The Most Despised Tax-And-Retreat French President Sinks Deeper Into Economic Quagmire

Nothing seems to work. Squeezing the French has reached its limit.

By Wolf Richter   

The French habitually appear to be on the verge of having had it. But the incidents have been getting denser, more frequent. There were the protests in the Bretagne and elsewhere, followed by "operation snail" where 2,100 heavy trucks drove side by side down major expressways at a snail’s pace, with everyone behind them going nuts. Every day, there are protests organized by different organizations. On Thursday, the farmers went to town, to Paris more specifically. They were getting there by driving their tractors on major highways, setting up roadblocks as they went, snarling traffic for miles.

They’re all protesting the relentless onslaught of new taxes. At first, buoyant from an election victory, President François Hollande and his government went after the rich then quickly hit even modest households, farmers, truckers, craftsmen, everyone who does or buys anything. Because it’s never enough. In January, the Value Added Tax hike will take effect. For the top tier of items, the VAT will only increase from 19.6% to 20%. But for some of the lower tier items, it will be jacked up massively. For example, for the equestrian industry, the VAT will jump from 7% to 20% – hence the protests the other day.

Now the farmers have had it. While at it, they’re also protesting EU rules on how they should run their businesses and anti-pollution laws that would limit the use of tractors on some days. The word "insurrection" is showing up in the media, though it's still more an exaggeration than a description. "Fiscal discontent” is better, but not broad enough.

After 18 months in office, Hollande's ratings have plunged to the lowest levels of any president since 1958, according to an Ifop/JDD poll, the only poll going back this far. A mere 20% of the French were satisfied with him; 17% among workers and employees; 15% among merchants and craftsmen. Even his erstwhile supporters have abandoned him.

And 79% were dissatisfied. Cited were "social desperation" of the people affected by his policies, but also his leadership qualities, his apparent "inability to decide," his "lack of discipline," his tendency to make decisions and then, when the volume gets too loud, withdraw them. It leaves the country rudderless.

Who could do a better job? Maybe Santa Claus.

Because no one else seems to be able to, in the eyes of the French. Turns out, 74% think that any of the major figures of the UMP, the party of former President Sarkozy, would do worse or no better. And on the right-wing where Marine Le Pen reigns with her National Front (FN)? 79% of the respondents think she’d be worse or no better than Hollande. There simply is no savior in sight. Much less a solution.

US-Afghan pact at impasse?

The Indian Ocean region will now inherit the tensions and contradictions of the new cold war

by John Holmes
Every cloud has a silver lining. When it seemed that the US-Afghan pact is all but wrapped up on Washington’s terms and nothing can now stop its signing before the end of the year — the Obama administration has even begun briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill regarding the provisions of the pact — a glitch seems to pop up from nowhere. 

The BBC has flagged, here, that the deal is “at impasse” ahead of the Loya Jirga meeting in Kabul next week because of disagreement over a key provision concerning the prerogative of the US forces’ operational freedom to enter Afghan homes. 

Kabul apparently feels “very strongly about this,” while the American side wants to continue the practice of entering Afghan properties. The quarrel may seem a storm in a tea cup but it isn’t really, since the Afghan opinion strongly militates against the manner in which foreigners invaded the privacy of their homes. 

Yet, this could also be a clever PR ploy by President Hamid Karzai after having caved in to meet the American demands on the key provisions of the pact. Karzai is brilliant in grandstanding and he probably hopes to present himself as an honest broker in front of the 3000 tribal leaders who assemble for the jirga in Kabul. 

He’s reason to be nervous that he is ramming down the throat of the Afghan nation a deal that formalises the open-ended foreign occupation of his country — and, there are already bad omens. Having said that, it is tempting to hope that the BBC report is for real and the US-Afghan difference would prove a deal-breaker. 

World War I once more?

We are probably better protected against the outbreak of global war than they were in 1914, but not by much

By Martin Hutchinson 

In early August next year, it will have been 100 years since investors suffered a very nasty shock indeed, when the London and New York stock markets closed for some five months and many international bonds previously thought to be high-grade proved worthless. It should be remembered: for the average investor, World War I, the cause of this disruption, blew up very quickly out of a clear blue sky. 

The sky is again blue; certainly many markets, notably that for US stocks, are priced as if it were positively ultra-violet. So could such an event occur again? 

The closure of the New York market at the outbreak of World War I had surprisingly little effect; the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened on December 12, 1914, at 54.3, somewhat above the 52.6 at which it had closed on July 30. The market then went into a steady upward march, so that by the peak in November 1916, after Woodrow Wilson had won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of war", it had more than doubled to 110. 

Needless to say, the US actually entering the war was a dreadful shock to the investor class, and fighting the battles proved much less profitable than supplying munitions for them, so that by the nadir of Allied fortunes in May 1918, the index had dropped by about a third to the mid-70s. 

Nevertheless, at the end of 1919, it was once again at the 1916 peak, although wartime inflation meant that investors who had held since 1914 had achieved little profit in real terms, had received some nice juicy dividends, but had paid some unpleasant taxes, at ordinary income tax rates, on capital gains that were purely the result of inflation. 

The London Stock Exchange had no index before the Financial Times established one in 1935, reflecting the greater amateurishness of London equity markets compared with New York. Even though London was the center of world finance in 1914, and the London merchant banks were the world's most sophisticated, they played little role in equity financing, which was handled by stock brokers and dubious company promoters unconnected with the better end of the business. 

Stock prices, which had been sluggish during the Edwardian period, declined sharply during World War I, while inflation soared so by 1919 real prices were less than half what they had been in 1914. In France, stock prices declined even more than they did in Britain, while in Germany, stocks were little protection against the virulent inflation that took hold during the war, before giving way to the hyperinflation of 1923. Thus for investors as a whole, World War I was an unmitigated disaster, with only American investors and those in some of the neutral countries such as Sweden managing to preserve their wealth more or less intact in real terms. 

The economic causes of World War I have been largely neglected. Much modern scholarship, notably Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers published earlier this year, has shown that the major protagonists in World War I were not very aggressive in their outlook, that the system of alliances which Britain fatally joined with the 1904 Entente Cordiale was inherently destabilizing, and that the assassination of the Archduke Frank Ferdinand was merely one of a number of possible triggers, albeit a trigger that with better diplomacy by Britain in particular need never have resulted in conflagration. 

The neglected causes of conflict however were the barriers to trade in the pre-1914 world, which was not fully globalized and had economic rivalries at least as destabilizing as political ones. Whereas travel between the major countries was freer than today, with passports unnecessary to visit most countries, the trade system was highly protectionist. 

What’s behind 21st-century anti-Semitism?

More and more people project their disdain for the modern world on to ‘the Jew’

By Frank Furedi’s

First, a health warning. For some time now it has been difficult to have a grown-up discussion about anti-Semitism. In post-Second World War Europe, this issue, perhaps more than any other, has provoked powerful memories and emotions. The debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism, and where it is being expressed, can be a moral minefield, and it can impact both positively and negatively on European attitudes towards Jewish people. As a result, there are frequently controversies about whether or not a certain statement or act is anti-Semitic.

For example, in early January an appeals court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that Henryk Broder, a German-Jewish journalist, could describe the statements made by a fellow Jew, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, as anti-Semitic. ‘Even German courts are beginning to understand that it is not enough to be Jewish in order not to be anti-Semitic’, boasted Broder (1). This court case highlighted another difficulty in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism today. In recent times, how Jews are perceived has become closely bound up with the issue of Israel. So Broder had denounced the Jewess Hecht-Galinski as anti-Semitic because she had equated Israel’s policies with those of Nazi Germany. As far as Hecht-Galinski was concerned, Broder’s claim that her criticism of Israel in such a fashion was ‘anti-Semitic’ represented defamation against her character.

Disputes such as this one should remind us that there is a powerful subjective and interpretative element to how we characterise another individual’s words and behaviour – and these acts of interpretation can be influenced by unstated cultural and political assumptions. Today, there are at least four important trends that complicate our understanding of how anti-Semitism works.

First of all, contemporary Western culture continually encourages groups that perceive themselves as victims to inflate the wrongs perpetuated against them. As a result, we are always being told that racism is more prevalent than ever before, or that homophobia and Islamophobia are rising, or that sexual discrimination is more powerful than in the past. It is unthinkable today for advocacy groups to concede that prejudice and discrimination against their members have decreased, and that the status of their community or people has improved. Such groups are acutely sensitive to how they are represented in the media, and to the language in which they are discussed and described. And this identity-based sensitivity is shared by Jewish organisations, too, which in recent decades have often been all-too-willing to interpret what are in fact confused and ambiguous references to their people as expressions of anti-Semitism.

Consequently, the charge that a certain statement is ‘anti-Semitic’ should not be accepted at face value. Statements and acts need to be analysed and interpreted in the context in which they were made or carried out. It is particularly important to resist the temptation to characterise speech or behaviour as anti-Semitic by second-guessing its real meaning. An objective assessment demands analysis of what was actually said, rather than speculation about its ‘true’ or ‘hidden’ meaning. Just as we already have the irrational concept of ‘unwitting racism’ in the UK, we may soon end up with charges of ‘unwitting anti-Semitism’ being made against those individuals judged by other people’s interpretive wits to be anti-Semitic.

The second complication is that, in recent decades, the defenders of Zionism have developed the unfortunate habit of labelling criticisms of Israel as a form of anti-Semitism. The aim of these rhetorical attacks is to devalue the moral standing of Israel’s critics, and thus avoid having to deal with their often difficult, persuasive arguments. The cumulative impact of this very defensive response to criticism of Israel is to undermine the moral weight of charges of anti-Semitism. Those who are anti-Zionist are often able to accuse Israeli politicians and their supporters of ‘hiding behind’ the charge of anti-Semitism. Worse still, the pro-Israel movement’s propagandistic association of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has encouraged others to erode the conceptual distinction between Zionism and Jews.

B-H Levy and the destruction of Libya

Neither morality nor philosophy has much to do with Levy and his unending quest for war

By Ramzy Baroud 
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is "the world's most influential Jew", Bernard-Henri Levy is number 45, according to an article published in the the Jerusalem Post, on May 21, 2010. Levy, per the Post's standards, came only two spots behind Irving Moskowitz, a "Florida-based tycoon considered the leading supporter of Jewish construction in east Jerusalem". 

To claim that at best Levy is an intellectual fraud is to miss a clear logic that seems to unite much of the man's activities, work and writings. He seems obsessed with "liberating" Muslims, from Bosnia to Pakistan, to Libya and elsewhere. However, this would not qualify as a healthy obsession stemming from overt love for and fascination with their religion, culture and myriad ways of life. 

Throughout his oddly defined career, Levy has done much harm by at times serving as a lackey for those in power, and at others leading his own crusades. He is a big fan of military intervention, and his profile is dotted with references to Muslim countries and military intervention from Afghanistan to Sudan and finally Libya. 

Writing in the New York magazine on Dec 26, 2011, Benjamin Wallace-Wells spoke of the French "philosopher" as if he were referencing a messiah that was not afraid to promote violence for the greater good of mankind. 

In "European Superhero Quashes Libyan Dictator", Wallace-Wells wrote of the "philosopher [who] managed to goad the world into vanquishing an evil villain". The villain in question is, of course, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who was ousted and brutally murdered after reportedly being sodomized by rebels following his capture in October 2011. 

A detailed analysis by Global Post of the sexual assault of the leader of one of Africa's most prominent countries was published in CBS news and other media. 

Levy, who at times appeared to be the West's most visible war-on-Libya advocate, has largely disappeared from view within the Libyan context. He is perhaps stirring trouble in some other place in the name of his dubious philosophy. His mission in Libya, which is now in a much worse state it has ever reached during the reign of Gaddafi, has been accomplished. The "evil dictator" has been defeated, and that's that. 

Never mind that the country is now divided between tribes and militias, and that the "post-democracy" Prime Minister Ali Zeidan was recently kidnapped by one unruly militia to be freed by another. 

The President of Mongolia preaches freedom to North Korea – in North Korea

I believe in the power of freedom

A speech given at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang by the president of Mongolia late last month has caused raised eyebrows for its starkly critical portrayal of the follies of tyrannical rule and the repression of human rights.

President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj delivered the speech on the final day of his visit to North Korea. Mongolia has traditionally maintained friendly relations with the North, but the tenor of the speech is bound to have caused surprise even though it was delivered before an audience of relative loyalists.

Relative loyalists. Now there’s a choice phrase. I’m guessing it does not mean people who are literally blood relatives of the ruling dynasty.

Under this report, Daily NK reproduces the full text of the President’s speech, and it is well worth a read.

Quote (and it is very quotable):

I believe in the power of freedom. Freedom is an asset bestowed upon every single man and woman. Freedom enables every human to discover and realize his or her opportunities and chances for development. This leads a human society to progress and prosperity. Free people look for solutions in themselves. And those without freedom search for the sources of their miseries from outside. Mongols say, “better to live by your own choice however bitter it is, than to live by other’s choice, however sweet”.

See what I mean about quotable?

No tyranny lasts forever. It is the desire of the people to live free that is the eternal power.

You surely do now.

In 1990 Mongolia made a dual political and economic transition, concurrently, without shattering a single window and shedding a single drop of blood. Let me draw just one example. Over twenty years ago, the sheer share of the private sector in Mongolia’s GDP was less than 10%, whereas today it accounts for over 80%. So, a free society is a path to go, a way to live, rather than a goal to accomplish.

As I say, remarkable. Pessimists may say: it’s just words. But words matter. Why would any of us bother with reading and writing the stuff here if words did not matter?

I never used to like those Mongols much. Now, I find myself warming to them.

Europe’s Bank Money Blues

Faced with intense regulatory pressures, banks in Europe have been deleveraging big time

BY STEVE HANKE

Well, it’s official, the economic talking head establishment has declared war on Germany. The opening shots in this battle were fired by none other than the United States Treasury Department, which had the audacity to blame Germany for a weak Eurozone recovery in its semi-annual foreign exchange report. The Treasury’s criticisms were echoed by IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton, in a recent speech in Berlin — a speech so incendiary that the IMF opted to post the “original draft,” rather than his actual comments, on its website. Things were kicked into a full blitzkrieg when Paul Krugman penned his latest German-bashing New York Times column.

The claims being leveled against Germany revolve around nebulous terms like “imbalances” and “deflationary biases.” But, what’s really going on here? The primary complaint being leveled is that Germany’s exports are too strong, and domestic consumption is too weak. In short, the country is producing more than it consumes. Critics argue that “excess” German exports are making it harder for other countries (including the U.S.) to recover in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

While a review of international trade statistics is all well and good, the ire against Germany actually comes down to one thing: austerity. Despite Germany’s relatively strong recovery, the international economic establishment is none too happy about the country’s tight fiscal ship. If only Germany would crank up government spending, then Germans would buy more goods, and all would be right in the Eurozone, and around the world - the argument goes.

Yes, the anti-austerity crowd has found a convenient way to both slam austerity and scapegoat one of the few countries to successfully rebound from the crisis. I would add that it is hardly a coincidence that this line of argument fits nicely into the fiscalist message of Germany’s Social Democratic party, with whom Chancellor Angela Merkel is currently trying to arrange a governing coalition.

Meet the miserabilists who think Filipinos bred themselves into disaster

We have to shoot down the storm of Malthusian and modernity-bashing bullshit that now follows every natural disaster that takes place

By PATRICK HAYES

All environmental problems become harder, and ultimately impossible, to solve with ever more people.’ So said Sir David Attenborough, the highest profile patron of Population Matters (PM), formerly the Optimum Population Trust, the campaigning organisation dedicated to curbing population growth. The Attenborough outlook infuses all of PM’s propaganda. Everything PM pumps out contains the same brutally reductive message: that people’s fecundity, all their casual breeding, makes everything from natural disasters to poverty worse than it needs to be.

Malnutrition in the Yemen? ‘A root cause is too many people’, says PM. Famine in Ethiopia? ‘The underlying cause is population growth.’ Drought in England? ‘Too many people for the water available.’

So no prizes for guessing what PM believes was a major contributor to the destruction caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines last week. Yep, too many bloody Filipinos. Under the headline, ‘Big families and typhoons’, PM tells us: ‘The sheer numbers of people mean that more suffer when storms… strike.’ It’s classic victim-blaming – you are suffering because you had too many children and allowed your towns and cities to swarm with human beings.

According to PM, the suffering in the Philippines was exacerbated by a condition that afflicts more than 80 per cent of Filipinos: Catholicism. ‘While family planning is now legal [in the Philippines]’, says PM, ‘decades of rearguard action by the conservative local Catholic hierarchy means that access and use is limited’. The result is that the average birth rate remains at ‘around three per woman’, causing the nightmarish scenario (in PM’s view anyway) of a fivefold increase in the Filipino population since 1950, from 19 million back then to nearly 100 million today. And this is what made Haiyan so destructive, apparently – the massive numbers of Catholic-lectured people having more and more babies put ‘pressure on space and resources’, making the nation more ‘vulnerable to storms’. In a nutshell: these poor Catholic baby machines have bred themselves into disaster.

But how true is it that the Philippines has peculiar ‘pressures on space’, with loads of people crammed into small places? It’s actually the fortieth most population-dense country in the world, with 329 people per square kilometre. There are many far more densely populated countries that do not suffer the same problems as the Philippines, even when big natural disasters occur. Belgium, for example, has 366 per sq km. Holland has almost 500. Hong Kong has 6,516. Which rather puts paid to PM’s claim that numbers of people and amount of space necessarily make natural disasters worse when they hit. What people in the Philippines need is not ‘help [to] manage their family size’, as PM proposes, but rather industry, development, more economic growth; if the Philippines were more like Hong Kong, it would be better prepared to deal with natural problems that arise.

Left and Right

When E.F. Hutton Talks

BY W BEN HUNT PHD

The concept of utility is the most fundamental concept in economics. It gets wrapped up in impressive sounding terms like “exogenous preference functions”, and written in all sorts of arcane runes and formulas, but all utility means is that you like something more than something else. The assumptions that economic theory makes about utility are really pretty simple and mostly about consistency — if you like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate ice cream, and chocolate more than strawberry, then economic theory assumes you also like vanilla more than strawberry — and continuity — if you like one scoop of vanilla ice cream, then you like two scoops even more. But as far as what you like, what your tastesor preferences are in ice cream or music — or health insurance plans — economic theory is intentionally silent. Economics is all about making rational decisions given some set of likes and dislikes. It doesn’t presume to tell you what you should like or dislike, and it assumes that you do in fact know what you like or dislike.

Or at least that’s what economic theory used to proclaim. Today economic theory is used as the intellectual foundation for a political stratagem that goes something like this: you do not know what you truly like, and in particular you do not know your economic self-interest, but luckily for you we are here to fix that. This is the common strand between QE and Obamacare. The former says that you are wrong to prefer safety to risk in your investments, and so we will fix that misconception of yours by making it extremely painful for you not to take greater investment risks than you would otherwise prefer. The latter says that you are wrong to prefer no health insurance or a certain type of health insurance to another type of health insurance, and so we will make it illegal for you to do anything but purchase a policy that we are certain you would prefer if only you were thinking more clearly about all this.

Secrets And Lies

Fiat Truth is the currency of power

Every credit has its debit, every positive its negative. So for every secret there must be a lie, and every lie must be kept secret.

We are not allowed to have any secrets any more.  And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us. in return, only lies.

It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.

Living the lie

We all know the famous Goebbels quote,

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

From Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to goal because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question.

The eye of providence looks out and approves of what is done – Annuit cœptis.

But who does the all seeing eye, that sits atop  the pyramid of power on the mighty dollar bill, work for now? Is it really you and me?  That is what we are told to believe. But is it true? I think there are too many secrets but few of them are yours and mine.

The private dealings of the ordinary citizen are considered suspect and must, we are told, be rooted out. The secrets and outright lies of the corporate and governmental worlds, however – they are confidential. They are protected – behind razor-wire threats of  legal action and closed door tribunals of hand picked experts.

A few weeks ago I sat and listened to the former leader of the Conservative party, now an elder statesman of British politics, Michael Howard, tell an audience that governments need to lie. He is a clever man. He quoted Goebbels and then gave this carefully chosen example.

Imagine, he said, that a Chancellor knew that he was going to have to devalue the currency. The evening before the appointed hour, he is asked by a journalist if he is going to devalue. If he tells the truth and says yes, there will be a run on the currency and great damage will be done. So he lies. “No”, he says, “I have absolutely no plans to devalue at all.” And then next morning he devalues as he had planned.

Mankind’s brilliant victories over nature’s whims

The dignity and excellence of man

By Brendan O’Neill

How’s this for heartening: the number of people in Europe dying from heart disease has more than halved since the 1980s. Halved. In almost every EU country there has been a ‘dramatic drop’ in death by cardiovascular disease, said a study published last week in the European Heart Journal. Among both women and men (yes, even among blokes, those apparently health-unaware ticking timebombs of physical malaise), and among every age group, including the over-65s, there has been a ‘large and significant decrease in death rates from heart disease’, said the study. If anything deserves a ‘Wow’, it’s these findings.

In a nutshell: in the space of one generation, in the time it took for Madonna to go from singing ‘Holiday’ to adopting black babies from Africa, mankind has won some massive, tide-turning battles in the war on heart disease. Which is really a war on nature, of course - on capricious nature’s failure to provide us with hearts that can withstand all the crap we throw at them, from physical exertion to fatty foods to emotional stress.

Even in the US, which some Europeans have a sniffy tendency to look upon as a land of elephantine eating habits and corresponding bodily rot, heart disease is in retreat from humanity’s scalpel-waving charge: there’s been ‘a substantial, persistent and remarkable decline in deaths from heart disease’ in the US, as one study puts it. In every year since 1968, heart-disease death rates in the US have fallen. In 2012, around 600,000 Americans died from heart disease; sad, yes – but if the death rate had remained at its 1968 levels, closer to 1.5million would have died.

Mankind’s creeping victory over heart disease is, ultimately, a story of targeted human endeavour, of scientific and technological discoveries conspiring to do away with one of the major ailments that prevents people from living full, long lives. Anti-smoking moral entrepreneurs, adept at hogging the headlines, insist heart-disease death rates are falling because people are giving up cigarettes. In truth, it’s a combination of medical and technological breakthroughs – from the development of various heart-fortifying drugs to the invention of machines that keep pumping blood around the body during surgery on the heart – that has led to such a dramatic diminution in heart suffering. Consider heart bypass surgery, developed in the 1960s, where veins from one part of a person’s body are grafted on to his sick heart in order to ‘bypass’ its narrowed veins. ‘Bypass’ – I love that word, for this intricate surgery, like all human technological endeavour, is really a bypassing of nature and its whims and idiocies.

The Exit on the Road to Tyranny?

The state will continue to grow relentlessly if people are convinced that at the very least it is a necessary evil

By George F. Smith

One of my favorite quotes from the quotable Thomas Paine is a mere footnote in his treatise, Rights of Man, Part Second, in which he wrote:

It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not suggest an allusion to some corruption in governments.

Paine was referring to “the splendor of the throne,” which he said “is no other than the corruption of the state.  It is made up of a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of the public taxes.”  He thought the U.S. federal government, newly created by the Constitution, provided hope against political corruption because of the limitations it imposed on the government.  Paine was in England at the time and had no idea that the new government, whose intellectual leader was Alexander Hamilton, was busy interpreting those limitations out of existence.

Paine also didn’t know the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was in fact a coup d'état.  The participants had been authorized only to amend the Articles of Confederation, but the nationalists, at least, wanted to replace the Articles with a new government that would be more “energetic.”  Knowing that Washington’s presence at the convention would be critical to its success, Henry Knox told the retired general that he would be given the president’s chair, and moreover, that he would not be presiding over some middling conference of officials tinkering with the “present defective confederation,” but instead would lead a prestigious body of men as they created an “energetic and judicious system,” one which would “doubly” entitle him to be called The Father of His Country.

In a previous note Knox had awakened Washington’s interest by lying about the meaning of Shays’s Rebellion.  According to Knox, former Revolutionary War officer Daniel Shays had organized the riffraff of Western Massachusetts to shut down the courts to avoid paying their taxes.  They were levelers, Knox said, who sought to annihilate all debts through “the weakness of government.”  Washington, who owned some 60,000 acres in the Virginia backcountry, thought that such people were “a wretched lot, not to be trusted, and certainly not to be the bone and sinew of a great nation.”

In truth, as historian Leonard L. Richards has shown, Shays’s Rebellion was not an uprising of poor indebted farmers, but a protest against the Massachusetts state government and its attempt to enrich the few at the expense of the many through a regressive tax system. The rebellion began as peaceful petitioning and escalated into violence only after the state repeatedly ignored the petitions.  Though they were described in various disparaging terms, the rebels saw themselves as regulators whose purpose was “the suppressing of tyrannical government in the Massachusetts State.”  They drew their inspiration from the Declaration of Independence that said people should throw off any government that is destructive of their rights.

But the rebellion was finally crushed and has since been interpreted as proof that a stronger central government was necessary.  Following ratification, “We the people” were headed down the long road to serfdom at an accelerated pace.

Punish Criminals for their Actions, not their Thoughts

Hate crime laws have made the punishment of thoughtcrime a reality

By JON HOLBROOK

In recent years, a new class of criminal offence has come to the fore in the UK: hate crime. This is a crime defined not by what the offender does but by his beliefs and thoughts while doing it.

Until recently, hate crimes were limited to the intentional stirring up of racial hatred, a crime dating back to the Race Relations Act 1965. But since 2001, more characteristics have been protected by the criminal law: religion in 2001, sexual orientation and disability in 2003, and transgender in 2012. So there are now five characteristics recognised and protected by the law.

Each act of parliament recognising a new characteristic is met with a claim for recognition of another characteristic. Comedian Rowan Atkinson even jokingly suggested that future legislation could be extended to outlaw hatred directed at ‘people with big ears’. Still, a serious case could be made for protecting women, the elderly and fat people, or sub-cultures like Goths. In 2003, Viscount Colville proposed an amendment in the House of Lords that would protect persons who were targeted on the basis of race, religion or ‘other identifiable characteristics’.

These claims for further protections are merely direction-of-travel arguments. And here’s the problem: the criminal law has been travelling in the wrong direction for too long. The hate-crime reforms over the years have seen one pragmatic but erroneous exception to principle after another, each one justified by the previous ones. If race, why not religion?  And if race and religion, why not race, religion and sexual orientation? The principle upon which hate-crime legislation is based remains stubbornly unquestioned.

So it ought to come as good news that the body charged with keeping the law under review, the Law Commission, has opened a consultation about hate crime.  Yet what should be an opportunity for people to question the current direction of travel is no such thing. The government has required the Law Commission to avoid all questions of principle. The thrust of the consultation is simply: if race, religion and sexual orientation, then why not race, religion, sexual orientation and disability and transgender?

The consultation is concerned with the detail of existing hate crime, and in particular, its three-level application: specific hate crimes; crimes that are aggravated by hate; and enhanced sentencing on the basis of an offender’s hate.

Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

Robert Zubrin's Merchants Of Despair Reveals Racism And Genocide Cloaked In Green Camouflage

From Charles Darwin to Margaret Sanger to Adolf Hitler: Zubrin connects the dots in Merchants of Despair 

By Larry Bell

Robert Zubrin’s “Merchants of Despair” chronicles huge and devastating influences of radical environmentalists along with associated criminal pseudo-scientists and a fatal cult of anti-humanism upon global events and society which continue today. Examples include profound ideological influences that resulted in large and long population “cleansing” campaigns through mass sterilization, abortion, and racial/ethnic genocide.

Much of the background material in this article (and some that will follow) draws upon information provided in Zubrin’s extensively-sourced research, along with supplementary information compiled through my own investigations. Here the intent is not to condemn the entire green movement or the great many extremely dedicated people who care deeply about our shared planet and ecosystems. Rather, it is to reveal how even the loftiest, best- sounding interests can be manipulated by extremely misguided ideological zealots and fully-evil and powerful propagandists who prey upon ignorance and emotion. I will mention some of them, along with horrific consequences they have wrought.

The Ugly Malthusian Legacy  

If there is one person to be attributed the title “Father of Manipulated Gloom and Doom Environmental Fright”, it must be Thomas Robert Malthus, a political economy professor at the British East India Company’s East India College who lived from 1766-1834.  His “zero-sum-gain” population and resource theories have had tremendous influence on global agendas, policies and travesties which continue unabated today.

Malthus initiated an alarmist international movement with an unsigned pamphlet titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population”  that first appeared in London bookstores in 1798. The publication forecast a terrifying world future whereby the population would increase geometrically while agriculture necessary to sustain it would increase only arithmetically.

Malthus proclaimed as “incontrovertible truths” that because of the “fixity of land”, growing families would overwhelm means to feed them. This circumstance would lead to “misery or vice”-some combination of disease, famine, foregone marriage, barbarianism and war that reduced population to a sustainable subsistence level. This, he argued, would be 

“decisive against the existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure.”

The remedies Malthus proposed to ensure lives of “ease, happiness and comparative leisure” were draconian to say the least. For example, he argued to condemn doctors who find cures in order to reduce population …even encouraged efforts to keep wages low:

“We are bound in justice and honor to disclaim the right of the poor to support…[W]e should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits.”

Malthus went on to propose: 

Due Process and the Death Penalty

Utilitarian arguments and contradictions

by Theodore Dalrymple        

No one would contradict me, I suspect, if I were to assert that human beings are not always wholly consistent. Indeed, those who are much more consistent than average are apt to excite our fear or condemnation rather than our admiration. To be faithful to a bad principle is worse than having no principle at all. And, as Emerson said, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

Yet by what other law than that of non-contradiction are we supposed to argue? Argumentation cannot just be a cacophony of incommensurable assertion, with the one who shouts loudest, speaks longest or employs the best phrases, taking the honors. And this is so even if Gödel was correct, and there is no entirely consistent system of logic without necessity to assume, without proof, the truth of some of its suppositions.

Yet there are contradictions and contradictions. I mention this because I am going to write about the death penalty, a subject about which almost everyone is contradictory, including me. I am against it though I am not a complete pacifist and do not believe that it is always wrong to kill, and though I happen also to believe that it, the death penalty, works – as a deterrent. I found unexpected evidence of this in the British historical experience, which I cannot here divulge because I confided it to a colleague who wants to use it in a book he is writing. To reveal it now would be to spoil its effect in his book.

My main objection to the death penalty is that, even in the most scrupulous of jurisdictions, mistakes are sometimes made, and for the law to put someone to death wrongly is an injustice so monstrous as to undermine trust in law itself. I once used this argument in company in which someone claimed to be able to refute me easily; for it was a fact, he said, that more people had been murdered by murderers who had not been executed than who had been wrongfully executed.

Granting for a moment his empirical premise, though I was not absolutely sure that it was factually correct, I replied that his argument was valid only if one accepted a very narrow interpretation of utilitarianism: and since I knew him to be not that kind of utilitarian, he was guilty of self-contradiction. My problem was that, on occasion and if need be, I resort to precisely the same kind of utilitarian argument myself; and therefore I was guilty myself of the very philosophical inconsistency of which I accused him. My interlocutor had the grace not to mention it.

Hyperinflation could become an irresistible force

Hyperinflation Is the Necessary, Proper, Patriotic, and Ethical Thing to Do

by Patrick Barron 
Hyperinflation is the complete breakdown in the demand for a currency, which means simply that no one wishes to hold it. Everyone wants to get rid of that kind of money as fast as possible. Prices, denominated in the hyper-inflated currency, suddenly and dramatically go through the roof. The most famous examples, although there are many others, are Germany in the early 1920′s and Zimbabwe just a few years ago. German Reichsmarks and Zim dollars were printed in million and even trillion unit denominations.

We may scoff at such insanity and assume that America could never suffer from such an event. We are modern. We know too much. Our monetary leaders are wise and have unprecedented power to prevent such an awful outcome.

Think again.

Our monetary leaders do not understand the true nature of money and banking; thus, they advocate monetary expansion as the cure for every economic ill. The multiple quantitative easing programs perfectly illustrate this mindset. Furthermore, our monetary leaders actually advocate a steady increase in the price level, what is popularly known as inflation. Any perceived reduction in the inflation rate is seen as a potentially dangerous deflationary trend, which must be countered by an increase in the money supply, a reduction in interest rates, and/or quantitative easing. So an increase in inflation will be viewed as success, which must be built upon to ensure that it continues. This mindset will prevail even when inflation runs at extremely high rates.

Wealth, Poverty And Ignorance

Favored myths and popular lies

by George Handlery

There are developments that do not fit your anticipations if you are socialized by Western values. Reality and our cultural assumptions can clash. Several postulates that are said to be mankind’s goals only express local cultural preferences. Their summary would be a sentence about “liberty”, the “pursuit of happiness” and “self-evident”. 

True, the order that produced these concepts has been sufficiently successful to justify emulation. However, it does not follow that the way of the achievers is predestined to become a guideline for all of mankind. We may add that, the worldwide differences in wealth and rights reflect this. The rejection of the values that advanced societies hold to be universal explains global differences in achievement. The attitude expressed through this rebuff reveals why much of mankind remains unfree, badly governed, and poor. 

The inequality that is a result as well as the cause of this condition, proves to be resistant. Blaming “unequal distribution” is only a superficial explanation. The well sounding phrase is more a symptom of past and future failures than a revelation of causes. The term “distribution” brings to mind a traditional remedy of the Left. It has healed little but developed a tradition of failure that is enshrined as a sign of moral superiority. That the misled masses that are the victims of the credo fail to see through the slogan does not invalidate the judgment. 

Redistribution does not overcome the condition of those that missed modernization. In fact, the underachieving tend to misunderstand the roots of poverty and wealth. Also, they like to believe that success is a reflection of luck or of theft by the powerful. The equation of power and wealth explains why popular movements arise to replace a bad dictatorship with a good one – one that will be generous to its subjects. Being in the dark regarding wealth’s origins causes a misunderstanding. That concerns the implications of receiving aid in response to penury that is supplied involuntarily by those that are said not to need what they contribute. The beneficiaries overlook that the precondition - a shakedown of the better off - demotivates unwilling donors. Ultimately, the results will shrink the cake out of which the handouts come. With the resulting downward tending equality, sapping motivation to produce will diminish what politics can give away.

Neither nature, nor luck creates whatever is rated as “wealth”. Wealth is the product of attitudes and their application to potentialities. We all compete, and we compete with our cultures. This explains why richly endowed countries are poor and why countries that are by nature poor can be rich. Those who, in the service of distorting ideologies hide this do a disservice to mankind. Their approach creates firewood for envy-fed conflicts and prevents accomplishments by dismissing success strategies.

The Charms of Deferred Cost

Deferred cost: the old gain. The young lose even more.

By Anthony de Jasay

There are two main ways of buying a new car. One is to save up the cost little by little and get the new car when the money is all there. The other is to get the car now and defer paying the cost by resorting to some arrangement that permits us to do so and then save the money and pay the cost some time in the future. If the arrangement were not expensive, everybody would rather have the car now than later. We call this "time preference". It seems to be a very basic human trait. If instead of time preference we had "time indifference," while money we saved brought a return in interest, rent and dividend, we would all starve to death, for we would by definition always prefer to save the marginal dollar and earn a return of a few cents on it than earn no return at all and spend the dollar on present consumption that we did not prefer to future consumption.

However, saving is not governed only by time preference and the return on the capital we accumulate by saving. Its major determinant is income itself. Subsistence level incomes permit only little saving or none at all. At the other end of our social order, astronomically high incomes are almost wholly saved for obvious physical reasons. The top 1 per cent of American households have an average annual income of roughly $15 million. Even if such a household were to spend all of it, the part of actual consumption in its spending would almost certainly be infinitesimal. Housing, food and drink, domestic and other personal services and everything else billionaires really appropriate from the national product and imports, however lavish and luxurious they may be, can hardly absorb more than a single-digit percentage of billionaire incomes. If the rest is all spent on million-dollar stamp collections, old masters canvasses or the endowment of university chairs, no part of the nation's product is used up thereby. It all adds up to saving, though its flow to industrial investment may pass through circuitous transfers.

Saving is determined not only by income, but also by changes in income. There is some evidence that consumption is geared to past income, so that when income rises sharply, people consume less and save more from it than they would if their current income had been as high in the past as it is now. This seems to explain the extraordinarily high savings generated by the Asian "tigers", such as Taiwan, China or South Korean during their period of double-digit annual growth in the 1980s and '90s—precisely the period when they needed high saving the most.

Other than time preference that reduces it and income that makes it grow, saving is determined by the contingencies of life. People strive to provide against incapacity in old age and for their children's education. They also wish to leave something for them after they are gone, for giving children an easier start in life than one's own had been is a fairly universal ambition. Despite all the progress we have been achieving, this ambition is now turning out to be very difficult to fulfill.

Is there an entity called "society"?

Ever since World War II, when European governments, starting with the English, went to work building welfare states, the incentives individuals had to save were progressively weakened or even wiped out. This was done for incontestably well-meaning reasons by having individuals' cares about the contingencies life taken off their shoulders and looked after collectively by society. Individual provision against ill health, unemployment, and old age became less pressingly necessary. Society stood in as the willing protector.