Defining reality

The "Fair" Trade Delusion

by Richard Epstein

In the sprawling field of international relations, few debates are as persistent and acrimonious as the one between the advocates of "free trade" and "fair trade." The fair trade position takes the view that a wide range of tariffs, duties, and other conditions may be used to restrict the flow of goods and services across national or state boundaries. The free trade position, which I heartily endorse, holds that national trade policy should allow goods and services to move fluidly across national borders—just as if those borders did not exist. One way to achieve this end is to sign bilateral free trade accords with other nations, with an eye to reducing tariff barriers and other impediments to the free flow of goods and services.

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

Right now, the United States has three pending free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Signing them just as they are will expand growth and lead to more opportunities for all parties. Although the economics of free trade are straightforward, its politics are not.

Last week, that sometime friend of free trade, President Barack Obama, announced that he would not submit any of these three free trade agreements to Congress unless and until Congress decided to reauthorize and extend the Trade Adjustment Assistance ("TAA") program that offers a rich package of financial benefits to various workers whose jobs are lost as a result of imported goods and services.

The president’s political logic is depressingly clear. He is willing to hold hostage the large overall gains from free trade to his renewed demand for economic assistance to those individuals, often union members, who are dislocated by the onslaught of new goods and services into the United States. Those parties, like the Chamber of Commerce, which should know better, have supported the president with the pragmatic argument that it is better to yield on the TAA, and move forward on the mentioned free trade agreements, than to come away empty handed.

That pragmatic compromise will, however, strangle free trade. Once it is accepted that all free trade agreements can be tied to other demands, the sky is the limit. For instance, labor groups have long insisted on the fair trade provision that we can only have free trade agreements with those nations whose labor laws look remarkably like our own. Their intention is to use these conditions to hobble their foreign competitors by forcing the competitors to abandon their own low-cost practices, thereby depriving free trade of much of its punch. Environmental groups have also joined the fair trade fray by insisting that poorer countries must have public amenities that only rich countries can afford, so that they too become weakened competitors in the American market.

All of these clever maneuvers should be stoutly resisted as a matter of first principle. Quite simply, the label "fair trade" in the hands of its advocates is a snare and delusion. My objection to fair trade does not rest on the absurd proposition that "fairness" is irrelevant to market transactions. It is the broad definitions of both fair trade and "unfair competition" that turns them into the enemy of growth and competition properly understood.

Although the economics of free trade are straightforward, its politics are not.

What exactly is unfair competition? The differences between the narrow classical liberal definition and much broader progressive definition are too vivid to deny. To truly understand unfair competition, we should step back from international disputes over free trade and ask how the notion of unfair competition plays out in the context of domestic trade. Classical liberal theory does not dismiss "unfair competition" as an oxymoron. Quite the opposite, it develops a set of rules that isolate for attack cases where one competitor uses force and fraud to upset the balance in a competitive market.

Consider this example: well before the eighteenth century, a suit for unfair competition lay against one schoolmaster who fired shots across the path of students who were making their way to a rival school. As the students dispersed, the rival was allowed to sue his mischievous competitor even though he and his school were never in the line of fire. The point here is that no individual student could be expected to mount this costly effort against the aggressor—each student’s stake is too small. But the competitor who lost customers to force surely did care about the collapse of his business. Allowing such a suit advances social welfare by forcing people to compete solely on quality and price.

"War is the health of the State."

The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne

by Jeff Riggenbach 

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century — in the Teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920. Bourne wrote mostly for magazines during this period. His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic — until his radically antiwar views on the eve of the US government's intervention in World War I got him fired.

He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The New Republic and one less well suited to Bourne's particular talents and interests, since its primary focus was the arts, rather than social and political issues. He was able to publish only six antiwar articles in The Seven Arts before its doors were closed by an owner fearful of the Wilson administration and its  Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag.

Only a few months after The Seven Arts ceased publication, Randolph Bourne died, a victim of the flu epidemic that killed more than 25 million people in 1918 and 1919, nearly a million of them in the United States. That was 1 percent of the population 90 years ago. One percent of the present US population would be more than 3 million Americans. Imagine what it would be like to live through a flu epidemic that killed more than 3 million people in the space of little more than a year. That's what it was like for Americans living 90 years ago, at the end of World War I.

Most of the people that flu virus killed have long been forgotten — except, of course, by members of their own families. But Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely. People are still reading his work. They're still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases. The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote or said it: "War is the health of the State."

Randolph Silliman Bourne first emerged into the light of day on May 30, 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a small town fewer than 20 miles from Manhattan. His family was comfortably middle-class, and he was the grandson of a respected Congregational minister. But he seems to have been born unlucky all the same. First, his head and face were deformed at birth in a bungled forceps delivery. Then, at the age of four, after a battle with spinal tuberculosis, he became a hunchback. Then, when he was seven, his parents lost everything in the Panic of 1893, and he and his mother were abandoned by his father and left to live in genteel poverty on the charity of his mother's prosperous (if somewhat tightfisted) brother. Meanwhile, his growth had been permanently stunted by the spinal tuberculosis of a few years before, so that by the time he graduated from high school at the age of 17, in 1903, he had attained his full adult height of five feet.

Bourne was an exemplary student. His academic record in high school earned him a place in the class of 1907 at Princeton, but by the time he was supposed to appear on campus to register for classes in the fall of 1903, it was evident that he couldn't afford to attend. He could barely afford books. He was flat broke. And his mother needed his financial help if she was going to go on living the decent, middle-class lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. So Bourne postponed college and went to work. He knew his way around a piano, so for the next six years he worked as a piano teacher, a piano tuner, and a piano player (accompanying singers in a recording studio in Carnegie Hall). He also cut piano rolls. On the side he freelanced for book publishers as a proofreader. Now and then, when musical work was harder to find, he did secretarial work.

By 1909, when he was 23 years old, Bourne had saved enough to cut back on his working hours and try to catch up on the college experience he'd been putting off. He enrolled at Columbia, where he fell under the sway of historian and political scientist Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey, and began publishing essays in the Dial, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. His first book,Youth and Life, a collection of his magazine essays, was published the year he graduated from Columbia, 1913. And that fall, the now 27-year-old Bourne set out for Europe. In his senior year he had been awarded the Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad, which the historian Louis Filler has called "Columbia's most distinguished honor" during that period. Bourne spent a year travelling around Europe and pursuing such independent study as interested him.

Urgent

Cuban opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera beaten by police and missing

By Alberto de la Cruz

Diario Las Americas is reporting that Cuban opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera was brutally beaten and knocked unconscious by Castro security agents before taking her into custody on May 25th. As of today, her whereabouts are unknown.

translation:

Opposition Leader on the Island Disappears

Defenders of human rights in Cuba are alarmed by the beating and disappearance of opposition leader Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera on the morning of May 25th during activities that ended the opposition conference Boitel y Zapata Viven. 

According to Adriano Castañeda Meneses, executive member of the National Front for Civic Resistance Orlando Zapata Tamayo, two activists from Placetas: Donaida Perez Paseiro and Yaimara Reyes Mesa were released from prison around 11 pm the night of May 25. They had been arrested and beaten when they went to the Placetas General Hospital to inquire about Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, who had been detained and then transferred to the hospital after losing consciousness. 

“After that they were released at around 11 pm, they saw a small bus from the specialized brigades take Idania Yanes Contreras and her husband Alcides Rivera. They also saw when another police car took a handcuffed Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera after having received a beating. It is not known if she is at the Santa Clara hospital because here in Placetas we cannot find her. Her brothers have been searching for any information and have assumed she is missing," declared Castañeda Meneses from Placetas. 

The activist explained that it was known that Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antúnez" was detained in the jail of the political police in Placetas, but that Yris and the other detained activists were not there.

"Yris was subjected to a brutal beating by a member of State Security that goes by the alias "El Pesista." While in a jail cell, they took her again from the hospital to jail. Her hands were numb, she felt nauseous, had a headache, dizziness, she is epileptic, has diabetes, asthma. We don't know where they have taken her. We don't know if she died, or what condition she was in when they took her," Donaida Perez Paseiro added via a telephone call to the Cuban Democratic Directorate in Miami.

Monsters vs Giants

52 years of Oppression

Former Cuban prisoner of conscience Ariel Sigler Amaya when he arrived in Miami on July of 2010, after being released from Castro's Gulag and 10 months later, under freedom and decent health care

The Betrayal of Elián González

10 years after Elian, US players mum or moving on

By JENNIFER KAY and MATT SEDENSK 

MIAMI (AP) - When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father's relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban-Americans took to Miami's streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that.

Ten years later, the Little Havana home - for weeks the epicenter of a standoff that divided the U.S. - is a museum dedicated to Elian's brief time in this country, but visitors are rare. Almost no one involved in the international custody case wants to talk about Elian, who is now a teenager back in Cuba.

Even most Cuban-Americans have moved on.

"It was a very sour taste left in their mouths," said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. "But, realistically, it was a battle to be lost."

Elian was just shy of his sixth birthday when a fisherman found him floating in an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving 1999. His mother and others drowned trying to reach the U.S.

Elian's father, who was separated from his mother, remained in Cuba, where he and Fidel Castro's communist government demanded the boy's return.

Elian was placed in the home of his great-uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, while the Miami relatives and other Cuban exiles went to court to fight an order by U.S. immigration officials to return him to Cuba. Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general and a Miami native, insisted the boy belonged with his father.

When talks broke down, she ordered the raid carried out April 22, 2000, the day before Easter. Her then-deputy, current U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, has said she wept after giving the order.

Associated Press photographer Alan Diaz captured Donato Dalrymple, the fisherman who had found the boy, backing into a bedroom closet with a terrified Elian in his arms as an immigration agent in tactical gear inches away aimed his gun toward them. The image won the Pulitzer Prize and brought criticism of the Justice Department to a frenzy.

No one answered the AP's repeated calls to a number listed for Dalrymple in the Miami area, and there was no response to interview requests sent through intermediaries.

Lazaro Gonzalez declined to comment, as did his daughter, Marisleysis, who became Elian's surrogate mother during his U.S. stay. The Justice Department has never released the identity of the agent and did not immediately respond to an AP request this week for the agent's name.

Clinton, who was in Miami last weekend, said he would still make the same decision because it conformed with international child custody law.

"I did everything I could to try to have this resolved in a peaceful way," he said. "Believe me, I hated what happened because I thought we would be able to do it in a different way."

More than 300 protesters were arrested in the hours after the raid, and the community's outrage did not subside. Al Gore, the sitting vice president, lost Florida that November to George W. Bush by a mere 537 votes, and with it the White House. Many pundits said the Elian debacle made the difference.

They are not secret

Hidden in plain sight

   by Richard 

Seeing as we are in "snarl mode" – our default position – let's have a go at Guido Fawkes, and the latest of his asinine comments, as he laps up the Mandelson "drama". "It is a fascinating world inside the ruling elite isn't it?" twitters Guido:

Rupert Murdoch parks his yacht offshore from Nathaniel Rothschild's sunshine estate and drops in. Mandelson and Osborne take a ride in the same billionaire's boat when not dining together. All very cosy, enough to turn you into one of those crazy conspiracy theorists ...

What does make his comments particularly facile is that, when it comes to looking for (or hinting at – as Guido does) secret conspiracies to dominate the world, there aren't any. That doesn't mean conspiracies don't exist. The thing is, they are not secret.

They are there, they are real, they are visible and (relatively) easy to find, if you know where to look – and can be bothered. But, because they are so visible, no one takes a blind bit of notice of them, instead preferring to look for fantasy conspiracies of their own making.

The most obvious and visible "conspiracy", of course, is the European Union. It has its agenda, it makes no secret of it, it has been steadily pursuing that agenda for the best part of fifty years and, over that period, has had a modicum of success.

Yet, there is perhaps a bigger conspiracy here – the "conspiracy of silence" amongst our own ruling elite and chatterati, who will simply not talk about the European Union and its ambitions. Guido, of course, does not expose this – he is part of the conspiracy.

But this is boring. If you want a real conspiracy, go for that shadowy group of anonymous bankers, who meet in secret to hatch up plans to control the world's financial system. You want it? You got it! It is called the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).

“A clue to what’s ahead”

Betting the Farm . By Mark Steyn  I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson best when he’s writing about the California he loves and which his family has farmed for generations. Okay, “enjoy” isn’t exactly the word; it’s ineffably sad stuff. But he’s covering something that’s as relevant to the future of this nation as deficits and debt ceilings. “Where Dreams Die” concludes with a bleak list of some recent visitors to the Hanson homestead in “the center of our cry-the-beloved state”: May 2011: two males drive in “looking to buy scrap metal.” They are politely told to leave. That night barn is burglarized and $1200 in property stolen. Later May 2011: a female drives in van into front driveway with four males, “just looking to rent” neighbor’s house. They leave. Only later I learn they earlier came in the back way and had forced their way in, prying the back driveway gate, springing and bending armature. Later May 2011: shop is burglarized — both bolt and padlock knocked off. Shelves stripped clean. Victor adds: It is the little things like this that aggravate Californians, especially when lectured not to sweat it by the academics on the coast and the politicians in Sacramento. I can believe it. That “cry-the-beloved” line is an allusion to Alan Paton’s now mostly unread novel about South Africa. But my thoughts strayed further north, to the white farmers in post-independence Zimbabwe. First, you get some oddly determined visitors and attendant burglaries. Then, the intimidation gets ratcheted up. Your farmhands get beaten. The local authorities take down the details and do nothing. Then you or your wife and kids get beaten, or shot. You sell your land for a fraction of what you would have got a few years earlier. And, if you don’t, you get driven off it anyway. Or killed. White Rhodesians were the planet’s favorite pariahs for a long time, so nobody cares what happens to them. But it’s strange to see the same scenario starting to play out in the Golden State – and in parts of Arizona, too. Where next? Texas? Border immigration on the scale of the south-west is not about people moving but about borders moving. Less enlightened regions of the world understand this as they understand the sun rising in the morning, but it all seems too complicated for Californian sophisticates. Victor calls what’s happening to him “a clue to what’s ahead”. It certainly seems a safe bet that these trends will not diminish over the course of the next decade in an ever more debt-ridden state ruled by kleptocrat commissars far from the sharp end of their policy consequences. When widespread impoverishment meets demographic transformation, you’re not going to want to be standing anywhere near. I suppose his friends on the Stanford campus 180 miles away assume, consciously or otherwise, that, when it comes to their own neighborhood, they’ll be able to hold the line. But, of course, that in turn assumes there is a line. And, as a matter of government policy, there isn’t.

“If not now, when?”

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

By David Mamet

Reviewed by Roger L. Simon

With all the talk of Hollywood liberalism — the endless leftist blather from Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, the cozying up to Castro and Chavez by Oliver Stone and Danny Glover, the jejune Iranian peace-making by Annette Bening and Alfre Woodard, etc., etc — it’s fascinating that the two leading playwrights in the English language (the smart guys) — Tom Stoppard and David Mamet — identify as conservative/libertarians.

For Stoppard — born in Communist Czechoslovakia — this was natural, but for Mamet — a Chicago Jewish child of the sixties — it was a considerably longer slog. As he relates in his superb new book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, “I had never knowingly talked with nor read the works of a Conservative before moving to Los Angeles, some eight years ago.”

Mamet certainly made up for lost time. Barely ten pages into his book, you know this man has read, and thoroughly digested, the major conservative works of our and recent times, from Friedrich Hayek to Milton Friedman and on to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. And he is able to explicate and elaborate on them as well as anybody.

Not that the playwright’s political transformation is such a surprise. In 2008, he wrote an op-ed for The Village Voice(of all confrontational places), “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” That article was somewhat more tentative than its title, which may have been added for dramatic effect by the newspaper’s editors.

Not so The Secret Knowledge. Mamet has come a ways in three years from a chrysalis bewildered and astonished by his new found views to an author writing in white heat. The new book is a full-throated intellectual attack on liberalism in almost all its aspects from someone who was there, a former leftwing intellectual of prominence, a Pulitzer Prize winner even (and one who deserved it, unlike the New York Times’ Walter Duranty).

Rand Paul Vs The Patriot Act

Rand Paul Single-Handedly Halts Vote on PATRIOT Act ReauthorizationRand Paul Single-Handedly Halts Vote on PATRIOT Act Reauthorization

Rand Paul Single-Handedly Halts Vote on PATRIOT Act Reauthorization

by E.D. Kain

It appears Rand Paul isn’t folding on the PATRIOT Act after all – at least, not yet:

Sen. Rand Paul has single-handedly stopped the extension of three key provisions of the Patriot Act until after they expire at midnight Thursday. Unless he folds.

The Senate voted to end debate on the measure, but Sen. Paul, a Kentucky Republican, is insisting the Senate debate the measure for a full 30 hours, which would extend beyond the midnight expiration. Mr. Paul’s tactic is procedural: By not agreeing to a request for unanimous consent to yield back debate time, he can insist the debate continues until 7a.m. Friday, past the midnight expiration of the provisions. Mr. Paul, a libertarian who opposes the Patriot Act, could change course and allow a vote before the provisions expire.

Here’s hoping Paul digs in and sticks this one out. He is quickly becoming the most important man in the Senate. I hope the American people, and the citizens of Kentucky, realize just how important. We’ll see what happens. With Wyden’s amendment withdrawn, Paul remains the only obstacle.

Filthy Rich

Just How Rich are these Socialists?

by Clare O'Connor

Long before his arrest for allegedly assaulting a hotel maid, former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wealth was a bone of contention in his native France. Political opponents derided him as a ‘caviar socialist’ for his luxury lifestyle. When he was pictured driving a Porsche shortly before his arrest, the press pounced, and the minutiae of his spending habits —€25,000 suits made by Obama’s tailor — are well documented in Europe.

Only since Strauss-Kahn’s arrest and indictment has the media’s focus, especially in the U.S., fallen on the real source of his fortune: his wife Anne Sinclair, the heiress to a family of art merchants and a well-known broadcast journalist in France. Strauss-Kahn himself has a bank balance in the “low seven figures”, according to his lawyer; his IMF gig paid$420,930 a year. It was Sinclair who posted $1 million in bail and guaranteed a $5 million bond, and who will presumably be paying theestimated $200,000 a month for Strauss-Kahn’s round-the-clock security now that he’s under house arrest.

Noting Sinclair’s expenditure on her husband’s case and her glamorous family history, media outlets including New York Magazine and the New York Post are now describing her as a ‘billionaire’. Hmm. We at Forbes are in the billionaire business, so we thought we’d better look into it.

Towards a National Socialist America

The Political Doctrine of Statism

 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The Patriot Act that was rammed through after the September 2001 attacks was one of the more egregious blows against liberty in our lifetimes. It shredded core rights and liberties that had been taken for granted for centuries. Liberties are never lost all at once, but the Patriot Act, as disgusting in its details as in its name and the rhetoric that surrounded it, was for the United States the turning point, the law that best exemplifies a full-scale embrace of statism as a national ideology. It is a law so severe, so outlandish, as to cause people to forget what it means to be free.

This is why I believe Ron Paul’s book Liberty Defined to be one of the most important statements of our time. He defines liberty clearly and cleanly as freedom from coercive interference from the state. That is how the liberal tradition from Aquinas to Jefferson to Rothbard understood it, too, for there is no greater threat to liberty than the state. Its powers must be crushed if we are to revisit what liberty means.

Ron goes further to apply the principle of liberty in many of the most controversial areas of modern life. The purpose here is not to detail some governing blueprint. What Ron seeks to do is much more important. He seeks to fire up the human imagination in ways that permit people to think outside the prevailing statist norms.

In 1945, Ludwig von Mises wrote a similar book called Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. It is probably the most blistering and thorough attack on National Socialism ever written. He details the peculiar characteristics of Nazi-style statism (its nationalism rooted in the worship of bloodlines). Just as importantly – and very unusually for this genre of writing – Mises sought to explain how Nazism is only a symptom of a larger problem, which is statism itself. He regarded statism as a special doctrine that people come to embrace often without entirely understanding its teaching and claims. It emerges within a context of economic or security emergency.

There is always some great excuse for the trashing of the human freedom that built civilization as we know it. If the state cannot find one, it is glad to invent one. A population that is ideologically gullible or afraid for its security can permit government to run roughshod over people’s rights and liberties, and a government that gains such power never gives it back on its own. Rights and liberties must be reclaimed by the people themselves, and the spark that makes this happen is reversing the conditions that permitted the rise of statism. The people must lose their gullibility through ideological enlightenment, and they must lose their sense of fear that the world will fall apart if the tyrant is not in control.

Part of this process of enlightenment requires an understanding of what was lost when we gave up liberty, and what can be gained by reclaiming it. Mises’s book did not overlook this task, with a pithy description of the traditional classical liberal vision:

In order to grasp the meaning of this liberal program we need to imagine a world order in which liberalism is supreme. Either all the states in it are liberal, or enough are so that when united they are able to repulse an attack of militarist aggressors. In this liberal world, or liberal part of the world, there is private property in the means of production. The working of the market is not hampered by government interference. There are no trade barriers; men can live and work where they want. Frontiers are drawn on the maps but they do not hinder the migrations of men and shipping of commodities. Natives do not enjoy rights that are denied to aliens. Governments and their servants restrict their activities to the protection of life, health, and property against fraudulent or violent aggression. They do not discriminate against foreigners. The courts are independent and effectively protect everybody against the encroachments of officialdom. Everyone is permitted to say, to write, and to print what he likes. Education is not subject to government interference. Governments are like night-watchmen whom the citizens have entrusted with the task of handling the police power. The men in office are regarded as mortal men, not as superhuman beings or as paternal authorities who have the right and duty to hold the people in tutelage. Governments do not have the power to dictate to the citizens what language they must use in their daily speech or in what language they must bring up and educate their children. Administrative organs and tribunals are bound to use each man's language in dealing with him, provided this language is spoken in the district by a reasonable number of residents.

"Free" medicare

Elderly patients dying of thirst

By SOPHIE BORLAND

Doctors are prescribing drinking water for neglected elderly patients to stop them dying of thirst in hospital. The measure – to remind nurses of the most basic necessity – is revealed in a damning report on pensioner care in NHS wards. Some trusts are neglecting the elderly on such a fundamental level their wards could face closure orders. 

Neglected: Doctors are being forced to prescribe water to some patients to remind nurses of the most basic necessity a damning report has revealed 

The snapshot study, triggered by a Mail campaign, found staff routinely ignored patients’ calls for help and forgot to check that they had had enough to eat and drink. Dehydration contributes to the death of more than 800 hospital patients every year.

Statism

"The characteristic feature of all utopian plans from that of Plato down to that of Marx is the rigid petrification of all human conditions. Once the perfect state of social affairs is attained, no further changes ought to be tolerated."

                                                                            Ludwig von Mises