The social role of scavengers

What the Turks Can Teach Us about Recycling

by Doug French

After battling the teacher's union in Wisconsin, that state's governor, Scott Walker, proposed a state budget that would have eliminated mandatory recycling. The outrage came fast and furious. An editorial at TheJournalTimes.com began with:

"Recycling has developed into a service too valuable to toss on the scrap heap.

Some officials worry Wisconsin communities will revert to a sort of Wild West dumping ground if Gov. Scott Walker's budget passes as is. Under the plan, subsidies for local recycling programs would end and municipalities would no longer be required to run those programs."

The editorial went on to say: "recycling is cleaner than garbage, trims energy use, creates jobs, and keeps tons of waste from ending up in landfills."

The governor quickly folded his plan when he failed to get the backing of key Republican lawmakers, who said his plan goes too far. So Wisconsin residents can look forward to sorting and separating their paper, plastic, and cans under the thumb of Wisconsin authorities. It's now radical to believe that people should just throw unwanted items away. To allow people to do this is "going too far."

Forcing people to spend time separating garbage turns the division of labor on its head. Wisconsin residents could hire specialists to come to their homes to separate the garbage, but that would be costly and inefficient. Plus, the government mandate gives no consideration to which materials have value in the scrap market.

As Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker learned the hard way, it's now radical to believe that people should just throw unwanted items away.

So while in certain cities of the United States, people are forced to sort through their own garbage, in a number of places in the world, residents throw away their trash with no worries. The trash will be sorted and removed by the estimated 15 million waste pickers in the world.

Spend any time in Istanbul and you see(mostly) men pulling what look to be large canvas bags strapped to steel frames on two wheels. They are everywhere — residential and commercial areas.

Before the municipal garbage trucks pull up to empty trash bins, these waste pickers comb through the trash, pulling out paper, plastic, glass, or anything else they know they can sell. The typical garbage collectors reportedly earn from 50 to 100 Turkish lira a week.

But there is considerable upside depending upon what a picker may find in the trash.

In the words of one trash picker,

"Every garbage can contains a new dream. You go to a garbage bin. You dip your hand inside, and you start dreaming about what you might find. Perhaps it will be something valuable. And if you don't find it in this bin, you go to the next. In this manner, you can walk for seven or eight hours daily."

Another take on the Austrian Business Cycle

Death By Debt

by Chris Martenson

One of the conclusions that I try to coax, lead, and/or nudge people towards is acceptance of the fact that the economy can't be fixed.  By this I mean that the old regime of general economic stability and rising standards of living fueled by excessive credit are a thing of the past.  At least they are for the debt-encrusted developed nations over the short haul -- and, over the long haul, across the entire soon-to-be energy-starved globe.

 

The sooner we can accept that idea and make other plans the better.  To paraphrase a famous saying, Anything that can't be fixed, won't. 

The basis for this view stems from understanding that debt-based money systems operate best when they can grow exponentially forever. Of course, nothing can, which means that even without natural limits, such systems are prone to increasingly chaotic behavior, until the money that undergirds them collapses into utter worthlessness, allowing the cycle to begin anew.

All economic depressions share the same root cause. Too much credit that does not lead to enhanced future cash flows is extended.  In other words, this means lending without regard for the ability of the loan to repay both the principal and interest from enhanced production; money is loaned for consumption, and poor investment decisions are made. Eventually gravity takes over, debts are defaulted upon, no more borrowers can be found, and the system is rather painfully scrubbed clean. It's a very normal and usual process.

When we bring in natural limits, however, (such as is the case for petroleum right now), what emerges is a forcing function that pushes a debt-based, exponential money system over the brink all that much faster and harder. 

But for the moment, let's ignore the imminent energy crisis.  On a pure debt, deficit, and liability basis, the US, much of Europe, and Japan are all well past the point of no return.  No matter what policy tweaks, tax and benefit adjustments, or spending cuts are made -- individually or in combination -- nothing really pencils out to anything that remotely resembles a solution that would allow us to return to business as usual.

At the heart of it all, the developed nations blew themselves a gigantic credit bubble, which fed all kinds of grotesque distortions, of which housing is perhaps the most visible poster child.  However, outsized government budgets and promises, overconsumption of nearly everything imaginable, bloated college tuition costs, and rising prices in healthcare utterly disconnected from economics are other symptoms, too. This report will examine the deficits, debts, and liabilities in such a way as to make the case that there's no possibility of a return of generally rising living standards for most of the developed world.  A new era is upon us.  There's always a slight chance , should some transformative technology come along, like another Internet, or perhaps the equivalent of another Industrial Revolution, but no such catalysts are on the horizon, let alone at the ready.

At the end, we will tie this understanding of the debt predicament to the energy situation raised in my prior report to fully develop the conclusion that we can -- and really should -- seriously entertain the premise that there's just no way for all the debts to be paid back.  There are many implications  to this line of thinking, not the least of which is the risk that the debt-based, fiat money system itself is in danger of failing.

Too Little Debt! (or, Your One Chart That Explains Everything)

[Note: this next section is an excerpt from a recent Martenson Blog entry, so if this seems familiar to any site members, it's because you've seen it before.]

If I were to be given just one chart, by which I had to explain everything about why Bernanke's printed efforts have so far failed to actually cure anything and why I am pessimistic that further efforts will fall short, it is this one:

 

There's a lot going on in this deceptively simple chart so let's take it one step at a time.  First, "Total Credit Market Debt" is everything - financial sector debt, government debt (federal, state, and local), household debt, and corporate debt - and that is the bold red line (data from the Federal Reserve). 

Next, if we start in January 1970 and ask the question, "How long before that debt doubled and then doubled again?" we find that debt has doubled five times in four decades (blue triangles).  

Then if we perform an exponential curve fit (blue line) and round up, we find a nearly perfect fit with a R² of 0.99.  This means that debt has been growing in a nearly perfect exponential fashion through the 1970's, the 1980's, the 1990's and the 2000's.  In order for the 2010 decade to mirror, match, or in any way resemble the prior four decades, credit market debt will need to double again, from $52 trillion to $104 trillion. 

Finally, note that the most serious departure between the idealized exponential curve fit and the data occurred beginning in 2008, and it has not yet even remotely begun to return to its former trajectory.

This explains everything.

From the era of mismanagement into the era of no-management

Ecoterrorism Kills

But not necessarily the way you think

By Robert J. Smith

With reports that some of the fires in California may have been started by arsonists, some people have speculated that all the fires were set by ecoterrorists. What these accusations seem to overlook, however, is that the nation has long faced a much deeper and more insidious philosophical ecoterrorism.

This philosophical ecoterrorism envisions and strives for an mythical, pre-settlement America — while ignoring the fact that we have 300 million people living here. This philosophy, combined with governmental inefficiencies, has created the conditions under which forest fires flourish and eventually spread out to destroy private property, as has occurred with the most recent catastrophe.

Every one of this month’s 15 major southern California’s fires started on government lands — mainly in the three or four National Forests that stretch 250 miles from Mexico into Ventura County. These are the Cleveland National Forest, the San Bernardino National Forest, Angeles National Forest, and Los Padres National Forest. Also the Malibu fire came down out of the infamous Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The eighth-largest fire was at Camp Pendleton Marine Base, which is now run largely as an inviolate Endangered Species Preserve.

These fires have burned out of control for a number of reasons. First, the federal government has mismanaged all the National Forests for a century — believing fires were unnatural and evil, the government sought to extinguish at all costs. The Smokey the Bear era — beginning in the 1940s — exacerbated that policy, pushing to stop every fire within 24 hours.

By contrast, the pre-settlement, open, park-like forests naturally were characterized by relatively frequent ground-hugging low-intensity underbrush clearing fires. However, the action on the part of the feds to stamp these out for about 100 years, filled the forests with duff, needles, cones, deadwood, and downed wood, and thousands of small undergrowth trees — what amounts to a tinder box. In addition, these conditions stressed and weakened the entire forest.

Paradox

Europe Is Warning Us

By Victor Davis Hanson

If Americans think fuel and food prices are high, they should try Europe, where both can nearly double those in the United States -- while salaries here are often lower.

Italians, like most now-broke Southern European countries, are desperate to privatize bloated public-owned utilities. Politicians are trying to curb pensions, and to encourage the private sector to hire workers and buy equipment, as a way of attracting wary foreigner parents to lend such perpetual adolescents more bailout money.

In theory, Italians accept that they are going to have to be a lot more like the Germans, and less like the Irish, Portuguese and Spaniards. In fact, they may end up like the Greeks, who are still striking and occasionally rioting because too few foreigners wish to continue subsidizing their socialist paradise. Red graffiti on Italian streets still echoes socialist solidarity, while Italian politicians talk capitalism to foreign lenders.

The European Union, like the 19th-century Congress of Vienna, can point to one achievement -- a general absence of war in Western Europe for more than 60 years. Otherwise, almost all its socialist promises of an equality of result are imploding before their eyes.

The higher taxes go, the more people cheat on them, the less revenue comes in. There are sometimes two prices in Italy (and often elsewhere in Europe) -- the official price that includes a high value-added tax that the unwary pay, and the negotiated, under-the-table, tax-free discount that the haggling shopper obtains.

Europe is essentially defenseless, as governments further trim defense budgets to keep shrinking spread-the-wealth entitlements alive. The French and British -- the continent's two premier military powers -- have been trying for nearly three months to defeat Muammar Gadhafi's ragtag nation of less than 7 million, itself rent by civil war. The ancestors of Wellington and Napoleon so far seem no match for Gadhafi or the Taliban. Both nations will soon be leaving Afghanistan in frustration.

Subsidized wind and solar power have not led to much of an increase in European electricity supplies, but they helped to make power bills soar. Highly taxed gas runs about $10 a gallon, ensuring tiny cars and dependence on mass transit. Central planners love the resulting state-subsidized, high-density European apartment living without garages, back yards or third bedrooms. Yet the recent Japanese tsunami and accompanying nuclear contamination have reminded European governments that their similarly fragile models of highly urbanized, highly concentrated living make them equally vulnerable to such disasters.

Popular culture may praise the use of the subway and train. But about every minute or two, some government grandee in a motorized entourage rushes through traffic as an escort of horn-blaring police forces traffic off to the side. A European technocratic class in limousines that runs government bureaus and international organizations -- for example, disgraced former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn -- lives like 18th-century aristocrats at Versailles as they mouth socialist platitudes.

Throughout Western Europe, a subordinate class of unassimilated North African, sub-Saharan African and Pakistani immigrants hawk wares and do menial labor -- and are increasingly despised by Europeans as times get rougher. A growing number of the working classes here are getting fed up that the welfare state means sky-high fuel and food costs for the masses, small and expensive apartments, limited disposable income -- and lots of aristocratic perks for the technocrats who oversee the redistributive mess. The notion of a large and esteemed class of self-made, independent-thinking business people and empowered upper-middle-class entrepreneurs is a concept that seems foreign, if not subversive.

An acknowledged despair now seems to permeate Western Europe. A glorious past is equated with tourist dollars, not appreciation of the European Renaissance or the Enlightenment. Majestic churches are more moneymaking museums or tourist stops than honored hallmarks of past culture and current faith. European Christendom often helped to preserve humanity through horrific crises, but you would never learn that from the average cynical European, who appears either indifferent to or apologetic about both his religion and the hallowed European origins of Western Civilization, responsible for much of what is good in the world today.

All this European turmoil raises a paradox. If dispirited Europeans are conceding that something is terribly wrong with their half-century-long experiment with socialism, unassimilated immigrants, cultural apologies, defense cuts and post-nationalism, why in the world is the Obama administration intent on adopting what Europeans are rejecting?

What about 150 stars

California A Failed State

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power.  It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can no longer enforce the law within its frontiers.

Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state.  Virtually every important civil institution in society has to fail to get you to this point.  Your homes and houses of worship are failing to build law abiding citizens, much less responsible and informed voters.  Your schools aren’t educating enough of your kids to make an honest living.  Your taxes and policies are so bad that you are driving thousands of businesses away.  Your management systems must be fouled and confused to the max for you to create something so dysfunctional, so wildly beyond your means, that the Supreme Court of the United States (wisely or foolishly is another question) starts to micromanage your jails.

California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state.  Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.

This is partly a blue social model thing.  California’s public unions are sucking the state dry — like a parasite killing its host.  Too many Californians buy the ideology of entitlement best described by that great Louisiana prophet of the blue social model Huey Long: “If you aren’t getting something for nothing, you’re not getting your fair share.”

The federal government’s generation of serial failures in migration policy is also to blame.  More exposed to illegal migration than any other state, California has been overwhelmed by both legal and illegal immigrants.  Immigrants are a net plus for the United States, but neither the federal nor the state governments have been willing to provide the appropriate policy framework to manage this flow — and to cope with the consequences.

Some of the fault is judicial.  California’s prison blues partly reflect micromanagement by a host of addled judges who among them have imposed a conflicting and overlapping set of requirements that increase costs to the point where overall conditions decline.  One judge imposes a health mandate; another throws in some food and nutrition requirements; somebody else issues an order for exercise, education, visitation rights or what have you.  In the end the system becomes unmanageable and unsustainable and in yet another fatheaded intervention the Supreme Court supports a lower court order for mass prisoner release.  Judicial intervention in the prison system needs to be safe, legal and rare: at the moment it seems to be none of the above.

It’s partly about corporate flight.  Destructive and shortsighted tax policies have literally driven big corporations out of the state.  For the last five years, Southern California has been losing roughly one Fortune 500 corporate headquarters a year, while the state as a whole has lost four such companies in the last twelve months in an accelerating flight to greener pastures in less-dysfunctional states like Texas, Colorado and Virginia.

Meanwhile, California has the one of the worst business climates in the country: in three widely-cited rankings, California came 49th or 50th.  High taxes, rigid regulations, bribery, unresponsive bureaucrats: California has it all.

Another case of tight coupling with high complexity

How to Make Money in Microseconds

By Donald MacKenzie

What goes on in stock markets appears quite different when viewed on different timescales. Look at a whole day’s trading, and market participants can usually tell you a plausible story about how the arrival of news has changed traders’ perceptions of the prospects for a company or the entire economy and pushed share prices up or down. Look at trading activity on a scale of milliseconds, however, and things seem quite different.

When two American financial economists, Joel Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar, did this a couple of years ago, they found strange periodicities and spasms. The most striking periodicity involves large peaks of activity separated by almost exactly 1000 milliseconds: they occur 10-30 milliseconds after the ‘tick’ of each second. The spasms, in contrast, seem to be governed not directly by clock time but by an event: the execution of a buy or sell order, the cancellation of an order, or the arrival of a new order. Average activity levels in the first millisecond after such an event are around 300 times higher than normal. There are lengthy periods – lengthy, that’s to say, on a scale measured in milliseconds – in which little or nothing happens, punctuated by spasms of thousands of orders for a corporation’s shares and cancellations of orders. These spasms seem to begin abruptly, last a minute or two, then end just as abruptly.

Little of this has to do directly with human action. None of us can react to an event in a millisecond: the fastest we can achieve is around 140 milliseconds, and that’s only for the simplest stimulus, a sudden sound. The periodicities and spasms found by Hasbrouck and Saar are the traces of an epochal shift. As recently as 20 years ago, the heart of most financial markets was a trading floor on which human beings did deals with each other face to face. The ‘open outcry’ trading pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, for example, were often a mêlée of hundreds of sweating, shouting, gesticulating bodies. Now, the heart of many markets (at least in standard products such as shares) is an air-conditioned warehouse full of computers supervised by only a handful of maintenance staff.

The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via ‘matching engines’, computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. The matching engines of the New York Stock Exchange, for example, aren’t in the exchange’s century-old Broad Street headquarters with its Corinthian columns and sculptures, but in a giant new 400,000-square-foot plain-brick data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey, 30 miles from downtown Manhattan. Nobody minds you taking photos of the Broad Street building’s striking neoclassical façade, but try photographing the Mahwah data centre and you’ll find the police quickly taking an interest: it’s classed as part of the critical infrastructure of the United States.

Small print

An Iranian Suicide

By Ben S. Cohen

In his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," the French philosopher Albert Camus depicted suicide as an abdication of one's responsibility to confront the absurdities, disappointments and frustrations that accompany human existence. Our inherent freedom, Camus believed, confronts us continually with the question of whether life is worth living. To answer in the negative is to reject that freedom.

What, then, are we to make of those who commit suicide in the name of freedom? I do not, of course, include suicide bombers in this category, since their purpose is to kill others in a method of murder which necessitates their own death. I am thinking of those who take only their own lives as a political act.

I am thinking of such individuals as Jan Palach, the Prague student who, in 1969, set fire to himself in public to protest the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia that crushed a brief flourish of political freedom the year before. I am thinking, too, of Szmuel Zygielbojm, an exiled Polish Jewish activist who, in protest at Allied indifference to the Holocaust, gassed himself in his dingy London flat in 1943. More recently, and far more obviously, there is the example of the young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation has entered the popular imagination as the trigger for the current revolutionary upheavals across the Arab world.

And then there is the subject of this article, an Iranian intellectual who chose suicide on April 29 by throwing himself from the balcony of his Tehran apartment. His name, well-known to those who follow the struggle for human rights in Iran, but with nowhere near the mass recognition of a Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel, was Siamak Pourzand.

Unlike the three previous examples I gave of political suicide, in which those who died were either young (Palach was 20, Bouazizi was 26) or in middle age (Zygielbojm was 48) the 80-year-old Pourzand was clearly in his final years. A prominent journalist and critic before the Islamist seizure of power in 1979, he had endured more than three decades of vicious harassment at the hands of the regime, including kidnapping by the security police and several years in the regime's notorious Evin Prison, an incarceration that catastrophically impacted his personal health. Somehow, he managed to evade the sentence of execution that is imposed with gruesome regularity -- three hundred in the last year alone -- upon the regime's domestic opponents.

Mother Earth must be pleased

Club a seal, save the planet

Environmentalists turn to animal sacrifice to fight global warming

by Washington Post Editorial 

Saving the baby seals was once the signature cause of environmentalism. The global-warming crowd used the image of an unhappy polar bear “stranded” on a small iceberg to rally support for their cause. Concern for animal rights is now being kicked to the curb in Australia. In order to save the planet, animals must die. It’s all part of a “carbon-farming initiative” designed to help the land Down Under meet its so-called greenhouse-gas emission targets under the Kyoto Treaty.

Aussie lawmakers are putting the finishing touches on legislation that creates economic incentives for companies to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. Those wishing to get in on the subsidies can apply to the government for permission to carry out projects with no purpose other than raking in the credits. “The scheme covers reductions in emissions from savannah burning,” a summary of the current legislation explained. It also covers “animal emissions avoidance projects such as camel reduction.”

That means pyromaniacs can earn extra cash setting brush fires, allegedly to prevent the larger fires started by nature. The deserts of the Australian outback are home to the world’s largest population of camels, so slaughtering these defenseless creatures has become a sanctioned activity. As ruminants, camels emit a great deal of methane. In greenhouse-gas terms, four camels do the same annual damage to the ecosystem as one Toyota Prius. These impious emissions would come to an end as an eco-friendly helicopter rains fire upon 600 to 750 camels each day. At current prices, that would bring a daily bounty of $11,000 in carbon credits.

This also fulfills the left’s desire to do away with capitalism’s fundamental goal of wealth creation. Liberals are establishing a new, artificial economy where destructive activity and creative output are treated as equally important. Burnt offerings and animal sacrifice can thus be made to Mother Earth so that she will be pleased and cool the planet.

One wonders whether animal-rights activists will step up and defend the camels. These hard-working beasts of burden may lack the cuteness of a polar bear and the adorability of a baby seal, but they don’t all deserve to die simply because Al Gore thinks they smell bad.

North Korea economics

Obama and free trade: Appease big labor

By George F. Will

Because government is inherently dangerous and often mischievous, the Constitution’s framers provided, and congressional rules have multiplied, mechanisms for blocking government action. These mechanisms can, however, also be used to force action. One is being so used in a dispute that has two remarkable facets.

President Obama is sacrificing economic growth and job creation in order to placate organized labor. And as the crisis of the welfare state deepens, he is trying to enlarge the entitlement system and exacerbate the entitlement mentality.

Forty-four Republican senators, three more than necessary to stop Senate action, have vowed to block confirmation of John Bryson, the president’s nominee to be commerce secretary, until the president submits for congressional approval the already negotiated free-trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. The 44 are responding to this:

On May 4, the administration announced that, at last, it was ready to proceed with congressional ratification of the agreements. On May 16, however, it announced it would not send them until Congress expands an entitlement program favored by unions.

Since 1974, Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) has provided 104, and then 156, weeks of myriad financial aid, partly concurrent with the 99 weeks of unemployment compensation, to people, including farmers and government workers, and firms, even whole communities, that can more or less plausibly claim to have lost their jobs or been otherwise injured because of foreign competition. Even if the injury is just the loss of unfair advantages conferred, at the expense of other Americans, by government protectionism. And even if the injury results not from imports but from outsourcing jobs. TAA benefited 50,000 people at a cost of$500 million in 2002. In 2010, it cost $975 million for 234,000 people. Its purpose is to purchase support for free-trade policies that allow Americans to benefit from foreign goods and services, and from domestic goods and services with lower prices because of competition from imports.

The perfect "citizens"

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Bananas

by Alexander Boot

Strident Darwinist propaganda has convinced most people that man is created in the image and likeness of ape. And as we’re almost equal to apes genetically, doesn’t it naturally follow that apes ought to be almost equal to us legally? Of course it does—every faddish idea is these days enshrined in law.

So one could’ve been certain that sooner or later apes would be elevated to the level of man not only de facto but also de jure. As if to atone for her tardiness in abandoning Christianity, Spain blazed the trail.

The parliament of the same country that was the first to forcibly stop communism has now passed a resolution granting human rights to apes. Specifically it has committed Spain to the dictates of the Great Ape Project (GAP), founded in 1994 by Princeton “philosopher” Peter Singer. The apes currently residing in Spain will henceforth enjoy the legal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of bananas. Oops, got that wrong. Freedom from torture is what it actually says.

A “United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes” is in the works. The draft states that all primates, including man, are “members of the community of equals” who aren’t to be deprived of their liberty without due process. The detention of great apes who haven’t been convicted of any crime should be permitted only in their interest or when it’s necessary to protect the public. In such cases apes must have a right of appeal to a judicial tribunal, either directly or through an advocate.

One wonders how this document’s framers see the ensuing practicalities. For instance, where trial by jury is part of due process, who would be the ape’s peers to sit in judgment? Surely they would have to be other apes. (British football supporters may be narrowly disqualified.) How would the jury follow the proceedings and communicate their verdict? How would the defendants confer with counsel? Be sworn in? Give testimony? Launch a direct appeal? And if convicted of, say, murder, how would they be punished?

As the death penalty isn’t an option in Europe, it would have to be incarceration in the same zoos in which all Spanish apes are kept already, with no due process anywhere in sight. Illogically, the Spanish resolution states that there they can remain, although the conditions must improve, presumably in line with human prisons equipped with color TVs and sports facilities.

However, it’ll become illegal to keep apes in circuses, or for the purposes of using them in TV commercials or films. Apes will thus enjoy greater protection than, say, Kate Moss or every living creature under Barnum & Bailey’s tent. And in general, apes will acquire weightier rights than humans, for ours are counterbalanced by responsibilities and theirs demonstrably aren’t. Our right to the state’s protection, for example, is contingent upon our allegiance to it. Since an ape cannot pledge such allegiance, the balance is clearly in its favor.

Let’s not forget the right to work—or rather the right not to work and draw welfare payments, which has become the cornerstone of our government’s economic policies. One has to reluctantly acknowledge that, apart from working in circuses, apes have limited employment opportunities. However, that makes them different only from some humans. Just like welfare recipients, apes could live in free housing provided by the state; they could be taken by their “carers” to the “social” once a month to collect their paycheck. Simian citizens dependent on government largesse may be just the ideal that the state craves.

If you think this is bad, consider the track record of Peter Singer, the “mind” behind the Great Ape Project. In 2001 he allowed that humans and animals can have “mutually satisfying” sexual relations because “we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.” Therefore such sex “ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings.” Good news for some shepherds, bad news for poor Mrs. Singer.

Even in a theocracy, reality does, at times, intrude

California's Green Jihad

by Forbes

Ideas matter, particularly when colored by religious fanaticism, wreaking havoc even in the most favored of places. Take, for instance, Iran, a country blessed with a rich heritage and enormous physical and human resources, but which, thanks to its theocratic regime, is largely an economic basket case and rogue state.

Then there’s California, rich in everything from oil and food to international trade and technology, but still skimming along the bottom of the national economy. The state’s unemployment rate is now worse than Michigan’s and ahead only of neighboring Nevada.  Among the nation’s 20 largest metropolitan regions, four of the six with the highest unemployment numbers are located in the Golden State: Riverside, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco. In a recent Forbes survey, California was home to six of the ten regions where the economy is poised to get worse.

One would think, given these gory details, California officials would be focused on reversing the state’s performance. But here, as in Iran, officialdom focuses more on theology than on actuality.   Of course, California’s religion rests not on conventional divinity but on a secular environmental faith that nevertheless exhibits the intrusive and unbending character of radical religion.

As with its Iranian counterpart, California’s green theology often leads to illogical economic and political decisions. California has decided, for example,  to impose a rigid regime of state-directed planning related to global warming, making a difficult approval process for new development even more onerous.  It has doubled-down on climate change as other surrounding western states — such as Nevada, Utah and Arizona — have opted out of regional greenhouse gas agreements.

The notion that a state economy — particularly one that has lost over 1.15 million jobs in the past decade — can impose draconian regulations beyond those of their more affluent neighbors, or the country, would seem almost absurd.

Californians are learning what ideological extremism can do to an economy. In the Islamic Republic, crazy theology leads to misallocating resources to support repression at home and terrorism   abroad In California  green zealots compel companies to shift their operations to states that are still interested in growing their economy — like Texas. The green regime is one reason why CEO Magazine has ranked California the worst business climate in the nation.

Some of these green policies often offer dubious benefits for the environment. For one thing, forcing California businesses to move to less energy-efficient states, or to developing countries like China, could have a negative impact overall since shifting production to Texas or China might lead to higher greenhouse gas production given California’s generally milder climate.   A depressed economy also threatens many worthy environmental programs, delaying necessary purchases of open space and forcing the closure of parks. These programs enhance life for the middle and working classes without damaging the overall econmy.

But people involved in the tangible, directly carbon-consuming parts of the economy — manufacturing, warehousing, energy and, most important, agriculture — are those who bear   the brunt of the green jihad [ ] . Farming has long been a field dominated by California, yet environmentalist pressures for cutbacks in agricultural water supplies have turned a quarter million acres of prime Central Valley farmland fallow, creating mass unemployment in many communities.

Spending as a "Core Value"

Truth, Lies, and Euros

By Samuel Gregg 

As Europe's financial crisis worsens, it's increasingly apparent that the economic woes of countries like Portugal, Spain, and Greece have resulted from more than just bad policy. With each passing day, evidence mounts that one dynamic driving the crisis is that of untruth: a disturbing European pattern of fabrication about levels of public spending and debt.

The latest proof for this thesis is the discovery by newly-elected Spanish regional and local governments of concealed debts run up by their predecessors. This contradicts claims by Spain's Socialist Finance Minister, Elena Salgado, that Spain's regions had no "hidden deficits" on their accounts. Spain's business community, however, has long complained about local governments pressuring private companies to do business with them "off the books."

One reason for such behavior is that Spain's government knows that the greater Spain's real overall-public debt, the higher will be the interest-rates demanded by financial markets and the more stringent will be the conditions attached to any "financial assistance package" (i.e., bailout) that Spain might, like Portugal and Greece, eventually need.

Unfortunately, financial sleight-of-hand in today's EU has a longer history than the present turmoil. It's characterized the entire monetary union project from the start.

In the 1990s, European governments agreed the single currency's success would depend upon countries entering the eurozone on a solid financial basis and then remaining on a firm footing. To that end, both the 1992 Maastricht Treaty and the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) established strict criteria concerning public spending for countries admitted to the single currency.

We are doomed

The Next Step on the Road to Serfdom

Paul Krugman writes:

"But nobody is proposing that the government deny you the right to have whatever medical care you want at your own expense. We’re only talking about what medical care will be paid for by the government."

I wish that Paul were correct, but I am not convinced that he is. Chills went down my spine a few days ago when I read the following proposal from the Center for American Progress, a think tank with strong ties to the Democratic party: 

Thus we also include a failsafe mechanism that would ensure significant savings. Our failsafe would be triggered if, starting in 2020, total economywide health care expenditures grow at a rate faster than the economy. Should that happen, we would empower the IPAB [the panel of experts set up by President Obama's health care law] to extend successful reforms in Medicare and other public programs to insurance plans offered in the health care exchanges and then potentially to all health care plans,such that the target is met. This will ensure that costs are constrained across the health care sector, preventing cost-shifting and maintaining access for all.*

That is, under the likely scenario that healthcare spending keeps rising faster than GDP, the Center for American Progress would give government the power to prohibit people from buying expensive health plans with their own money. That is not my idea of progress. 
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*Source: Page 43-44 of this document. I put the crucial phrase in bold.

Social Engineering bearing fruit

The conspiracy of silence

by Robert Wenzel

Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society experiment is in full bloom and it is downright ugly. LBJ's attempt to coddle the lower classes with free money for going fatherless and even more money for mother's having more children, without husbands around, has perhaps reached the third generation of such fatherless, uncontrollable youth. The experiment has resulted in roaming bands of criminals.
In Chicago this weekend, downtown pedestrians and bicyclists faced roaming mob attacks.
The first weekend attack happened around 8:25 p.m. Saturday when a man was attacked after parking his motor scooter near the Northwestern University campus, according to CBS News in Chicago.
A few minutes after that attack, man riding his bicycle on the lakefront path at 701 N. Lake Shore Dr. was attacked by a group of teenagers, who punched and kicked him.
Three teens – Dvonte Sikes, 17, of the 7500 block of South Normal Avenue; Travolus Pickett, 17, of the 8400 block of South Dorchester avenue; and Derodte Wright, 18, of the 3500 block of South State Street – have been charged as adults with felony robbery and mob action.
Sikes’ bond was set at $250,000. Pickett’s at $300,000 and Wright’s at $200,000.
Two other 16-year-olds were also charged as juveniles and their names were not released.
Earlier this year, retailers on North Michigan Avenue reported several instances in which young people would suddenly gather inside a store and ransack the place.
Also, on Sunday morning, a male University Of Illinois-Chicago student was on a westbound No. 12 CTA bus on Roosevelt Road at Throop Street, when a group of eight to 10 men wearing white T-shirts boarded, UIC police said. One of the men hit the victim on the back of the head with a glass bottle and stole his iPad. Then the robbers got off the bus.
Police also shut down North Avenue beach on Memorial Day–officially because of the heat and huge crowds. However, police sources say, concerns about the potential for violence was behind the decision as well.