Our betters are upset

Why the state should butt out of our personal lives

It is a sign of the times that the only debate we seem to have about nudging is ‘does it work?’ rather than ‘what gives them the right?’.

by Rob Lyons 

This week, the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee published a report into behaviour change. It provides revealing insights into the limitations of the fashionable idea that we can be ‘nudged’ into changing our ways on a range of problems, from obesity to climate change. What the report doesn’t do, however, is challenge the idea that our behaviour needs to be changed in the first place, and that it is the role of government to do it.

The committee that prepared the report was chaired by Baroness Julia Neuberger and included such luminaries as former UK chief scientific adviser, Lord Robert May, and the first chairman of the Food Standards Agency, Lord John Krebs. In the course of their enquiry, they questioned a wide variety of academics, politicians, business leaders and representatives of NGOs. Their report thus provides an unusually wide survey of opinion from the movers and shakers of modern British society.

The thinking behind the enquiry is laid out in the opening paragraph. ‘Many of the goals to which governments aspire - such as bringing down levels of crime, reducing unemployment, increasing savings and meeting targets for carbon emissions - can be achieved only if people change their behaviour.’ This single sentence reveals how the politics of behaviour has become so central to political thought today. Clearly, crime is a form of behaviour, so no surprises there, though the causes of crime surely run much wider than individual choices. Unemployment has usually been seen in the past as an economic problem, not one of individual behaviour. Carbon emissions could more easily be reduced by major infrastructural investment rather than by badgering people to fiddle with their thermostats or to use the bus sometimes instead of the car. So why the obsession with personal behaviour?

The logic of this outlook, as the report says, is that ‘understanding how to change the behaviour of populations should be a concern for any government if it is to be successful’. Of course, governments have long had mechanisms to try to alter behaviour. The most obvious one is to use the criminal law to make something either illegal (like smoking in pubs) or compulsory (like wearing a seatbelt in cars). Slightly less draconian - but manipulative nonetheless - is the authorities’ attempts to influence behaviour in economic ways, by providing incentives (for example, generous subsidies to the middle classes to install solar panels and wind turbines) or disincentives (like setting a minimum price per unit of alcohol). If all else fails, the government can just spend hundreds of millions of pounds nagging us to lose weight, get fit, stop smoking or use a condom.

One problem with these kinds of mechanisms is that they look a bit authoritarian, or at the very least hectoring. It’s really rather obvious that the government is demanding that you behave in a different manner. New Labour clearly had absolutely no problem with stating this fairly openly, which is why Tony Blair and Gordon Brown famously oversaw the creation of over 3,000 new criminal offences, congestion charging in London, on-the-spot fines for not recycling, and so on.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, like to kid themselves that they are lovers of liberty - yet the truth is that they want to meddle in our lives just as much as New Labour did. So they put forward the idea of ‘non-regulatory and non-fiscal measures with relation to the individual’ that alter our ‘choice architecture’. Essentially, when we’re not really thinking about our behaviour or don’t really care very much what we do or how we do it in a particular situation, we can be subtly directed towards doing the right thing.

They will never admit it

Environmentalism was an ugly experiment

Mark Lynas has converted from eco-alarmist to pro-growth rationalist. But he still doesn’t get the problem with green thinking.

by Ben Pile 

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

Last November, Channel 4 aired What the Green Movement Got Wrong, which featured prominent environmentalists, including Lynas, reflecting on the failures of environmentalism. The film claimed that environmentalists’ opposition to technologies that offered environmentally benign methods of energy and crop production had impeded their aim of creating an ecologically sustainable society. Since then, the debate between pro- and anti-nuclear environmentalists has deepened, exposing the many divisions that exist within the green camp.

That said, the green movement has never really been united by a coherent perspective that could withstand criticism with confidence. Instead, it has been more easily characterised as intransigent, its critics simply dismissed as ‘deniers’ funded by big business. Environmentalism, ignorant to criticism, has thus developed inside an insular, self-regarding bubble. Perhaps only someone from within it could prick that bubble, revealing to its members what those outside it have been telling them for decades.

However, the object of Lynas’s criticism is not the substance or ends of environmentalism but merely its means. The environment has not been saved by green hostility to development, he says. Environmentalism’s uncompromising demands that we accept lower living standards make green politics unpalatable. Accordingly, he attempts to locate the basis for an environmentalism characterised by realism and pragmatism: what the science really tells us and how it can be most effectively acted upon.

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology – the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

The joke is getting better by the day

Volcanic Ash And Aerosols Inhibit Climate Warming

A recent increase in the abundance of particles high in the atmosphere has offset about a third of the current climate warming influence of carbon dioxide (CO2) change during the past decade.  The findings have been published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a new study in the online edition of Science.

By Mark Dunphy 

Lidar instruments - pointing up from the ground or down from satellites - use reflected light to measure the amounts of particles and their locations, which can influence climate. (Credit: CIRES/NOAA)

In the stratosphere, miles above Earth’s surface, small, airborne particles reflect sunlight back into space, which leads to a cooling influence at the ground. These particles are also called “aerosols,” and the new paper explores their recent climate effects — the reasons behind their increase remain the subject of ongoing research.

“Since the year 2000, stratospheric aerosols have caused a slower rate of climate warming than we would have seen without them,” says John Daniel, a physicist at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) in Boulder, Colo. and an author of the new study.

The new study focused on the most recent decade, when the amount of aerosol in the stratosphere has been in something of a “background” state, lacking sharp upward spikes from very large volcanic eruptions. The authors analysed measurements from several independent sources – satellites and several types of ground instruments – and found a definitive increase in stratospheric aerosol since 2000.

“Stratospheric aerosol increased surprisingly rapidly in that time, almost doubling during the decade,” Daniel said. “The increase in aerosols since 2000 implies a cooling effect of about 0.1 watts per square meter – enough to offset some of the 0.28 watts per square metre warming effect from the carbon dioxide increase during that same period.”

Sources of aerosols reach the stratosphere from above and below, as shown in the graph. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbonyl sulfide (OCS), and dimethyl sulfide(DMS) are the dominant surface emissions which contribute to aerosol formation. (Credit: NOAA) Lidar instruments - pointing up from the ground or down from satellites - use reflected light to measure the amounts of particles and their locations, which can influence climate. (Credit: CIRES/NOAA)

Sources of aerosols reach the stratosphere from above and below, as shown in the graph. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbonyl sulfide (OCS), and dimethyl sulfide(DMS) are the dominant surface emissions which contribute to aerosol formation. (Credit: NOAA) Lidar instruments - pointing up from the ground or down from satellites - use reflected light to measure the amounts of particles and their locations, which can influence climate. (Credit: CIRES/NOAA)

The reasons for the 10-year increase in stratospheric aerosols are not fully understood and are the subject of ongoing research, says coauthor Ryan Neely, with the University of Colorado and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). Likely suspects are natural sources – smaller volcanic eruptions – and/or human activities, which could have emitted the sulfur-containing gases, such as sulfur dioxide, that react in the atmosphere to form reflective aerosol particles.

Daniel and colleagues with NOAA, CIRES, the University of Colorado, NASA, and the University of Paris used a climate model to explore how changes in the stratosphere’s aerosol content could affect global climate change – both in the last decade, and projected into the future. The team concluded that models miss an important cooling factor if they don’t account for the influence of stratospheric aerosol, or don’t include recent changes in stratospheric aerosol levels.

Moreover, future global temperatures will depend on stratospheric aerosol. The warming from greenhouse gases and aerosols calculated for the coming decade can vary by almost a factor of two — depending on whether aerosols continue to increase at the same rate as over the past decade, or if instead they decrease to very low levels, such as those experienced in 1960.

If stratospheric aerosol levels continue to increase, temperatures will not rise as quickly as they would otherwise, said Ellsworth Dutton, also with NOAA ESRL and a co-author on the paper. Conversely, if stratospheric aerosol levels decrease, temperatures would increase faster. Dutton and his colleagues use the term “persistently variable” to describe how the background levels of aerosol in Earth’s stratosphere can change from one decade to the next, even in the absence of major volcanic activity.

Ultimately, by incorporating the ups and downs of stratospheric aerosols, climate models will be able to give not only better estimates of future climate change, but also better explanations of past climate changes.

“The ‘background’ stratospheric aerosols are more of a player than we thought,” said Daniel. “The last decade has shown us that it doesn’t take an extremely large volcanic eruption for these aerosols to be important to climate.”

The Good Fellas

Dodd-Frank Damage Begins to Unfold

The Washington Times does a little follow-up on the Dodd-Frank bill, a monstrous 2,300-page law named after two of the most corrupt clots of slime ever to disgrace the Beltway. It was a reaction to the $zillions our rulers flushed down the toilet in bailouts after Democrat race-based mortgage policies crippled the housing sector and with it the entire economy in 2008. Supposedly it would do away with the alarming concept that politically connected firms are “too big to fail.”

The actual result has been a mountain of red tape. At least 400 new federal rules will be layered on top of existing regulations. New bureaucracies will have overlapping jurisdiction with existing regulatory bodies. Affected banks and businesses are scrambling to comply, but frequently they don’t know what they are supposed to be complying with. Only 21 of these rules have been finalized, and the remainder are being rammed through with nearly no time made available for cost-benefit analysis, public comment or reflection.

Far from getting rid of bailouts, Dodd-Frank institutionalized them. Title II empowered the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation with “orderly liquidation” authority, giving the agency discretion to intervene between a financial institution and its creditors in any way it sees fit. Markets have not been slow to recognize this. Historically, large banks have paid higher interest rates on their loans than small banks; since the passage of Dodd-Frank that relationship has been reversed. Markets believe Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner when he says the federal government is prepared to do “exceptional things” if warranted. That means the “too big too fail” ethic still applies.

Dodd-Frank has largely severed the relationship between risk and return, which is the necessary discipline imposed by a free market. Now, the big banks get to keep the rewards, but American taxpayers bear the risk. If that sounds familiar, it should. That is precisely what happened in Greece, when the International Monetary Fund underwrote hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, leaving American and German taxpayers stuck with the bills.

The only difference between America under its current rulers and Greece is that we have nowhere to turn for help, once our own taxpayers have been bled dry. To sum up:

Dodd-Frank has been an expensive exercise in command and control by the federal government. It encourages crony capitalism while undermining free markets and limiting competition.

The insane law will cost businesses $27 billion over the next 10 years in various fees, assessments, et cetera. At least major Dem donors like Goldman Sachs will get their money’s worth.

The destruction of poverty and privilege

Hutt's Crushing Blow to Keynes

by Hunter Lewis

Genius does not always announce itself. This was especially true of William H. Hutt. There was nothing about him to attract attention. He was born in London of working class parents, earned a bachelor's degree in economics from The London School of Economics in 1924, worked for a London publishing firm, and migrated to South Africa where he lectured obscurely in economics, before eventually retiring and moving to the United States in 1965. He was slight in frame and modest in manner, never pushing, always delighted to see the triumphs of others. He identified himself as a classical economist, not a member of any contemporary group or movement — how easy indeed to overlook him, but what a mistake to do so.

Hutt's mind was made for logic. It could see a logical problem from every side, draw every distinction and nuance, then penetrate right to the bottom of it. No fallacy was safe from him, and, without being the least combative, he never flinched from telling the unvarnished truth.

The history of modern economics is full of destructive fallacies, beginning with the mercantilists, continuing through Karl Marx, and culminating with John Maynard Keynes. These false ideas have impoverished billions of people and caused no end of needless suffering. When Keynes published his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936, a potpourri of fallacies supported by obscurity, shifting definitions, and other rhetorical tricks, many economists criticized it privately, but very few did so publicly. Why? Because Keynes was an intimidating figure, the best known economist in the world, a master publicist and polemicist, the editor of The Economic Journal, an essential venue for English-speaking economists.

In the preface to The Theory of Idle Resources, completed a year after Keynes's General Theoryappeared, and published two years later in 1939, Hutt says forthrightly: "I have been wisely advised not to touch on any of the major controversies which his contribution [Keynes's General Theory] has aroused."[1] But, then, with laser-like logic, he proceeds to demolish some of the most important intellectual props for Keynes's Theory. Moreover, he does so, as he says, "as far as possible, in a nontechnical way" so that "the reader who is unacquainted with the economic textbooks may follow my reasoning from point to point and himself decide on it's validity."[2]

Keynes's argument may be simplified as follows. Full employment should be our goal. The market system will not get us there; it requires government help as well as guidance. This means, in practice, that government will continually print money, in order to reduce interest rates, ultimately to zero[3], and also borrow and spend as needed. Booms are good, even economic bubbles are acceptable. Recession and bust must be avoided at all cost. As Keynes wrote: "The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom."[4]

In a variety of books and articles, Hutt pointed out the absurdity of this. One cannot create wealth simply by printing more money or by borrowing and spending funds which can never be repaid. Moreover, the real source of unemployment is some disturbance in the price-and-profit system. Government cannot possibly help matters by intervening in ways that further distort and disturb that system.

In his Theory of Idle Resources, Hutt deconstructs even the initial premise of Keynes's thinking, that we should want a permanent condition of full employment. Not only is full employment not definable; it is not even desirable. A moment's thought will show this to be true. To grow, an economy must change. To change, assets and workers must be shifted from where they are less needed (less productive) to where they are more needed (more productive). These shifts will inevitably produce temporary unemployment. If there had never been unemployment, and thus no economic change, we would all still be living in caves, and there would be far fewer of us, because hunting and gathering would only support a small fraction of the present population.

This insight is not original to Hutt. The economic writer Henry Hazlitt, a friend of Hutt's, found similar observations in a paper written by John Stuart Mill during 1829–30 when he was age 24, and collected in his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy. Mill's paper completely refutes Keynes's false contention that "classical" economists simply assumed that there would always be "full employment." But Hutt takes the examination of unemployment much further than the pioneering Mill. Indeed, he does not just examine unemployment. He examines unemployment as part of the larger phenomenon of unused or idle productive resources, including land, plant, equipment, and money as well as workers.

Hutt's careful reasoning demonstrates, through a variety of illustration, that we cannot just lump together (and falsely quantify) all the complexities of human choice and action working within a closely coordinated price-and-profit system. What looks like nonproductive idleness may actually be very productive, indeed essential to the smooth working of the system. Is it more productive for a highly trained but unemployed engineer to bag groceries for pay or to invest time without pay in looking for an engineering job? If he or she took the grocery-bagging job, Keynes would presumably be satisfied; we would be closer to full employment. But the economy would clearly not be more productive, which it must be to create new jobs. We should also keep in mind that an employment-agency employee job searching for the engineer would be considered gainfully "employed," while the engineer doing the same work would still be "unemployed."

Do not panic

If the world’s population lived in one city…

 by Tim De Chant

Little Nazis

The Threat to Israeli Liberties from the Israeli Supreme Court

By Steven Plaut

Robert Bork, the eminent American law professor from Yale University, once described the Israeli Supreme Court as the worst in the Western world.  Israel, Bork wrote, "has set a standard for judicial imperialism that can probably never be surpassed, and, one devoutly hopes, will never be equaled elsewhere."  Bork finds "less and less reason for the Israeli people to bother electing a legislature and executive; the attorney general, with the backing of the Supreme Court, can decide almost everything for them."  To make things worse, judges in Israel, including Supreme Court judges, are chosen by a non-elected panel dominated by other judges, and there are no possibilities for impeachment of judges by the parliament or by ballot initiative.  Appointments of judges are not subject to approval by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset).

Israel's Supreme Court has been dominated by the anti-democratic doctrine of "judicial activism" for a generation.  "Judicial activism" is when judges simply make up imaginary "laws" as they go along, without the need for the legislature to bother passing them as laws.  This week the Israeli Supreme Court in Israel is denouncing benefits for Israeli army veterans.  What law allows them to do so?  None at all.

In many cases the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court are attempts to implement the leftist ideologies of judges.  Ex-chief Justice Aharon Barak used to brag about his issuing rulings based upon "enlightened opinion" in Israel, meaning leftist opinion.  The current chief justice is also a great believer in "judicial activism."  The unelected justices of the Supreme Court claim the right, invented by them out of thin air, to be able to overturn laws passed by the elected representatives of the people.  There is no constitutional basis in Israel for their claiming such a right.

The Israeli Supreme Court has also frequently long displayed indifference when it comes to civil liberties.  It is militantly aggressive in defending the "liberties" of Israeli Arabs and far leftists, but seems to have little interest in defending civil liberties, including freedom of speech, for others.  In one extreme example, a Supreme Court justice, Ayala Procaccia, ordered the imprisonment without trial of 14-year-old religious girls who had dared to participate in a demonstration of the right.  No one believes the girls would have been imprisoned had they participated in a demonstration of the left.  Writing in Azure, Robert Bork says, "Israel's High Court, however, has decided that state inaction amounts to state action, so that the individual's freedom may be declared unconstitutional and the state required to act. Individual freedom thus exists at the sufferance of judges. ... All of this is exacerbated, as Polisar observes, by a method of selecting judges that allows the High Court to choose its own membership."

Israel's Supreme Court recently refused to review the decision of the Nazareth Appeals court in the famous long-running Plaut-Gordon lawsuit, in effect leaving the earlier anti-democratic decision by the Nazareth court in place.  That lawsuit was a SLAPP harassment suit filed by the Israeli leftist anti-Semite Neve Gordon against me to try to stop my criticizing his political opinions and activities.  "SLAPP" stands for "Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation," and SLAPP suits are anti-democratic harassment tactics used to suppress freedom of speech.

The Israeli Supreme Court has now refused to defend freedom of speech and refused to squash SLAPP suit harassment in Israel.  It took the Supreme Court nearly two years to decide not to review an earlier appeals court decision in the Gordon-Plaut case.  Its refusal in essence establishes formal infringements on freedom of expression in Israel.  The Supreme Court opinion was written by the Deputy Chief Justice, Eliezer Rivlin.  He was joined in his refusal to defend freedom of speech by justices Neil Handel, supposedly the voice of religious conservatives on the court, and Salim Jubran, the Arab judge in the Supreme Court.  A few days ago Rivlin was one of the judges who voted for a different Court ruling that telling the truth is no defense against the Soviet-style charge of "insulting a public official" in Israel.

This was one more nail in the coffin for Israeli freedom of speech.  The Gordon SLAPP suit filed against me, which began a decade ago, should have been summarily dismissed in the very first round of litigation.  Gordon sued me because I accused him of being a "groupie" of anti-Semite Norman Finkelstein, after Gordon compared Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets of the Bible, and after I denounced Gordon for his serving as a human shield for wanted terrorist murderers and his illegal interference with Israeli anti-terror operations.  The facts of his doing so were never denied by Gordon.

That suit would have been if Israel were really a democratic country with a functioning judiciary.  Instead, it was assigned to a radical Nazareth court Arab woman judge, whose husband was the right-hand party man of Azmi Bishara, the Israeli-Arab traitor and spy now in hiding.  Nazareth court has many Arab judges, some of them radical politically.  Neither Gordon nor I live in the Nazareth district, and the suit was filed in Nazareth as an act of naked forum-shopping, because Gordon wanted to get a radical Arab judge.  In her verdict this judge endorsed Holocaust revisionism and declared all of Israel a state constructed on lands stolen from another people.  Not surprisingly she found for Gordon and awarded him 95,000 NIS in "damages," even the law does not let her award more than 50,000 NIS in such cases.  In essence her verdict amounted to the ruling that treason in Israel is protected speech but criticism of treason is libel.  She is still sitting on the bench.

This is the same Neve Gordon who routinely calls for Israel to be destroyed, who insists that Israel is a fascist, Nazi-like apartheid regime, and whose own university president regards him as a traitor.  Gordon is very likely to be among the very first people to be sued under Israel's new "anti-boycott" law, which allows the filing of damage suits against those who have worked for world boycotts against Israel.

That Nazareth lower court ruling in the case was later reversed on appeal in the Nazareth Appeals Court, but only 90% of it was reversed, allowing (by a vote of two judges against one) Gordon to retain 10% of the "damages" the Arab woman judge had granted him (or 10,000 shekels).  Those 10% were based entirely on my use of the term "Judenrat-wannabe" in an internet article referring to Gordon's illegal pro-terrorism activities.

The Nazareth Appeals Court ruling was based on an older Supreme Court case, Dankner vs. Ben Gvir, in which Amnon Dankner, a national journalist, called the Kahanist Ben Gvir a "little Nazi" on national television.  Ben Gvir sued, and when it reached the Supreme Court the ruling was that "Holocaust era rhetoric" is prohibited in political discourse in Israel.  The Supreme Court found for Ben Gvir and awarded him one shekel.

The same Supreme Court has now allowed Neve Gordon to retain 10,000 shekels in "damages" because I referred to his group of human shields for terrorists as "Judenrat wannabes."  The Court believes this is 10,000 times worse than calling someone a "little Nazi."  Ironically, the same Deputy Chief Justice Rivlin, who wrote the Supreme Court ruling in Gordon-Plaut, voted against the ruling in Dankner-Ben Gvir, and was the minority voice who claimed even that was protected speech. To put this differently, denouncing on the internet the illegal treasonous activities of a person is now 10,000 times worse than calling someone a little Nazi on national television, in Rivlin's new opinion.  Guess what the Court's "price tag" would be if a leftist called a non-leftist a Nazi or a storm trooper.  I leave you to ponder how much the use of Holocaust-era rhetoric would be valued by the court if it were a leftist denouncing Israel as a Nazi regime.

After the Nazareth Appeals Court ruling, I filed a Supreme Court appeal.  After dragging its feet, the Supreme Court panel of three, led by the same Rivlin, decided there was insufficient constitutional or public interest in reviewing the Nazareth appeals ruling, in effect allowing it to stand.  And, in effect, also preserving the suppression of freedom of speech contained in that verdict.

Give Greece What It Deserves

The Socialist Republic of Greece 

By B. Frezza

Once in a great while an opportunity comes along to deliver justice to a people, giving them what they truly deserve. Greece’s time has come.

It must be dawning on all but the most obtuse member of the banking elite that they can’t possibly steal enough money from German taxpayers to save the Greek government from default. Put it off, maybe, but collapse is inevitable.

Once this happens, what is the purpose of casting Greece into some selective temporary financial purgatory where the irrelevant Greek economy can continue embarrassing anyone foolish enough to lend their dysfunctional government a dime? Why not go all the way and give the country what many of its people have been violently demanding for almost a century?

Let them have Communism.

Hard as it is for young people to believe, Communism was once a major historical force holding billions of people in thrall. Outside the halls of elite universities, who still takes it seriously? Sure we have Cuba, where the Castro deathwatch is the last thing standing between that benighted penal colony and an inevitable makeover by Club Med. Then there is Venezuela, though hope is fading that Hugo Chavez will carry the Bolivarian banner much longer now that he’s busy sucking down FOLFOX cocktails while checking for signs that his hair is falling out. And frankly, a psychopathic family dynasty ruling a nation of stunted zombies hardly makes North Korea a proper Communist exemplar.

What the world needs, lest we forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? They’ve been pining for it for years, exhibiting a level of anti-capitalist vitriol unmatched in any developed country. They are temperamentally attuned to it, having driven all hard working Greeks abroad in search of opportunity. They pose no military threat to their neighbors, unless you quake at the sight of soldiers marching around in white skirts. And they have all the trappings of a modern Western nation, making them an uncompromised test bed for Marxist theories. Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then stand back for a generation and watch.

The land that invented democracy used it to perfect the art of living at the expense of others, an example all Western democracies appear intent on emulating. Being the first to run out of other people’s money makes Greece truly ripe to take the next logical step beyond socialism.

As wrenching as it will be we can take comfort in the fact that Greece doesn’t have much of an economy to disrupt. The only Greek industry that’s worth a damn is tourism, rapidly collapsing as travelers get tired of being stranded by strikes while dodging Molotov cocktails. The rest of us can find plenty of other sources of lamb chops, yogurt, and olive oil. They crushed the concept of private property long ago under the burden of environmental, cultural, and social regulations that govern land use. Wouldn’t it be instructive to let them have a go at building a workers’ paradise to remind us what state enforced equality looks like?

Unlike neighboring Balkan nations that got to experience the joys of Communism after the Second World War, Greece was brought back from the brink by massive western intervention as well as a Churchillian side deal that obliged Stalin to butt out. The nasty civil war between the Greek Communist Party (the KKE) and government forces backed by Britain and the U.S. set the stage for decades of struggle between communist sympathizers who never gave up the dream, and right wing juntas determined to rule by force. The uneasy peace that has existed since the colonels were booted merely masks underlying tensions as every Greek worries, is someone else working fewer hours than I am?

How Greece conned its way into the European Union while hard working Turkey was left begging is a testament to the astute diplomats in Brussels, no doubt consulting their playbook on what dodge they can conjure up next to stick someone else with the bill. Why the E.U. extended credit to a nation whose governments have been in a chronic state of default since the country gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832 is a fitting subject for a News of the World expose. Perhaps they were being advised by Fannie Mae.

So despite the frantic meetings, the tragicomedy nears its final act. It’s time for the global financial industry to pull up stakes and go home before more innocent bank employees get immolated. If you don’t want the real contagion to spread, that is the disease of believing you can perpetually consume more than you produce, leave Greece to the Greeks and let the bankers take their lumps.

As difficult as it is for a Greek-American like myself to admit, resting on 2,000 year old laurels is a stale act. While few cultures can proudly look back on as many achievements in the arts, drama, athletics, philosophy, rhetoric, and architecture that were the glory of Greece, it’s time for modern Greeks to take a good hard look at themselves. What have they done for the world lately? More importantly, what are they prepared to do to help themselves? If they can’t face that question then it’s time to sing the Internationale.

Another one down the drain

Sharia law at work in Australia

By Chris Merritt,

SHARIA law has become a shadow legal system within Australia, endorsing polygamous and underage marriages that are outlawed under the Marriage Act.

 

A system of "legal pluralism" based on sharia law "abounds" in Australia, according to new research by legal academics Ann Black and Kerrie Sadiq.

They have found that Australian Muslims have long been complying with the shadow system of religious law as well as mainstream law.

But in family law, not all Muslims were registering their marriages and some were relying on religious ceremonies to validate unions that breached the Marriage Act.

This included "polygynist marriages", in which a man takes multiple wives, and marriages where one party is under the lawful marriage age.

Their research, which will be published on Monday in the University of NSW Law Journal, says that the wider community has been "oblivious to the legal pluralism that abounds in this country".

The findings come soon after Ikebal Patel, president of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, triggered a backlash inside the Islamic community when he called for Australia to compromise with Islam and embrace legal pluralism.

Mr Patel later said he supported secular law and it had been a mistake to even mention legal pluralism.

The latest research has found that while polygamy is unlawful, mainstream law accommodates men who arrive in Australia with multiple wives and gives some legal standing to multiple partnerships that originate in Australia.

"Valid Muslim polygynist marriages, lawfully entered into overseas, are recognised, with second and third wives and their children able to claim welfare and other benefits," they write.

Changes to the Family Law Act in 2008 meant that polygamous religious marriages entered into in Australia could also be recognised as de facto marriages. "It means a second wife can be validly married under Islamic law . . . and be a defacto wife under Australian law with the same legal entitlements as any other de facto relationship," they write.

The findings on polygamy were confirmed yesterday by Islamic community leader Kuranda Seyit. His personal view was "one wife is enough". But a small minority of Muslim men were taking second wives in ways that breached family law and their Islamic obligations.

"A second wife is permitted under Islam, but it is very difficult and there must be absolutely equal treatment of both wives," said Mr Seyit, who is director of the Forum on Australia's Islamic Relations.

He was aware of a very small number of "exploitative" arrangements in which men were taking much younger second wives and not complying with the sharia requirement of equal treatment.

"It's definitely a minority, but unfortunately is does exist and I think it comes down to the standard of living that Australia affords many men who normally would not be able to afford such a situation," Mr Seyit said.

In their article, associate professor Sadiq and Ms Black note that research on Islamic marriage found in 2008 that 90 per cent of Muslims did not want to change Australian law.

They write that many Muslims support the protection of human rights and had come to Australia because of practices such as genital mutilation and honour killings in countries ruled by unreformed versions of sharia.

However, they suggest there should be "tweaking" of family law to take account of sharia.

They suggest that the Family Law Act could be changed to ensure that when courts make parenting orders Muslim children are given similar rights to those enjoyed by indigenous children.

This would require courts to consider they have a right to enjoy their own culture and the culture of people who share their culture.

Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said if there was ever any inconsistency between cultural values and the rule of law "then Australian law wins out".

"There is only one law that's applicable in Australia - that's Australian law based on our common law tradition," he said. "Our constitutional founders included a provision against the state endorsing or prescribing any religion or religious practice."

He said the Family Law Act included specific provision for courts to consider, among other factors, an individual's lifestyle and background culture and traditions. "The government believes these provisions to be adequate," Mr McClelland said.

Gender Spectrum Diversity Training

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF DEBTORS                

By Mark Steyn

The other day, Abdul Qadir Fitrat, the governor of Afghanistan’s central bank, fled the country. The only wonder is that there aren’t more fleeing. Not Afghans; central bankers. I mean, you gotta figure that throughout the G-20 there are more than a few with the vague but growing feeling that the jig’s up big time.

Round about the time the Afghan central banker was heading for the hills, the Greek central banker ventured some rare criticisms of his government. “Piling more taxes on taxpayers has reached its limit,” said Giorgos Provopoulos. The alleged austerity measures do not “place enough emphasis on the containment of spending.”

All very sensible. Prudent and measured. Outside, in the streets of Athens, strikers struck, rioters rioted, and an already shrunken tourism industry dwindled down to an international press corps anxious to get on with societal collapse. “We don’t want your money, Europe,” declared a protesting “youth,” Iamando, 36. “Leave us alone — please, please, please.”

I would bet that, somewhere not too deep down, Giorgos Provopoulos understands that the problem is not the Greek economy or the Greek government but the Greek people. Many years ago in this space, I quoted the line Gerald Ford liked to use when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” And I suggested there was an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. That’s the stage Greece is at and so, to one degree or another, is the rest of the Western world. In the United States, our democracy is trending as Athenian as the rest: We’re the Brokest Nation in History, but, as those Medicare polls suggest, getting enough people to give enough of it back isn’t going to be any easier than it is in Greece. From Athens to Madison, Wis., too many people have gotten used to a level of comfort and ease they haven’t earned.

It’s not a green-eyeshade issue. The inability to balance the books is a symptom of more profound structural imbalances. Over on the Mediterranean, the only question that matters is: Are the Greek people ready to get real? Most of us, including Mr. Provopoulos, have figured out the answer to that.

Since Obama took office, it’s been fashionable to quote Mrs. Thatcher’s great line: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” But we’re way beyond that. That’s a droll quip when you’re on mid-20th-century European fertility rates, but we’ve advanced to the next stage: We’ve run out of other people, period. Hyper-rationalist technocrats introduced at remarkable speed a range of transformative innovations — welfare, feminism, mass college education, abortion — whose cumulative effect a few decades on is that the developed world has developed to breaking point: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. In the course of so doing, they have fewer children later. And the few they do have leave childhood ever later — Obamacare’s much heralded “right” for a 26-year old to remain on his parents’ health insurance being merely a belated attempt to catch up with the Europeans, and one sure to be bid up further.

A society of 25-year-old “children” whiling away the years till early middle age in desultory pseudo-education has no desire to fund its prolonged adolescence by any kind of physical labor, so huge numbers of unskilled Third World immigrants from the swollen favelas of Latin America or (in Europe) the shanty megalopolises of the Muslim world are imported to cook, clean, wash, build, do. On the Continent, the shifting rationale for mass immigration may not illuminate much about the immigrants but it certainly tells you something about the natives: Originally, European leaders said, we needed immigrants to work in the mills and factories. But the mills and factories closed. So the new rationale was that we needed young immigrants to keep the welfare state solvent. But in Germany the Turks retire even younger than the Krauts do, and in France 65 percent of imams are on the dole. So the surviving rationale is that a dependence on mass immigration is not a structural flaw but a sign of moral virtue. The evolving justification for post-war immigration policy — from manufacturing to welfare to moral narcissism — is itself a perfect shorthand for Western decay.

Most of the above doesn’t sound terribly “fiscal,” because it’s not. The ruinous debt is a symptom of our decline, not the cause. As Angela Merkel well understands every time she switches on the TV and sees a news report from Greece, culture trumps economics. I had a faintly surreal conversation with two Hollywood liberal pals not so long ago: One moment they were bemoaning all those right-wing racists like Pat Buchanan who’d made such a big deal about the crowd cheering for the Mexican team and booing the Americans at a U.S.–Mexico soccer match in Pasadena, and deploring the way the U.S. goalie had complained that the post-match ceremony was conducted entirely in Spanish. Ten minutes later they were sighing that nothing in Los Angeles seemed to work quite as well as it did when they first came out west over 40 years ago.

And it never occurred to them that these two conversational topics might somehow be connected.

Meanwhile, at Redwood Heights Elementary in Oakland, Californian kindergartners are put through “Gender Spectrum Diversity Training” in order to teach them that there are “more than two genders.”

The social capital of a nation is built up over centuries but squandered in a generation or two. With blithe self-confidence, the post-war West changed too much too fast. We changed everything, and yet we’ll still wonder why everything’s changed