Why Syria Isn’t the Big Story This Week

Land policy in India is a bigger deal than sectarian politics in Syria

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

The world’s eyes are riveted on Syria this week, as the United States, France and perhaps a few others organize plans to punish a bloodstained government for its use of chemical weapons against its own people. It’s a story that has everything: the prospect of violence, the political agony of an embattled White House, David Cameron’s loss of grip, and perplexing questions about right and wrong. For liberal internationalists, few international laws are more important than those that ban the use of WMD against civilians; on the other hand, when the political patrons of a war criminal block action at the UN Security Council, liberal internationalists must choose between their highest values and their most cherished institution.

That’s why the Syria story is dominating the news this week, and like the rest of the world, VM has been following it closely. But another story that is getting less attention is much more important for the future of the world: the economic crisis in India represents a much more fateful moment in world politics than anything happening in Syria.

What’s so important about India’s economic problems? It’s more what they tell us about the state of the country than the severity of the problems themselves. The stock market jitters, the currency crash, the GDP slowdown and the government deficit aren’t enough in themselves to sink India. All economies go through rough patches every now and then, but the question isn’t about a downturn. The question is whether the Indian political system has what it takes to get the economy back on track.

Two horrible things happened in India this week: an inept government reeling from serial corruption scandals and mounting evidence of economic failure pushed two bad bills towards enactment. There’s a wasteful “food security law” that will do much more to nourish India’s rich world of government corruption than to help the poor on a sustainable basis, and a poorly designed “land reform” law that could be even more crippling.

We’ve noted the food bill before; the land law is new and its consequences could be devastating enough to India’s growth prospects to change the course of world history. In India, under a law dating from the British Raj, the government has wide powers of eminent domain. Essentially, the government is the nation’s real estate agent, organizing transactions between buyers (often Indian or foreign companies who want to build factories, or Indian government organizations wanting to build roads or other infrastructure) and the farmers and others who own the land. For many Indians, this approach makes sense for two reasons. First, there are so many small plots in India that without the convenience of government organization (and its powers of eminent domain to force unwilling holdouts to sell), it would difficult if not impossible for private organizations to get the land for big projects. The second reason is that given the low level of education among many rural people in India and their lack of economic sophistication, there is a fear that unscrupulous investors will swindle the poor unless the government is there to protect them.

Ze Germans Aren’t Coming

23 percent of German men say “zero” is the ideal family size

By Jonathan V. Last

Last week, the New York Times ran a piece on the dire demographic problems facing Germany. The short version: Germans aren’t having enough kids, and as a result the economy is in trouble and there are all sorts of logistical problems—vacant buildings that need to be razed; houses that will never be sold, sewer systems which may not function properly because they’re too empty. If you want to read the long version, I write pretty extensively about Germany’s problems in What to Expect When No One’s Expecting. 

The Times piece reaches a couple interesting conclusions. The first is that they, somewhat surprisingly, acknowledge how much trouble demographic decline represents. This is surprising not because it’s news—most economists believe, and much of the historical record suggests, that aging, declining populations are problematic. No, it’s surprising because the Times is normally one of the last bastions of the neo-Malthusian idea that small is beautiful and that shrinking populations will be good for everyone. Because, you know, this time will be different. Maybe the reporters behind the Times’s Germany story are just conservative moles.

But probably not, because the second conclusion of the piece is that what Germany needs to do is stop trying to prod families with handouts and start focusing on helping working mothers:

There is a band of fertility in Europe, stretching from France to Britain and the Scandinavian countries, helped along by immigrants and social services that support working women.

Raising fertility levels in Germany has not proved easy. Critics say the country has accomplished very little in throwing money at families in a system of benefits and tax breaks that includes allowances for children and stay-at-home mothers, and a tax break for married couples.

Demographers say that a far better investment would be to support women juggling motherhood and careers by expanding day care and after-school programs. They say recent data show that growth in fertility is more likely to come from them.

“If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,” said Reiner Klingholz of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development.

And liberal bloggers agree! So, problem solved. Prop up nationalized daycare and demographic difficulties just take care of themselves.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not that simple.

For starters, the countries in the “high fertility band” from France to Scandinavia don’t really have “high” fertility. None of them is above the replacement rate and only France is even close. Germany’s total fertility rate is about 1.43. Now, sweep down the list and look at the TFR’s in Scandinavia: Norway is at 1.77; Denmark 1.73; Sweden 1.67. That’s the “success” being heralded.

Are the Scandinavian countries better off than Germany? Sure. Are they still in a whole mess of trouble, even with their super-progressive daycare programs and cultures of gender equality? You betcha. Think about it this way: If we had Sweden’s fertility rate here in America, you’d be hearing klaxon alarms every day about the demographic cliff we had careened over.

Which leaves France. France has a legitimately great fertility rate: 2.08—which is within spitting distance of the replacement rate. But is French fertility driven by its daycare centers? Not so much. Separate out the fertility rates of native-born Frenchwomen from the foreign-born population and you see a tremendous divide. Native-born French women have a TFR around 1.7. Foreign-born French women are much higher, probably north of 2.8. (Finding hard numbers here is difficult because it is taboo in France to make such demographic distinctions. Which means that in order for French demographers to get the same numbers our Census Bureau puts out every year, they have to hand-count (and sort) birth records. For a good discussion of all of this, see Christopher Caldwell’s definitive Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.)

What the gulf between native- and foreign-born French fertility suggests is that daycare centers and gender equality have only helped France so much—about as much, actually, as they’ve helped Scandinavia. What really gives France its demographic boost has been immigration which, in the French experience, has also been a source of many problems.

There’s actually been a fair amount of academic study on the efficacy of pro-natalist measures—everything from baby bribes to state-run daycare—and the evidence suggests that none of these efforts bring about much more than marginal returns. (This econometric analysis by Gauthier and Hatzius is a good place to start, if you’re interested.)

This isn’t to say that nationalized daycare is a bad idea. If people on the left (or elsewhere) want to make a principled case that such a system is an important expression of societal values and would work as a building block in showing national seriousness about pro-natalism, then that’s a perfectly good argument and we should absolutely have that discussion.

But anyone who looks at demographic decline and says, “Hey, just give us nationalized daycare and the problem takes care of itself” is either uninformed, or trying to sell you something.

I’m not selling anything myself. (Except a book—pick up your copy of What to Expect When No One’s Expecting today!) But I’d suggest that when it comes to demographics and falling fertility rates there are no easy answers. If you want to understand how truly deep Germany’s problems run, consider this: In 2005, Europe did a Population Policy Acceptance Study which looked at a broad range of demographic indicators. One of these indicators was “ideal fertility”—that is, how many kids an individual thought was the ideal number.

Twenty-three percent of German men—that’s not a typo, 23 percent—said that “zero” was the ideal family size. There probably aren’t public policy solutions to a cultural worldview like that.

Everybody Is a Criminal

The Law – Growing Like a Weed

By Pater Tenebrarum

In a recent article at the Mises Institute entitled 'Decriminalize the Average Man', Wendy McElroy writes: 

“If you reside in America and it is dinnertime, you have almost certainly broken the law. In his book Three Felonies a Day, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate estimates that the average person unknowingly breaks at least three federal criminal laws every day. This toll does not count an avalanche of other laws — for example misdemeanors or civil violations such as disobeying a civil contempt order — all of which confront average people at every turn.” 

(emphasis added)

Along similar lines, here is a brief excerpt from Chalres Norman Fay's 'Too Much Government, Too Much Taxation', a book published in 1923 (!) on the production of laws: 

“The natural result of filling local and state legislative bodies with second- or third-rate men of small experience and limited education, who go there to make what they can out of the job; especially when coupled, as it is in most states, with the practice of paying them a per-diem allowance for time spent in session, is a flood of perfectly useless legislation.

Each alderman, representative, or senator feels, of course, that he is there to legislate, and that he ought to do something himself in that direction. Some bill must be introduced and passed that bears his name. The most enticing proposition to him is apt to be one involving the expenditure of public money in his district; or perhaps the regulating or controlling some other fellow whose ways he does not like; or per contra the throwing of something in the way of someone whom he does like.

[...]

There are a thousand reasons for introducing a thousand or more bills; and introduced they certainly are.” 

(emphasis added)

In an interview with the Austrian Economics Newsletter that he gave a while ago, Hans-Hermann Hoppe stated: 

“The democratic ruler does not invoke the principle of private property to show that he is the legitimate ruler. He invokes the principle that no property is entirely private. It follows that these people are tempted to think of law as simply legislation.

Under democracy, you can change law whenever you want. No one knows what the laws will be tomorrow. In fact, hardly anyone knows what the laws are today, because there are so many. In this way, democracy undermines the value of property and undercuts long-term planning and decision making.” 

We would submit that while in the beginning, the flood of regulation and legislation of the modern State was more or less the result of the factors Charles Fay describes above, this jungle of laws and thicket of regulations in the meantime serves a very specific purpose. By making a criminal out of everybody, as all of us are every day bound to break a number of laws and regulations without even knowing it, anyone who is disliked by the State or one its minions can be made into a target to be harassed at will.

Once there are so many laws that it would be simpler to jot down what isn't expressly forbidden yet, it is completely vain to talk of the 'rule of law'. One has in fact arrived in a state of tyranny – and an iron fist is hiding behind the velvet glove.

As Ludwig von Mises says in 'Omnipotent Government': 

“The total complex of the rules according to which those at the helm employ compulsion and coercion is called law. Yet the characteristic feature of the State is not these rules, as such, but the application or threat of violence.” 

(emphasis added) 

Striking the Root

What prompted us to write about this was an article we came across recently, in which the author complains that “Regulators Repeat Exactly What They Did During the Last Housing Boom” by failing to implement certain provisions of the 'Dodd-Frank' Act, one of the government's more weighty attempts (literally) to close the barn door long after the horse has fled. It is actually quite ironic that the act bears the names of Messrs. Dodd and Frank, who were among those most vociferously arguing in favor of the government-instituted subsidies and market distortions that led to the massive lending spree to  borrowers who were not creditworthy. This is not to say that bankers didn't act irresponsibly, but the very basis for their irresponsible acts has been created by the government.

Our first thought upon reading the article was, “what makes anyone think that a telephone book sized tome of additional regulations can somehow make us 'safer'?” After all, the mortgage credit market was already one of the most over-regulated business activities in the country prior to the housing bubble. In fact, it is a very good bet that the more regulations there are, the more unsafe the financial system will become. This is so because these regulations provide only an illusion of safety – by making everybody think that they will 'prevent' another crash, they invite precisely the kind of risk taking behavior that will in the end contribute to producing the next crash (after all, everybody knows now that nothing can go wrong anymore!).

In fact, all such complaints fail to strike the root. If the privilege of fractional reserve banking were repealed, there could be no more credit expansion that was not backed by an increase in genuine savings. There would no longer be the need for a 'lender of last resort' to bail out the banks when the inevitable busts strike and bank runs ensue as the holders of fiduciary media try to save what they can. The banking cartel could be immediately put out of business and replaced with a free banking system, i.e., a free market in money and banking. Would this require thousands of pages of regulations? Actually, no. The entire regulatory framework for such a system would fit on the back of a napkin. 

The EU: A Club For Anti-Democrats

How Brussels became a hiding place for elites sick of dealing with the demos

By Daniel Ben-Ami 

One of the most shocking political developments of recent years was the lack of any public outcry at the imposition of unelected regimes in Greece and Italy. In fact, the installation of technocratic governments in both countries in the midst of the Eurozone economic crisis in 2011 was widely welcomed. The European Union played a central role in insisting on what could reasonably be called a ‘soft coup’.

If something similar had been attempted a generation or two earlier, it would almost certainly have been met with widespread protest. Europeans might have seen such a blatant attack on democracy as normal in other parts of the world, but not at home, in the birthplace of democracy.

Such changing attitudes point to the rise of technocratic rule. Democracy, even in the limited sense of an expression of the popular will through parliament, has gone out of fashion. Indeed, there is no real politics today, in the sense of popular contestation over different visions of how society should be run. Instead, the trend is towards apolitical administration by an elite of expert technocrats. The general public, the demos in democracy, has been sidelined.

This is the backdrop to James Heartfield’s groundbreaking new book, The European Union and the End of Politics. Both parts of the title are important. Heartfield, a London-based writer and fellow contributor to spiked, explains the rise of the EU against the backdrop of the depoliticisation of nation states. He provides an innovative account of the rise of technocratic rule in its most advanced and grotesque incarnation.

For Heartfield, the drive to European integration in its current form begins in the 1980s. He avoids the common error of reading the recent experience back into earlier pan-European entities such as the European Coal and Steel Community or the European Economic Community. Indeed, technically the EU itself did not even come into existence until 1993.

The EU did not come about as a result of any democratic drive to transcend nation states and replace them with a pan-European superstate. Popular agency did not drive the change. Instead, as Heartfield points out, the EU emerged as a result of the decline of popular democracy within nation states.

Old forms of politics, such as the party system and trade unions, have lost legitimacy. The old right and the old left are both defunct. Free-market reforms have failed to achieve their goal of rolling back the state and national Keynesian solutions have not resolved underlying economic problems.

In such circumstances, the drive towards EU integration has materialised almost by default. National elites have become more dependent on their relationships with their European counterparts as a source of legitimacy. Domestic politics and political parties matter much less than in the past.

Discovery gives learning that touch of magic

Where there is no magic, there is little, if any, learning

BY VERNON L. SMITH, PH.D.

In my early childhood years, I came to think of libraries as places that surely contained all that was known, and I aspired to go to college because – I believed – that is where one learns all there is to know.

Nothing, I naively thought, was unknowable. One had only to seek knowledge. But, as I gradually learned, the action – all the learning and understanding – occurs in the pursuit of knowledge. The questions actually multiply faster than the answers, and that is the charm of education as a search process.

Fantasy is also important to a child. Dreams are fashioned of fantasy, and out of dreams come the desire for adventure, the desire to learn, and ultimately the realization that learning to learn is what is important. In dreams and fantasy nothing is unattainable – and this is not only a model for seeking, overcoming, and coming to know, but also – and most important – a model for living.

It seems that this conception of the role of fantasy for a child was quite unpopular with the constructivist psychologists of the 1950s and '60s, until it was thoughtfully reconsidered in works such as Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses of Enchantment." It's fortunate that these modern educational fads sometimes tend to be short-lived.

What has endured from my early school years are memories of pleasure and excitement in learning, a search-and-discovery process that was intrinsically rewarding. But that process was increasingly compromised by the growth of performance testing in the schools. By the high school years, "learning" had become less important in proportion to scores on achievement tests.

For example, in those tests you would read several utterly boring paragraphs of text, and then answer a bunch of questions that would measure your comprehension of the text. What I remember is how little of it was worth remembering. This continued in college, except that now the text was sometimes a bit more memorable. Also, the math and physics problems carried some intrinsic joy in the process of discovering solutions.

The Real Reason College Costs So Much

We have 115,520 janitors in the United States with bachelor's degrees or more

By ALLYSIA FINLEY

Another school year beckons, which means it's time for President Obama to go on another college retreat. "He loves college tours," says Ohio University's Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "Colleges are an escape from reality. Believe me, I've lived in one for half a century. It's like living in Disneyland. They're these little isolated enclaves of nonreality."

Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he's made himself America's foremost expert on the economics of higher education, which he distilled in his 2004 book "Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much." His analysis isn't the same as President Obama's.

This week on his back-to-school tour of New York and Pennsylvania colleges, Mr. Obama presented a new plan to make college more affordable. "If the federal government keeps on putting more and more money in the system," he noted at the State University of New York at Buffalo on Thursday, and "if the cost is going up by 250%" and "tax revenues aren't going up 250%," at "some point, the government will run out of money."

Note that for the record: Mr. Obama has admitted some theoretical limit to how much the federal government can spend.

His solution consists of tying financial aid to college performance, using government funds as a "catalyst to innovation," and making it easier for borrowers to discharge their debts. "In fairness to the president, some of his ideas make some decent, even good sense," Mr. Vedder says, such as providing students with more information about college costs and graduation rates. But his plan addresses just "the tip of the iceberg. He's not dealing with the fundamental problems."

College costs have continued to explode despite 50 years of ostensibly benevolent government interventions, according to Mr. Vedder, and the president's new plan could exacerbate the trend. By Mr. Vedder's lights, the cost conundrum started with the Higher Education Act of 1965, a Great Society program that created federal scholarships and low-interest loans aimed at making college more accessible.

In 1964, federal student aid was a mere $231 million. By 1981, the feds were spending $7 billion on loans alone, an amount that doubled during the 1980s and nearly tripled in each of the following two decades, and is about $105 billion today. Taxpayers now stand behind nearly $1 trillion in student loans.

Meanwhile, grants have increased to $49 billion from $6.4 billion in 1981. By expanding eligibility and boosting the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350, the 2009 stimulus bill accelerated higher ed's evolution into a middle-class entitlement. Fewer than 2% of Pell Grant recipients came from families making between $60,000 and $80,000 a year in 2007. Now roughly 18% do.

This growth in subsidies, Mr. Vedder argues, has fueled rising prices: "It gives every incentive and every opportunity for colleges to raise their fees."

Let Them Work!

The First Step to a Free Detroit

By Patrick Barron

I have received more personal emails regarding my earlier essay Declare Detroit a Free City than all my other essays put together. Some have been especially poignant. For example, one lady said that she and her husband, who has been unemployed for two years from a company for which he worked for twenty-five years, would move to a Free Detroit themselves, confident that her husband could find work. I pointed out to her that Ludwig von Mises explained that the only real barrier to economic expansion was the limited supply of labor, which puts a practical limit to the expansion of the division of labor. In other words, the larger the pool of labor, the more specialized is the economy, which results in lower costs of production.

No Unwilling Unemployment in a Free Market

By himself an individual cannot exist much above basic survival, if he can even do that. However, larger groups who engage in peaceful cooperation develop a division of labor which allows each individual to specialize according to his comparative advantage, accumulate capital, and provide everyone else in the group with goods and services that would be impossible for them to produce in a hermit’s existence. Given the fact of an unlimited desire to improve our condition that is limited only by the size of the labor pool, Mises explained that under free market capitalism there is no unwilling unemployment. There is always more work to be done than there are people to it. Therefore, the first step to freeing Detroit from its downward economic spiral is to remove whatever barriers exist that prevent people from working.

Step One–Free the Market for Labor

The greatest of these barriers to work are the myriad and complex laws that interfere in the ability for labor and capital to arrive at mutually agreeable terms of employment. Minimum wage laws should be the first to go, but also the many costly labor regulations that business must consider when hiring. Government has been piling on costly mandatory benefits, whether these benefits would be valued by the employee in a free labor market or not. Again, Mises explained that business must take into account the total cost of labor, not just the wage cost. If business must pay for other benefits, then that cost must be added to the explicit wage cost to arrive at the real, total cost of labor.

Protecting the All Important First Rung of the Ladder

Minimum wage laws and onerous regulation raise–or eliminate altogether–that critical first rung on the employment ladder for many workers, preventing them from gaining that all important first step on the road to independence and self-reliance. The entry level employees and younger workers, those who have less marketable skills and whom labor laws are supposed to benefit, are the ones who are harmed the most by labor laws. These workers are locked out of the labor market by the inexorable laws of economic reality. If their skills provide business with less revenue than their total costs of employment, no business can employ them for long without running out of capital. Hence, they never get on the ladder at all. This is a tragedy not only for them but for all of us, too.

Dismantling the Ladder: Cooperative Relations Under Constant Attack 

Our lawmakers seem to live in an alternative world where they believe that wages may be mandated ever upward with no adverse economic consequences. In this tragic world–where unfortunately WE live–they are doing everything possible to stop new entrants from entering the labor force and gaining the skills that businesses would be willing to give them. Currently there even is a movement afoot to outlaw the practice of “employing” interns. Internships are one way for workers with low marginal productivity to gain skills and contacts in the careers of their choice. Typically, an intern works either for free or perhaps for room, board, and a small stipend. Hypocritically, Congress itself “employs” many interns. My son was an unpaid intern for our congressman for two summers while in college. Needless to say his eyes were opened to the ways of the world, which have served him well as an attorney.

The most egregious attempt at interference in what has always been a free labor market occurred recently in the great farm state of Iowa. The U.S. Department of Labor, with assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring the children of farm families under their regulatory umbrella! The rest of us benefited immensely when Iowa’s farm families said NO!. Not only was this an intrusion into the hearths and homes of some of the most hard working and independently reliant people in America, it would have created a precedence for even more intrusions into American families’ everyday lives. Tell junior to take out the garbage and mow the grass? Make sure you pay minimum wage, buy workers’ comp insurance, and file that W-2 at the end of the year! (Don’t think that this could not have happened!)

Detroit Could Become a New Beacon of Freedom

What might ordinary people achieve if all barriers to the free use of their labor were removed? Might they not be inspired to move to such a place, set up shop, take on interns, establish apprenticeships, and produce the goods and services that all of us need and cannot produce for ourselves? They would be following in the footsteps of all those who crossed an ocean to do just that, seeking only the opportunity to live and work freely. Detroit could become the new beacon of freedom and liberty for the oppressed people of America, like the lady who told me that she and her husband would move to a Free Detroit. She and her husband would follow in the honorable tradition of our pilgrim ancestors and all who came here later seeking only freedom. Let us establish such a place, a haven free of the oppressive hand of the parasitic state. And let us establish it in the most dysfunction real estate in America–the bankrupt city of Detroit. All that our oppressors have to fear is our success. 

The Fallacy of the Public Sector

Any reduction of the public sector, any shift of activities from the public to the private sphere, is a net moral and economic gain

By  Murray N. Rothbard

We have heard a great deal in recent years of the “public sector,” and solemn discussions abound through the land on whether or not the public sector should be increased vis-à-vis the “private sector.” The very terminology is redolent of pure science, and indeed it emerges from the supposedly scientific, if rather grubby, world of “national-income statistics.” But the concept is hardly wertfrei; in fact, it is fraught with grave, and questionable, implications.

In the first place, we may ask, “public sector” of what? Of something called the “national product.” But note the hidden assumptions: that the national product is something like a pie, consisting of several “sectors,” and that these sectors, public and private alike, are added to make the product of the economy as a whole. In this way, the assumption is smuggled into the analysis that the public and private sectors are equally productive, equally important, and on an equal footing altogether, and that “our” deciding on the proportions of public to private sector is about as innocuous as any individual’s decision on whether to eat cake or ice cream. The State is considered to be an amiable service agency, somewhat akin to the corner grocer, or rather to the neighborhood lodge, in which “we” get together to decide how much “our government” should do for (or to) us. Even those neoclassical economists who tend to favor the free market and free society often regard the State as a generally inefficient, but still amiable, organ of social service, mechanically registering “our” values and decisions.

One would not think it difficult for scholars and laymen alike to grasp the fact that government isnot like the Rotarians or the Elks; that it differs profoundly from all other organs and institutions in society; namely, that it lives and acquires its revenues by coercion and not by voluntary payment. The late Joseph Schumpeter was never more astute than when he wrote, “The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”[1]

Apart from the public sector, what constitutes the productivity of the “private sector” of the economy? The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing “something,” anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers. Businessmen and other producers direct their energies, on the free market, to producing those products that will be most rewarded by the consumers, and the sale of these products may therefore roughly “measure” the importance that the consumers place upon them. If millions of people bend their energies to producing horses-and-buggies, they will, in this day and age, not be able to sell them, and hence the productivity of their output will be virtually zero. On the other hand, if a few million dollars are spent in a given year on Product X, then statisticians may well judge that these millions constitute the productive output of the X-part of the “private sector” of the economy.

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor, and capital-goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. Therefore, while the statistics of the total output of the private sector seem to be a mere adding of numbers, or counting units of output, the measures of output actually involve the important qualitative decision of considering as “product” what the consumers are willing to buy. A million automobiles, sold on the market, are productive because the consumers so considered them; a million buggies, remaining unsold, would not have been “product” because the consumers would have passed them by.

Bombing Syria: War as Therapy

It is the height of adolescent stupidity to take action without thinking of the consequences

By Brendan O’Neil

War used to be the pursuit of politics by other means. Today, if the statements made by the Western politicos and observers who want to bomb Syria are anything to go by, it’s the pursuit of therapy by other means. The most startling and unsettling thing about the clamour among some Westerners for a quick, violent punishment of the Assad regime is its nakedly narcissistic nature. Gone is realpolitik and geostrategy, gone is the PC gloss that was smeared over other recent disastrous Western interventions to make them seem substantial, from claims about spreading human rights to declarations about facing down terrorism, and all we’re left with is the essence of modern-day Western interventionism: a desire to offset moral disarray at home by staging a fleeting, bombastic moral showdown with ‘evil’ in a far-off field.

Easily the most notable thing in the debate about bombing Syria in response to Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians is the absence of geopolitical considerations, or of any semi-serious thought about what the regional or international consequences of dropping bombs into an already hellish warzone might be. Instead, all the talk is of making a quick moral gesture about ourselves by firing a few missiles at wickedness. In the words of a Democratic member of the US Foreign Affairs Committee, there might be ‘very complex issues’ in Syria, but ‘we, as Americans, have a moral obligation to step in without delay’. Who cares about complexity when there’s an opportunity to show off our own moral decency?

All the discussion so far has focused, not on the potential moral consequences of bombing Syria, but on the moral needs of those who would do the bombing. US secretary of state John Kerry says failing to take action on Syria would call into question the West’s ‘own moral compass’. Others talk about Syria as a ‘test for Europe’, as if this rubble-strewn country is little more than a stage for the working-out of our values. So intense is the narcissism of the bomb-Syria brigade that that one of its number describes the slaughter caused by the use of chemical weapons as ‘a question mark painted in blood, aimed at the international community’. They’re so vain, they think someone else’s war is all about them. Onepro-bombing commentator says the situation in Syria ‘holds a mirror up to Britain’, asking ‘what sort of country are we?’. Like Narcissus, the beaters of the drum for war on Assad are concerned only with their own image, their own reflection, and the question of whether they’ll be able to look at themselves in the mirror if they fail to Do Something.

Strikingly, not only do bomb-Syria folk fail to think seriously about geopolitical matters – they actively brush aside such pesky complex questions in their pursuit of the instant moral hit that comes from dropping a bomb on evil. One observer says of course military action in Syria is not ‘guaranteed to succeed’, but it nonetheless gives us Brits an opportunity to advertise our moral resolve and principles. Philip Collins, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair, has openly admitted that ‘intervention… will mean chaos’. ‘But there is chaos already’, he says, and at least the chaos we might cause will be giving voice to our ‘revulsion’ at Assad’s crimes, a ‘revulsion too profound to be written off as adolescent or unrealistic’. ‘It is important to add weight to our moral impulse’, Collins wrote.

Think about what is being said here: that it doesn’t matter if our attack on Syria doesn’t succeed (at whatever it is meant to do, which no one has spelled out), or even if it intensifies the bloodshed and chaos in that benighted nation. All that matters is that we in the West add physical weight – in the shape of bombs – to our ‘moral impulse’. Such blasé barbarism was taken to its logical conclusion by Norman Geras, co-author of the pro-war Euston Manifesto, when he wrote: ‘Since it is urgent that we respond somehow, out of solidarity, of our “common human heritage” with the victims, action must be taken even if it means meeting chaos with chaos and (by implication) that the chaos we cause turns out to be worse than the chaos we’re trying to bring to an end.’ (My emphasis.)

This is extraordinary stuff. It exposes what lies at the heart of modern Western interventionism – a desire to make a massive, fiery display of our own ‘moral impulse’, of the West’s flagging sense of ‘common human heritage’, regardless of the consequences on the ground or around the world. In our era, Western intervention is increasingly demanded and pursued, not as a specific, targeted thing that might change the shape of a conflict or further the geopolitical interests of Western nations, but as a kind of bloody amplifier of the presumed probity of the Western political class. At a time when both politics and morality at home are in a profound state of disarray, when there’s little of substance that can unite Western elites or populations, we’re seeing a desperate turn to foreign fields in search of the sort of black-and-white clarity and sense of mission that eludes our rulers domestically. That’s why John Kerry says opposing wickedness in Syria is a ‘conviction shared even by countries that agree on little else’. Firing some rockets at Syria might just provide a thrilling if fleeting boost to the ‘moral impulses’ of a confused Western elite. And if it ends up making things worse? Doesn’t matter. Tough shit. At least we’ll have given voice to our collective revulsion.

Obama set for holy Tomahawk war

Mix Kosovo with Libya and voila!

By Pepe Escobar 

The ''responsibility to protect'' (R2P) doctrine invoked to legitimize the 2011 war on Libya has just transmogrified into ''responsibility to attack'' (R2A) Syria. Just because the Obama administration says so. 

On Sunday, the White House said it had ''very little doubt'' that the Bashar al-Assad government used chemical weapons against its own citizens. On Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry ramped it up to ''undeniable'' - and accused Assad of ''moral obscenity''. 

So when the US bombed Fallujah with white phosphorus in late 2004 it was just taking the moral high ground. And when the US helped Saddam Hussein to gas Iranians in 1988 it was also taking the moral high ground. 

The Obama administration has ruled that Assad allowed UN chemical weapons inspectors into Syria, and to celebrate their arrival unleashed a chemical weapons attack mostly against women and children only 15 kilometers away from the inspectors' hotel. If you don't believe it, you subscribe to a conspiracy theory. 

Evidence? Who cares about evidence? Assad's offer of access for the inspectors came ''too late''. Anyway, the UN team is only mandated to determine whether chemical weapons were deployed - but not by who, according to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon's spokesman. 

As far as the Obama administration and UK Prime Minister David ''of Arabia'' Cameron are concerned - supported by a barrage of corporate media missiles - that's irrelevant; Obama's ''red line'' has been crossed by Assad, period. Washington and London are in no-holds-barred mode to dismiss any facts contradicting the decision. Newspeak - of the R2A kind - rules. If this all looks like Iraq 2.0 that's because it is. Time to fix the facts around the policy - all over again. Time for weapons of mass deception - all over again. 

The Saudi-Israeli axis of fun

The window of opportunity for war is now. Assad's forces were winning from Qusayr to Homs; pounding ''rebel'' remnants out of the periphery of Damascus; deploying around Der'ah to counterpunch CIA-trained ''rebels'' with advanced weapons crossing the Syrian-Jordanian border; and organizing a push to expel ''rebels'' and jihadis from suburbs of Aleppo. 

Now, Israel and Saudi Arabia are oh so excited because they are getting exactly what they dream just by good ol' Wag the Dog methods. Tel Aviv has even telegraphed how it wants it: this Monday, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper headlined with ''On the Way to Attack'' and even printed the ideal Order of Battle. (see photo) 

Months ago, even AMAN, the Intelligence Directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) concluded that Assad was not a fool to cross Obama's chemical weapon ''red line''. So they came up with the concept of ''two entwined red lines'', the second line being the Syrian government ''losing control of its chemical weapons depots and production sites''. AMAN then proposed different strategies to Washington, from a no-fly zone to actually seizing the weapons (implying a ground attack). 

It's now back to the number one option - air strikes on the chemical weapons depots. As if the US - and Israel - had up-to-the-minute intelligence on exactly where they are. 

Bernanke: Maestro of misery

Obama and Bernanke's model offers a perfect model of chaos and misery

By Noureddine Krichene 

The US enjoyed two decades of prosperity initiated by Ronald Reagan's policies. Come Ben Bernanke, the top economic policy maker of the George W Bush administration, and prosperity ended and was succeeded by falling real incomes; financial chaos spread in the United States and elsewhere. 

Bernanke's cheap money policy set off housing, stocks, and commodity booms; all these booms had to crash in 2008 leaving behind bankruptcies; millions of foreclosures; inflation and poverty; debt crises; massive unemployment in the US and Europe; record fiscal deficits; and rapidly rising public debts. With all this lousy record, Bernanke should have retired as Federal Reserve chairman in 2008, along with Bush and the Bush team, or even rightly been dismissed by the US Congress.

No surprise, Barack Obama entrusted Bernanke to restore prosperity and full-employment. The CEO of Asiana would never retain the pilot of the recent doomed 214 flight; nor would the owner of the Costa Concordia retain the captain of the doomed cruise liner. 

Yet Obama wanted a most extreme fiscal policy, which relied on Bernanke's most extreme policy of near-zero interest rates and rivers of money called quantitative easing for its financing. Fanatical about their ideologies, both men were confident that ultra-expansionary policies would yield prompt prosperity and full employment. 

Unfortunately, these policies are failing now as they did in the past; economic growth is slow; unemployment and inflation remain high; stock prices have shattered records amid economic stagnation; a housing boom is underway; a currency war is raging; crude oil prices remain high; and massive wealth redistribution is under way via asset speculation, credit, and welfare. Europe and Japan are forced into producing cheap money. 

Uncertainty is very high. Bernanke keeps reassuring speculators that near-zero interest rates and rivers of money are to stay around forever (though occasionally hinting at the prospect of a change in tack). He considers money printing a panacea for all: firing up stock and home prices; depreciating exchange rates creating full employment; financing deficits; growing corn; pumping oil; constructing houses; and so on and so on. 

Obama and Bernanke have created the most unmanageable fiscal and money disequilibria. US government debt, at 120% of GDP, is still building up due to exceptionally large fiscal deficits; domestic debt, at about 400% of GDP, is rising fast. Bernanke has tied himself to no exit except push forward with more inflation. 

Bernanke is like a man who jumps from a tall building and thinks he can stop anywhere he wishes in mid-air. Gravitation forces work differently. He is out of control. If interest rates rise, as in 2005, all credit will tumble; stocks, already highly overvalued, will crash. 

To avoid a gigantic collapse, he has to keep printing trillions of dollars. Moreover, Obama has created a large dependency on welfare programs; any cut will severely affect the livelihoods of 100 million or more people who depend on these programs and will be met by ferocious opposition. It is difficult to roll back government spending once it has been put in place.

U.S. Once Again Flouts Russian and Chinese Interests

Both myopic and counterproductive 

By Ted Galen Carpenter

The apparent use of chemical weapons in Syria's civil war has produced shrill calls for launching air strikes on the regime of Bashar al Assad. Even the inconvenient detail that the source of the chemical attack is not clear has not deterred advocates of a U.S-led military response. Some proponents have latched onto the 1999 NATO war in Kosovo as an ideal precedent. Kosovo is a precedent all right-an object lesson for why going to war in Syria would be morally dubious and strategically unwise.

Adopting that approach especially has the potential to cause serious tensions in Washington's already delicate ties with China and Russia. Policy regarding Kosovo has been a festering sore on U.S. relations with those countries since the original crisis in the late 1990s. The supposedly inadvertent U.S. bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade in 1999 was only the most spectacular example of the diplomatic carnage.

Indeed, for Chinese and Russian leaders, Kosovo has become a symbol of Washington's contempt for international law and disdain for the prerogatives of other major powers in the international system. No rational person should wish to replicate that outcome by pursuing the same high-handed strategy in response to the Syria conflict.

President Bill Clinton and his supporters insisted that adequate international support was sufficient authorization for U.S. action against Serbia over the Kosovo issue, even absent congressional approval. International support typically meant a UN Security Council resolution-an argument that George H.W. Bush made before belatedly deciding, under domestic public pressure, to seek congressional authorization for the Persian Gulf War.

The Kosovo conflict, though, posed a problem for pro-war internationalists in the U.S. foreign policy community. Both Russia and China vehemently opposed intervention against Serbia, and there was, therefore, no chance of passing a Security Council Resolution authorizing the use of force. Clinton administration officials overcame that impediment by simply bypassing the Council just as they bypassed Congress. "Sufficient international support" now meant support from the U.S.-dominated NATO alliance.

Washington's subsequent actions under the administration of George W. Bush further antagonized Beijing and Moscow and undermined international security cooperation. Bush took the Kosovo precedent one step further with the invasion of Iraq. Once again, Russia and China believed that military action was unwarranted and threatened to use their Security Council vetoes. This time, even NATO was divided, so U.S. leaders could not use the alliance's imprimatur as supposed sufficient justification for an armed intervention. Washington overcame that problem by arguing that endorsement by an ad hoc "coalition of the willing" (or as cynical wags described it, the coalition of the bribed and bullied) constituted adequate international support. Seething leaders in Russia and China disagreed.

The Bush administration was not done showing its contempt for the views and rights of its fellow permanent members on the Security Council. Although the Council had reluctantly authorized the NATO-led postwar occupation of Kosovo under nominal UN auspices, Beijing and Moscow assumed that the province would not be granted independence from Serbia without another Council vote. But the United States, Britain, and France adopted a markedly different course. They recognized Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008-once again over the strenuous objections of China and Russia.