Liberty and gold

The Gold Standard Never Dies

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

John Maynard Keynes thought he had pretty well killed gold as a monetary standard back in the 1930s. Governments of the world did their best to help him. It took longer than they thought. Gold in the money survived all the way to Nixon, and it was he who finally drove the stake in once and for all. That was supposed to be the end of it, and the beginning of the glorious new age of paper prosperity.

It didn't work out as they thought. The 1970s was a time of monetary chaos. What was worth a buck in 1973 is worth only 20 cents today. Stated another way: a dime is worth 2 cents, a nickel is worth a penny, and a penny is worth...nothing at all. It is an accounting fiction that takes up physical space for no reason.

Welcome to the age of paper money, where governments and central banks can manufacture as much money as they want without limit. Gold was the last limit. Its banishment as a standard unleashed the inflation monster and leviathan itself, which has swelled beyond comprehension.

But guess what? Gold actually hasn't gone anywhere. It is still the hedge of choice, the thing that every investor embraces in time of trouble. It remains the most liquid, most stable, most fungible, most marketable, and most reliable store of wealth on the planet. It has a more dependable buy-sell spread than any other commodity in existence, given its value per unit of weight.

But is it dead as a monetary tool? Maybe not. Whenever the failures of paper become more-than-obvious, someone mentions gold and then look out for the hysteria. This is precisely what happened the other day when Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, made some vague noises in the direction of gold. He merely suggested that its price might be used as a metric for evaluating the quality of monetary policy.

What happened? The roof fell in. Brad DeLong of Keynesian fame called Zoellick "the stupidest man alive" and the New York Times trotted out a legion of experts to assure us that the gold standard would not fix things, would hamstring monetary policy, would bring more instability rather than less, would bring back the great depression, and lead to mass human suffering of all sorts.

One thing this little explosion proved: newspapers, governments, and their favored academic economists all hate the gold standard. I can understand this. The absence of the gold standard has made possible the paper world they all love, one ruled by the state and its managers, a world of huge debt and endless opportunities for mischief to be made from the top down.

One of the funniest explosions came from Nouriel Roubini, who listed a series of merits of gold without recognizing them as such: gold limits the flexibility and range of actions of central banks (check!); under gold, a central bank can't "stimulate growth and manage price stability" (check!); under gold, central banks can't provide lender of last resort support (check!); under gold, banks go belly-up rather than get bailed out (check!).

His only truly negative point was that under gold, we get more business cycles, but here he is completely wrong, as a quick look at the data demonstrates. And how can anyone say such a thing in the immediate wake of one of history's biggest bubbles and its explosion, which brought the world to the brink of calamity (and it still isn't over)? Newsflash: it wasn't the gold standard that gave us this disaster.

As Murray Rothbard emphasized, the essence of the gold standard is that it puts power in the hands of the people. They are no longer dependent on the whims of central bankers, treasury officials, and high rollers in money centers. Money becomes not merely an accounting device but a real form of property like any other. It is secure, portable, universally valued, and rather than falling in value, it maintains or rises in value over time. Under a real gold standard, there is no need for a central bank, and banks themselves become like any other business, not some gigantic socialistic operation sustained by trillions in public money.

Imagine holding money and watching it grow rather than shrink in its purchasing power in terms of goods and services. That's what life is like under gold. Savers are rewarded rather than punished. No one uses the monetary system to rob anyone else. The government can only spend what it has and no more. Trade across borders is not thrown into constant upheaval because of a change in currency valuations.

Of course the World Bank head was not actually talking about a real gold standard. At most he was talking about some kind of rule to rein in central banks that attempt what the Fed is attempting now: inflating the money supply to drive down the exchange-rate value of the currency to subsidize exports.

Still, it's good that he raised the topic. The Mises Institute has been pushing scholarship and writing about gold since its founding. To be sure, the issue of the gold standard is largely historical, but no less important for that reason. The people who hate the gold standard of the past have no desire for serious monetary reform today.

We should be thrilled should the day ever come when monetary authorities really make paper money directly convertible into gold (or silver or something else). I doubt we can look forward to that day anytime soon. But one thing they could let happen right away: free the market to create its own gold standard by permitting true innovation and choice in currency. It's a fair guess that opponents of the gold standard would oppose that too, because, as Alan Greenspan himself once admitted, the people who oppose gold are ultimately opposed to human freedom.

This debate isn't really about monetary policy, much less the technical aspects of the transition. It is about political philosophy: what kind of society do we want to live in? One ruled by an ever-growing, all-controlling state or one in which people have freedom guaranteed and protected?

The unsung virtues

Get a Job!

by Heather Mac Donald

Working is (usually) more admirable than protesting.

Why is a month-long slumber party in a public park more heroic or newsworthy than getting up daily and going to work? “I’ve been here a week and I’m lovin’ every minute of it,” a jagged-toothed, self-described vet leaning against a planter in Zuccotti Park told me on Sunday. One of the biggest decisions that he and his fellow occupiers have to make each day is whether to eat vegan or to scarf down some saturated animal fats in the Dunkin’ Donuts that regularly make the rounds, thanks to the bounteous food donations that pour into the park on an hourly basis. (The most critical decision, of course, is which local establishment to invade for your sanitary needs.)

Henry, a delicate, doe-eyed anthropology and interdisciplinary-studies major from the University of Alabama, came up to New York a week ago with the blessings of his professors, who are undoubtedly celebrating the long-hoped-for revival of 1960s student activism. The chance that his courses are so demanding that his open-ended leave of absence will jeopardize his grades is zero. “It’s obvious that the good guys are fighting the bad guys,” he said. “It’s a question of good v. evil. Bad guys serve themselves, seeking individual gain; they’ve forgotten what it means to be a good guy. You can be rich, but you shouldn’t try to get richer, because you make people poor by getting richer.” Henry was particularly exercised by the fact that a timber company had bought up all the farmland in his area, while three counties there lack hospitals.

Behind them, underneath the gangly red Mark di Suvero sculpture on the Broadway side of the park, a sad-faced young mime was performing with a carrot inside a stage marked off by clotheslines as people tossed around beach balls. In an adjacent stage, a young man from San Antonio was leading a group chant: “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” On the sidewalk behind these theatrical spaces, a few people in what was billed as a delegation of Buddhist monks started down Broadway holding aloft a papier-mâché golden calf.

Other residents were less mobile. A colony-within-the-colony of gutter punks—those young moochers who travel up and down the West Coast with bedrolls and pit bulls, hanging out on city sidewalks and getting stoned—had spread out their usual cardboard signs on a blanket: TRAVELLING SOUTH. NEED MONEY. Someone put a dollar in the cup of a ski-mask-wearing “crusty kid,” as they call themselves.

Everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun and to be confidently self-important, which is even better fun. Showing up to a job is less enjoyable. But a lot more hangs on that insurance agent’s getting to his desk on time every day than on whether the residents of an encampment supported by the surplus wealth that floods through our society come up with a set of demands to present to someone TBD. Why should protest be privileged over the daily fulfillment of responsibilities that keeps society stable, especially when so many of the protesters are young people with lots of free time and few responsibilities?

Sometimes, to be sure, youthful protesters happen to get it right—as in Tiananmen Square—just as a broken clock is right twice a day. More often, they’re moved by a laughably incomplete understanding of the world. Having a hard time with your student loans? Have you checked out your college’s burgeoning diversity bureaucracy recently, and other costly accretions onto the basic function of a university? What about the role of government loans in giving colleges an incentive to inflate tuition?

Obviously, the extent to which a spectator is moved by the alleged heroism of protesters depends on whether he finds their message compelling. Every liberal pundit is reading into Occupy Wall Street the realization of his fondest policy wish list, just as conservative pundits saw in Tea Party rallies a resurrection of hardy yeoman ideals—even if the actual bearers of the messages seized on by these interpreters don’t always make sense. We forgive incoherence and delusion when it’s for our own cause. So maybe the Rothschilds don’t own 38 percent of the Federal Reserve, as a thin man who purported to be an investor told me at Zuccotti Park, but if his presence there can be used to justify an even greater redistribution of wealth, who’s to quibble about the details?

There are times when mass protest carries an undeniable dignity and grows out of an unbearable necessity; the civil rights marches and sit-ins in the 1950s South were one of those moments. But our culture’s glamorization of protest—most celebrated when the message is a leftist one—scants the unsung virtues of showing up and doing your job.

Addictions

Math vs. Myth

By M.Tanner
There is no austerity, only more uncontrolled spending.

It is a medical truism that if you get the diagnosis wrong, the treatment will be wrong. The same holds true with Washington budgeting. Unfortunately, as we prepare for yet more debates over budgeting, spending, and stimulus, we can expect to once again enter a fact-free debate.

Among the most common myths:

1. Republicans have slashed government spending. While there are political reasons for both Democrats and Republicans to pretend that we’ve entered a new age of austerity, it’s not even close to true. According to figures released last week by the Treasury Department, federal spending this year is up by roughly 5 percent over the same period last year. That’s a $120 billion increase in just the first nine months of this year. That’s right: Despite a near shutdown of the government and “holding the debt ceiling hostage,” government spending is still increasing. And not surprisingly, we are borrowing more money in order to fund it. The deficit is already $23.5 billion higher this year — with three months still to go. As a result, our national debt continues to grow. This month it will close in on $15 trillion. Throw in the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare, and our real indebtedness tops $120 trillion and rising. If Keynesian-style stimulus worked, we should be swimming in jobs.

2. States are firing teachers and firefighters because they are broke. Washington has to help. That’s the logic behind the president’s plan for $35 billion in additional federal aid to the states, a bill that the Senate is expected to vote on this week. In reality, however, state government spending has also been rising, up more than 10 percent in the past two years. And while some of that represents a pass-through of federal aid from earlier stimulus bills, state general-fund spending rose 5.2 percent this year. If state governments are laying off teachers and firefighters, it’s because they are failing to manage their priorities, not because they don’t have any money.

3. We have a revenue problem. Yes, tax revenues are low today by historic standards, in part because of the recession and in part because of the Bush tax cuts. But this is a temporary phenomenon. According to the Congressional Budget Office, even if the entirety of the Bush tax cuts were made permanent and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) repealed, tax revenue would rise to more than 20 percent of GDP by 2020. That’s roughly two percentage points of GDP above the historic average. If taxes will bring in more revenue than usual, how is it that we are still projecting huge future deficits? Simple, spending is expected to rise even faster. In 2020, federal spending is estimated to be roughly 25 percent of GDP, roughly four percentage points higher than historic averages, and seven points higher than it was under President Clinton. So, which side of the ledger has a problem?

4.  We can solve our problems by taxing the rich and closing corporate loopholes. Set aside the question of whether higher taxes on the rich would stifle economic growth and job creation. There is simply no way to raise enough money to cover our deficits by taxing the rich. As the president would say, “It’s math.” This year, we will run a deficit of roughly $1.3 trillion. Eliminating the tax break for corporate jets, a prime Democratic talking point, would raise roughly $300 million this year. Yes, that’s million with an “m.” Ending tax breaks for oil and gas companies, another frequent Democratic target, would bring in somewhat more, nearly $4 billion per year. And, the big enchilada, the Democrats’ proposed 5.6 percent surtax on “millionaires and billionaires,” would raise an average of $45.3 billion in additional revenue per year. Therefore, if the Democrats were able to get every penny that they want, they would raise all of $49.6 billion per year, leaving us with a budget deficit this year of only $1.25 trillion.

5.  We can balance the budget by cutting “fraud, waste, and abuse.” This is the Republican flip side of the Democrats’ reliance on higher taxes, a way to avoid making tough choices about cutting defense and reforming entitlements. Total domestic discretionary spending — everything from the Department of Education to the Department of Commerce, from the FBI to the FDA — amounted to roughly $650 billion this year. If we simply abolished all of those programs, the muscle and bone as well as the fat, we would still have a $650 billion budget deficit. That is not to say that we shouldn’t cut everywhere we can, but to spend too much time searching for “fraud, waste, and abuse” is to pluck out a splinter while the patient is bleeding to death.

With any addiction, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem. Washington remains addicted to spending. It is time for Congress to get honest about that and stop hiding behind these budget myths. Maybe then, we can begin the path to economic recovery.

A reminder

America's Ridiculously Large $15 Trillion Economy

Which Countries Match the GDP of U.S. Metro Areas?

Rank	U.S. Metropolitan Area GDP, 2010	Millions	Equivalent Country by GDP, 2010
1	New York City	$1,280,517	Australia
2	Los Angeles-Long Beach	$735,743	Turkey
3	Chicago	$532,331	Switzerland
4	Washington, D.C.	$425,167	Taiwan
5	Houston	$384,603	Austria
6	Dallas-Fort Worth	$374,081	Argentina
7	Philadelphia	$346,932	South Africa
8	San Francisco-Oakland	$325,927	Thailand
9	Boston	$313,690	Denmark
10	Atlanta	$272,362	Colombia
11	Miami-Fort Lauderdale	$257,560	Finland
12	Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue	$231,221	Portugal
13	Minneapolis-St. Paul	$199,596	Chile
14	Detroit	$197,773	Phillipines
15	Phoenix	$190,601	Czech Republic
16	San Diego	$171,568	Pakistan
17	San Jose	$168,517	Romania
18	Denver	$157,567	Peru
19	Baltimore	$144,789	New Zealand
20	St. Louis	$129,734	Kuwait

The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released GDP by U.S. metropolitan area for 2010, and the top 20 largest metro areas are displayed above along with the equivalent countries that have economies that are approximately the same size as U.S. metro areas.  Pretty amazing, and a testament to the enormity of the U.S. economy and the productivity of American workers. 

Related: Map from The Economist comparing the 2009 economic output of American states to the economic output (GDP) of entire countries.

The Fourth Dimension

Henry Hazlitt 1955 editorial

Common Sense

Random Thoughts

By T. Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to "spread the wealth," Barack Obama has ended up spreading poverty.

Have you ever heard anyone as incoherent as the people staging protests across the country? Taxpayers ought to be protesting against having their money spent to educate people who end up unable to say anything beyond repeating political catch phrases.

It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.

I hate getting bills that show a zero balance. If I don't owe anything, why bother me with a bill? There is too much junk mail already.

Radical feminists seem to assume that men are hostile to women. But what would they say to the fact that most of the women on the Titanic were saved, and most of the men perished -- due to rules written by men and enforced by men on the sinking ship?

If he were debating Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich could chew him up and spit him out.

Whether the particular issue is housing, medical care or anything in between, the agenda of the left is to take the decision out of the hands of those directly involved and transfer that decision to third parties, who pay no price for making decisions that turn out to be counterproductive.

It is truly the era of the New Math when a couple making $125,000 a year each are taxed at rates that are said to apply to "millionaires and billionaires."

On many issues, the strongest argument of the left is that there is no argument. This has been the left's party line on the issue of man-made global warming and the calamities they claim will follow. But there are many scientists -- some with Nobel Prizes -- who have repudiated the global warming hysteria.

With professional athletes earning megabucks incomes, it is a farce to punish their violations of rules with fines. When Serena Williams was fined $2,000 for misconduct during a tennis match, that was like fining you or me a nickel or a dime. Suspensions are something that even the highest-paid athletes can feel.

Most of us may lament the fact that so many more people are today dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies. But dependency usually translates into votes for whoever is handing out the benefits, so an economic disaster can be a political bonanza, as it was for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Don't count Obama out in 2012.

Politicians can solve almost any problem -- usually by creating a bigger problem. But, so long as the voters are aware of the problem that the politicians have solved, and unaware of the bigger problems they have created, political "solutions" are a political success.

Do people who advocate special government programs for blacks realize that the federal government has had special programs for American Indians, including affirmative action, since the early 19th century -- and that American Indians remain one of the few groups worse off than blacks?

I hope the people who are challenging Obamacare in the Supreme Court point out that the equal application of the laws, mandated by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, is violated when the president can arbitrarily grant hundreds of waivers to the Obamacare law to his political favorites, while everyone else has to follow its costly provisions.

People who live within their means are increasingly being forced to pay for people who didn't live within their means -- whether individual home buyers here or whole nations in Europe.

Regardless of how the current Republican presidential nomination process ends, I hope that they will never again have these televised "debates" among a crowd of candidates, which just turn into a circular firing squad -- damaging whoever ends up with the nomination, and leaving the voters knowing only who is quickest with glib answers.

Have you noticed that we no longer seem to be hearing the old familiar argument that illegal aliens are just taking jobs that Americans won't do?

"We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry"

All the Single Ladies

By Kate Bolick

IN 2001, WHEN I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

The period that followed was awful. I barely ate for sobbing all the time. (A friend who suffered my company a lot that summer sent me a birthday text this past July: “A decade ago you and I were reuniting, and you were crying a lot.”) I missed Allan desperately—his calm, sure voice; the sweetly fastidious way he folded his shirts. On good days, I felt secure that I’d done the right thing. Learning to be alone would make me a better person, and eventually a better partner. On bad days, I feared I would be alone forever. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life?

Ten years later, I occasionally ask myself the same question. Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot I didn’t know 10 years ago. The decision to end a stable relationship for abstract rather than concrete reasons (“something was missing”), I see now, is in keeping with a post-Boomer ideology that values emotional fulfillment above all else. And the elevation of independence over coupling (“I wasn’t ready to settle down”) is a second-wave feminist idea I’d acquired from my mother, who had embraced it, in part, I suspect, to correct for her own choices.

I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE, or: A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE—AND THE SENATE, and bellowing along to Gloria Steinem & Co.’s feminist-minded children’s album, Free to Be … You and Me (released the same year Title IX was passed, also the year of my birth). Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda’s retelling of “Atalanta,” the ancient Greek myth about a fleet-footed princess who longs to travel the world before finding her prince, became the theme song of my life. Once, in high school, driving home from a family vacation, my mother turned to my boyfriend and me cuddling in the backseat and said, “Isn’t it time you two started seeing other people?” She adored Brian—he was invited on family vacations! But my future was to be one of limitless possibilities, where getting married was something I’d do when I was ready, to a man who was in every way my equal, and she didn’t want me to get tied down just yet.

This unfettered future was the promise of my time and place. I spent many a golden afternoon at my small New England liberal-arts college debating with friends the merits of leg-shaving and whether or not we’d take our husband’s surname. (Even then, our concerns struck me as retro; hadn’t the women’s libbers tackled all this stuff already?) We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? One of the many ways in which our lives differed from our mothers’ was in the variety of our interactions with the opposite sex. Men were our classmates and colleagues, our bosses and professors, as well as, in time, our students and employees and subordinates—an entire universe of prospective friends, boyfriends, friends with benefits, and even ex-boyfriends-turned-friends. In this brave new world, boundaries were fluid, and roles constantly changing. Allan and I had met when we worked together at a magazine in Boston (full disclosure: this one), where I was an assistant and he an editor; two years later, he quit his job to follow me to New York so that I could go to graduate school and he could focus on his writing. After the worst of our breakup, we eventually found our way to a friendship so deep and sustaining that several years ago, when he got engaged, his fiancée suggested that I help him buy his wedding suit. As he and I toured through Manhattan’s men’s-wear ateliers, we enjoyed explaining to the confused tailors and salesclerks that no, no, we weren’t getting married. Isn’t life funny that way?

I retell that moment as an aside, as if it’s a tangent to the larger story, but in a way, it is the story. In 1969, when my 25-year-old mother, a college-educated high-school teacher, married a handsome lawyer-to-be, most women her age were doing more or less the same thing. By the time she was in her mid-30s, she was raising two small children and struggling to find a satisfying career. She’d never had sex with anyone but my father. Could she have even envisioned herself on a shopping excursion with an ex-lover, never mind one who was getting married while she remained alone? And the ex-lover’s fiancée being so generous and open-minded as to suggest the shopping trip to begin with?

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation.

But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

A.D. 2041

End of White America?

By P. Buchanan

John Hope Franklin, the famed black historian at Duke University, once told the incoming freshmen, "The new America in the 21st century will be primarily non-white, a place George Washington would not recognize."

In his June 1998 commencement address at Portland State, President Clinton affirmed it: "In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States." The graduates cheered.

The Census Bureau has now fixed at 2041 the year when whites become a minority in a country where the Founding Fathers had restricted citizenship to "free white persons" of "good moral character."

With publication today of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" this writer takes up what this portends. And while many on the left are enthusiastic about relegating the America of Eisenhower and JFK to a reactionary past, I concur with the late Clare Boothe Luce.

In this world, she said, there are optimists and pessimists.

"The pessimists are better informed."

What are the seemingly inevitable consequences of an America where whites are a shrinking minority?

First, the end of a national Republican Party that routinely gets 90 percent of its presidential votes from white America.

California is the harbinger of what is to come.

Carried by Richard Nixon in all five presidential elections when he was on the ticket and by Ronald Reagan all four times he ran, California, where whites are now a shrinking minority, is a state where the GOP faces extinction. John McCain's share of the California vote was down to the Barry Goldwater level of 1964.

When Texas, where two-thirds of the newborns and half the schoolchildren are Hispanic, goes the way of California, it is the end for the GOP. Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, also critical to any victorious GOP coalition, are Hispanicizing as rapidly as Texas.

In every presidential election since Bush I in 1992, Hispanics have given 60-70 percent of their votes to the Democratic ticket.

For Hispanics, largely poor and working class, are beneficiaries of a cornucopia of government goods -- from free education to food stamps to free health care. Few pay federal income taxes.

Why would they not vote for the Party of Government?

Second, the economic crisis of California, brought on by an outflow of taxpayers and a huge influx of tax consumers -- i.e., millions of immigrants, legal and illegal -- will be mirrored nationally.

For though the majority of immigrants and illegals comes to work, and work hard, most now come from Third World countries and do not bring the academic or professional skills of European-Americans.

Third, the decline in academic test scores here at home and in international competition is likely to continue, as more and more of the children taking those tests will be African-American and Hispanic. For though we have spent trillions over four decades, we have failed to close the racial gap in education. White and Asian children continue to outscore black and Hispanic children.

Can the test-score gap be closed? With the Hispanic illegitimacy rate at 51 percent and the black rate having risen to 71 percent, how can their children conceivably arrive at school ready to compete?

Should this continue for three decades, what will it mean for America if Asians and whites occupy the knowledge-industry jobs, while scores of millions of black and Hispanic workers are relegated to low-paying service-sector jobs? Will that make for social tranquility?

Affirmative action is one answer. But this is already causing a severe backlash, and the reason is obvious.

When affirmative action was first imposed, whites outnumbered blacks nine to one. The burden of reverse discrimination on the white community was thus relatively light. Today, however, not only blacks, but Hispanics and women -- two-thirds of the entire population -- qualify for affirmative action in hiring and school admissions.

And the burden falls almost entirely on white males, who are one-third of the country but three-fourths of the dead and wounded coming back from Afghanistan.

Sociologist Robert Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone," has also found that the greater the racial and ethnic diversity in a community, the less social capital there is -- i.e., people in diverse settings are far less disposed to cooperate for social goals. They retreat into enclaves of their own kind.

Putnam found social capital at the lowest level he ever measured in Los Angeles, the most diverse community on earth. Yet, by 2042, the demography of every American city will approximate that of L.A.

What is happening to America is happening across the West.

Can Western civilization survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants? Probably not, for the new arrivals seem uninterested in preserving the old culture they have found.

Those who hold the white race responsible for the mortal sins of mankind -- slavery, racism, imperialism, genocide -- may welcome its departure from history. Those who believe that the civilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London to be the crowning achievement of mankind will mourn its passing.

Chain reaction

The World’s Biggest Sovereign Debtors

By Jeff Harding 

Who are the biggest sovereign debtors? I hope this doesn’t surprise you: