Intellectuals adore tyrants

Rating and Ranking Our Presidents

by Patrick J. Buchanan

In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures.

Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and FDR. Below, but also among the Greats, were Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The Near Greats were Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk.

In 1962, Schlesinger followed with a New York Times piece, also based on the responses of historians, political scientists and journalists. This list had the same top seven. But Jackson had fallen to Near Great and Polk, who took the Southwest and California away from Mexico, had risen from 10th to eighth.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others have since produced their own rankings. The latest in the field is Robert Merry, a lifelong journalist and now editor at The National Interest. In "Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians," Merry adds a new criterion. Did this president win a second term, and was he succeeded by a man of his own party?

Camus and Sartre’s intellectual fisticuffs

Much ado about almost nothing

A fascinating and entertaining new book explores the fractious relationship between two of the twentieth century's most compelling intellects.

by Tim Black 

The Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre Vs Camus. The title of a new book by Andy Martin, a dude-like don from Cambridge University, isn’t that promising. Neither is the subtitle: ‘They should have been a dream team. It turned into a duel to the death.’ And the cover, just to ram home the gimmicky, ‘prize bout’ theme, is mocked up like a 1950s boxing promotion.

Thankfully, The Boxer is not as naff as it sounds. In fact, Martin has produced a rather lovely, sometimes playful, sometimes moving and often very droll take on the life, loves and, yes, thought of two of the twentieth century’s most compelling intellects. The combative element is there, of course. And Martin certainly has fun pitting the two writers and thinkers against one another. Their ‘binary antagonisms’ seem to proliferate under Martin’s gaze: Jean-Paul Sartre the thinker versus Albert Camus the man of action; the lover of the symbolic versus the savage lover; the prolix writer versus the minimal stylist; and, of course, the ugly versus the beautiful. Lest we forget, Camus, eight years Sartre’s junior, was blessed with good looks. A young Humphrey Bogart, reckons Martin. Sartre, meanwhile, looked like ‘something hanging off the side of Notre Dame’.

Why Don't People Get It?

Facts will always be with us. Wisdom, however, must be taught

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Even now, people think nothing of professing their attachment to socialist ideology at cocktail parties, at restaurants serving abundant foods, and lounging in the fanciest apartments and homes that mankind has ever enjoyed. Yes, it is still fashionable to be a socialist, and — in some circles within the arts and academia — socially required. No one will recoil. Someone will openly congratulate you for your idealism. In the same way, you can always count on eliciting agreement by decrying the evils of Walmart and Microsoft.

Isn't it remarkable? Socialism (the real-life version) collapsed nearly 20 years ago — vicious regimes founded on the principles of Marxism, overthrown by the will of the people. Following that event we've seen these once-decrepit societies come back to life and become a major source for the world's prosperity. Trade has expanded. The technological revolution is achieving miracles by the day right under our noses. Millions have been made far better off, in ever-widening circles. The credit is wholly due to the free market, which possesses a creative power that has been underestimated by even its most passionate proponents.

What's more, it should not have required the collapse of socialism to demonstrate this. Socialism has been failing since the ancient world. And since Mises's book Socialism (1922) we have understood that the precise reason is due to the economic impossibility of the emergence of social order in the absence of private property in the means of production. No one has ever refuted him.

It's Up to the Voters Now

The last chance to stop ObamaCare is in November

By Paul Clement

If there is a modicum of hope in Chief Justice John Roberts's inglorious one-man opinion Thursday, it is that Americans were reminded again that they cannot count on others to protect their liberty. Certainly judges aren't reliable. They can be turned by the pressure of the media and the whims of vanity. If Americans want to repeal ObamaCare, their only recourse is to demand it at the ballot box in November.

The Affordable Care Act is more unpopular now than when it passed, yet it will grind on toward implementation in a second Obama term. The President made that clear in his remarks Thursday, deploying the usual half-truths he used to jam the law through Congress. He continued to claim that no one will lose his current health insurance, though millions are sure to do so as they are dropped from business coverage and tossed into Medicaid or government exchanges.

The Supreme Court And Natural Law

A tough but valuable lesson

by James Miller
I won a bet today.

A few weeks ago I wagered with a coworker that the United States Supreme Court would uphold the Affordable Care Act otherwise known as Obamacare.  He reasoned that the federal government has no authority under the Constitution to force an individual to purchase a product from a private company.  My reasoning was much simpler.  Because the Supreme Court is a functioning arm of the state, it will do nothing to stunt Leviathan’s growth.  The fact that the Court declared no federal law unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995—from the tail end of the New Deal through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—should have been proof enough.  He naively believed in the impartialness of politically-appointed judges.  For the first time he saw that those nine individuals are nothing more than politicians with an allegiance to state supremacy.

It was a tough but valuable lesson to learn.

The Big Blink?

Not Really

by Wolf Richter   

Markets soared in Asia, Europe, the US, everywhere. Let the good times roll. The euro jumped to the highest level in a couple of weeks. Yields on Spanish bonds plunged to the lowest level since, well, Monday. A miracle had happened. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had blinked. Um, a little bit.

All eyes were on her at the EU summit in Brussels, the one summit that would once and for all save the Eurozone, THE summit, where she’d be forced to submit to the majority of the Eurozone, and indeed to the majority of the world, and where she’d be forced to come to her senses and give in to the demands set out before the summit.

There was the Grand Plan, issued by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy. It included all the goodies: a European Treasury with power over national budgets and how much countries could borrow; Eurobonds; a banking union that would guarantee deposits; and the ESM that would bail out banks directly.

The Largest Theft Racket In World History

U.S. Entitlements

By Wendy Milling

Suppose that you were a police officer who moved in on a major theft racket that involved thousands of people. You arrest the perpetrators and question them, whereupon they nonchalantly tell you the secret incentive that drew hordes of loot-seekers into their racket.

They had agreed amongst themselves that new recruits would steal from victims on the outside and then turn the loot over to older members. The older members would assist the newer members in the commission of the thefts, and some of the loot would be used to buy off key law enforcement personnel, prosecutors, witnesses, and others in order to assist the racket or protect it from trouble. After a time, the newer members became older members entitled to take from the new recruits. The loot turned out to be larger in size than your state’s economy.

A Finalized Path to Full, Socialized Medicine in America

Thanks to Conservatives and George W. Bush 
By Richard M. Salsman

Once again American conservatives have struck a lethal blow against freedom, rights and capitalism. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling today, condoning every sordid feature of the 2700-page, rights-violating “ObamaCare” law, ensures that America will move still farther and faster down the path to full, socialized medicine, a path first paved in the 1960s, with Medicare and Medicaid. The lawless ruling was made possible by the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush.

With today’s ruling the U.S. government can do virtually anything it wishes to its citizens – liberty and rights be damned, without limit. Officially in America we now have a totally arbitrary and limitless government. That is, we have a “total government.” In short, we’ve got totalitarian government. As to how much further liberty we may lose in our lifetimes, it’ll depend only on how arbitrary and vicious reigning rulers choose to be, or not. There’s no real Rule of Law any more, only the Rule of Men – and these are mostly ignorant, reckless men.

The Truth About Healthcare

Medical care is a scarce good

By Douglas French

Nothing starts a fistfight like the health-care debate. The market for what is just a basic service has been contorted and mangled by government intervention for more than a century. The average person wouldn’t know a free-market health care system if they saw one.

“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” must include health care, say those on the political left. The alternative is barbaric, they claim. Never mind that someone else’s rights must be trampled upon in order to provide the “right” of health care. And never mind that the results will be seriously degraded for everyone but the elite.

But the political right is just as clueless. Who can forget the Tea Party member who protested loudly, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”

Yet another betrayal, from yet another "compassionate conservative"

A lie makes Obamacare legal

By mark steyn

Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada's ghastly "Charter of Rights and Freedoms": "There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself," wrote Jonas. "It's as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them."

For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule – until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism rendered U.S. constitutionalism increasingly absurd. As I also wrote three months ago (yes, yes, don't worry, there's a couple of sentences of new material in amongst all the I-told-you-so stuff), "The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it – or, at any rate, torturing its language beyond repair."

‘Ordering Nature Around’ Some More and Why the EU May Break Apart

France Raises the Minimum Wage Rate
By Pater Tenebrarum

Crisis-stricken Greece had to cut its minimum wage by 22% in February this year – this was part of its agreement with the 'Troika' of lenders. For workers under the age of 25 the cut was an even bigger 32%.

Reuters at the time wistfully reported that this 'slashed the living standards of low-paid workers'. Presumably the author of the report would have rather seen them join the swelling ranks of the unemployed and retain a vague hope of a 'higher living standard' if their jobs ever came back.

Minimum wages raise no-one's living standard. They merely price unskilled workers out of the labor market. Not a single advance in living standards can be credited to so-called 'pro-labor' legislation – what raises real wages and living standards is the increase in capital per worker employed and the concomitant increase in economic productivity.

A Eurocrash is baked in the Cake

"All these hordes of Eurocrats should be summarily fired, and their agencies totally abolished"

In a pungent interview with Louis James, Doug Casey talks about the coming economic crash and how to survive it.

Louis James: So Doug, you're off to FreedomFest 2012 shortly, where people will be able to hear your latest thoughts on many subjects. Maybe you can give us a sneak preview on whatever is uppermost on your mind today. 

Doug: Lately I've been thinking about the EU's rising tide of troubles. We talked about this last January, when I said it was coming, but it seems to me that at this point it's rapidly coming to a head. A major financial and economic catastrophe in Europe is unavoidable. From there, it's likely to spread out to the whole world.

John Roberts’s Betrayal

The "stealth strategy" for the court has failed -- try winning elections instead.

By W. JAMES ANTLE III

The Supreme Court was poised to deliver conservatives a major victory by overturning a hated liberal policy with little basis in the Constitution. A majority of the justices had been appointed by Republican presidents. Some of them were so conservative that Senate Democrats had attempted to prevent their confirmation.

Yet when the much anticipated ruling was finally handed down, the liberal policy was upheld with fairly minor caveats. A Republican-appointed justice unexpectedly voted with the liberal bloc. Instead of a victory, conservatives feared they had endured a permanent defeat on an important issue, and in an election year to boot.

While this certainly describes the past day’s events, it was also true 20 years ago. When the Senate narrowly confirmed Clarence Thomas, liberals feared he would be the deciding vote against Roe v. Wade. Well, Thomas did rule that Roe was wrongly decided at his first opportunity. But in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 5-4 majority affirmed the core holding of the infamous abortion decision.

The Constitution Is What They Make It

The Founders’ fear of a powerful central government has been betrayed by the Court

 “You are free to not eat broccoli, but if you don’t the government will impose a penalty on you. This penalty is really just a tax and since the government has the power to tax for all sorts of reasons, they can tax you if you don’t eat broccoli.”

By Jeff Harding

This is the logic of Justice Roberts argument in the Obamacare case that was handed down today.

This should not surprise us because the Constitution is whatever the Justices wish it to be. Now they have handed the government another mandate to regulate our behavior. As we know they can and do regulate our behavior already. For example, if you smoke, they will tax your habit heavily. It is not a giant leap to force you to do something they want you to do by penalizing you for not doing it. According to today’s ruling, there is nothing in the Constitution preventing them from doing this.

This Frau’s Not for Turning

At Least Not Yet

By DoctoRx

The Telegraph has an opinion piece out titled Angela Merkel isn’t bluffing; like everyone else in Europe, she’s defending national sovereignty.  It compares her to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher in steadfastness and then says this:

"Take this extraordinarily prescient observation by the radical economist Wynne Godley, penned as early as 1992. “It needs to be emphasised at the   start that the establishment of a single currency in the EC would indeed   bring to an end the sovereignty of its component nations and their power to   take independent action on major issues…I sympathise with those (like Margaret Thatcher) who, faced with the loss of sovereignty wish to get off the EMU train altogether. I also sympathise with those who seek integration under the jurisdiction of some federal constitution with a federal budget very much larger than that of the Community budget."

The Healthcare Myths We Must Confront

Fixing our system is not as complicated as many make it out to be

As debate about whether ObamaCare is a good idea continues, rejecting four major misconceptions about healthcare is crucial to any chance of our eventually emerging with a better system.

By Cliff Asness

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare decision, we must refocus. The Court’s decision was never about whether ObamaCare was a good idea, only about whether it was constitutional. The Court found a convoluted way to uphold the law.

That’s done, but the debate on whether ObamaCare’s provisions are good ideas will continue. To date, this debate has been unable to shake off a lot of mythology—things believed about healthcare and our healthcare system in general, or ObamaCare specifically—that simply are not so.

A Confused Opinion

Another Step towards full scale Socialism

By RICHARD A. EPSTEIN

THE stunner yesterday was that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by the Supreme Court’s four most liberal justices, wrote the majority opinion that upheld the individual mandate in President Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, which requires Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. In an ironic twist, the chief justice simultaneously accepted the conservative argument that Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce did not include the power to regulate economic inactivity, like a decision not to purchase health care. The court ruled 5 to 4 on that point, with the chief justice joined by the court’s four other conservative justices.

But what Chief Justice Roberts took from Congress with one hand, he gave it with the other: a broad reading of the taxing power. In the majority opinion, he wrote that since paying a penalty for not obtaining insurance could be seen as a tax, and since “the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.” He will no doubt attract praise in some quarters for splitting this baby.

Americans Are Being Prepared For Full Spectrum Tyranny

It is happening right now

by Brandon Smith

Totalitarian governments, like persistent forms of cancer, have latched onto the long history of man, falling and then reemerging from the deep recesses of our cultural biology to wreak havoc upon one unlucky generation to the next.  The assumption by most is that these unfortunate empires are the product of bureaucracies gone awry; overtaken by the chaotic maddening hunger for wealth and power, and usually manipulated by the singular ambitions of a mesmerizing dictator.  For those of us in the Liberty Movement who are actually educated on the less acknowledged details of history, oligarchy and globalized centralism is much less random than this, and a far more deliberate and devious process than the general unaware public is willing consider.  

Unfortunately, the final truth is very complex, even for us… 

The Long Memory of “The Sick Man of Europe”

Governments in the EU “are all bankrupt,” and Europeans “will be indentured servants of the Chinese.”

By Wolf Richter

It’s astounding just how distorted the coverage of Germany’s role in some grand Eurozone bailout scheme has been—well, at least in the English-speaking mainstream media. Time after time, we’re confronted with the inanest headlines and reports that place German politicians, and particularly Chancellor Angela Merkel, on some kind of invisible verge where they will suddenly, and under tremendous international pressure, come to their senses and ... blink.

And by blinking, Germany would agree to, guarantee, and fund all the panaceas regularly trotted out by those that need them, particularly Spain, Italy, and now loudest of all, due to its shaky megabanks, France. The lasted blast came from the Wall Street Journal where Berlin Blinks on Shared Debt. Others regurgitated it, including MarketWatch. Yet, it contradicted everything that either German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble or Chancellor Merkel had ever been quoted saying in the German press. And indeed, not much later, a spokesman at the Ministry of Finance made it clear, once again: “This is not true,” he said.

Rio +20 Earth Summit

The End of International Environmentalism

By Ronald Bailey

Twenty years ago the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked the ascension of environmentalism as a political force in international affairs. That conference in 1992 produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. At the time, Chris Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute crowed, “You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not find some degree of environmental awareness and some amount of environmental politics.” Flavin added that with socialism in disrepute, environmentalism is now the “most powerful political ideal today.” At the conclusion of the Rio +20 Earth Summit, it is clear that that is no longer so.

The largest United Nations conference ever—featuring more than 50,000 participants from 188 nations —was a flop. For most of the environmentalist ideologues at the Rio +20 conference the only question was whether it was a “hoax” or a “failure.” Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking preferred "hoax" while "failure" was Greenpeace spokesperson Kumi Naidoo’s dismissive term.

The Mysticism of "Social Justice"

A good catchword can stop thought for 50 years

By Thomas Sowell

If there were a Hall of Fame for political rhetoric, the phrase "social justice" would deserve a prominent place there. It has the prime virtue of political catchwords: It means many different things to many different people.

In other words, if you are a politician, you can get lots of people, with different concrete ideas, to agree with you when you come out boldly for the vague generality of "social justice."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that a good catchword can stop thought for 50 years. The phrase "social justice" has stopped many people from thinking, for at least a century -- and counting.

The war is over

And nobody won

The ‘symbolic’ handshake between the queen and the former IRA chief is a meeting of the ghosts of British imperialism and Irish republicanism.

by Mick Hume 

Everybody agrees that the meeting between Her Majesty the Queen and Martin McGuinness, the IRA commander-turned-deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, is heavily ‘symbolic’. But what exactly does it symbolise?

In all of the media fuss about the planned handshake behind closed doors, a key word has been ‘reconciliation’. That rather gives the game away. Because there could never be reconciliation between Irish republicanism and the British Crown. They are, by definition, mortal enemies whose hands belong around one another’s throat. The handshake between the queen and McGuinness must be symbolic of something else: the fact that neither the unionist British Establishment nor the Irish republican movement still exists in its historic form. It is a meeting of ghosts – the ghost of British imperialism and that of Irish republicanism.

Inviting the state into our intimacies

Marriage should become a matter of private preference rather than an institution validated by the state

Gay marriage is presented as an issue of equal rights, but it’s better understood as a top-down overhaul of the institution of marriage.

by Frank Furedi 

Today, there are continuous disputes over moral issues – abortion, sexuality, euthanasia – yet the ideal of marriage retains a formidable influence over society.

It is true that this ideal is frequently contradicted by people’s behaviour. Britain is now at a point where people are more likely to co-habit than get married. Almost half of new births occur outside of marriage. With spectacularly high rates of divorce and a rise in single-parent households, it would appear that marriage has lost its status as a fundamental institution of society. And yet marriage as an ideal still dominates the cultural imagination. Most people look upon marriage as an institution that deserves society’s support, and also as a model that they aspire to embrace.

The Math Scam

Only so much stuff can be forced inside human brain

By Stan Brin

Some of us are good at math, some of us struggle merely to get through it.

Whether we’re good at it or bad, few of us will ever again use anything we learned in calculus or trigonometry class ever again, not even once. After graduation, few will even be able to recognize such general terms as sine and cosine, much less be able to explain what they mean.

For those who want to become engineers, scientists or economists, math is the foundation of their careers. It’s vital, not to be questioned.

For the rest of us — and I include technicians and medical workers* among the rest of us — math is, more often than not, a painful and soul-breaking ritual that we are forced to endure if we hope to have a decent life.

The official line is that lots and lots of math is supposed to prepare us for work. It’s supposed to teach us to think logically. It’s also supposed to help America compete against Asian Tiger economies that are eating our national lunch.

Many Keynesians really hate the concept of liquidationism

I’m trying to grasp why

By John Aziz

Paul Krugman wrote:

One discouraging feature of the current economic crisis is the way many economists and economic commentators — apparently ignorant of what went on over the last 75 years or so of macroeconomic debate — have been reinventing old fallacies, imagining that they were coming up with profound insights.

The Bank for International Settlements has decided to throw everything we’ve learned from 80 years of hard thought about macroeconomics out the window, and to embrace full-frontal liquidationism. The BIS is now advocating a position indistinguishable from that of Schumpeter in the 1930s, opposing any monetary expansion because that would leave “the work of depressions undone”.

How Much To Save The Euro?

How much does it make sense for Germany to pay?

by Geoffrey Wood

Germany keeps being told that it must pay up to save the euro. But how much can Germany pay? No-one seems to have thought about that, but there is already concern about the possible size of bill – German bond yields rose soon after news of the Spanish bail out, even before it was announced where the money was going to come from. (And it was of course a bail out for Spain, regardless of what Spain’s prime minister says. If I borrow money and then lend it to someone else I’ve still borrowed it.)

There is though a more basic question. How much does it make sense for Germany to pay? What sort of bill would it be reasonable to present to them? In fact the best approximation one can arrive at is a bill of zero.

Why zero? What about all these exports that have been produced because Germany has a currency whose value is determined not just by Germany but also by less productive, higher cost, economies?  That link has artificially depressed the prices of German exports. These net exports resulting from Germany’s Eurozone membership are actually the problem.

Without change US will become a socialist nation

The Rest versus the old West

Moyo achieved a chemistry degree and MBA at Washington DC’s American University, a doctorate in economics from Oxford and a masters from Harvard before working as a consultant at the World Bank and then for nearly a decade at Goldman.

Economist Dambisa Moyo predicts in her new book that the West's economic dominance will collapse unless some very difficult choices are made.

By Andrew Cave

Dambisa Moyo is that rare type of person – an economist who makes waves. Her first book, Dead Aid, angered many in the charity sector by arguing that foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out.

Her second, which is published in London on Thursday, accuses America and other Western powers of squandering their world economic dominance through a sustained catalogue of fundamentally flawed policies.

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead goes so far as to predict that the US will be a “bona fide socialist welfare state” by the latter part of this century.

Peripheral Europe will never be like Germany

The End Of The Euro: What’s Austerity Got To Do With It?

By Simon Johnson

Most of the current policy discussion concerning the euro area is about austerity.  Some people – particularly in German government circles – are pushing for tighter fiscal policies in troubled countries (i.e., higher taxes and lower government spending).  Others – including in the new French government — are more inclined to push for a more expansive fiscal policy where possible and to resist fiscal contraction elsewhere.

The recently concluded G20 summit is being interpreted as shifting the balance away from the “austerity now” group, at least to some extent.  But both sides of this debate are missing the important issue.  As a result, the euro area continues its slide towards deeper crisis and likely eventual disruptive break-up.

No Peak Oil in Sight

We've Got an Unprecedented Upsurge in Global Oil Production Underway

The global oil boom underway represents the most significant increase in any decade since the 1980s.

By Mark Perry

In the tradition of resource economist Julian Simon, here are some of the conclusions and predictions from new research just published by Harvard Research Fellow Leonardo Maugeri, titled "Oil: The Next Revolution; The Unprecedented Upsurge of Oil Production Capacity""

1. Contrary to what most people believe, oil is not in short supply and oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. From a purely physical point of view, there are huge volumes of conventional and unconventional oils still to be developed, withno “peak-oil” in sight. The full deployment of the world’s oil potential depends only on price, technology, and political factors. More than 80 percent of the additional production under development globally appears to be profitable with a price of oil higher than $70 per barrel.

A Guidebook for the Urban Age

Cities may rise and fall, but the concept of the city can't be unmade

By NATE BERG

The city is both ambiguous and defined, with endless quirks but also finite borders. It's housing and politics and slang and disease and a zillion other things, a fractal-like creature that becomes more complex the closer you look. Delving in is exciting but also a little intimidating. None of that dissuaded P.D. Smith, author of the new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, an impressively comprehensive look at this very broad topic.