of selective "humanitarian intervention" and "bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed peoples." On an opportunistic basis, Washington targets countries for intervention that are not its "international partners." Caught off guard, perhaps, by popular revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, there are some indications that Washington responded opportunistically and encouraged the uprising in Libya. Khalifa Hifter, a suspected Libyan CIA asset for the last 20 years, has gone back to Libya to head the rebel army.

Gaddafi got himself targeted by standing up to Western imperialism. He refused to be part of the US Africa Command. Gaddafi saw Washington’s scheme for what it is, a colonialist’s plan to divide and conquer.

The US Africa Command (AFRICOM) was created by order of President George W. Bush in 2007. AFRICOM describes its objective:

Too good to pass

Sympathy Deformed

Decades of foreign aid have not helped Tanzanians.
By Theodore Dalrymple
To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been--one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor--moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural--that were particularly prevalent in the country (see "Childhood's End," Summer 2008).

My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most important charities in Britain's increasingly corporatist society, was the government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the "maldistribution of resources"; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people's self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption--not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.

I first started thinking about poverty when I worked as a doctor during the early eighties in the Gilbert Islands, a group of low coral atolls in an immensity of the Central Pacific. Much of the population still lived outside the money economy, and the per-capita GDP was therefore extremely low. It did not seem to me, however, that the people were very poor. Their traditional way of life afforded them what anthropologists call a generous subsistence; their coconuts, fish, and taros gave them an adequate--and, in some respects, elegant--living. They lived in an almost invariant climate, with the temperature rarely departing more than a few degrees from 85. Their problems were illness and boredom, which left them avid for new possibilities when they came into contact with the outside world.

Life in the islands taught me a lively disrespect for per-capita GDP as an accurate measure of poverty. I read recently in a prominent liberal newspaper that "the majority of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day." This statement is clearly designed less to convey an economic truth than to provoke sympathy, evoke guilt, and drum up support for foreign aid in the West, where an income of less than $1 a day would not keep body and soul together for long; whereas it is frequently said that one of Nigeria's problems is the rapid increase in its population.

The Ecosocialist Critique of Capitalism vs. Real World Socialism

by Ed Dolan

It has been twenty years now since first glasnost and then the collapse of the USSR lifted the curtain on the appalling environmental record of Soviet socialism. Over that same 20 years, the burgeoning economy of socialist China has overtaken the United States as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gasses. Still, it remains common to hear capitalism singled out as the greatest environmental threat to our planet, and socialism as its salvation.
A forceful statement of the environmentalist case against capitalism can be found in the Belem Ecosocialist Declaration, the product of a conference held in Paris in 2007. That document sets out a simple chain of cause and effect: Capitalism requires profit, profit requires growth, and growth means environmental destruction. Here are some excerpts:

Humanity today faces a stark choice: ecosocialism or barbarism. . . .We need no more proof of the barbarity of capitalism, the parasitical system that exploits humanity and nature alike. Its sole motor is the imperative toward profit and thus the need for constant growth. . . . Capitalism’s need for growth exists on every level, from the individual enterprise to the system as a whole. The insatiable hunger of corporations is facilitated by imperialist expansion in search of ever greater access to natural resources . . . . The capitalist economic system cannot tolerate limits on growth; its constant need to expand will subvert any limits that might be imposed . . . because to do so would require setting limits upon accumulation – an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die!

To be right up front about it, the critique is not all wrong. There is a “Drill, Baby, Drill!” version of capitalism with a throughput mentality and a contempt for environmental values that provide fodder for the ecosocialist critique. Clearly, neither capitalism nor socialism has a monopoly either on environmental sin or environmental virtue. Reaching a considered judgement about their relative economic impacts requires asking two questions:

The Fight of the Century (may be more)

The Passing of a True Prince of Modern Classical Liberalism: Richard Cornuelle (1927-2011)

by Peter Boettke

Richard Cornuelle passed away in the early morning of Tuesday April 26, 2011.  He was one of the true princes of the modern classical liberal movement.  And I use that term -- "prince" -- in full knowledge that Dick rejected all forms of aristocracy and authoritarianism and in all walks of life --- between citizen and politician; between worker and boss; between student and teacher; between wife and husband, etc.  He would be the first to deny any princely status to himself.  His book De-Managing America (1975) is a radical denunciation of the "front office" view of society as requiring management by an educated technocratic elite and any idea of a natural aristocracy.  But Dick understood as well that in real democratic ways of relating with one another that granted authority did play an essential role in social progress.  Earned authority was real and in fact vital, but imposed authority was pretend and destructive.  Dick's critique of modern US policy was that we had lost sight of the power of individuals and communities to mobilize and effectively address even the most pressing social issues, and instead we were derailed into thinking that we needed politicians and the state to realize the good society.

White man's burden ... but not for everybody

Bono's ONE foundation under fire for giving little over 1% of funds to charity

By Daily Mail Reporter

Bono's anti-poverty foundation ONE is under pressure to explain its finances after it was revealed that only a small percentage of money it raises reaches the needy.

The non-profit organisation set up by the U2 frontman received almost £9.6million in donations in 2008 but handed out only £118,000 to good causes (1.2 per cent).

The figures published by the New York Post also show that £5.1million went towards paying salaries.

Friends in high places: U2 singer Bono meets French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris at the weekend ahead of the UN summit in New York

While the organisation's gameplan has never been direct handouts on the ground, many who admire the Irish rock legend may be surprised by the figures.

White man's burden ... but not for everybody

Do We Want To Be Fooled?

by Bruce Bawer 

Over the last few years, a Montana nurse named Greg Mortenson has been building an international reputation as a world-class hero and future Nobel Peace Prize winner for having built scores of schools, mostly for girls, in war-torn Afghanistan. At this writing, his 2006 book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time ^[1] has been on the New York Times’s paperback nonfiction bestseller list for 220 weeks. But everything changed on April 17, when 60 Minutes broadcast an exposé of Mortenson ^[2]. The next day, Jon Krakauer ^[3], author of Into Thin Air and a former supporter of Mortenson, published online a detailed takedown of Mortenson ^[4] entitled Three Cups of Deceit. Among the richly substantiated charges was that Mortenson had invented key episodes in his book (and in its 2009 sequel, Stones into Schools ^[5]), that many of the schools he claimed to have built did not exist and that some of those that did exist had not received help from him or his charity, the Central Asia Institute ^[6], since their construction, and that he was guilty of serious financial irregularities. (One former colleague accused Mortenson of using the CAI “as an ATM.”) The fallout from the takedown made it clear that zillions of Mortenson’s fans around the world were shocked by the allegations.

I wasn’t. When I first heard Mortenson speak at a conference two years ago, I was unaware what a big deal he was. Indeed, as far as I can remember it was the first time I’d ever heard of him. I was immediately appalled. He was swaggering, slick, self-satisfied. These attributes especially stood out in contrast with the other speakers at the conference. For the occasion was the first annual Oslo Freedom Forum ^[7], at which many if not most of Mortenson’s fellow speakers were genuine heroes — men and women who’d stood up for freedom in autocratic countries and been punished for it with years of imprisonment and torture.

Make's sense, doesn't it

Here's The Setup For The Con Of The Decade

By Tyler Durden

I consider myself an agnostic about the destruction of the U.S. dollar and hyperinflation (basically the same thing), but my idea that hyperinflation is fundamentally a political process makes me a heretic. I skimmed a few of the dozens of comments posted on Rick's Picks and Zero Hedge after they posted one of my expositions on this dynamic, and didn't see even one comment in favor of this perspective.

The Con is being set up right now, and the outlines are clearly visible. The Con works like this:

1. The Financial Elites/Oligarchy raked in billions in private profit from the orgy of leverage, credit expansion, fraud, embezzlement and misrepresentation of risk that resulted in the Housing Bubble.

2. The losses were transferred to the public (Federal government, i.e. The central State) or its proxy, the Federal Reserve (i.e. the central bank), via bailouts, backstops, guarantees, the Fed's purchase of taxic assets, and an open window for the financiers to borrow billions at zero interest (ZIRP) for further speculations.

3. The Treasury now borrows $1.6 trillion every year, fully 11% of the nation's GDP, as the Central State has replaced private demand and credit expansion with its own borrowing and spending.

4. Non-U.S. central banks have largely ceased to support this unprecedented scale of borrowing, so the Federal Reserve now buys most of the Treasury's issuance of debt via QE2 (quantitative easing, the direct purchase of $600 billion in Treasury bonds).

5. Unlike Japan, the U.S. cannot self-fund its own government borrowing: while U.S. investors, banks and insurance companies do own a significant chunk of Treasuries, the U.S. savings rate (capital accumulation) is still abysmally low, around 4%, which is half the historical average savings rate.

It is happening right now

SHHHHH!!
It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.
The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.
Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.
Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.
Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.
The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.
I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.
I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

rare

Dream of a Palestinian Tiger

Boom Times in the West Bank

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt

With five-star hotels, booming high-tech companies and a modern, new city under construction near Ramallah, the West Bank is preparing for the future. Local entrepreneurs speculate that if the Palestinians ever gain independence, their country could become a leader in the region.

"Palestinian tycoon," he reads, shaking his head. He doesn't like the word. He prefers the headline of the piece next to it: "We Need Peace, or We'll Face an Economic Catastrophe." The editorial was written by Idan Ofer, one of Israel's wealthiest businessmen. Masri smiles and then reaches for the phone and calls Ofer. "Great article," he says. They have a short conversation and then Masri hangs up. Ofer and Masri, the tycoons of Tel Aviv and Ramallah, are friends.Bashar Masri is sitting behind a yellow desk in Ramallah with two Israeli newspapers open in front of him. A large photo of Masri is featured in one of the dailies and his wife Jane is pictured in the other. As he speaks, he plugs the text into Google for a translation.

Masri is possibly the most unusual businessman in the Palestinian Territories. The 50-year-old is a frequent guest in the homes of Israel's wealthiest citizens, his wife runs the largest advertising agency in the Palestinian Territories and studies in Tel Aviv, and his uncle is a billionaire from Nablus. Masri went to the United States at 17 to attend college, and afterward he worked there and married an American woman, until returning home in 1994. He founded Massar International and began building a small empire. He already had dreams of building a Palestinian city in those days, but then came the second Intifada, so he built in Morocco initially instead.

But he never lost sight of his goal to establish the first modern city in the Palestinian Territories -- and he began building it in the West Bank near Ramallah more than a year ago. The new city, called Rawabi, comes at a price tag of more than $850 million (€586 million). Masri's most important investor is the government of Qatar. In addition to 5,000 residential units, Masri is building a sewage treatment plant and a mosque, supermarkets and an administration complex. When the new city reaches its target population of 40,000 people, it will be larger even than Ramallah itself.

Quote of the day

'It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.'


Martin Amis

Our betters want us to watch our tongue

Calling Pets "Pets" Is a Thought Crime

It's time for a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. According to the pointy-headed circus clowns who pass down surrealist moral judgments from atop their ivory towers, our current vocabulary oppresses animals:

Animal lovers should stop calling their furry or feathered friends "pets" because the term is insulting, leading academics claim.

Domestic dogs, cats, hamsters or budgerigars should be rebranded as "companion animals" while owners should be known as "human carers", they insist.

Other forbidden terms include "critters" and "beasts." Pet owners are not to be referred to as "owners," because this "harks back to a previous age" when animals were considered to be animals.

The term "wildlife" is not to be used because "For most, 'wildness' is synonymous with uncivilized, unrestrained, barbarous existence." In actuality, academics have discovered that tigers and hyenas sit around tea tables in the jungle, sipping Earl Grey with their pinkies raised.

Certain idiomatic expressions also have to go:

Phrases such as "sly as a fox, "eat like a pig" or "drunk as a skunk" are all unfair to animals, they claim.

With all this verbal abuse hurled at their sensitive feelings, you can see why Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein wants animals to be provided with lawyers so they can sue us.

The deadly Utopian Vision

by Richard Perle

There are many specters haunting our world, but one is of our own making—the utopian vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, the dream that has come to be called “global zero.”

The vision of the total elimination of nuclear weapons is a postmodern version of an old idea, popular early in the twentieth century, when Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (reprinted in 1933) was required reading in intellectual and policy circles in the United States and Europe. Seventy-six years before Barack Obama was honored in Oslo, Norman Angell also won the Nobel Prize, having come to prominence with the argument that global economic interdependence rendered war futile and unprofitable and therefore obsolete.

In the wake of the Bush administration, what lies in store for the future of America's presence abroad?

Angell’s theory expressed the war-weary and wishful temper of the time. Enthusiasm for achieving peace through international institutions and legal constructs ran high in the period after the disastrous First World War, its most fulsome expression being the Kellogg-Briand Pact, named for its authors, an American secretary of state and a French foreign minister. Ratified by parliaments around the world (and by the US Senate on an 85–1 vote, with only Wisconsin Republican John J. Blaine voting against), the pact sought to deal with the problem of international aggression by simply outlawing war. Less than two years after the pact entered into force in 1929, one of the signatories, Japan, invaded Manchuria. The world “community”—that is, the rest of the treaty parties—did nothing. Other signatories followed suit: Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and Germany launched World War II with the invasion of Poland in 1939.

The great powers that signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact understood its utopian character, but they affirmed it anyway. As with any public endorsement that embraces virtue and rejects vice, the pact appeared to offer little to lose. What did it matter if there was no reasonable assumption that all parties would act in good faith, and no mechanism for enforcement? What harm could come from a lofty ideal formalized with fanfare and champagne in Paris? Realists among its supporters argued that even if prohibiting war couldn’t actually end aggression, it would at least bolster the principle that disputes should be resolved peacefully. Outlawing war made good people feel better; how could that be bad?

But, looking back, we can see that the illusion created by Kellogg-Briand, that war had been outlawed, together with widespread but unjustified faith in the League of Nations, was part of the negligence that allowed Hitler to build his strength and seize vast territories from his neighbors without serious opposition. The Kellogg-Briand frame of mind contributed to the responsibility-evading defense and foreign policies of Britain, France, and others in the 1930s, countries that might have stopped Adolf Hitler in his tracks if they had not been so wishful and unrealistic. Far from making the world safer, proclaiming the “norm” of nonaggression had lulled the great powers into a lethal vulnerability. The lesson here is that nations, by indulging utopianism, do not necessarily make the world more idealistic. In fact, they may help bring about the very evils they are trying to eliminate.

Infertile monarchy is doomed

Cuba’s politburo threatened by senility

BY PEDRO ROIG

It is not difficult to understand that the discourse of the Cuban revolution has been manipulating dreams for 50 years in a delirious frenzy of unfulfilled promises.

Fidel Castro, the elderly Marxist dictator, appeared briefly at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party, looking very fragile, not speaking, raising the arm of his brother Raúl, now confirmed as First Party Secretary, and surrounded by the 15 members of the Politburo, half of whom are generals between the ages of 72 and 83.

Fidel himself, 84, appeared weak and walked with difficulty, but it was clear that, despite his precarious health, he is dying stunningly slowly, which, some analysts say, hinders Raúl Castro’s work.

Half a century into the failure of the revolution, the Sixth Congress concluded with an incoherent report that contained contradictory signals about five-year plans to establish bank credit, decentralize the state’s economy, set up commercial contracts to solve conflicts and give Cubans the right to own their homes and buy and sell cars. But at the end, the hard line of the decrepit Marxist socialist imposed itself.

Arteriosclerosis clung to power. The visceral intolerance of an “irreversible” socialism, along with the crushing presence of the military high command and the absence of a generational relay, formed the framework of the Sixth Congress of the PCC that ended with the delegates singing the Internationale, whose lyrics mention “the poor of the world and the slaves without bread.”

These concepts are applicable to socialist Cuba, which in the past 50 years has become one of the world’s poorest nations, without civil liberties. Perhaps this was the Congress’ most lucid moment.