A must read for PIIGS.

'Enslaved humans usually produce for their masters about half the amount of finished goods that freed slaves produce for themselves'

by Andy Duncan

If you believe in a Creator, then you must acknowledge that He (or She) possesses an incredible sense of humor. Without this, how do you explain Iceland?

Fortunately for us, and particularly perhaps for the Irish, the Greeks, and the Portuguese, this deific challenge is detailed gloriously in the new book, Deep Freeze: Iceland's Economic Collapse, written by Professors Philipp Bagus and David Howden, which is freely downloadable for your Kindle or iBook pleasure via the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

In much the same way that East Germany and West Germany formed the perfect means of comparing complete socialism and partial socialism, the isolated case of Iceland forms an almost perfect storm of a standalone test tube to examine the money-crank experiment of fiat paper currency — a diabolical pathway to fiscal hell followed by all of the world's short-sighted and feeble-minded governments (and all of the personally selfish, corrupt individuals within them) since 1971, when Richard Nixon took the Bretton-Woods US dollar off the final tattered shred of a voluntarily accepted commodity money standard. This thereby allowed an almost infinite abuse of power amongst government officials around the entire world, predicated upon the oil-based momentum and former preeminence of the dollar as the pyramidal fulcrum of the exploded Bretton-Woods global currency system.

With the final link to gold cut and the pyramid finally floating free, it was merely a question of how long it would take for reality to catch up with the almost-infinite paper-currency bubble that the world's central planners were about to blow up, to test these new, unknown limits of financial-paper gravity.

As with all my favorite books, Bagus and Howden come at the problem from an unorthodox angle. To be cunning, however, they begin straightforwardly enough for an Austrian-based book:

The real reasons for Iceland's collapse lie in intrusions by the state into the workings of the economy, coupled with the interventionist institutions of the national and international monetary systems.

So far, so predictable. But then, immediately following this bland opening, there's this:

Iceland's crisis is the result of two banking practices that, in combination, proved to be explosive: excessive maturity mismatching and currency mismatching.

Say what? I awoke at once from my cortical slumber.

What on earth were Bagus and Howden talking about?

Would they be gentle with me? Would they explain the Icelandic situation in ways a man could understand even when he was drinking a beer and stoking up a barbecue, even when he had (temporarily, you understand) forgotten everything he is supposed to know professionally during a working week, while he wears a suit?

Luckily for me, they could.

Iceland has something in common with other developed economies that the recent economic crisis has affected: its banking system was heavily engaged in maturity mismatching. In other words, Icelandic banks issued short-term liabilities in order to invest in long-term assets.

Best Econ lesson on Foreign Aid

A generous offer by the crew turns ugly, quick.

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

(Watch from 8 min. to end)

Tony feeds the locals

A Travel Channel episode of No Reservations, a cooking-focused show narrated by Anthony Bourdain, took viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I had heard that the show offered unique insight into the country and its troubles. I couldn't imagine how. But it turns out to be true. Through the lens of food, we can gain an insight into culture, and from culture to economy, and from economy to politics and finally to what's wrong in this country and what can be done about it.

Through this micro lens, we gain more insight than we would have if the program were entirely focused on economic issues. Such an episode on economics would have featured dull interviews with treasury officials and IMF experts and lots of talk about trade balances and other macroeconomic aggregates that miss the point entirely.

Instead, with the focus on food and cooking, we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes. And what we find is surprising in so many ways.

In a scene early in the show set in this giant city after the earthquake, Bourdain and his crew stop to eat some local food from a vendor. He discusses its ingredients and samples some items. Crowds of hungry people begin to gather. They are doing more than gawking at the camera crews. They are waiting in the hope of getting something to eat.

Bourdain thinks of a way to do something nice for everyone. Realizing that in this one sitting, he is eating a quantity of food that would last most Haitians three days, he buys out the remaining food from the vendor and gives it away to locals.

Nice gesture! Except that something goes wrong. Once the word spreads about the free food — word-of-mouth in Haiti is faster than Facebook chat — people start pouring in. Lines form and get long. Disorder ensues. Some people step forward to keep order. They bring belts and start hitting. The entire scene becomes very unpleasant for everyone — and the viewer gets the sense that it is worse than we are shown.

Bourdain correctly draws the lesson that the solutions to the problem of poverty here are more complex than it would appear at first glance. Good intentions go awry. They were thinking with their hearts instead of their heads, and ended up causing more pain than was originally there in the first place. From this event forward, he begins to approach the problems of this country with a bit more sophistication.

The rest of the show takes us through shanty towns, markets, art shows, festivals, and parades — and interviews all kinds of people who know the lay of the land. This is not a show designed to tug at your heart strings in the conventional sort of way. Yes, there is obvious human suffering, but the overall impression I got was not that. Instead, I came away with a sense that Haiti is a very normal place not unlike all places we know from experience, but with one major difference: it is very poor.

"Many people rail against the term capitalism because it implies that freedom is all about privileging the owners of capital. But there is a sense in which capitalism is the perfect term for a developed economy…"

By the time the show was made, the glamour of the post-earthquake onslaught of American visitors seeking to help had vanished. One who remains is actor Sean Penn. Although he's known as a Hollywood lefty, he's actually living there, chugging up and down the hills of a shanty town, unshaven and disheveled, being what he calls a "functionary" and getting stuff for people who need it. He had no easy answers, and he had sharp words for American donors who think that dumping money into new projects is going to help anyone.

The people of Haiti in the documentary conform to what every visitor says about them. They are wonderfully friendly, talented, enterprising, happy, and full of hope. Like most people, they hate their government. Actually, they hate their government more than most Americans hate theirs. Truly, this is a precondition of liberty. There is a real sense of us-versus-them alive in Haiti, so much so that when the presidential palace collapsed in the recent earthquake, crowds gathered outside to cheer and cheer! It was the one saving grace of an otherwise terrible storm.

Rebound

by Mark Perry

The chart above helps tell the story of manufacturing's comeback this year.  Compared to the overall real growth rate of the U.S. economy during the first quarter of 2011 at 1.8%, the manufacturing sector is growing at 9%, or five times faster than the overall economy (based on the annual growth rate of Industrial Production: Manufacturing series from the Federal Reserve). 

NEW GEOGRAPHY -- "This year’s survey of the best cities for jobscontains one particularly promising piece of news: the revival of the country’s long distressed industrial sector and those regions most dependent on it. Manufacturing has grown consistently over the past 21 months, and now, for the first time in years, according to data mined by Pepperdine University’s Michael Shires, manufacturing regions are beginning to move up on our list of best cities for jobs.

The fastest-growing industrial areas include four long-suffering Rust Belt cities Anderson, Ind. (No. 4), Youngstown, Ohio (No. 5), Lansing, Mich. (No. 9) and Elkhart-Goshen, Ind. (No. 10). The growth in these and other industrial areas influenced, often dramatically, their overall job rankings. Elkhart, for example, rose 137 places, on our best cities for jobs list; and Lansing moved up 155. Other industrial areas showing huge gains include Niles-Benton Harbor, Mich., up 242 places, Holland-Grand Haven, Mich., (up 172), Grand Rapids, Mich., (up 167)   Kokomo Ind., (up 177) ; and Sandusky, Ohio, (up 128).

One big driver of industrial growth has come from the source of so much pain in the past: the auto industry. Although production remains 25% below its 2007 peak, the industry, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the nation’s industrial output, is on the rebound.  Ford Motor is achieving its best profits in over a decade, and both Chrysler and General Motors are officially in the black.

Long-depressed industry center Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills, Mich., topped our list of manufacturing job-creators, with an impressive 8.2% increase. Second place went to the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn area, which experienced 3.5% growth."

We are doomed. Really.

Our betters now what is best for us

Making It Cool to Use Less Stuff

by Van Helsing 

Not even Hollyweird could produce a more preposterous eco-hypocrite that the dribbling cretin we know as Prince Chucklehead:

Late Spring

Letter from Tunisia

by Gregory Mann

Have we already forgotten that the ‘Arab Spring’ began in the winter?

Ben Ali and co. took flight in January, before the whole word learned that the Arabic word for ‘liberation’ is ‘Tahrir,’ as in ‘Tahrir Square.’ But Tunisia’s revolution is not yet ancient history—it’s still underway. Here in Tunis, the dust hasn’t settled, and the end is unclear. Next door in Libya, not to mention Syria and Yemen, it’s hard to know what’s beginning, or whether one swallow can make a spring.

In the seaside town of Hammamet, a local businessman boasts that one of his neighbors slit the throat of a pet tiger that one of Ben Ali’s in-laws kept there. The beachfront villa Ben Ali gave this amateur zoo-keeper stands gutted and hollowed out, everything in it having long been reduced to ashes and pebbles. Next door, the villa of one of Ben Ali’s children from his first marriage was untouched. That wife was respected, say local residents, and they had no quarrel with her children. Meanwhile, in town the last of the burnt out buildings—mostly banks and government offices—are being re-plastered and painted. Tourism has collapsed. Builders are doing well, though, and the price of bricks has shot up dramatically. They’re not needed for re-building, but for new construction. Landowners are trying to build as fast as they can while the building codes go unenforced. When a new government comes in this summer, everyone thinks that window of opportunity will close.

In this long moment of waiting, Tunis is a strangely quiet town. The country is in a long pause between Ben Ali’s flight and July’s elections. Will the pause be long enough for the new political parties to mount a respectable opposition to the better-established, moderate, and business-minded Ennahdha party, with its Islamist orientation? Many doubt it. In the meantime, no one is sure what is happening. Prison breaks are frequent, and strikes flicker across the country. Security forces fired shots on Friday to disperse some of the Islamists’ partisans, prompting more than one wag to ask how they could claim to be excluded from a political progress that has hardly begun. Nonetheless, the machine guns on top of the armored personnel carriers all have covers drawn over them, as if they were slumbering while stationed at traffic circles, in front of ministries and banks, or near some of the embassies. They often have water cannons mounted on big blue trucks to keep them company, just as the policemen and the soldiers lighten the burden of their boredom by sharing it. But the Libyan embassy is buckled down, squat and non-descript behind a heavy wreath of concertina. It makes you wonder what the border itself looks like: the Libyan army crossed it over the weekend, bombarding a frontier town and killing Tunisians. Meanwhile, Tunisians are proud to recount that their countrymen are sheltering Libyans who’ve taken refuge here. Here and there across the capital, collection points have sprung up to gather goods that will be channeled to the refugees. There may be a re-emergent fraternity between Libyans and Tunisians, whose governments long sought to keep them apart. After the supposed death of one of the Colonel’s sons, Qadaffi’s people sacked European embassies in Tripoli, but the soldiers in Tunis look to have nothing more serious than time on their hands.

The chimera

Osama Unbound: A moment in the war on terror

Journeying through the Muslim world during the height of the so-called “war on terror” was to experience a region mired in a powerful dream world. No pronouncement from the West or, for that matter, from local leaders, was met with anything other than a labyrinthine counter-narrative. But the mother of all conspiracy theories was saved for the events of September 11, 2001. What does Osama bin Laden’s death mean when millions believe he wasn’t responsible for the crimes for which he died? By RICHARD POPLAK.

It’s a sweltering day in the city of Peshawar, when finally I snap. Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been on the frontline of global terror for almost as long as there has been global terror. Many on the “Most Wanted” list have lived there, in dusty compounds with rhododendrons, shaded porches and the ghostly whiff of Pims and lemonade.
I have just spent my day in the old city’s canton, among vestiges of a barely remembered Raj, interviewing the usual array of Taliban or Talibanish folk who really rule the roost. The grand and terrible joke defining the war on terror, at least for those of us who have limned it, was indeed Peshawar and its environs. So porous is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for so long has it been the de facto home of Islamic radicalism, that one enters a shadow world where the news coverage and political newsspeak seem to come from another realm. This was the heart of the war. Why, then, wasn’t it a theatre?
The symbol presiding over all this was Osama bin Laden, or the horrific Boy’s Own caper he engineered on September 11, 2001. I bring up Boy’s Own, because Peshawar featured once or twice in stories in the old paper, which hitched the mores of Protestant colonialism to tales of valour, over the Khyber Pass and beyond. It always seemed to me that 9/11 originated in a barely formed adolescent mind, a Boy’s Own mentality where McGyvering and Jerry-rigging and derring-do, all in the service of some amorphous greater good, were the reigning morality. The attack always felt hormonal, petulant, the sort of thing a boy who salts snails or fries ants under a magnifying glass would do, while assuring us there was some larger ideological merit to his actions. Never has a Little Lord Fauntleroy, a child of such munificent privilege, spent his daddy’s money in such an awful way.
Such thoughts are on my mind as I hitch a ride back to my hotel with a young man who hopes to be my fixer. We rattle through the gloaming in an auto-rickshaw and fall into conversation. As so often happens in these parts, our chat morphs into a disquisition on the evils of the West, which doubles as a parsing of the nature of truth. I am informed that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founding father, was a Jew—how else could he champion rigid secularism over the glories of Islam? I learn that Yasser Arafat was poisoned by Mossad. I am told that Bush is not the President of the United States, but the puppet of a powerful cabal who want to rule the world. (Which was true, I suppose, but in a far more prosaic way than my new friend imagined.) Then this—the old shibboleth, the dread canard I suffered through countless times to leach a story from a source: 9/11 was an inside job; there were no Jews in the Towers on that fateful day; it is impossible for an airplane to bring down a building etc. etc.

Failure of Development Aid, as planned

African Universities: Creating True Researchers or “Native Informers” to NGOs?

By Laura Freschi 

In a recent speech addressing the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani described the state of academic research and higher education in Africa as dominated by a “corrosive culture of consultancy.”

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates…

What’s the difference between academic research and consultancy-driven research? Mamdani, who spent decades teaching at universities in South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda before moving to Columbia University, defines research for a consultant as seeking answers to problems posed and defined by a client. But university research, properly understood, requires formulating the problem itself.

His example of how this works in practice is an interesting one. In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shifted global health spending priorities towards their research question: How to eradicate malaria? But if malaria can’t be eradicated, as a team of scientists from France and Gabon now believe, then researchers have spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars answering the wrong question.

The cumulative effect of this model is to “devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa.”

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.

In my view, the proliferation of “short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers.

Mamdani, who is now director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in addition to his professorship at Columbia, seeks to counter the spread of consultancy culture “through an intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture.”

“To my knowledge,” he said, “there is no model for this on the African continent today. It is something we will have to create.”

Bought and Paid For

by George C. Leef

Americans who have at least a modicum of political sophistication know that special-interest groups have enormous power to influence the political system, getting favors from government they couldn’t obtain through voluntary means. Informed people know, for example, that many farmers receive subsidies, that labor unions have privileges to employ coercion that no other private organization has, and so on.

Few of us, however, think of Wall Street in a similar vein. Why, Wall Street consists of rich, Republican-leaning firms that make their money by financing business—right? Wall Street is interested in minimizing government because its business clients are harmed by the expansion of government—right?

Those notions could not be more mistaken, as veteran financial journalist Charles Gasparino demonstrates in his latest book, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street. Far from advocating a minimal, night-watchman State (or at least shrinking somewhat the bloated leviathan we now have), the big Wall Street firms earn such enormous profits from financing federal deficits that a shrinking State is the last thing they would ever want. On the contrary, expanding government that borrows heavily guarantees buckets of money in their coffers—far more than the big firms make from the difficult work of business finance.

Democracy in action

Egypt: Muslim rampage against Christians continues, now 12 dead, 232 wounded

Will the Islamophobia never end? An update on this story. "Muslims Attack Christians in Egypt, 12 Killed, 232 Injured," by Mary Abdelmassih for AINA, May 8:

(AINA) -- Christians Copts in the area of Embaba were attacked Saturday evening by Muslim Salafis. The attacks lasted for 14 hours. The Muslims fired guns and rifles and hurled Molotov cocktails at Coptic churches, houses and businesses. 12 Copts were killed and 232 injured.

The church of Saint Mina church was the first to be attacked. According to its pastor Fr. Abanoub the attack started at 5.30 PM on Saturday May 7, when church parishioners noticed a large number of Salafis, estimated at 3000 men, congregating near the church. Anticipating trouble, the army was called. The Salafis went to the church and asked to search it because they believed a Christian girl named called Abir, who had converted to Islam, married a Salafi and wanted to revert back to Christianity, was hiding inside the church. The Muslims circulated a rumor that the husband of Abir received a call from her asking him to save her as she was being "tortured" inside the church.

State or Private-Law Society ?

By Hans Hermann Hoppe

The Problem of Social Order

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases. For him, the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct — social cooperation — simply does not arise. This question can only arise once a second person, Friday, arrives on the island. Yet even then, the question remains largely irrelevant so long as no scarcity exists. Suppose the island is the Garden of Eden. All external goods are available in superabundance. They are "free goods," just as the air that we breathe is normally a "free" good. Whatever Crusoe does with these goods, his actions have no repercussions — neither with respect to his own future supply of such goods nor regarding the present or future supply of the same goods for Friday (and vice versa). Hence, it is impossible that a conflict concerning the use of such goods could arise between Crusoe and Friday. A conflict is possible only if goods are scarce; and only then is there a need to formulate rules that make orderly, conflict-free social cooperation possible.

In the Garden of Eden only two scarce goods exist: a person's physical body and its standing room. Crusoe and Friday each have only one body and can stand only at one place at a time. Hence, even in the Garden of Eden conflicts between Crusoe and Friday can arise: Crusoe and Friday cannot occupy the same standing room simultaneously without coming into physical conflict with each other. Accordingly, even in the Garden of Eden rules of orderly social conduct must exist — rules regarding the proper location and movement of human bodies. Outside the Garden of Eden, in the realm of all-around scarcity, there must be rules that regulate the use not only of personal bodies, but of everything scarce, such that all possible conflicts can be ruled out. This is the problem of social order.

The Solution: The Idea of Private Property

In the history of social and political thought, myriad proposals have been offered as solutions to the problem of social order, and this multitude of mutually incompatible proposals has contributed to the widespread belief that the search for a single "correct" solution is futile and illusory. Yet a correct solution does exist. There is no reason to succumb to moral relativism. Indeed, the solution to the problem of social order has been known for hundreds of years. The solution is the idea of private property.

Let me formulate the solution first for the special case represented by the Garden of Eden and subsequently for the general case represented by the real world of all-around scarcity.

Literature’s Most Influential Hussy

by Joy Setton

She lives on credit and lusts after entertainment, whether emotional or commercial. She derives her pleasure solely from seeing her reflection in the gleam of a man’s eye or in the sheen of a new silk dress. Like a L’Oréal target customer, she is “worth it.” Whatever luxury the world contains should be hers because she is beautiful and of superior sentimentality.

I am not talking about a modern American woman, but about Emma Bovary, born 1857, with no end in sight to her reign of senseless craving and mediocrity.

Why even bother to write about that common hussy? Because here she is loose again in bookstores, made up like a flapper on a sickening pink cover. A new translation is out, and critics are raving. (How many of them speak French, I shudder to ask.)

Madame Bovary: A New Translation by Lydia Davis sounds exactly like what it is—a book written in 21st-century America. Hollywood period movies can be dated by the hairstyles; here the turn of phrase is a dead giveaway. There is “give me a hug” in place of “embrace me,” “deep in her soul” instead of “at the bottom of her soul,” and “waiting for something to happen” rather than “waiting for an event.” Little things, little things, though some would say that even a comma is big when it comes to translation and that a translator should be a slave to the original as the Slav Nabokov was to Pushkin, as the poet Baudelaire was to Poe—“servilely attached to the letter” at the risk of producing baroque and even painful results.

The Warfare part of the Warfare - Welfare State

How US Squandered the Peace Dividend
                                                          

by Patrick Foy

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and effectively ended the Cold War, there was tremendous relief and a sense of hope for the future. One writer even boldly declared that it marked “The End of History” and, as a natural result, the end of war.

Since global communism—perceived as the main, if not sole, threat to global peace—had been vanquished, President George H. W. Bush promised that Americans would soon enjoy a “peace dividend.” Taxpayers commonly understood this to mean that military spending would be downgraded and the billions that had been siphoned from them to fight communism would be shunted back into their pockets.

“That’s not a peacetime dividend. That’s a huge wartime debt.”

But the promised peace dividend never came. With communism defeated, Arabs and Islam were presented as the new threat for the world’s lone surviving superpower. In response to this “threat” that didn’t seem to exist until the Soviet Union fell, the US is now spending moreon defense than it was during the Cold War. By 2004 the US defense budget was almost twice that of the next 15 military powers combined. More than twenty years after Bush promised a peace dividend, Washington is still stretched all over the greater Middle East, which is ablaze.

Country by country, here’s what went wrong:

We are doomed

2+2=?

Since moonbattery is a totalitarian ideology, nothing escapes from its poisonous lies — not even mathematics. Teachers unsure how to pass off indoctrination in race-based Marxism (a.k.a. "social justice") as a math class can find resources to assist them at Radical Math:

There are at least two related ideas behind "Social Justice Math". The first is that you can use mathematics to teach and learn about issues of social and economic justice. The second is that you can learn math through the study of social justice issues….

A subspecies of Social Justice Math is "Ethnomathematics," defined as:

The study and celebration of mathematical practices from various countries and cultures from both historical and contemporary perspectives, including: symbolic systems, spatial designs, games and puzzles, calculation methods, measurement in time and space, architecture and design, problem solving, etc.

With all this important material to cover, it's no surprise if teachers don't get around to boring stuff like multiplication tables.

The Math Skills & Social Justice Topics Chart (Word doc) offers concrete suggestions for dressing up moonbat propaganda as math. For example:

Comparing how money spent on military operations could be used to support other important causes (ex: if a bomb costs $10 million and a it costs $10,000 to provide health care for an entire family for a year, how many families could get health care for the cost of this bomb).

Here's how geometry can be combined with "environmental justice":

Determine the density of toxic waste facilities, factories, dumps, etc, in the neighborhood.

By now it should be obvious why moonbats cannot be left in control of education. This means prying it out of the fist of Big Government and the unions that bankroll Democrat politicians.

Service in a Free Society

by Chad W. Seagren
Politicians, pundits, and social commentators often lament the fact that the United States has no comprehensive program for national service. Both major-party candidates in the 2008 presidential election proposed such plans, and retired General Stanley McChrystal recently proposed1 a national service program. Although McChrystal graciously acknowledges Americans' expressions of gratitude for the service and sacrifices of those in the military, he argues, "Americans performing critical, selfless service to our country are less common than they must be."

Many people think that service to one's country must mean military service. I agree with McChrystal that this interpretation is far too narrow. But if the General would only take his own advice and widen his vision of what it means to serve, he would see that literally millions of Americans diligently serve their country every day. Simply put, in a free society, a person who participates in the market serves his or her countrymen in an immensely powerful way.

Participation in the Division of Labor Serves Society

The market so readily provides us with products we desire that we often overlook the crucial role that service plays in our lives. The fact that the shelves of your local grocery store are consistently stocked with milk surprises no one. But the process that brings milk from the dairy to your local retailer is incredibly complex and requires the cooperation of millions of individuals.

This process not only succeeds in bringing milk and myriad other products to the masses, but also, in the last 300 years, has raised the standard of living to heights that were unimaginable only a few generations ago. In industrialized countries, it has eliminated abject poverty and starvation. It has greatly increased the availability and quality of medical care, vastly extending life spans. Don Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University, regularly points out2 the seemingly mundane, but ultimately remarkable, ways in which the capitalist market has improved the environment for humans. The free market is responsible for the wide availability of housing structures to protect people from the elements; climate control such as heating and air conditioning; indoor plumbing; personal hygiene items such as soap and shampoo; and appliances that allow for the safe and clean storage of food, to name just a few. And contrary to popular belief, the market actually enables people to care for the environment, a luxury that becomes attainable only when societies become sufficiently wealthy.

The market is so integral to our relationships with other individuals in society and so effectively provides both necessities and luxuries that it is easy to overlook the extent to which people depend on it. Similarly, few realize the contributions that millions of people make every day to this essential social institution.

Caveman Vs The State

Bin Laden’s war against the U.S. economy

by Ezra Klein

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. 

Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.