The chimera

Osama Unbound: A moment in the war on terror

Journeying through the Muslim world during the height of the so-called “war on terror” was to experience a region mired in a powerful dream world. No pronouncement from the West or, for that matter, from local leaders, was met with anything other than a labyrinthine counter-narrative. But the mother of all conspiracy theories was saved for the events of September 11, 2001. What does Osama bin Laden’s death mean when millions believe he wasn’t responsible for the crimes for which he died? By RICHARD POPLAK.

It’s a sweltering day in the city of Peshawar, when finally I snap. Peshawar, near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been on the frontline of global terror for almost as long as there has been global terror. Many on the “Most Wanted” list have lived there, in dusty compounds with rhododendrons, shaded porches and the ghostly whiff of Pims and lemonade.
I have just spent my day in the old city’s canton, among vestiges of a barely remembered Raj, interviewing the usual array of Taliban or Talibanish folk who really rule the roost. The grand and terrible joke defining the war on terror, at least for those of us who have limned it, was indeed Peshawar and its environs. So porous is the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and for so long has it been the de facto home of Islamic radicalism, that one enters a shadow world where the news coverage and political newsspeak seem to come from another realm. This was the heart of the war. Why, then, wasn’t it a theatre?
The symbol presiding over all this was Osama bin Laden, or the horrific Boy’s Own caper he engineered on September 11, 2001. I bring up Boy’s Own, because Peshawar featured once or twice in stories in the old paper, which hitched the mores of Protestant colonialism to tales of valour, over the Khyber Pass and beyond. It always seemed to me that 9/11 originated in a barely formed adolescent mind, a Boy’s Own mentality where McGyvering and Jerry-rigging and derring-do, all in the service of some amorphous greater good, were the reigning morality. The attack always felt hormonal, petulant, the sort of thing a boy who salts snails or fries ants under a magnifying glass would do, while assuring us there was some larger ideological merit to his actions. Never has a Little Lord Fauntleroy, a child of such munificent privilege, spent his daddy’s money in such an awful way.
Such thoughts are on my mind as I hitch a ride back to my hotel with a young man who hopes to be my fixer. We rattle through the gloaming in an auto-rickshaw and fall into conversation. As so often happens in these parts, our chat morphs into a disquisition on the evils of the West, which doubles as a parsing of the nature of truth. I am informed that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s founding father, was a Jew—how else could he champion rigid secularism over the glories of Islam? I learn that Yasser Arafat was poisoned by Mossad. I am told that Bush is not the President of the United States, but the puppet of a powerful cabal who want to rule the world. (Which was true, I suppose, but in a far more prosaic way than my new friend imagined.) Then this—the old shibboleth, the dread canard I suffered through countless times to leach a story from a source: 9/11 was an inside job; there were no Jews in the Towers on that fateful day; it is impossible for an airplane to bring down a building etc. etc.

Failure of Development Aid, as planned

African Universities: Creating True Researchers or “Native Informers” to NGOs?

By Laura Freschi 

In a recent speech addressing the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, Mahmood Mamdani described the state of academic research and higher education in Africa as dominated by a “corrosive culture of consultancy.”

Today, intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity. Extra-curricular seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels. Workshop attendance goes with transport allowances and per diem. All this is part of a larger process, the NGO-ization of the university. Academic papers have turned into corporate-style power point presentations. Academics read less and less. A chorus of buzz words have taken the place of lively debates…

What’s the difference between academic research and consultancy-driven research? Mamdani, who spent decades teaching at universities in South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda before moving to Columbia University, defines research for a consultant as seeking answers to problems posed and defined by a client. But university research, properly understood, requires formulating the problem itself.

His example of how this works in practice is an interesting one. In 2007, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation shifted global health spending priorities towards their research question: How to eradicate malaria? But if malaria can’t be eradicated, as a team of scientists from France and Gabon now believe, then researchers have spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars answering the wrong question.

The cumulative effect of this model is to “devalue original research or intellectual production in Africa.”

The global market tends to relegate Africa to providing raw material (“data”) to outside academics who process it and then re-export their theories back to Africa. Research proposals are increasingly descriptive accounts of data collection and the methods used to collate data, collaboration is reduced to assistance, and there is a general impoverishment of theory and debate.

In my view, the proliferation of “short courses” on methodology that aim to teach students and academic staff quantitative methods necessary to gathering and processing empirical data are ushering a new generation of native informers.

Mamdani, who is now director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in addition to his professorship at Columbia, seeks to counter the spread of consultancy culture “through an intellectual environment strong enough to sustain a meaningful intellectual culture.”

“To my knowledge,” he said, “there is no model for this on the African continent today. It is something we will have to create.”

Bought and Paid For

by George C. Leef

Americans who have at least a modicum of political sophistication know that special-interest groups have enormous power to influence the political system, getting favors from government they couldn’t obtain through voluntary means. Informed people know, for example, that many farmers receive subsidies, that labor unions have privileges to employ coercion that no other private organization has, and so on.

Few of us, however, think of Wall Street in a similar vein. Why, Wall Street consists of rich, Republican-leaning firms that make their money by financing business—right? Wall Street is interested in minimizing government because its business clients are harmed by the expansion of government—right?

Those notions could not be more mistaken, as veteran financial journalist Charles Gasparino demonstrates in his latest book, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street. Far from advocating a minimal, night-watchman State (or at least shrinking somewhat the bloated leviathan we now have), the big Wall Street firms earn such enormous profits from financing federal deficits that a shrinking State is the last thing they would ever want. On the contrary, expanding government that borrows heavily guarantees buckets of money in their coffers—far more than the big firms make from the difficult work of business finance.

Democracy in action

Egypt: Muslim rampage against Christians continues, now 12 dead, 232 wounded

Will the Islamophobia never end? An update on this story. "Muslims Attack Christians in Egypt, 12 Killed, 232 Injured," by Mary Abdelmassih for AINA, May 8:

(AINA) -- Christians Copts in the area of Embaba were attacked Saturday evening by Muslim Salafis. The attacks lasted for 14 hours. The Muslims fired guns and rifles and hurled Molotov cocktails at Coptic churches, houses and businesses. 12 Copts were killed and 232 injured.

The church of Saint Mina church was the first to be attacked. According to its pastor Fr. Abanoub the attack started at 5.30 PM on Saturday May 7, when church parishioners noticed a large number of Salafis, estimated at 3000 men, congregating near the church. Anticipating trouble, the army was called. The Salafis went to the church and asked to search it because they believed a Christian girl named called Abir, who had converted to Islam, married a Salafi and wanted to revert back to Christianity, was hiding inside the church. The Muslims circulated a rumor that the husband of Abir received a call from her asking him to save her as she was being "tortured" inside the church.

State or Private-Law Society ?

By Hans Hermann Hoppe

The Problem of Social Order

Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe can do whatever he pleases. For him, the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct — social cooperation — simply does not arise. This question can only arise once a second person, Friday, arrives on the island. Yet even then, the question remains largely irrelevant so long as no scarcity exists. Suppose the island is the Garden of Eden. All external goods are available in superabundance. They are "free goods," just as the air that we breathe is normally a "free" good. Whatever Crusoe does with these goods, his actions have no repercussions — neither with respect to his own future supply of such goods nor regarding the present or future supply of the same goods for Friday (and vice versa). Hence, it is impossible that a conflict concerning the use of such goods could arise between Crusoe and Friday. A conflict is possible only if goods are scarce; and only then is there a need to formulate rules that make orderly, conflict-free social cooperation possible.

In the Garden of Eden only two scarce goods exist: a person's physical body and its standing room. Crusoe and Friday each have only one body and can stand only at one place at a time. Hence, even in the Garden of Eden conflicts between Crusoe and Friday can arise: Crusoe and Friday cannot occupy the same standing room simultaneously without coming into physical conflict with each other. Accordingly, even in the Garden of Eden rules of orderly social conduct must exist — rules regarding the proper location and movement of human bodies. Outside the Garden of Eden, in the realm of all-around scarcity, there must be rules that regulate the use not only of personal bodies, but of everything scarce, such that all possible conflicts can be ruled out. This is the problem of social order.

The Solution: The Idea of Private Property

In the history of social and political thought, myriad proposals have been offered as solutions to the problem of social order, and this multitude of mutually incompatible proposals has contributed to the widespread belief that the search for a single "correct" solution is futile and illusory. Yet a correct solution does exist. There is no reason to succumb to moral relativism. Indeed, the solution to the problem of social order has been known for hundreds of years. The solution is the idea of private property.

Let me formulate the solution first for the special case represented by the Garden of Eden and subsequently for the general case represented by the real world of all-around scarcity.

Literature’s Most Influential Hussy

by Joy Setton

She lives on credit and lusts after entertainment, whether emotional or commercial. She derives her pleasure solely from seeing her reflection in the gleam of a man’s eye or in the sheen of a new silk dress. Like a L’Oréal target customer, she is “worth it.” Whatever luxury the world contains should be hers because she is beautiful and of superior sentimentality.

I am not talking about a modern American woman, but about Emma Bovary, born 1857, with no end in sight to her reign of senseless craving and mediocrity.

Why even bother to write about that common hussy? Because here she is loose again in bookstores, made up like a flapper on a sickening pink cover. A new translation is out, and critics are raving. (How many of them speak French, I shudder to ask.)

Madame Bovary: A New Translation by Lydia Davis sounds exactly like what it is—a book written in 21st-century America. Hollywood period movies can be dated by the hairstyles; here the turn of phrase is a dead giveaway. There is “give me a hug” in place of “embrace me,” “deep in her soul” instead of “at the bottom of her soul,” and “waiting for something to happen” rather than “waiting for an event.” Little things, little things, though some would say that even a comma is big when it comes to translation and that a translator should be a slave to the original as the Slav Nabokov was to Pushkin, as the poet Baudelaire was to Poe—“servilely attached to the letter” at the risk of producing baroque and even painful results.

The Warfare part of the Warfare - Welfare State

How US Squandered the Peace Dividend
                                                          

by Patrick Foy

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and effectively ended the Cold War, there was tremendous relief and a sense of hope for the future. One writer even boldly declared that it marked “The End of History” and, as a natural result, the end of war.

Since global communism—perceived as the main, if not sole, threat to global peace—had been vanquished, President George H. W. Bush promised that Americans would soon enjoy a “peace dividend.” Taxpayers commonly understood this to mean that military spending would be downgraded and the billions that had been siphoned from them to fight communism would be shunted back into their pockets.

“That’s not a peacetime dividend. That’s a huge wartime debt.”

But the promised peace dividend never came. With communism defeated, Arabs and Islam were presented as the new threat for the world’s lone surviving superpower. In response to this “threat” that didn’t seem to exist until the Soviet Union fell, the US is now spending moreon defense than it was during the Cold War. By 2004 the US defense budget was almost twice that of the next 15 military powers combined. More than twenty years after Bush promised a peace dividend, Washington is still stretched all over the greater Middle East, which is ablaze.

Country by country, here’s what went wrong:

We are doomed

2+2=?

Since moonbattery is a totalitarian ideology, nothing escapes from its poisonous lies — not even mathematics. Teachers unsure how to pass off indoctrination in race-based Marxism (a.k.a. "social justice") as a math class can find resources to assist them at Radical Math:

There are at least two related ideas behind "Social Justice Math". The first is that you can use mathematics to teach and learn about issues of social and economic justice. The second is that you can learn math through the study of social justice issues….

A subspecies of Social Justice Math is "Ethnomathematics," defined as:

The study and celebration of mathematical practices from various countries and cultures from both historical and contemporary perspectives, including: symbolic systems, spatial designs, games and puzzles, calculation methods, measurement in time and space, architecture and design, problem solving, etc.

With all this important material to cover, it's no surprise if teachers don't get around to boring stuff like multiplication tables.

The Math Skills & Social Justice Topics Chart (Word doc) offers concrete suggestions for dressing up moonbat propaganda as math. For example:

Comparing how money spent on military operations could be used to support other important causes (ex: if a bomb costs $10 million and a it costs $10,000 to provide health care for an entire family for a year, how many families could get health care for the cost of this bomb).

Here's how geometry can be combined with "environmental justice":

Determine the density of toxic waste facilities, factories, dumps, etc, in the neighborhood.

By now it should be obvious why moonbats cannot be left in control of education. This means prying it out of the fist of Big Government and the unions that bankroll Democrat politicians.

Service in a Free Society

by Chad W. Seagren
Politicians, pundits, and social commentators often lament the fact that the United States has no comprehensive program for national service. Both major-party candidates in the 2008 presidential election proposed such plans, and retired General Stanley McChrystal recently proposed1 a national service program. Although McChrystal graciously acknowledges Americans' expressions of gratitude for the service and sacrifices of those in the military, he argues, "Americans performing critical, selfless service to our country are less common than they must be."

Many people think that service to one's country must mean military service. I agree with McChrystal that this interpretation is far too narrow. But if the General would only take his own advice and widen his vision of what it means to serve, he would see that literally millions of Americans diligently serve their country every day. Simply put, in a free society, a person who participates in the market serves his or her countrymen in an immensely powerful way.

Participation in the Division of Labor Serves Society

The market so readily provides us with products we desire that we often overlook the crucial role that service plays in our lives. The fact that the shelves of your local grocery store are consistently stocked with milk surprises no one. But the process that brings milk from the dairy to your local retailer is incredibly complex and requires the cooperation of millions of individuals.

This process not only succeeds in bringing milk and myriad other products to the masses, but also, in the last 300 years, has raised the standard of living to heights that were unimaginable only a few generations ago. In industrialized countries, it has eliminated abject poverty and starvation. It has greatly increased the availability and quality of medical care, vastly extending life spans. Don Boudreaux, an economics professor at George Mason University, regularly points out2 the seemingly mundane, but ultimately remarkable, ways in which the capitalist market has improved the environment for humans. The free market is responsible for the wide availability of housing structures to protect people from the elements; climate control such as heating and air conditioning; indoor plumbing; personal hygiene items such as soap and shampoo; and appliances that allow for the safe and clean storage of food, to name just a few. And contrary to popular belief, the market actually enables people to care for the environment, a luxury that becomes attainable only when societies become sufficiently wealthy.

The market is so integral to our relationships with other individuals in society and so effectively provides both necessities and luxuries that it is easy to overlook the extent to which people depend on it. Similarly, few realize the contributions that millions of people make every day to this essential social institution.

Caveman Vs The State

Bin Laden’s war against the U.S. economy

by Ezra Klein

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. 

Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Bin Laden’s transition from scion of a wealthy family to terrorist mastermind came in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was trying to conquer Afghanistan. Bin Laden was part of the resistance, and the resistance was successful — not only in repelling the Soviet invasion, but in contributing to the communist super-state’s collapse a few years later. “We, alongside the mujaheddin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” he later explained.

The campaign taught bin Laden a lot. For one thing, superpowers fall because their economies crumble, not because they’re beaten on the battlefield. For another, superpowers are so allergic to losing that they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to conquer a mass of rocks and sand. This was bin Laden’s plan for the United States, too.

Carbon magic

by graig mcinnes

Thursday night the Vancouver school board approved a budget that reflected the cuts necessary to close an $8.4-million funding shortfall.

Earlier in the day, the B.C. government's Pacific Carbon Trust (PCT) announced a deal to buy 84,000 tonnes of carbon offsets from Encana, an energy company that reported net earnings of $1.5 billion in 2010 on revenues after royalties of $8.87 billion, all in U.S. dollars.

These announcements are related, because part of the money the PCT is using to buy the offsets comes from school boards, which, like other public bodies, are being required by the provincial government to reduce their own greenhouse-gas emissions enough to become carbon neutral or buy offsets to make up the difference.

The Pacific Carbon Trust is the company set up by the province to buy and sell carbon offsets. Carbon offsets are created when an organization or business, in this case Encana, is paid to reduce emissions in a manner it could not have achieved without the subsidy. That's the theory, anyway.

The PCT won't say how much it is paying Encana, but it is charging any organization that wants or needs offsets $25 a tonne.

The budget approved by the Vancouver school board includes $405,725 to pay for such offsets, money that board chair Patti Bacchus said Friday could have been put to better use.

"I could pay for about five teachers," she says.

What Is Acceptable Risk?

by Roger Scruton
The state of Massachusetts has passed a law against sushi—that is to say, you will be allowed to eat sushi only if it has first been either cooked or frozen, so ceasing, in effect, to be sushi. Why? A minuscule risk exists that sushi, in its normal condition, will make you sick. And this is a risk that the citizens of Massachusetts are no longer allowed to take.

Manufacturers of children's playgrounds now predict that swings in public playgrounds will become a thing of the past, since safety regulations require prohibitively expensive padding beneath them. Indeed, the regulations surrounding children's toys, clothes, and activities are now so strict that it is hard to have an adventurous childhood. In England it is even against the law to allow your child to walk down a country lane to school, since there is a one in a billion chance that he will be abducted.

In the past, the law made a distinction between those risks to health and safety that citizens might voluntarily assume and those from which the state should protect them. Since every act of protection by the state involves a loss of freedom, lawmakers assumed that only in very special cases should the state expropriate our risk taking. In matters of public hygiene, where the risks taken by one person also fall upon others, it seemed legitimate for the state to intervene: for example, the state could compel people to maintain standards of cleanliness in public places or to undergo vaccinations against contagious diseases. But it should not forbid a person to consume a certain product, merely because there is a tiny risk to his own physical well-being. For the state to extend its jurisdiction so far involves a serious invasion of privacy. In matters that affect the citizen alone and that have no adverse consequences on others, the citizen should be free to choose. The state can inform him of the risk, but it should not forbid the choice.

Such, at any rate, was the orthodox position, as defended by John Stuart Mill and the "classical" liberals. But it is not the position adopted by our modern legislators, who do their best to remove both the risk and the freedom to run it. My neighbors are farmers who produce dairy products, livestock, and poultry. Within a few yards of my door is an abundance of milk, eggs, chicken, duck, bacon, beef, and cheese. But I must travel six miles if I am to buy any of these things, and what I buy will have traveled a further 1,000 miles, on average, before reaching me. This is because the state has forbidden me to take the risk of eating my neighbors' products, until they have been processed, packaged and purified, released into the endless stream of global produce, and entirely purged of their local identity and taste. Although the risk of eating the food that grows next door is solely mine, I am not allowed to take it.

A new path for development ?

Cities from Scratch

by Paul Romer, Brandon Fuller

In 1091, Count Roger of Sicily raided the island of Malta, then under the control of the Fatimid caliphate, and secured the release of Christian captives there. Rather than observing the customs of conquest and forcibly resettling the prisoners, he let them choose between returning to their homes (many were Greek) and taking up residence in Sicily. There, he promised, they would be free to work their land as tenants, unchained from the burdens typical of medieval enserfment, such as servile dues and obligatory labor in the lord’s demesne.

Roger’s effort to attract, rather than enserf, new residents was unusually progressive for the time, but historian Richard Bartlett claims that it became common as western Europe expanded during the High Middle Ages. By offering people rights and opportunities, nobles could quickly attract voluntary migrants to new settlements, raising the productivity of their land and earning commensurately higher rents. Migrants who chose to move to the new settlements could improve their status, gaining improved legal rights, hereditary tenure as rent payers, and temporary exemptions from rents and military duty while they cleared land and built houses.

Senseless in Seattle

The Obama administration tells Boeing how to run its business.

by Richard A. Epstein

---

It has long been an open secret that the Obama administration regards itself as an eager and reliable ally of organized labor: whatever labor wants, labor gets. Nowhere is that fealty more evident than in the National Labor Relations Board ("NLRB") decision to file unfair labor charges on behalf of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union against the Boeing Company. Why? Boeing had the audacity to invest $2 billion in a new South Carolina facility where it would assemble its 787 Dreamliner---a job that Boeing assigned to 1000 non-union workers starting this coming July.
Acting NLRB General Counsel, Lafe Solomon, wants that work to be brought back to Washington state and the Portland, Oregon area, where Boeing has its current Dreamliner facilities. According to Solomon, "[a] worker's right to strike is a fundamental right guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act. We also recognize the rights of employers to make business decisions based on their economic interests, but they must do so within the law." But it is the boundary line between an employer’s unfair labor practice and its own legitimate economic interest that Solomon badly misunderstands.
The gist of the government’s case is this: in deciding to locate the production facility in South Carolina, Boeing executives engaged in "coercive" speech, with the intention of discouraging future union strikes and of retaliating against its west coast workforce. After all, the Boeing executives cited past union strikes, and the possibility of future ones, when they announced their decision to open the South Carolina production facility.
In fact, the union has gone on strike five times in the last 24 years—1977, 1989, 1995, 2005, and 2008. That last strike lasted some 56 days, with obvious disruptions in production. The worse the relationship with labor, it seems, the greater the legal duty an employer has to take it on the chin the next time around. The incentive structure here is perverse. If a union maintains good relations with the firm, it would be easy for the firm to leave, because it would have no anti-union animus. Yet ironically, the firm has incentives to stay. But on the government's theory, that option to exit the market could easily be prevented by a union that has kicked up a ruckus time after time, for now an anti-union sentiment is easy to prove or infer. It cannot be, as Solomon contends, that bad union behavior gives the union an exclusive lock on a firm's future business.

Hayek on Morality

by Tibor R. Machan

When he was about to receive the Nobel Prize in economic science, I interviewed F. A. Hayek for Reason magazine (at his home in Salzburg, Austria). Although he didn’t believe that political economists should dwell on ethical issues per se, he was by no means “necessarily a moral relativist” as Francis Fukuyama asserts in his Sunday New York Times Book Review piece (5-8-2011) of the new edition of The Constitution of Liberty (edited by Ronald Hamowy for the University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Hayek did, of course, object to the notion, mentioned by Fukuyama, that “there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends.” However, the stress here needs to be on “dictate.” No one can do what is morally right when this is being dictated to or coerced from a person. That isn’t at all because ethics or morality is subjective or relative. It is because to hold someone responsible for either morally right and wrong actions, it is that person who has to be the cause of it. The criminal law recognizes this, as have most moral philosophers. And when it is denied that one has free will or can exercise free choice about what one will or will not do, morality disappears. This is why so many thinkers who embrace determinism either reject morality as bogus or transform it into a social psychological device by which desired behavior might be encouraged or prompted from people. (A good example is much of the current work by nureoscientists!)

As Hayek put it elsewhere, “It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral merit.” (“The Moral Element in Free Enterprise,” Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967], pp. 230.) However, this view does not depend on moral relativism but on the ancient idea, held by most moral philosophers, that for conduct to be morally significant, it must be done freely, as a matter of the free choice of the moral agent.

It’s Time To Kill The ‘Robin Hood’ Myth

by YARON BROOK AND DON WATKINS

If you were to judge by the rhetoric, you might think that Paul Ryan’s plan for reducing the federal deficit slashed the government’s budget by 90%, and funded the killing of kittens to boot. E.J. Dionne, for instance,calls it “radical,” “irresponsible,” and “extreme,” and asks, is this “the end of progressive government?”The truth is that Ryan actually proposesincreasing government spending in the coming years–just at a lower rate than current projections. So why are Ryan’s critics so up in arms?

Because Ryan’s plan dares to touch (albeit, merely to scratch) the untouchable entitlement state. Ryan’s plan would, among other things, trim and reorganize Medicare and Medicaid and reduce federal support for education. To the plan’s critics, this amounts to “reverse-Robin Hood redistribution,” as former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Blinder put it. “[A]bout two-thirds of Mr. Ryan’s so-called courageous budget cuts would come from programs serving low- and moderate-income Americans, while the rich would gain from copious tax cuts.”

The “reverse-Robin Hood” line suggests that Ryan’s plan robs from “the poor” and gives to “the rich.” But cutting entitlements is not robbery–and cutting taxes isn’t a gift.

Entitlements are essentially government handouts: the government takes money from some people in order to finance other people’s retirements, doctor’s visits, and whatever else the government deems worthy. They are unearned benefits. It is shameful that in a civilized society we have to say this, but getting less loot is not the same thing as being robbed.

A tax cut, meanwhile, is not a government handout–it is a reduction of how much of your income the government takes. Whether you’re a millionaire, billionaire, or an ambitious stock boy, a tax cut means you get to keep more of what you earn.

If you are in a hole, stop digging

The land of 15% Growth

By Investor's Business Dail
As the U.S. languishes, Chile posted a head-turning 15.2% yearly gain in GDP in March, and forecasts for the year are rising. Why can't we do that here?

A year ago, Chile lay in rubble, victim of the world's fifth most powerful earthquake. So Chile's 15.2% growth is a big bounce from a bad setback.
But it shouldn't be dismissed as an anomaly. It's a showy number, but not the only one.

The same day Chile released its data, Goldman Sachs raised its 2011 growth forecast for the country to 6.4% from 6%. In its annual regional business index, Latin Business Chronicle ranked Chile as having the best business climate in Latin America in 2011.
Such numbers are so alien to the U.S. in the economically debilitated Obama era, it makes sense to look at what Chile has done.
First, Chile's policies for long-term growth were put into effect in the 1980s by the group of Milton Friedman-inspired economists known as the Chicago Boys.

Geithner Killed Plan for Irish to Haircut Their Debt

Yves Smith reports on an op-ed in the Irish Times, written by the Irish economist Morgan Kelly, which includes this gem:

Ireland’s Last Stand began less shambolically than you might expect. The IMF, which believes that lenders should pay for their stupidity before it has to reach into its pocket, presented the Irish with a plan to haircut €30 billion of unguaranteed bonds by two-thirds on average. Lenihan was overjoyed, according to a source who was there, telling the IMF team: “You are Ireland’s salvation.”

The deal was torpedoed from an unexpected direction. At a conference call with the G7 finance ministers, the haircut was vetoed by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner who, as his payment of $13 billion from government-owned AIG to Goldman Sachs showed, believes that bankers take priority over taxpayers. The only one to speak up for the Irish was UK chancellor George Osborne, but Geithner, as always, got his way.

Got that? The Irish were going to do the sane thing and, for all practical purposes, declare bankruptcy and start life all over. Geithner nixed the deal, which did nothing but protect the banskters and will end up costing Irish and global taxpayers.

From Geithner's killing of the deal, as Kelly reports, things went downhill, and all in favor of the banksters. In the end, the Irish negotiators fell in line with the banksters:

On one side was the European Central Bank, unabashedly representing Ireland’s creditors and insisting on full repayment of bank bonds. On the other was the IMF, arguing that Irish taxpayers would be doing well to balance their government’s books, let alone repay the losses of private banks. And the Irish? On the side of the ECB, naturally.

In the circumstances, the ECB walked away with everything it wanted. The IMF were scathing of the Irish performance, with one staffer describing the eagerness of some Irish negotiators to side with the ECB as displaying strong elements of Stockholm Syndrome.

Should 'we' rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness?

Beauty and Desecration
by Roger Scruton

The West’s great landscape painters
like the eighteenth-century Italian
 Francesco Guardi, capture the
 intimations of the eternal in the transient.

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.
The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in expression. This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms. We find this posture overtly adopted in the art of Austria and Germany between the wars—for example, in the paintings and drawings of Georg Grosz, in Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (a loving portrait of a woman whose only discernible goal is moral chaos), and in the seedy novels of Heinrich Mann. And the cult of transgression is a leading theme of the postwar literature of France—from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the nouveau roman.
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise.