Convulsions of a dying society

Endgame for Egypt

By David P. Goldman

Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man Without Qualities”), one of the great novels of the past century, is a portrait of the Austrian early in 1914. The readers know that their silly world will come to a terrible end a few months later with the outbreak of war, but the protagonists do not. Musil published a first volume and spent the rest of his life trying to write a second, without success, for it is the sort of story that has no end except for the abyss.

Arab politics today has a Musil-like quality of unreality, for the conclusion will be the collapse of the Egyptian state. The misnamed “Arab Spring,” really a convulsion of a dying society, began with food shortages. Egypt imports half its caloric consumption, 45% of its people are illiterate, its university graduates are unemployable, its $10 billion a year tourism industry is shuttered for the duration, and its foreign exchange reserves are gradually disappearing. In August, the central bank’s reported reserves fell below what the bank calls the “danger level” of six months’ import coverage, or $25 billion, from $36 billion in February, although I suspect that even this number is bloated by $5 to $10 billion of Algerian and Saudi loans and trade credits. Despite reports in the press that food price inflation in Egypt has slowed, Arab-language Egyptian media report that the price of some staples, like rice and sugar, have risen by 50% or more since March. The military government is distributing bread and propane (the main cooking fuel).

Egypt turned down a proposed loan from the International Monetary Fund earlier this year because the military government could not accept the conditionality attached to IMF money. The Gulf States and the West may keep Egypt on life support, which would leave a large proportion of Egyptians in a limbo of extreme destitution. The fiscal collapse of Southern Europe (and sever problems elsewhere) makes this an inopportune time to come to the West with a begging bowl. As for the Gulf States: they are not even meeting their commitments to the Palestine Authority, and can’t be expected to carry a $15 to $20 billion annual financing requirement for Egypt.

It does not compute. Western economists can concoct all the economic recovery plans in the world, but a country that can’t teach half its people to read, and can’t produce employable university graduates, and can’t feed itself, is going to go down the drain. Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak kept Egypt under control by keeping most of its people poor, ignorant, and on the farm, and by warehousing its youth in state-run diploma mills. After sixty years of such abuse, Egypt simply can’t get there from here.

The result, I predict, will be a humanitarian catastrophe that makes Somalia look like a picnic. It’s not surprising that the Egyptian mob might attack the Israeli embassy. The Egyptian street has nothing to do but rise up against perceived oppressors, because nothing good awaits them; and the desperation that will follow the collapse of the Arab “Spring” threatens every Middle Eastern regime, such that the rulers have to try to get out in front of the rage. But what will they actually do? The Egyptian military is hanging onto power by its fingernails. If it attacks Israel, it will lose, and generals will be hanged from lamp posts. The Syrian military is too busy killing protesters to attack Israel, or to assist Hezbollah in a confrontation with Israel.

What we are likely to witness during the next two years will be repellent, even horrifying – but not necessarily dangerous.

Freedom and property

Reflections on the Shanghai skyline

Two pictures comparing the Shanghai skyline between 1990 and 2010 have been making the rounds online – we posted them on the blog the other day. In this piece, Dr Richard Ebeling discusses the economic history of Shanghai's skyline, which thrived during the pre-Second World War years and, thanks to the laissez-faire economic policies it enjoyed as a virtual city-state, grew to become Asia's answer to New York City.

by Richard Ebeling        

The "before" picture of Shanghai (from 1990) is actually the same skyline from before the Second World War. Under communism, from 1949 until 1980s-1990s, this picture of Shanghai had not changed.

And, by the way, how did Shanghai come to have such a "Western"-style skyline before the Second World War? Because following the British-Chinese War of 1842 (the "Opium War"), Shanghai was one of the treaty ports in which there emerged foreign "concessions" administered by Western governments to minimize frictions between the Chinese and Europeans and Americans, due to conflicting conceptions of criminal and civil law, and property rights.

By the end of the 19th century, Shanghai had two foreign districts. The French Concession, administered by a Governor-General appointed by the French government in Paris, and the International Settlement (the picture, above, shows what was the "heart" of the International Settlement among the Bund (the waterfront) facing the Whangpoo River).

The International Settlement was administered by a city council of 14 members elected by the foreign rate payers (mostly property taxes) residing in the boundaries of the Settlement. Thus, it was, for all intents and purposes, a self-governing "city-state" under the protection of the Western Powers (which ended up meaning mostly a British and American military presence).

You ain't seen nothing yet

The Decapitalization of the 
West
by Sam Bowman  

A harsh dose of reality from the indispensible Kevin Dowd. The lecture above was given on Monday night. Dowd weaves together the strands of economic breakdown created by central banks, bailouts and high taxes into a tapestry of ruin. It's gripping and horrible, and essential viewing to anybody who thinks the worst is behind us. Dowd's message: you ain't seen nothing yet.

Kevin Dowd's most recent book is The Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. 

Non welfare economics

The Mayo Clinic and the Free Market

by Michel Accad

Neoclassical economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Joseph Stiglitz tell us that the healthcare market is imperfect (or "Pareto inefficient"), meaning that the allocation of services is not optimal from the standpoint of social welfare. They point toinformation asymmetry as an important cause of this imperfection: patients cannot distinguish on their own the physician from the charlatan, the surgeon from the butcher, the remedy from the snake oil, the hospital from the coop. This may lead to moral hazardwhere the party with the most knowledge can provide inferior service with impunity.

To provide the necessary counterbalance for this "knowledge gap," experts must be in charge of social institutions that tell patients where to go, whom to see, how to be treated, and how much it should cost. This has been a principal and virtually unchallenged argument underpinning healthcare legislation for the last 100 years. In a famous paper he wrote on the subject in 1963, Arrow declared, "It is the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-fairesolution for medicine is intolerable."

But for those who wonder how firmly established the "general social consensus" or how intolerable the "laissez-faire solution" really is, a short booklet published in 1926 may prove instructive. The Sketch of the History of Mayo Clinic and Mayo Foundation is an account produced by Mayo "merely to record in chronological order the principal facts concerning the two institutions."

One fact that stands out is the professional career of William W. Mayo, the clinic's founder. Mayo started practicing in Minnesota in 1855 and, for a time, was surgeon with a band of settlers frequently occupied by guerrilla warfare with the Sioux Indians. Mrs. Mayo herself, it appears, did not hesitate to swing around the pitchfork to deter Native American warriors from attacking their village. When the fighting subsided, the Mayos moved to Rochester where William Mayo established his private practice. Mayo had previously studied chemistry in Manchester under the famous John Dalton, but after moving to the United States, his medical training had consisted of a two-year apprenticeship in Indiana and a four-year formal medical education at the University of Missouri.

Mayo was keen on applying the latest discoveries in medical science. He was the first physician in the West to adopt the microscope for clinical work. In 1871 he took a graduate course at Bellevue Medical College in New York and became a pioneer in abdominal surgery. He was an avid reader and contributed frequently to the medical literature on a variety of topics. Remarkably, however, the patron of the famous clinic did not have a medical license.

A singular aspect of American medicine in the second half of the 19th century is its nearly complete lack of regulation. While modest licensing standards had been adopted by most states of the Union after the revolution, these weak requirements eventually disappeared during the westward expansion of the country. In his book Medical Licensing in America, historian Richard Shryock attributed this "deterioration" in part to Jacksonian "anti-intellectualism" and lamented that

By the 1850s, when German authorities were establishing uniform standards and when the British government was taking the first steps toward national control, the situation in the United States seemed to be approaching its nadir.

EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE…

The Inventor of the Digital Age

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Michael S. Hart (March 8, 1947 — September 6, 2011) got it. He understood. He saw what others missed. And he was nearly alone at the time.

After he was permitted access to an Internet account at the University of Illinois as long ago as 1971, he had a mind-blowing revelation. He realized that this tool had the potential to universalize all knowledge. It could liberate ideas from their static existence on physical media and put them into a form that could be copied, copied, copied, and copied unto infinity, not just for today but forever. This was the Star Trek replicator. Amazing.

How is it possible, he wondered, that this tool exists and yet it is being kept under wraps, used only for the most superficial purposes and only by a few?

He grabbed a copy of the Declaration of Independence, typed it in, and posted it — despite being warned that this was not allowed, that he might crash the system, that there was just something wrong with letting ideas escape the small group that controlled them and allocated them to physical things only.

Bosh, he said. He would dedicate himself and his entire life to the universal distribution of anything and everything he could. Over the rest of his life, he ended up personally typing hundreds of books and distributing them.

His medium was and is called Project Gutenberg — a perfect name for his plan and agenda. Virtually alone, he saw that the Internet was the next stage. The whole history of publishing technology was about reaching ever more people with knowledge at ever-lower costs. This was the driving force at work in publishing for thousands of years, and the whole key to progress

The Internet was the next stage, even the final stage, the culmination of the efforts of every scribe, every inventor, every printer, every distributor, every teacher, every novelist, poet, intellectual, lecturer, orator, scholar.

In 1995, the year that the web browser became part of the mainstream of life and the year that the Internet began to take its current shape, he sent out a clarion call to everyone who would read:

For the first time in the entire history of the Earth, we have the ability for EVERYONE to get copies of EVERYTHING as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of the people on the Earth, via computers [and the devices a person might need to make a PHYSICAL, rather than VIRTUAL copy of whatever it might be] …

Think about what you have just read for a moment, please, EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE…

Hart had a mighty vision here. He grasped the magic and meaning of the power of infinite reproducibility, the earth-shaking significance of what it means to reduce the costs of duplication to near zero and to do so without any depreciation of the content itself. The invention of the printing press was a hinge of history; the Internet contained within itself the power to do the work of millions of scribes and millions of printing presses every single instant, forever and for everyone. The knowledge of 1 person could reach 7 billion and those 7 billion could all reach each other.

And so his own Project Gutenberg became his driving passion, the way he decided to gift his entire life to the whole of humanity. It began with plain text, nothing fancy. He urged that people copy these texts and publish them in whatever way possible. Today, the venture offers 36,000 books online for free, in many different formats.

It pioneered new ways to crowd source proofreaders. It inspired hundreds of thousands of volunteers. It anticipated the medium of ebooks 40 years in advance, a medium that is only this year being taken seriously by publishers and institutions.

Hart's writings reveal a man who stayed in a constant state of stunned amazement at everything that stood in the way of the dream. He gagged on institutions like copyright. He scoffed at the trillions being spent on higher education to teach the few at a time when we possess the means to school the entire globe. But he did more than just dismiss anything that stood in the way; he was himself a tireless example of how to proceed.

Hart's institutional children are everywhere today: Google Books, Kindle, Nook, Audible, Creative Commons, MIT's OpenCourseWare project, Khan Academy, Mises.org, and thousands of other sites, and not just for ebooks but also for painting, architecture, music, medical research, and every other field in art, commerce, and science. The word "knowledge" sums up the human experience; the Internet could embody that and flood the entire world.

When Gutenberg invented his press, consumers loved it. A frenzy of buying swept the German-speaking world. Psalters and bibles for everyone! But producers' guilds put up resistance. They complained of Gutenberg's rising wealth. Scribes feared the loss of their jobs. Critics complained of how people were becoming obsessed with reading instead of working.

It is no different today except that the producers' guilds and cultural worrywarts are allied with the state to stop the universal distribution of knowledge. Many rue the day that the first text was made available through the Internet, and dedicate themselves to ending the global frenzy to discover and learn. Our descendants will laugh, just as we find it funny that people tried to hobble the printing industry

Hart's life demonstrates the difference that one person's thinking can bring about in the shape of the real world. Without such thinking, the world would grind to a halt. Nothing new would ever happen. We would all do and think yesterday the same way we would think tomorrow and the next day, and history would have no direction, no guiding purpose, and life itself would be reduced to tedium and a pointless and endless rotation of hours, days, years, and generations.

But with people like Hart, people who not only imagine change but work super hard to bring it about themselves, humanity is lifted up, and the world rises ever more out of the state of nature.

He liked to quote George Bernard Shaw: "Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

To say that Hart was unreasonable he would have regarded as the highest compliment you could ever give him.

Requiescat in pace. If you don't know what that phrase means, where it comes from, what it is used for, you can look it up in about two seconds. Hart's vision makes that possible. He certainly deserves to rest in peace knowing of his gift to the human race.

The audacity of hope

A Jeffersonian moment 

We’re here because America is at a tipping point. America faces a crisis. And it’s not a crisis like perhaps a Midwest summer storm – the kind that moves in and hits hard, but then it moves on.  No, this kind will relentlessly rage until we do restore all that is free and good and right about America. It’s not just fear of a double dip recession. And it’s not even the shame of a credit downgrade for the first time in U.S. history. It’s deeper than that. This is a systemic crisis due to failed policies and incompetent leadership. And we’re going to speak truth today. It may be hard-hitting, but we’re going to speak truth today because we need to start talking about what hasn’t worked, and we’re going to start talking about what will work for America. We will talk truth.

Now, some of us saw this day coming. It was three years ago on this very day that I spoke at the GOP Convention where I was honored to be able to accept the nomination for vice president that night. And in my speech I asked America: “When the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away….what exactly is [Barack Obama’s] plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger, and take more of your money, and give you more orders from Washington, and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world.” I spoke of this, but back then it was only my words that you had to go by. Now you have seen the proof yourself. Candidate Obama didn’t have a record while he was in office, but President Obama sure does, and that’s why we’re here today.

Candidate Obama pledged to fundamentally transform America. And for all the failures and the broken promises, that’s the one thing he has delivered on. We’ve transformed from a country of hope to one of anxiety. Today, one in five working-age men are out of work. One in seven Americans are on food stamps. Thirty percent of our mortgages are underwater. In parts of Michigan and California, they’re suffering from unemployment numbers that are greater than during the depths of the Great Depression. Barack Obama promised to cut the deficit in half, and instead he turned around and he tripled it. And now our national debt is growing at $3 million a minute. That’s $4.25 billion a day.

President Obama, is this what you call “winning the future”? I call it losing – losing our country and with it the American dream. President Obama, these people – these Americans – feel that “fierce urgency of now.” But do you feel it, sir?

The Tea Party was borne of this urgency. It’s the same sense of urgency that propelled the Sons of Liberty during the Revolution. It’s the same sense of urgency that propelled the Abolitionists before the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement during the 20th Century. The Tea Party Movement is part of this noble American tradition. This movement isn’t simply a political awakening; it’s an American awakening. And it’s coming from ordinary Americans, not the politicos in the Beltway. No, it’s you who grow our food; you run our small businesses; you teach our children; you fight our wars. We are always proud of America. We love our country in good times and in bad, and we never apologize for America.

That is why the far left’s irresponsible and radical policies awakened a sleeping America so that we finally understood what it was that we were about to lose. We were about to lose the blessings of liberty and prosperity. So, the working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box. And as much as the media wants you to forget this, Tea Party Americans won an electoral victory of historic proportions in November. We the people, we rose up and we rejected the left’s big government agenda. We don’t want it. We can’t afford it. And we are unwilling to pay for it.

That victory, remember friends, was only one step in a long march towards saving our country.

We sent a new class of leaders to D.C., but immediately the permanent political class tried to co-opt them – because the reality is we are governed by a permanent political class, until we change that. They talk endlessly about cutting government spending, and yet they keep spending more. They talk about massive unsustainable debt, and yet they keep incurring more. They spend, they print, they borrow, they spend more, and then they stick us with the bill. Then they pat their own backs, and they claim that they faced and “solved” the debt crisis that they got us in, but when we were humiliated in front of the world with our country’s first credit downgrade, they promptly went on vacation.

No, they don’t feel the same urgency that we do. But why should they? For them business is good; business is very good.  Seven of the ten wealthiest counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Polls there actually – and usually I say polls, eh, they’re for strippers and cross country skiers – but polls in those parts show that some people there believe that the economy has actually improved. See, there may not be a recession in Georgetown, but there is in the rest of America.

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars.  They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

So, do you want to know why the permanent political class doesn’t really want to cut any spending? Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done? It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed – a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.

It doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen this kind of crony capitalism before. It’s is the same good old boy politics-as-usual that I fought and we defeated in my home state. I took on a corrupt and compromised political class and their backroom dealings with Big Oil. And I can tell you from experience that sudden and relentless reform never sits well with entrenched interests and power-brokers. So, please you must vet a candidate’s record. You must know their ability to successfully reform and actually fix problems that they’re going to claim that they inherited.

Real reform never sits well with the entrenched special interests, and that’s why the true voices of reform are so quickly demonized. Look what they say about you. You are concerned civilized citizens and look what they say about you. And just look what happened during the debt-ceiling debate. We’d been given warning after warning that our credit rating would be downgraded if politicians didn’t get serious about tackling the debt and deficit problem. But instead of making the real cuts that are necessary, they used Enron-like accounting gimmicks, and they promised that if they were just allowed to spend trillions more today, they’d cut billions ten years from now. By some magical thinking, they figured they could run up trillion dollar deficits year after year, yet still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics that led to the downgrade. Well, they got a rude awakening from the rest of the world, and that’s that even America isn’t “too big to fail.”

When we finally did get slapped with that inevitable downgraded, the politicians and the pundits turned around and blamed us – independent commonsense conservatives. We got blamed! They called us un-American and terrorists and suicide bombers and…hobbits…couldn’t understand that one.

And what is the President’s answer to this enormous debt problem? It’s just spend more money. Only you can’t call it “spending” now. Now you got to call it “investing.” Don’t call it “spending.” Call it “investing.” It’s kind of like what happens with FEMA and some of these other bureaucratic agencies that don’t really want to refer to our centralized federal government as “government.” Now it’s called the “federal family.” Am I too old to ask to be emancipated? Never thought I’d say it, but I want a divorce.

No, the President’s answer to our debt problem is: Incur more debt. Spend more money (only call it “investing”). Make more folks even more reliant on government to supply their every need. This is the antithesis of the pioneering American spirit that empowered the individual to work, to produce, to be able to thrive and succeed with fulfillment and with pride; and that in turn built our free and hope-filled and proud country.

He wants to “Win The Future” by “investing” more of your hard-earned money in some harebrained ideas like more solar panels and really fast trains. These are things that venture capitalists will tell you are non-starters, yet he wants to do more of them. We’re flat broke, but he thinks these solar panels and really fast trains are going to magically save us. He’s shouting “all aboard Obama’s bullet train to bankruptcy.”

The only future that Barack Obama is trying to win is his own re-election, and he has shown that he’s perfectly willing to mortgage our children’s future to pay for it. And there is proof of this. Just look closely at where all that “green energy” stimulus money is “invested.” See a pattern. The President’s big campaign donors got nice returns for their “investments” in him to the tune of billions of your tax dollars in the form of “green energy” stimulus funds. The technical term for this is “pay-to-play.” Between bailouts for Wall Street cronies and stimulus projects for union bosses’ security and “green energy” giveaways, he took care of his friends. And now they’re on course to raise a billion dollars for his re-election bid so that they can do it all over again. Are you going to let them do it all over again? Are you willing to unite to do all we can to not let them do it again so we can save our country?

Now to be fair, some GOP candidates also raised mammoth amounts of cash, and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return for their “investments”? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar “thank you” notes to campaign backers. It is an important question, and it cuts to the heart of our problem. And I speak from experience in confronting the corruption and the crony capitalism since starting out in public office 20 years ago. I’ve been out-spent in my campaigns two to one, three to one, five to one. (And, by the way, I don’t play that game either of hiring expert political advisors just so they’ll say something nice about me on TV – if you ever wonder. You know how that game’s played too I’m sure.) But the reason is simple: It’s because like you, I’m not for sale. It’s because we believe in the free market. I believe in the free market, and that is why I detest crony capitalism. And Barack Obama has shown us cronyism on steroids. It will lead to our downfall if we don’t stop it now. It’s a root that grows our economic problems. Our unsustainable debt and our high unemployment numbers and a housing market that’s in the tank and a stagnant economy – these are all symptoms. Politicians are so focused on the symptoms and not the disease. We will not solve our economic problems until we confront the cronyism of our President and our permanent political class.

So, this is why we must remember that the challenge is not simply to replace Obama in 2012. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country.

Yes, we need sudden and relentless reform, and that will return power to “We the People.” This, of course, requires deeds, not just words. It’s not good enough for politicians to just be throwing our way some vague generalities, talking about some promises here and there. It’s time that we hold them accountable. It is amazing to me that even some good conservatives run away from being honest and straight up with us about what needs to be done. They don’t want to rock the boat. They can’t hurt future election prospects evidently. They just talk vaguely about cuts and then they move on. They’re too busy saying what they think we want to hear, but instead they should be telling us what needs to be said and what needs to be done. So, let us today in this field have that adult conversation about what needs to be done to restore America. Let’s do that now.

In five days time, our President will gift us with yet another speech. In his next speech he’ll reveal his latest new super-duper “jobs plan.” It will have more lofty goals and flowery rhetoric, more illogical economic fantasies and more continued blame and finger-pointing. But listen closely to what he says. All of his “solutions” will revolve around more of the same – more payoffs for his friends and supporters. His “plan” is the same as it’s always been, and that’s grow more government, increase more debt, take and give more of your hard-earned money to special interests. And this is such a problem. But you know what the problems are. We could go on all day about the problems caused by the status quo in Washington. Status quo I think is Latin for “more of the same mess that we’re in.” That status quo won’t work any more. We could go on all day about the problems, but you know them because you live them everyday. So, let’s talk about real solutions. I want to tell you what my plan is. My plan is a bona-fide pro-working man’s plan, and it deals in reality. It deals in the way that the world really works because we must talk about what really works in order to get America back to work.

My plan is about empowerment: empowerment of our states, empowerment of our entrepreneurs, most importantly empowerment of you – our hardworking individuals – because I have faith, I have trust, I have respect for you.

The way forward is no more politics as usual. We must stop expanding an out-of-control and out-of-touch federal government. This is first: All power not specifically delegated to the federal government by our Constitution is reserved for the states and for we the people. So, let’s enforce the 10th Amendment and devolve powers back locally where the Founders intended them to be.

Second, what happened to all those promises about staying committed to repealing the mother of all big government unfunded mandates? We must repeal Obamacare! And rein in burdensome regulations that are a boot on our neck. Get government out of the way. Let the private sector breathe and grow. This will allow the confidence that businesses need in order to expand and hire more people.

Third, no more run away debt. We must prioritize and cut. Cancel unused stimulus funds, and have that come to Jesus moment where we own up to the debt challenge that is entitlement reform. See, the reality is we will have entitlement reform; it’s just a matter of how we’re going to get there. We either do it ourselves or the world’s capital markets are going to shove it down our throats, and we’ll have no choice but to reform our entitlement programs. The status quo is no longer an option. Entitlement reform is our duty now, and it must be done in a way that honors our commitment to our esteemed elders today, while keeping faith with future generations. I don’t think anything has irked me more than this nonsense coming from the White House about maybe not sending our seniors their checks. It’s their money! They have paid into Social Security all of their working lives; and for the President to say, “ah, we may not be able to cut their checks,” ah, well, where did all their money go, politicians? It’s like the Commander-in-Chief being willing to throw our military under the bus by threatening that their paychecks may not arrive. But the politicians will still get their checks and their secure retirements, and he’ll still get his posh vacations. Aren’t you just sick to death of those skewed priorities? It’s all backwards. Our seniors and our brave men and women in uniform being used as pawns – I say it’s shameful, and enough is enough. No more.

Fourth, it is time for America to become the energy superpower. The real stimulus that we’ve been waiting for is robust and responsible domestic energy production. We have the resources. Affordable and secure energy is the key to any thriving economy, and it must be our foundation. So, I would do the opposite of Obama’s manipulation of U.S. supplies of energy. Drill here, drill now. Let the refineries and the pipelines be built. Stop kowtowing to foreign countries and dictators asking them to ramp up production and industry for us, promising them that we’ll be their greatest customer. No, not when we have the resources here. We need to move on tapping our own God-given natural resources. I promise you that this will bring real job growth, not the politicians’ phony “green jobs” fairy dust sprinkled with wishes and glitter… No, a hardcore all-of-the-above energy policy that builds this indestructible link between made-in-America energy and our prosperity and our security. You know, there are enough large conventional natural resource development projects waiting for government approval that could potentially create more than a million high-paying jobs all across the country. And this is true stimulus. It wouldn’t cost government a dime to allow the private sector to do these. In fact, these projects will generate billions of dollars in revenue. Can you imagine that: a stimulus project that actually helps dig us out of debt instead of digging us further into it! And these are good-paying jobs, and I know that from experience. For years my own family was supported (as Todd worked up on the North Slope) by a good energy sector job. America’s economic revival starts with America’s energy revival.

Fifth, we can and we will make America the most attractive country on earth to do business in. Here’s how we’re going to do this. Right now, we have the highest federal corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world. Did you know our rates are higher than China and communist Cuba? This doesn’t generate as much revenue as you would think, though, because many big corporations skirt federal taxes because they have the friends in D.C. who right the rules for the rest of us. This makes us less competitive and restrains our engine of prosperity. Heck, some businesses spend more time trying to figure out how to hide their profits than they do in generating more profits so that they can expand and hire more of us. So, to make America the most attractive and competitive place to do business, to set up shop here and hire people here, to attract capital from all over the globe that will lead to an explosion of growth, instead of chasing industry offshore, I propose to eliminate all federal corporate income tax. And hear me out on this. This is how we create millions of high-paying jobs. This is how we increase opportunity and prosperity for all.

But here’s the best part: To balance out any loss of federal revenue from this tax cut, we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes and we eliminate bailouts. This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich. We can change all of that. The message then to job-creating corporations is: We’ll unshackle you from the world’s highest federal corporate income tax rate, but you will stand or fall on your own, just like all the rest of us out on main street.

See, when we empower the job-creators, our economy will soar; Americans will get back to work.

This plan is a first step in a long march towards fundamental restoration of a strong and free market economy. And it represents the kind of real reform that we need. And, folks, it must come from you. It must come from the American people. Real hope is in you. It’s not that hopey-changey “stuff” that we heard about back in 2008. We’ve all learned that. And real hope isn’t in an individual. It’s not in a politician certainly. And that hopey-changey stuff that was put in an individual back when Barack Obama was a candidate – that hopey-changey stuff didn’t create one job in August, did it? That’s the first time that’s happened in the United States since World War II. Real hope comes from you. Real hope comes from realizing that we the people can make the difference. And you don’t need a title to make a difference. We can get this country back on the right track. We can do it by empowering the people and realizing that God has richly blessed this most exceptional nation, and then we do something about that realization.

Don’t wait for the permanent political class to reform anything for you. They won’t. They can’t. They can’t even take responsibility for their own actions. Our credit is downgraded, but it’s not their fault. Our economy’s in turmoil, but it’s not his fault. It’s the tsunami in Japan or the Middle East uprising. It’s Irene. It’s those doggone ATM machines.

Folks, the truth is Barack Obama is adrift with no plan because his “fundamental transformation” is at odds with everything that made this country great. It doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t make sense. Unbelievably our President declares that he “believes in American Exceptionalism… just as the Greeks believe in Greek Exceptionalism.” Well, the path he has us on will make us just as “exceptional” as Greece, alright – with the debt crisis and the stagnation and the unemployment and uprisings and all.

Friends, you are better than that. Our country is better than that. We’ve got to unite. We’ve got to stand together. We can confront the problem and we can achieve lasting reform. And I can tell you from hard-earned experience with bumps and bruises along the way, that the road ahead is not easy. You will be demonized. They’ll mock you. They’ll make things up. They’ll tell you to “go to hell.” But we’ll bite our tongue, we’ll keep it classy, and we won’t respond—as tempting as it is—to anyone who just has such disdain for our free market economy and for individual initiative and responsibility. We won’t say, “No, you go to hell.” No, we won’t say that. You know why we don’t have to say that? Because when we have time-tested truth and logic on our side, we win. And when we refuse to retreat because we know that our children’s future is at stake, we win.

No, the road isn’t easy, but it’s nothing compared to the suffering and sacrifice of those who came before us.

A few weeks ago, after my visit to the Iowa State Fair, I took my daughter Piper and my niece McKinley with us to the World War I Liberty Memorial in Kansas City. And standing in the rain, reading the inscriptions on the Memorial about the honor in one’s dedication to God and country, I thought of all those young patriots who suffered and died so far from home. And revering our vets there with the next generation by my side, there was such clarity – clarity in our calling, patriotic Constitutionalists. We have a duty not just to the living, but also to those who came and died before us and to the generations yet to be born. Our freedom was purchased by millions of men now long-forgotten throughout history who charged the bayonets, and they charged the cannons; they knew they were going to die, but it was worth it for them sacrificing for future generations’ freedom. They’re the ones who prayed in the trenches and suffered in the P.O.W. camps. They gave their lives so that we could be here today.

You and I are blessed to be “born the heirs of freedom.” As President John F. Kennedy said, “We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution.” We are the heirs of those who froze with Washington at Valley Forge and who held the line at Gettysburg, who freed the slaves to close a shameful chapter, and who carved a nation out of the wilderness. We are the sons and daughters of those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and raised the flag at Iwo Jima and made America the strongest, the most prosperous, the greatest nation on earth forever in mankind’s history – the greatest, most exceptional nation.

America, we will always endure. We will always come through. We will never give up. We shall endure because we live by that moral strength that we call grace. Because though we’ve often skirted a precipice, a Providential Hand has always guided us to a better future. So, let us seek that Hand once more. Our Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, we will be a nation gone under.” Yes, He shed his grace on thee, America! We will not squander what we have been given! We will fight for freedom. We will fight for America. We are at the tipping point. United we must stand. And we shall nobly save, not meanly lose, this last best hope on earth.

The problem with fascism

It’s time to expel the ‘experts’ from family life

In repackaging parenting as a superbly complex, almost scientific task, a gaggle of experts hopes to colonise our personal lives.

By Frank Furedi

In modern times, there has been something of a revolt against traditional authority. As a result of this, all forms of authority are increasingly being called into question. After all, if the authority of the king and the priest and the politician can be interrogated, why not call into question the authority of pater familias, too, the status of the mother or grandparent?

That is precisely what has happened, gradually, over the past century-and-a-half. A lack of confidence in the ability of ordinary adults to socialise the younger generation has been evident since early modern times. By the late nineteenth century, experts were making scathing remarks about parental competence and were attempting to restrain the authority of the father and mother.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty, linked his call for the compulsory schooling of children to his distrust of parental competence. He believed that state-sponsored formal education might free children from the ‘uncultivated’ influence of their parents. He asserted that since ‘the uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation’, they needed the support of enlightened educators to socialise their children.

This lack of confidence in parents’ capacity to develop their children led many nineteenth-century reformers to view formal education as the principal institution of socialisation. In the early twentieth century, educators and child experts sought to bypass parental authority through assuming more and more responsibility for the socialisation of young people. And since the 1990s, the once-implicit questioning of the ability of parents to socialise their children has become explicit, and increasingly strident.

As a result, there has been a shift in the way that the uneasy partnership between family and school is portrayed by experts. Policymakers often assume that poor parenting and the fragmentation of the family are everyday facts of life that make it necessary for public institutions to take responsibility for forms of socialisation that were hitherto carried out in the home.

In the nineteenth century, criticisms of parental incompetence tended to focus on parents’ alleged inability to educate their children. More recently, however, the alleged absence of parental competence has been detected in relation to a growing number of issues: how to nurture, how to stimulate, how to touch, how to discipline, how to discuss questions about sex, death, and so on.

The cumulative consequence of this questioning of parental competence has been the deepening and widening of the idea of a parental deficit. The claim that parents are inept at educating their children, or even nurturing and emotionally stimulating them, suggests that parents are not up to the job of socialising their offspring. In effect, these claims call into question parental authority.

The problem of parental authority

In much of the modern literature on parenting, the erosion of parental authority is often confused with the idea that there has been a decline in old-fashioned, authoritarian families. Too often, authority is confused with authoritarianism, and what is overlooked is that the targeting of parental competence is not about limiting authoritarianism in the home but is about calling into question the ability of mothers and fathers to socialise their children.

Hannah Arendt put matters most starkly when she declared that ‘authority has vanished’. Arendt took it for granted that ‘most will agree that a constant, ever-widening and deepening crisis of authority has accompanied the development of the modern world in our century’. In her view, the crisis of authority was not confined to the political domain – rather, she suggested, this crisis exerts its influence in every aspect of social experience.

She observed that: ‘[T]he most significant symptom of the crisis, indicating its depth and seriousness, is that it has spread to such pre-political areas as child-rearing and education, where authority in the widest sense has always been accepted as a natural necessity, obviously required as much by natural needs, the helplessness of the child, as by political necessity, the continuity of an established civilisation which can be assured only if those who are newcomers by birth are guided through a pre-established world into which they are born as strangers.’

Today, the fact that the contestation of authority dominates the ‘pre-political’ spheres of everyday life is clear from the constant, acrimonious debates over issues such as child-rearing, health, lifestyles and the conduct of personal relationships. The erosion of the legitimacy of pre-political authority has deprived many parents, and adults in general, of the self-confidence to engage in a meaningful way with the younger generation.

Parents are told time and again that their authority rests on outdated assumptions and that they lack the real expertise that one needs to socialise young people. And conscious of the fact that it is difficult to act authoritatively today, parents feel very insecure about rejecting expert advice. The explosion of various child-rearing and pedagogic fads is symptomatic of society’s loss of faith in parental authority; it represents a futile attempt to bypass the question of finding some convincing alternative to old forms of pre-political authority.

Do as I say ...

Wishing Greenpeace an unhappy birthday

 For 40 years, big green NGOs have helped to denigrate democracy and stand in the way of progress.

By Ben Pile

The growth of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) over the past 50 years has been extraordinary. Starting from humble beginnings and means, organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which are both celebrating their fortieth anniversaries this year, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), which opened its first office 50 years ago, now command budgets of hundreds of millions of dollars. But while the organic champagne may be flowing in the green camp, what does the rest of the world have to celebrate about the rise and rise of the Big Green NGO?

Greenpeace emerged when tensions between East and West dominated global politics. In September 1971, a boat full of activists set out from Vancouver in Canada to interrupt a US nuclear weapons test. A founding member of Greenpeace told the world: ‘We call our ship the Greenpeace because that’s the best name we can think of to join the two great issues of our times, the survival of our environment and the peace of the world… We do not consider ourselves to be radicals. We are conservatives, who insist upon conserving the environment for our children and future generations.’

The first Greenpeace mission failed to stop the escalation of the arms race, but it gave the organisation its trademark style of direct action. Big-scale stunts would ensure media attention for decades to come, but they also epitomised environmentalists’ shrill and uncompromising tone. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, NGOs grew in prominence and number, but it wasn’t until the Cold War drew to a close that NGOs really became global players.

Some have sought to explain the ascendency of the NGO as the regrouping of various left agendas after the disintegration of communism. Founding member turned critic of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, fuels this perception, claiming that ‘pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited’, thus they ‘moved into the environmental movement bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments’. While there may be some truth to this claim, its significance is questionable. Moore seems to forget that his erstwhile comrades had identified themselves as ‘conservatives’. There were few organisations or individuals in the USSR, never mind in the West, that could be accurately described as ‘pro-Soviet’ at the time.

Moreover, environmental issues had been established on the international agenda long before the collapse of communism. Former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland began compiling her UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) report in 1983. Our Common Future, published in 1987, became the blueprint for ‘sustainable development’ and proposed the ‘marriage of economy and ecology’. The NGOs we know today are the chimera produced by this ugly union.

Brundtland noted that NGOs had ‘played a major part in the environmental movement’ and were pioneers ‘in the creation of public awareness and political pressures that stimulated governments to act’. Accordingly, she saw in NGOs the potential to drive the sustainability agenda, in spite of public and governmental indifference. NGOs should be better funded and given access ‘to participate in decision-making’. They could ‘provide an efficient and effective alternative to public agencies’, in both the design and delivery of international and national policies.

Brundtland preferred that undemocratic and unaccountable NGOs keep national governments in check. They were handed the kind of tasks that the voting public might have once been expected to decide on through the ballot box. Concerns about ‘eco-Marxists’ or the left generally gaining power through the backdoor not only miss the point of Brundtland’s contempt for democratic politics - they also miss the real context of the NGOs’ ascendency: a post-political (or ‘post-ideological’) era.

Far from pitching governments against NGOs, this mode of politics has come to the rescue of politicians. In an era when suspicion of ‘ideology’ and of the public abounds, political leaders have been eager to prove their sympathy to the causes embraced by NGOs. Here, for instance, is David Cameron – then the opposition leader in the UK – holding a press conference about his energy policy at Greenpeace’s London offices.

It would be a mistake to imagine that the Brundtland report was the singular cause of the elevation of NGOs and the decline of democratic politics. But Brundtland nonetheless epitomises the desire for an organising basis for political institutions that transcends ‘ideology’. Soviet tyranny had come to an end, but so had faith in the idea that liberal democracies could be sustained by popular mandate. Scientists, with their immunity from ideology guaranteed by the objectivity of science, and NGOs, with their unimpeachable moral perspective, would determine the priorities that ought to drive policy and rescue the political establishment from its disorientation and disconnectedness.

Present as future past

The long road to green serfdom

Germany’s decision to ditch nuclear power should be a wake-up call to all those who favour development.

By Colin McInnes

German chancellor Angela Merkel is no slouch. The holder of a PhD in quantum chemistry, she understands better than most the technical intricacies of nuclear energy. It is therefore all the more surprising that such a savvy, technocrat politician has been manoeuvred into legislating a national prohibition on nuclear energy.

Let’s be clear about the magnitude of Merkel’s decision. To deliberately abandon the single largest source of cost-effective, reliable and clean energy in Europe’s largest economy is nothing short of jaw-dropping. As recently as 2008, Merkel declared that the then proposed gradual phase-out of nuclear energy was ‘absolutely wrong’. So just how did she get boxed into a corner and make such an economically and environmentally regressive decision?

The answer is not, of course, a Damascene conversion to renewable energy, but modern political dynamics that can allow minority parties to have a disproportionate influence on key national policies. Merkel well knows that nuclear energy is the lowest-cost means of generating reliable, clean energy, but she also understands that her party needs green votes to stay in power. Her capitulation on nuclear energy is a dangerous step along the road to green serfdom.

The sacrifice of abundant, low-cost energy to the downright irrationality of Die Grünen in the Bundestag should be a warning. An industrial accident in Japan – at Fukushima nuclear power station – with no direct fatalities will now result in higher energy costs to German industry and consumers who can ill afford the extra expense. To try to plug the hole left by nuclear energy will require the industrialisation of large tracts of the German landscape with resource-hungry wind farms and, ironically, a fleet of new coal-fired plants. Only in the wacky world of contemporary mainstream green thinking can this be seen as a success.

Environmentalist commentators such as Mark Lynas have discovered only recently that green politics can be less than candid and is often entirely riddled with misinformation. After doing their own fact-finding, Lynas and others have expressed mild shock that longstanding green claims on nuclear energy are, in fact, demonstrably false. Similarly, environmentalist Stewart Brand underwent a conversion on issues such as the use of genetic modification (GM) in agriculture to help boost crop yields. By ripping up field trials of GM crops, mainstream greens have held back publicly funded research that could have provided patent-free GM technology to the developing world. In this case, the green serfs are ultimately the poor, rather than German electricity consumers.

Ban human experiments

Lesbian foster couple put six year old boy in girl's clothes and post photos on Facebook

by Janet Fife-Yeomans

A SIX-year-old boy placed in the care of a lesbian foster couple was dressed in girl's clothes and the humiliating pictures were posted on the couple's Facebook page.

One of the women was preparing for a sex change to become a man at the time, while her girlfriend was undergoing fertility treatment.

The boy and his 12-year-old sister have since been moved but former Children's Court magistrate Barbara Holborow yesterday called for a full inquiry into the decision to put them there. "Oh my God, what are we doing?" Ms Holborow, who has fostered eight children, said.

Families Minister Pru Goward has demanded a full explanation from child welfare service Barnardos, which had recruited the couple.

"I am seeking advice from Barnardos to confirm that care arrangements were appropriate and the wellbeing of the children was paramount," Ms Goward said yesterday.

The children's story, described as one of the saddest in the state, has been revealed in a Supreme Court judgment posted last month in Children's Law news compiled by the NSW Children's Court.

Their mother had tried but failed in the Supreme Court to win back custody of her son, given the pseudonym Campbell by the court.

His current foster parents want to adopt him.

Campbell was taken into care in November 2006 at the age of 18 months along with his four stepbrothers and two stepsisters after complaints of physical and mental abuse at the hands of the parents.

 Campbell and his sister Abby, then 12, were placed with the lesbian couple in early 2009. The placement did not work out for Abby and after she was moved, Campbell was dressed in girl's clothes and his photograph placed on the couple's Facebook page.