The liquidation of the kulaks

Is America a Force for Good in the World?

By Justin Raimondo 

With the “liberation” of Libya from the grip of Muammar Gadhafi, progressives like E. J. Dionne and other cheerleaders for this administration are hailing the joint US-NATO operation as a new model for American intervention – an exemplar of the “good” way to push our weight around on the international stage, as opposed to the “bad” way pursued by George W. Bush and the neoconservatives in Iraq. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the same triumphalist message being trumpeted by this administration’s supporters over Libya was uncritically broadcast by the “mainstream” media in the wake of “mission accomplished” in Iraq. 

That reality will soon intrude, and correct this “irrational exuberance” – as a certain Federal Reserve chairman would put it – is an absolute certainty. Indeed, a few skeptical voices are already being raised, notably Patrick Cockburn, reporting from Benghazi: 

“Any black African in Libya is open to summary arrest unless he can prove that he was not a member of Colonel Gadhafi’s forces… The rebels claim that many of Colonel Gadhafi’s soldiers were black African mercenaries. Amnesty International says these allegations are largely unproven and, from the beginning of the conflict, many of those arrested or, in some cases, executed by the rebels were undocumented laborers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

“But there is no doubt that all black Africans are now under suspicion. The head of the militia in Faraj, a short bearded man in a brown robe named Issam, explained how well-prepared local insurgents had taken over the area on 19 August, telling Colonel Gadhafi’s supporters to hand over their weapons and stay at home. There was almost no resistance from the demoralized regime and few people had been arrested. Then Issam added, as an aside, that his men had also detained ‘tens of Africans whom we sent off to prison.’ He did not explain why they had been jailed.” 

Across “liberated” Libya, black Africans are being rounded up by the rebel forces, and often either summarily executed or else imprisoned. See here, here, and here for more disgusting evidence of the rebels’ anti-black campaign.  

Gadhafi reportedly hired African mercenaries to fight for his regime, and this is the ostensible reason why the rebels are rounding up blacks, but this explanation seems more like an excuse than an actual reason in view of the fact that there have been periodic anti-black riots in the country, notably in 2000.  

The idea that American imperialism could be a force for “good,” with a “progressive” president holding the reins, was never very convincing. But even I never expected to be confronted with the ultimate irony: the first African-American President appears to be responsible, in part, for a large scale anti-black pogrom. This is his signal foreign policy “accomplishment” – a mass lynching. 

We have truly entered Bizarro World. 

One could argue, however, that this is not the fault of the Obama administration, since it was their Libyan proxies, and not US troops, who committed that particular atrocity. We can still see the US as a force for “good” in the world, albeit not without morally complex anomalies to factor into the equation. Well, tell that to the people of Ishaqi, a village in Iraq, where  US troops recently conducted a raid: 

“Witnesses in the village of Ishaqi, just south of Tikrit, said Iraqi and American forces opened fire on civilians and threw grenades early Friday as they conducted the raid. The villagers said the forces were responding to gunfire from people in the village and then fired back, killing a 13-year-old boy and an off-duty police officer.” 

The American authorities are currently stonewalling, denying any responsibility for the deaths, and claiming it was an Iraqi operation – although they admit US forces entered the scene when “fighting broke out.” One has to wonder, however, how a 13-year-old boy and a police officer came to be the targets – are these the “terrorists” we’re supposedly fighting in Iraq, whose presence requires an extended American stay? 

It’s an irony that this latest incident – which has further complicated Washington’s efforts to persuade the Iraqis they need our continued presence – took place in Ishaqi, the scene of yet another infamous US atrocity in 2006. As Antiwar.com’s John Glaser was the first to report earlier this week: 

“As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed. The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006. 

Regime Uncertainty

Pirrong Debunks the Keynesian Debunking

By Robert Higgs

As the idea of regime uncertainty has gained ground in recent years as a partial explanation of the economy’s failure to recover quickly and fully, economists and others invested in Keynesian thinking have begun to strike back. One such Keynesian debunking of regime uncertainty was offered recently by Gary Burtless and seemingly endorsed by Mark Thoma. Now, Craig Pirrong, an economist at the University of Houston, has debunked Burtless’s arguments.

Pirrong uses options pricing theory to show why the Keynesians are missing the point of the regime uncertainty concept and why, even on their own terms, their arguments for disregarding regime uncertainty and simply pumping up aggregate demand are wrong.

To adapt a familiar saying:  first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they embrace the idea and claim that they had it first. We are now passing through Stage II.

Although I am pleased that the concept of regime uncertainty has come to be recognized in some quarters as an important part of our understanding the economy’s operation, I continue to be disconcerted that many of those who speak of it, including some of those who speak favorably of it, fail to understand its full scope. As I understand regime uncertainty, it has to do with widespread inability to form confident expectations about future private property rights in all of their dimensions. Private property rights specify the property owner’s rights to decide how property will be used, to accrue income from its uses, and to transfer these rights to others in various voluntary arrangements. Because the content of private property rights is complex, threats to such rights can arise from many different sources, including actions by legislators, administrators, prosecutors, judges, juries, and others (e.g., sit-down strikers, mobs).

Because of the great variety of ways in which government officials can threaten private property rights, the security of such rights turns not only on law “on the books,” but also to an important degree on the character of the government officials who administer and enforce the law. An important reason why regime uncertainty arose in the latter half of the 1930s, for example, had to do with the character of the advisers who had the greatest access to President Franklin Roosevelt at that time—people such as Tom Corcoran, Ben Cohen, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and others of their ilk. These people were known to hate businessmen and the private enterprise system; they believed in strict, pervasive regulation of the market system by—who would have guessed?—people such as themselves. So, as bad as the National Labor Relations Board was on paper, it was immensely worse (for employers) in practice. And so forth, across the full range of new regulatory powers created by New Deal legislation. In a similar way, the apparatchiki who run the federal regulatory leviathan today can only inspire apprehension on the part of investors and business executives. President Obama’s cadre of crony capitalists, which he drags out to show that “business is being fully considered,” in no way diminishes these worries.

Thus, regime uncertainty is a multifaceted and somewhat nuanced concept. Many economists don’t like it because it cannot be measured and compiled along with other standard macro variables in a convenient data base. But, as I have tried to show for fifteen years, various forms of empirical evidence can be and have been brought to bear to show that regime uncertainty is not simply a figment of the analyst’s imagination or an all-purpose club with which the Chamber of Commerce whacks the government’s every move to increase taxes or augment regulations. Anyone who actually manages a business or makes serious investment can readily understand the idea. Keynesian economists, who generally do not manage businesses or make serious investments, view the idea as merely something their ideological opponents toss out to obstruct the application of their “science” in policy making. It is good to have analysts such as Craig Pirrong showing that the Keynesian rejection of regime uncertainty has no firm foundation.

Moonbattery

The Regime Imposes Drunk Driver on Trucking Company

What happens when the most insane administration in American history implements the most insane piece of legislation (the Americans With Disabilities Act)?

This:

“Citing a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Obama administration is suing a trucking company for taking the keys away from an Arkansas driver and eventually firing him [for job abandonment] after he admitted he was battling alcohol abuse.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit this week arguing that Old Dominion Freight Line discriminated against Charles Grams by stripping him of his position and offering him a demotion…”

To discriminate means to fail to give a person of privileged status what they want. Charles Grams didn’t need to be black, homosexual, or Muslim to earn this precious status. He got it by being a drunk who drives. With the inmates running the asylum, this qualifies as a disability — the highest honor one can achieve under liberalism.

“The EEOC says alcoholism is a recognized disability under the ADA and that the company violated the law with its policy that bans any driver who admits alcohol abuse from driving again.

The EEOC wants the company to reinstate Grams and another affected driver to their previous positions and provide them with back pay, compensatory and punitive damages and compensation for lost benefits”

Unfortunately, when Grams or some other drunk causes a 20-car pile up while driving an Old Dominion truck, it won’t be the federal government that gets sued out of existence.

It isn’t easy to run a business in a country governed by the likes of our do-gooder rulers.

They don’t intend it to be.

Green illusions

Green "Jobs"

By Lisa Benson

More than a decade ago, Paul Gigot of the WSJ pointed out that "ethanol is produced by mixing corn with our tax dollars."  In that case, solar energy is produced by mixing sunlight with our tax dollars.

Get a government job

Social Security IS a Pyramid Scheme

By Mark Perry

Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme? Texas Governor Rick Perry says Yes, and calls it a "monstrous lie for younger people."  Cato Institute's Michael Tanner says Perry was being too kind, and writes:  "As with Ponzi’s scheme, when the number of new contributors dries up, it will become impossible to continue to pay the promised benefits." Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby says that's not the point, and points out that "Ponzi schemes are intended to defraud; Social Security was designed to be a social safety net for the old."

The debate will continue, but the facts in the graph above are crystal clear: the number of active workers per Social Security recipient is declining, and will continue to decline, and the Social Security system is clearly unsustainable.  Whether Social Security technically meets the technical definition of being a Ponzi scheme is less important than the fact that the current system has become a Pyramid scheme as the population ages.  We will eventually run out of money from active workers, and money from the "trust fund," to pay for the unfunded liabilities due to Social Security recipients.  

The Arab Spring

There has been an America Foreign Policy Coup

A stunning speech delivered in 2007 by General Wesley Clark. 

The uprisings in the middle east won't look so spontaneous after you hear this.

The politics of Envy

Against Women’s Lib

by Murray N. Rothbard

 (Originally published as "The Great Women's Liberation Issue: Setting It Straight" in The Individualist, May 1970)

 It is high time, and past due, that someone blew the whistle on "Women’s Liberation." Like The Environment, Women’s Lib is suddenly and raucously everywhere in the last few months. It has become impossible to avoid being assaulted, day in and day out, by the noisy blather of the Women’s Movement. Special issues of magazines, TV news programs, and newspapers have been devoted to this new-found "problem"; and nearly two dozen books on women’s lib are being scheduled for publication this year by major publishers.

In all this welter of verbiage, not one article, not one book, not one program has dared to present the opposition case. The injustice of this one-sided tidal wave should be evident. Not only is it evident, but the lack of published opposition negates one of the major charges of the women’s lib forces: that the society and economy are groaning under a monolithic male "sexist" tyranny. If the men are running the show, how is it that they do not even presume to print or present anyone from the other side?

Yet the "oppressors" remain strangely silent, which leads one to suspect, as we will develop further below, that perhaps the "oppression" is on the other side.

In the meanwhile, the male "oppressors" are acting, in the manner of Liberals everywhere, like scared, or guilt-ridden, rabbits. When the one hundred viragos of Women’s Lib bullied their way into the head offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal, did the harried editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter, throw these aggressors out on their collective ear, as he should have done? Did he, at the very least, abandon his office for the day and go home? No, instead he sat patiently for eleven hours while these harridans heaped abuse upon him and his magazine and his gender, and then meekly agreed to donate to them a special section of the Journal, along with $10,000 ransom. In this way, spineless male Liberalism meekly feeds the appetite of the aggressors and paves the way for the next set of outrageous "demands." Rat magazine, an underground tabloid, caved in even more spectacularly, and simply allowed itself to be taken over permanently by a "women’s liberation collective."

Why, in fact, this sudden upsurge of women’s lib? Even the most fanatic virago of the Women’s Movement concedes that this new movement has not emerged in response to any sudden clamping down of the male boot upon the collective sensibilities of the American female. Instead, the new uprising is part of the current degeneracy of the New Left, which, as its one-time partly libertarian politics and ideology and organization have collapsed, has been splintering into absurd and febrile forms, from Maoism to Weathermanship to mad bombings to women’s lib. The heady wine of "liberation" for every crackpot group has been in the air for some time, sometimes deserved but more often absurd, and now the New Left women have gotten into the act. We need not go quite so far as the recent comment of Professor Edward A. Shils, eminent sociologist at the University of Chicago, that he now expects a "dog liberation front," but it is hard to fault the annoyance behind his remark. Throughout the whole gamut of "liberation", the major target has been the harmless, hard-working, adult WASP American male, William Graham Sumner’s Forgotten Man; and now this hapless Dagwood Bumstead figure is being battered yet once more. How long will it be before the put-upon, long-suffering Average American at last loses his patience, and rises up in his wrath to do some effective noisemaking on his own behalf?

The current Women’s Movement is divisible into two parts. The older, slightly less irrational wing began in 1963 with the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and her organization of NOW (the National Organization of Women). NOW concentrates on alleged economic discrimination against women. For example: the point that while the median annual wage for all jobs in 1968 was almost $7700 for men, it only totaled $4500 for women, 58% of the male figure. The other major point is the quota argument: that if one casts one’s eye about various professions, top management positions, etc., the quota of women is far lower than their supposedly deserved 51%, their share of the total population.

The quota argument may be disposed of rapidly; for it is a two-edged sword. If the low percentage of women in surgery, law, management, etc., is proof that the men should posthaste be replaced by females, then what are we to do with the Jews, for example, who shine far above their assigned quota in the professions, in medicine, in academia, etc.? Are they to be purged?

The lower average income for women can be explained on several grounds, none of which involve irrational "sexist" discrimination. One is the fact that the overwhelming majority of women work a few years, and then take a large chunk of their productive years to raise children, after which they may or may not decide to return to the labor force. As a result, they tend to enter, or to find, jobs largely in those industries and in that type of work that does not require a long-term commitment to a career. Furthermore, they tend to find jobs in those occupations where the cost of training new people, or of losing old ones, is relatively low. These tend to be lower-paying occupations than those that require a long-term commitment or where costs of training or turnover are high. This general tendency to take out years for child-raising also accounts for a good deal of the failure to promote women to higher-ranking, and therefore higher-paying jobs, and hence for the low female "quotas" in these areas. It is easy to hire secretaries who do not intend to make the job their continuing life work; it is not so easy to promote people up the academic or the corporate ladder who do not do so. How does a dropout for motherhood get to be a corporate president or a full professor?

Price fixing

The Fix Is In: Ultra-Low Interest Rates

By P. Schiff

Low rates are the root cause of the misallocation of resources that define the modern American economy. As a direct result, Americans borrow, consume, and speculate too much, while we save, produce, and invest too little.

This week's wild actions on Wall Street should serve as a stark reminder that few investors have any clue as to what is really going on beneath the surface of America's troubled economy. But this week did bring startling clarity on at least one front. In its August policy statement the Federal Reserve took the highly unusual step of putting a specific time frame for the continuation of its near zero interest rate policy.

Moving past the previously uncertain pronouncements that they would "keep interest rates low for an extended period," the Fed now tells us that rates will not budge from rock bottom for at least two years. Although the markets rallied on the news (at least for a few minutes) in reality the policy will inflict untold harm on the U.S. economy. The move was so dangerous and misguided that three members of the Fed's Open Market Committee actually voted against it. This level of dissent within the Fed hasn't been seen for years.

Many economists have short-sightedly concluded that ultra low interest rates are a sure fire way to spur economic growth. The easier and cheaper it is to borrow, they argue, the more likely business and consumers are to spend. And because spending spurs growth, in their calculation, low rates are always good. But, as is typical, they have it backwards.

I believe that ultra-low interest rates are among the biggest impediments currently preventing genuine economic growth in the US economy. By committing to keep them near zero for the next two years, the Fed has actually lengthened the time Americans will now have to wait before a real recovery begins. Low rates are the root cause of the misallocation of resources that define the modern American economy. As a direct result, Americans borrow, consume, and speculate too much, while we save, produce, and invest too little.

It may come as a shock to some, but just like everything else in a free market, interest rate levels are best determined by the freely interacting forces of supply and demand. In the case of interest rates, the determinative factors should be the supply of savings available to lend and the demand for money by people and business who want to borrow. Many of the beneficial elements of market determined rates are explained in my book How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes. But allowing the government to determine interest rates as a matter of policy creates a number of distortions.

It was bad enough that the Fed held rates far too low, but at least a fig leaf of uncertainty kept the most brazen speculators in partial paralysis. But by specifically telegraphing policy, the Fed has now given cover to the most parasitic elements of the financial sector to undertake transactions that offer no economic benefit to the nation. Specifically, it will simply encourage banks to borrow money at zero percent from the Fed, and then use significant leverage to buy low yielding treasuries at 2 to 4 percent. The result is a banker's dream: guaranteed low risk profit. In other words it will encourage banks to lend to the government, which already borrows too much, and not lend to private borrowers, whose activity could actually benefit the economy.

This reckless policy, designed to facilitate government spending and appease Wall Street financiers, will continue to starve Main Street of the capital it needs to make real productivity-enhancing investments. American investment capital will continue to flow abroad, denying local business the means to expand and hire. It also destroys interest rates paid to holders of bank savings deposits which traditionally had been a financial pillar of retirees. In addition, such an inflationary policy drives real wages lower, robbing Americans of their purchasing power. The consequence is a dollar in free-fall, dragging down with it the standard of living of average Americans.

Until interest rates are allowed to rise to appropriate levels, more resources will be misallocated, additional jobs will be lost, government spending and deficits will continue to grow, the dollar will keep falling, consumer prices will keep rising, and the government will keep blaming our problems on external factors beyond its control. As the old adage goes, "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

A disastrous experiment

Wild Weekend in NYC for LBJ's Great Grandkids

By R. Wenzel

Some 31 people were shot in New York City between early Saturday and early Monday—part of a 24-hour run of shooting victims.

Public schooling, escalating minimum wage laws and the encouragement of fatherless families, were all  things  intensified under LBJ's  "Great Society" program and "War on Poverty". They have made for a mad cocktail of out of control kids.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, 226 out of 252 major legislative requests (over a four-year period) had been met, Federal Aid to the poor rose from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $30 billion.

President Johnson's first ever public reference to the 'Great Society' took place during a speech to students on May 7, 1964, at Ohio University. "And with your courage and with your compassion and your desire, we will build the Great Society. It is a Society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled."

Economist Thomas Sowell  explained in 2004 what LBJ's programs did:

August 20th marks the 40th anniversary of one of the major turning points in American social history. That was the date on which President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating his "War on Poverty" program in 1964.

Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting. Its intentions were the best. But we know what road is paved with good intentions.

In the liberal vision, slums bred crime. But brand-new government housing projects almost immediately became new centers of crime and quickly degenerated into new slums. Many of these projects later had to be demolished. Unfortunately, the assumptions behind those projects were not demolished, but live on in other disastrous programs...The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
Government has no clue as to how to raise kids, find them jobs, educate them or house them. It is a myth designed to further justify tax increases. Government has done nothing but create the most violent, gun-toting, out-of-control kids in the history of mankind.

It is time to ditch government "help" in the raising of children, that needs to be returned to the private charity level and the family level. Further, minimum wage laws need to be abolished so these kids can get jobs and learn basic skills. Otherwise, LBJ's great grandkids will be toting more guns and we will all end up ducking for cover, from time to time.

Picking peanuts

This Labor Day Celebrate Man's Mind

By Fredric Hamber

On Labor Day, let us honor the true root of production and wealth: the human mind.

It is fitting that the most productive nation on earth should have a holiday to honor its work. The high standard of living that Americans enjoy is hard-earned and well-deserved. But the term "Labor Day" is a misnomer. What we should celebrate is not sweat and toil, but the power of man's mind to reason, invent and create.

Several centuries ago, providing the basic necessities for one's survival was a matter of daily drudgery for most people. But Americans today enjoy conveniences undreamed of by medieval kings. Every day brings some new useful household gadget, or a new software system to increase our productivity, or a breakthrough in biotechnology.

So, it is worth asking: Why do Americans have no unique holiday to celebrate the creators, inventors, and entrepreneurs who have made all of this wealth possible--the men of the mind?

The answer lies in the dominant intellectual view of the nature of work. Most of today's intellectuals, influenced by several generations of Marxist political philosophy, still believe that wealth is created by sheer physical toil. But the high standard of living we enjoy today is not due to our musculature and physical stamina. Many animals have been much stronger. We owe our relative affluence not to muscle power, but to brain power.

Brain power is given a left-handed acknowledgement in today's fashionable aphorism that we are living in an "information age" in which education and knowledge are the keys to economic success. The implication of this idea, however, is that prior to the invention of the silicon chip, humans were able to flourish as brainless automatons.

The importance of knowledge to progress is not some recent trend, but a metaphysical fact of human nature. Man's mind is his tool of survival and the source of every advance in material well-being throughout history, from the harnessing of fire, to the invention of the plough, to the discovery of electricity, to the invention of the latest anti-cancer drug.

Contrary to the Marxist premise that wealth is created by laborers and "exploited" by those at the top of the pyramid of ability, it is those at the top, the best and the brightest, who increase the value of the labor of those at the bottom. Under capitalism, even a man who has nothing to trade but physical labor gains a huge advantage by leveraging the fruits of minds more creative than his. The labor of a construction worker, for example, is made more productive and valuable by the inventors of the jackhammer and the steam shovel, and by the farsighted entrepreneurs who market and sell such tools to his employer. The work of an office clerk, as another example, is made more efficient by the men who invented copiers and fax machines. By applying human ingenuity to serve men's needs, the result is that physical labor is made less laborious and more productive.

An apt symbol of the theory that sweat and muscle are the creators of economic value can be seen in those Soviet-era propaganda posters depicting man as a mindless muscular robot with an expressionless, cookie-cutter face. In practice, that theory led to chronic famines in a society unable to produce even the most basic necessities.

A culture thrives to the extent that it is governed by reason and science, and stagnates to the extent that it is governed by brute force. But the importance of the mind in human progress has been evaded by most of this century's intellectuals. Observe, for example, George Orwell's novel 1984, which depicts a totalitarian state that still, somehow, is a fully advanced technological society. Orwell projects the impossible: technology without the minds to produce it.

The best and brightest minds are always the first to either flee a dictatorship in a "brain drain" or to cease their creative efforts. A totalitarian regime can force some men to perform muscular labor; it cannot force a genius to create, nor force a businessman to make rational decisions. A slave owner can force a man to pick peanuts; only under freedom would a George Washington Carver discover ways to increase crop yields.

What Americans should celebrate is the spark of genius in the scientist who first identifies a law of physics, in the inventor who uses that knowledge to create a new engine or telephonic device, and in the businessmen who daily translate their ideas into tangible wealth.

On Labor Day, let us honor the true root of production and wealth: the human mind.

Mission Accomplished

After 9/11: ten years of a war against… who?

By Frank Furedi

One virtue of war is that it often provides society with an unusual degree of clarity about political issues. War tempts us with an irresistibly simple choice between Them and Us, enemy and friend, wrong and right, annihilation or survival. That kind of thinking came very easily during the Cold War. Every schoolboy knew that They – the so-called Evil Empire – were hellbent on destroying Us and our democratic way of life.

That was then, when it was clear who our friends and enemies were. The remarkable thing about the post-9/11 decade is that those old phrases about ‘them’ and ‘us’ no longer have much meaning. How can society make sense of global conflict when governments seem to lack a language through which to interpret it? A few weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center, President George W Bush asked a question that has proved unanswerable: ‘Why do they hate us?’ One reason why the US government has failed to answer that question is because the couplet ‘they’ and ‘us’ lacks meaningful moral contrast today. Before you can give a satisfactory reply to Bush’s question, you have to answer the logically prior question of who ‘they’ are, and who ‘we’ are. And after 10 years of linguistic confusion, Western governments appear to have made no headway in resolving that quandary.

Experience shows that when the meaning of ‘they’ and ‘us’ is self-evident, there is no need to pose morally naive questions about the issues at stake in a conflict. Roman emperors confronted with invading hordes of Vandals did not need to ask why they hated Pax Romana. Neither US president Franklin D Roosevelt nor British prime minister Winston Churchill felt it necessary to ask why the Nazis detested their way of life. Nor was that question asked by Western leaders in relation to the Kremlin during the Cold War. In all of those cases, the battle lines were reasonably clear, and so were the issues and interests at stake.

Since 9/11, it has proven increasingly difficult to grasp and characterise the interests – geopolitical or otherwise – in a variety of global conflicts and wars. It is far from evident what purpose is served by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such interventions frequently appear to have an arbitrary, even random quality. One day, officials in Whitehall are dishing out PhDs to Gaddafi’s children; the next day, NATO’s airplanes are bombing targets in Tripoli to teach Gaddafi a lesson. These foreign adventures make little sense from a geopolitical point of view. There is no equivalent of a Truman doctrine or even a Carter doctrine today. Ronald Reagan was the last US president to put forward a foreign policy doctrine that could be characterised as coherent. Although Bush’s ‘war on terror’ was periodically flattered with the label ‘doctrine’, in truth that so-called war was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along set of responses, detached from any coherent expression of national interest.

The main achievement of the Western, principally Anglo-American response to 9/11 has been to unravel the existing balance of power in the Middle East and in the region surrounding Afghanistan. But this demise of the old order has not been followed by the ascendancy of any stable alternative. In such circumstances, it is difficult to claim that these interventions have served the interests of their initiators. Moreover, the incoherent nature of such foreign policy has, if anything, undermined domestic support for it. These wars have little populist appeal and they do little to bind people together. These are military conflicts detached from people’s lives, which is why we are confronted with a very interesting situation where there is neither enthusiasm for foreign ventures, nor war-weariness.

A war in search of a name

One of the most remarkable features of the post-9/11 landscape is that, after 10 years of conflict, there is no real public appetite for evaluating what has happened. Consequently, all the fundamental questions normally posed by a war are being evaded rather than answered. Who is winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? What are the objectives of the occupying forces? And as they begin to wind down their activities and withdraw, what have they actually achieved? These interventions, as well as more minor episodes such as the attack on Libya, lack any clear political signposts. They are wars without names. They are directed at unspecified targets and against an enemy that cannot easily be defined.

The failure of language is most powerfully symbolised by the continuing reference to 9/11. Why rely on two numbers to serve as the representation of a historic moment? No one refers to the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 as 7/12, nor was the war against Japan coded in such euphemistic terms. The principal reason for labelling significant violent episodes as 9/11 or 7/7 is to avoid having to account explicitly for these events or to give them meaning. The preference for numbers rather than words exposes a sense of anxiety about the events, and an inability to communicate any lessons to the public.

Sleight of hand

India’s Mangled School Reforms

 The country’s new voucher provisions won’t increase choice.

Shikha Dalmia

When India included a voucher program in last year’s Right to Education Act, which mandates free, compulsory education for all Indian children between the ages of six and 14, school choice advocates everywhere applauded. After all, about 30 million poor kids would eventually get government vouchers that they could spend on private school tuition. A Wall Street Journal column hailed the voucher component as “nothing short of a revolution in school choice.” The Indian magazine Education World declared that the government had “launched one of the boldest education schemes in the world.” And a Cato Institute blog declared that the scheme could become “the biggest school choice program in the world.” Sadly, such jubilation is unwarranted because the voucher program, promising though it appears, comes with regulations that would actually cripple the private school market.

The worst of these regulations requires private schools to set aside 25 percent of seats in entering classes for “economically backward” kids with vouchers. A consortium of elite private schools is challenging that provision in court, arguing that because the vouchers will cover only a fraction of students’ costs, the rule would wreak havoc on school budgets. Further, within three years, all private schools must create minimum playground space, maintain prescribed teacher-student ratios, hire credentialed teachers, and pay salaries equivalent to those of unionized teachers. Private schools will be barred from holding back low-performing middle-school students. And because they now will also be required to use a government-prescribed curriculum and government-approved texts, many of which are written by government bureaucrats and are of shoddy quality, the private schools will no longer be able to offer pedagogical variety. Many of these regulations won’t apply to government schools, giving them an unfair advantage. The Center for Civil Society, a New Delhi–based libertarian outfit that campaigned for the vouchers, is challenging this double standard in court.

If India’s supreme court allows the provisions to stand, the new law will do severe damage to the private school market, which is a much bigger part of the K–12 mix in India than in America. About 55 percent of the nation’s urban children attend private schools, fleeing India’s abysmal public schools, where teachers routinely don’t show up and, when they do, often don’t teach or are abusive. The government’s own Public Report on Basic Education in India found in 1997 that only 53 percent of government schools had anything like teaching activity taking place. In some instances, teachers simply shut schools down for months without explanation and made schoolchildren perform domestic chores. Such neglect affected even schools with relatively good facilities and adequate student-teacher ratios. Press reports have also found government schools that demand bribes from kids who can’t produce birth certificates—which most poor people don’t have—before admitting them. No surprise, then, that 80 percent of government school teachers choose to send their children to private schools.

In the face of this government failure, India has made decent progress in raising its primary-school attendance rates, which now stand at 80 percent. For this, it has its private schools to thank. The private school market caters not just to wealthy families but also, as University of Newcastle education policy professor James Tooley has demonstrated, to every socioeconomic group, including the poorest of the poor. Private schools run by nonprofits, for-profits, religious organizations—you name it—have mushroomed everywhere, from urban slums to backwater villages. Though India has its share of superelite private academies, more often private schools are ramshackle, mom-and-pop operations run from someone’s backyard. But they’re usually better than the free government alternative.

Indeed, Tooley found that in the slums of Hyderabad, a predominantly Muslim city in south India, private schools suffered far less teacher absenteeism than public schools did, even though the teachers’ salaries were much smaller. Further, while private schools had fewer resources—their main revenue source being the paltry monthly fees they charged students—they surpassed public schools in nearly every respect, not just in the quality of their facilities but in academic performance as well. Private middle-school students scored 22 percentage points higher, on average, than public school students on math tests; the gap was even more pronounced on English exams. (Other researchers, including Geeta Gandhi Kingdon, another Britain-based scholar, have found that controlling for socioeconomic background, ability, and parental involvement closes the private-public academic gap somewhat but does not eliminate it.)

Putting more demands on schools already doing so much with so little will have catastrophic consequences, argues V. K. Madhavan, founder of a nonprofit that runs a primary school in the newly minted Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Madhavan, whose organization aims to improve rural families’ quality of life, has seen his school’s enrollment grow from ten students to 77 in four years because he has managed to keep fees low. But if the government enforces its new regulations, Madhavan’s school will struggle to survive financially.

Madhavan hopes that alternative schools like his will get an exemption from the rules. Another possibility is that the government simply won’t be able to enforce its regulations on the extensive network of Hindu and Muslim schools without triggering religious riots; it will therefore have to exempt them all, offering a way for schools like Madhavan’s to escape the law’s tentacles by reconstituting themselves—at least on paper—as religious institutions. But even if loopholes and lax enforcement prevent total annihilation of the private school industry, many schools will surely shut down, notes Barun Mitra, director of the Liberty Institute in New Delhi. That will mean fewer options for the poor.

Such an outcome is the opposite of what libertarian voucher proponents in India intended. But it’s exactly what educators like Vinod Raina, who helped draft the Right to Education Act, wanted. Raina and other quasi-socialists have long despised India’s private schools because, in their view, they reproduce social and class divisions. Instead, schools should foster social integration, “bringing kids from diverse backgrounds into the same classroom,” as Raina puts it. The best way to accomplish that, Raina and his allies believe, would be to abolish private schools altogether; since that’s not politically possible, handing poor kids a modest voucher and forcing private schools to restructure themselves on the public school model is the next best thing.

Combining vouchers with restrictions on private schools appealed both to India’s egalitarian intelligentsia and to politicians eager to buy the votes of poor people, making for a politically potent alliance. Libertarian voucher proponents and their own allies—private schools that will have to raise fees on middle-class parents to offset the meager vouchers—weren’t powerful enough to resist. Raina and his cohorts also had the support of a powerful lobby: teachers’ unions. Though India lacks an all-powerful national teachers’ union like the National Education Association, the country’s smaller, state-based unions are collectively quite strong because teachers serve as election officers and run polling booths during elections. No surprise, then, that the bulk of the roughly $9.5 billion in extra educational spending in the new law will be devoted to financing government teachers’ salaries—which already average seven times India’s per-capita income, according to Gurcharan Das, author of India Unbound.

India’s experience testifies to the challenge of reforming the government school system from within, as the school choice movement has long sought to do in the United States. Entrenched interests can twist and contort the reforms, burdening them with rules that render them unworkable or counterproductive. In India, teachers’ unions are using vouchers to cripple a flourishing private school market; in America, by contrast, they have frozen the voucher program so that decades into the school choice movement, only about 100,000 of 50 million American kids get a voucher or tax credit. Charter schools, serving about 5 million students, have made more inroads. But the competition they have generated is less against public schools and more against Catholic and parochial ones, many of which have shut down, unable to compete against free charters. On balance, it’s unclear whether charters thus far have increased or diminished choice.

The cleaner but more arduous approach to reform might be to marginalize the public school monopoly from the outside. Instead of fighting to redirect public school funds toward poor parents, the school choice movement could intensify its efforts to pursue private philanthropy to fund voucher programs. It could also look for ways to strengthen America’s home-schooling movement, especially now that online learning is putting good, cheap educational opportunities directly in the hands of parents and children.

India’s reforms offer a warning about the perils of government meddling dressed up as choice. School choice advocates should stop cheering India’s new education law. Just because it contains something resembling vouchers doesn’t mean that it has anything to do with empowering parents or expanding educational options.

tip-toeing

Mayor Nutter Spoke the Truth About Race
by t. Sowell

Someone at long last has had the courage to tell the plain, honest truth about race.

After mobs of young blacks rampaged through Philadelphia committing violence — as similar mobs have rampaged through Chicago, Denver, Milwaukee, and other places — Philadelphia's black mayor, Michael A. Nutter, ordered a police crackdown and lashed out at the whole lifestyle of those who did such things.

"Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt," he said. "If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy," the mayor said. He added: "You have damaged your own race."

While this might seem like it is just plain common sense, what Mayor Nutter said undermines a whole vision of the world that has brought fame, fortune and power to race hustlers in politics, the media and academia. Any racial disparities in hiring can only be due to racism and discrimination, according to the prevailing vision, which reaches from street corner demagogues to the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Just to identify the rioters and looters as black is a radical departure, when mayors, police chiefs and the media in other cities report on these outbreaks of violence without mentioning the race of those who are doing these things. The Chicago Tribune even made excuses for failing to mention race when reporting on violent attacks by blacks on whites in Chicago.

Such excuses might make sense if the same politicians and media talking heads were not constantly mentioning race when denouncing the fact that a disproportionate number of young black men are being sent to prison.

The prevailing social dogma is that disparities in outcomes between races can only be due to disparities in how these races are treated. In other words, there cannot possibly be any differences in behavior.

But if black and white Americans had exactly the same behavior patterns, they would be the only two groups on this planet that are the same.

The Chinese minority in Malaysia has long been more successful and more prosperous than the Malay majority, just as the Indians in Fiji have long been more successful and more prosperous than the indigenous Fijians. At various places and times throughout history, the same could be said of the Armenians in Turkey, the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, the Parsees in India, the Japanese in Brazil, and numerous others.

There are similar disparities within particular racial or ethnic groups. Even this late in history, I have had northern Italians explain to me why they are not like southern Italians. In Australia, Jewish leaders in both Sydney and Melbourne went to great lengths to tell me why and how the Jews are different in these two cities.

In the United States, despite the higher poverty level among blacks than among whites, the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits since 1994. The disparities within the black community are huge, both in behavior and in outcomes.

Nevertheless, the dogma persists that differences between groups can only be due to the way others treat them or to differences in the way others perceive them in "stereotypes."

All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.

This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.

This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans — and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves

Subtle changes

Babysitters Have Rights, Too — Lots and Lots of Rights

By Vodkapundit

California is descending from business-hostile to parents-hostile. No, really:

Under AB 889, household “employers” (aka “parents”) who hire a babysitter on a Friday night will be legally obligated to pay at least minimum wage to any sitter over the age of 18 (unless it is a family member), provide a substitute caregiver every two hours to cover rest and meal breaks, in addition to workers’ compensation coverage, overtime pay, and a meticulously calculated timecard/paycheck.

Failure to abide by any of these provisions may result in a legal cause of action against the employer including cumulative penalties, attorneys’ fees, legal costs and expenses associated with hiring expert witnesses, an unprecedented measure of legal recourse provided no other class of workers – from agricultural laborers to garment manufacturers. (On the bright side, language requiring an hour of paid vacation time for every 30 hours worked was amended out of the bill in the Senate.)

Unbelievable.

No, wait — totally believable for the morons in charge of the once-great Golden State.