Who celebrates a birth nowadays?

Elisabeth’s Barrenness and Ours 

By Mark Steyn

Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.

America is not in as perilous a situation as Europe — yet. But its rendezvous with fiscal apocalypse also has demographic roots: The Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain the solvency of mid-20th-century welfare systems premised on mid-20th-century birthrates. The “Me Decade” turned into a Me Quarter-Century, and beyond. The “me”s are all getting a bit long in the tooth, but they never figured there might come a time when they’d need a few more “them”s still paying into the treasury.

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: “These are useful narratives we tell ourselves,” as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a “useful” story, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian “rationalism” has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.

The true heroes in our economy are the producers and earners

The Class Warfare We Need

The class deserving voters’ wrath is composed of society’s predators and parasites, who span all rungs of the income ladder.

By Steve Conover

Class warfare is emerging as a major theme for the 2012 presidential election campaign. “Millionaires and billionaires”—a reliable phrasethat apparently continues to test well with the Democrats’ focus groups—are the easy target, because even though they receive a large portion of national income, they represent only a small fraction of the electorate. But are the millionaires and billionaires the right enemy? Not according to the Republicans, who warn that the major victims of a class war against millionaires would be small businesses.

In short, the class war as it stands today finds "Democrats accusing Republicans of siding with the rich, and Republicans countering that Democrats were taxing small business owners who create jobs." Voters are faced with an apparent dilemma, a contest between the two powerful emotions of envy and fear: should we let our envy of the supposedly too-wealthy, too-powerful “rich” outweigh our fear of damaging the economy’s ability to create private sector jobs? Which side should we take in the unfolding class war: the Democrats’ message exploiting envy, or the Republicans’ message exploiting fear?

It’s a difficult dilemma—but, fortunately, it’s also a false dilemma. Why? Because, as it stands today, the class war has misidentified the enemy. Not all of the rich are the “bad guys” who deserve targets on their backs. By the same token, not all of the remainder are the “good guys” who deserve to be defended—and that includes the middle class, the poor, small businesses, and any other group we don’t usually think of as rich. It’s just not as simple as “the rich versus the rest.”

The graphic below illustrates the underlying error: the class of people who deserve our enmity is not precisely “the rich” at the very top of the income ladder; instead, the class deserving voters’ wrath is composed of society’s predators and parasites, who span all rungs of the income ladder.

The point is this: If we’re going to have a war, let’s do it right. The battle lines should be drawn orthogonally to the oversimplified “rich versus the rest.” A virtuous war would be one that rewards society’s honest earners and productive contributors, while punishing society’s predators, pirates, and parasites—all without regard to anyone’s income level. It is a target-rich environment that includes anyone (of any income level) who is cheating to win, any business or union (of any size) with its snout in the public trough, any politician filling that trough and feeding those snouts for reciprocal gain, and any group using the political system (at any level) to maintain its monopoly, or its winning “edge” against less-well-connected competitors.

Among “the rich” are many entertainment superstars, artists, CEOs, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Are all of them villains because of their huge incomes? Of course not. Most of them get where they are because they produce things that entertain us, make us more productive, save us money, or save us time. Most are “rich” because they earned it—and because they earned it, they do not deserve to be targets in the class war.

It’s also true that not everyone at the top earned their way to that position. For example, a few are the well-positioned rentiers leveraging their strategic position at a bottleneck in the financial system. As economist Tyler Cowen points out, "The high incomes in finance should give us all pause." Why? Because much of it was not earned; it was instead obtained bygaming the system, by staying a step ahead of the statutes, by keeping profits privatized and risks socialized, and by monetizing moral hazards. This group includes Wall Street firms employing high-speed data feeds into computers programmed to beat less-sophisticated market participants by using a trading technique known as “quote-stuffing,” a method designed to submit-and-retract thousands of dummy bids per second in the profitable quest for fleeting arbitrage events worth pennies each. This group stays one step ahead of the letter of current laws and regulations, lobbies to prevent unfavorable changes in those regulations, nudges the free market a step closer to a fake market, and extracts the resultant economic profits from a comparatively inexpert investing public.

As economic historian Joel Mokyr said of some past economic successes, “Prosperity and success led to the emergence of predators and parasites in various forms and guises who eventually slaughtered the geese that laid the golden eggs.” Might today’s Wall Street situation be a contemporary example of history repeating itself? Cowen’s article implies as much. In any case, any Republicans (or Democrats) who think the profitmaking methods described above are worth defending will have an increasingly difficult time doing that, and deservedly so. As the above diagram depicts, some of “the rich” fall into the class known as “predators and parasites” whose profits are large but not earned.

However, predators and parasites inhabit more than just the ranks of “the rich.” Examples abound. Some tech-savvy individuals and small businesses prey on the elderly, on government programs, or on vulnerable computer systems in governments and other businesses. Some public-sector union bosses are powerful enough to swing elections toward the candidates who will sit on the other side of the negotiating table, thereby bending the public trust to their special advantage. Some businesses—large and small, national and local—are sufficiently well-connected politically to maintain their comfort and longevity by extracting government subsidies for their special interest, or by getting their political friends to pass favorable legislation against competitive threats. The politicians on one side of crony capitalism, as well as the business managers on the other, are part of the problem a virtuous class war should be designed to fix.

A proper class war would require Democrats and Republicans to admit that the distinguishing characteristic of the enemy is not the level of income or wealth; rather, it is whether that income or wealth was earned. The true heroes in our economy are the producers and earners; they can be found all the way up and down the income ladder, and class warfare should defend and reward them instead of targeting them. Conversely, the proper targets are the class that includes cheaters, predators, pirates, and parasites—who can also be found at all income levels.

If class warfare is inevitable, let’s at least go after the right enemy. Fingering “millionaires and billionaires” as the culprits is the easy way out; it might pass muster in focus groups and might fit well into campaign speeches, but it doesn’t even come close to a proper description of the true enemies of economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. If we can target the right enemy, we’ll be fighting a good war; in that case, by all means, let the 2012 class war begin in earnest.

A pessimist is an informed optimist

The 7 most illuminating economic charts of 2011

By James Pethokoukis

My Magnificent Seven. Some bust myths. Others highlight a reality the media is ignoring. 

1. The overly optimistic unemployment forecast of the Obama White House. This may be the most infamous economic prediction in U.S. political history (helpfully updated by The Right Sphere). For the original January 2009 chart from White House economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Christina Romer, see here.

2.  The real unemployment rate. The official (U-3) unemployment rate is 8.6 percent. But the labor force has been shrinking as discouraged workers have been disappeared by government statisticians rather than counted as unemployed. But what if they weren’t? What if the Labor Department added those folks back into the numbers? Well, you would get this:

3. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for decades—not. It is an oft-repeated liberal talking point, one that President Obama himself used in his populist Osawatomie Speech: The rich got richer the past 30 years while the middle-class went nowhere. In short, the past few decades of lower taxes and lighter regulation have been a failure. Or, rather, pro-market policies have been a failure … except that new research from the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan find that “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”

4. Inequality has exploded—not. According to the MSM and liberal economists, U.S. inequality has exploded to levels not seen since the 1920s or perhaps even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. And to prove their point—that the 1 percent has gotten amazingly richer in recent decades—the inequality alarmists will inevitably trot out a famous income inequality study from economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Pike. But why not instead look at wealth—all financial and nonfinancial assets—instead of income? It’s less volatile and a truer measure of all the economic resources at an individual’s command. Turns out that Saez has done research on that subject, too. And he even created a revealing chart documenting the ups and downs of U.S. wealth over the past century. It reveals a very different picture of inequality in America:

5. and 6. The underwhelming Obama recovery. When you compare the current recovery to those of the past, it looks pretty anemic. And it doesn’t matter if you look at GDP growth or unemployment (via The Economist).

 7. America’s debt picture is worse than you think. If you factor in the long-term impact of rising federal debt on U.S. interest rates and economic growth—raising borrowing costs and lowering tax revenue—you’ll find that federal debt could be almost 50 percent higher by 2035 than the estimates usually bandied about in the media.

Merry Christmas

Major Quotes

Still stealing from our children and grandchildren

The ECB blew away €500 billion, and the markets still fell

By Daniel Hannan

I'm not sure people have grasped the magnitude of what has just happened. The European Central Bank firehosed €489,190,000,000 at the eurozone banking system. Five-hundred-and-twenty-three banks snatched greedily at the cheap cash. And the markets fell.

This blog has been railing for three years against the EU's bailout-and-borrow mania. I am, I realise, in danger of becoming something of a bore on the subject. But these sums are almost literally unimaginable (this might give you some sense of what half a trillion looks like in banknotes).

Just think this through. The ECB has no resources of its own: it is backed by the European taxpayer. So the money it has lent to the banks must either be drawn from EU governments or directly from their citizens in the form of inflation. And where is all the moolah to go? Well, the ECB is hoping that banks will buy government debt with it – as, indeed, they are more or less obliged to do under the Basel III rules. So eurozone governments are borrowing money to lend to private banks to lend to, er, eurozone governments.

I blogged a couple of months ago that the EU's bailout-and-borrow policy had taken on a momentum of its own, like a runaway train. That train is now going at maximum speed, and has passed the point where a switch can still be thrown. The only question is when it hits the buffers. My guess is that we are months away.

The human factor

The Long goodbye

By Rod Dreher    

Thinking about the sick feeling of disgust that came over me when I learned that Christopher Hitchens had publicly praised Lenin for crushing the Russian Orthodox Church, I was reminded of the precise moment when I began to turn from the Left. I arrived at college as a fairly convinced left-winger, and certainly an ardent one. I joined the Progressive Student Network at my university — a small, unpopular group, to be sure, but more interesting to me than the College Democrats. I’d work the table in front of the student union building, passing out pro-Sandinista literature and suchlike.

One morning, I woke up at my apartment that first semester in freshman year, turned on the news, and learned that the Achille Lauro hijackers had shot the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer and dumped his body over the transom. I was gobsmacked by the cruelty of this act, and was still fuming when I turned up at the PSN table to work that morning. When I expressed my views to my colleagues, a tall, garrulous comrade griped that our corporate media always reported on Palestinian terrorism, but never said boo about Israeli terrorism. And then — I’ll never forget this — a short Puerto Rican fellow who headed the group sat there calmly behind the table, looked at me through his Coke-bottle glasses, and said calmly, “Well, if he was rich enough to take the cruise, maybe he deserved what he got.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. The sheer cold-bloodedness of it. He was prepared to justify — no, was indeed justifying — the terrorist murder of an old Jewish man in a wheelchair, because that old man had the money to take a cruise. My thoughts were jumbled that morning, but I knew in my heart that I had to get as far away from these lunatics as I could.

This instinct, I think, is what made all my admiration for Hitchens, despite knowing his many flaws, evaporate. Not his hatred of religion, but his willingness to justify the murder of innocent people for the sake of cleansing the world of “heretics.” In fact, I think it must have had something to do with my ultimate decision to distance myself from the Catholic Church. In the end, I could not stand to be part of something whose leadership was willing to endure the sodomization of children by some of its clergy, and to justify tolerating it in the name of the mission. To too many bishops, Catholic children and families were simply collateral damage. Over the years of writing about this, as a Catholic, I would look at my own little children in the evenings and think that they, and their mother and father, are nothing to the bishops of the Roman Catholic church. If a priest had sodomized one or more of my children, we would have been treated in the very same way these people I was interviewing and reading about had been treated. The human factor was not relevant to them. It’s not the same as justifying murder, of course, but it’s on the spectrum.

This is not a theological argument, obviously; I am simply saying that there is something in my own emotional constitution that finds the violation of human dignity, and its justification for religious, political, or otherwise ideological reasons, abhorrent and intolerable. Every appalling thing Hitchens said, that I knew he had said, I could live with and forgive, because as he puts it in his memoir, it often happens that the right people believe and say the wrong things, and vice versa. If I stopped admiring the good in people I know who believe appalling things, my life would be lonelier, for sure. Some of the things I believe strike others as appalling too, and I hope they will, in their humanity, tolerate my beliefs and look for the good in me.

But there is a limit. As disgusting as some of Hitchens’s opinions were, and as wrong as he was about consequential questions (as, of course, I have been), nothing he said that I was aware of ever struck me as — what’s the word? — as defiling, in some foundational spiritual sense, as his justification of mass murder and torture for the sake of exterminating religion.

From the "Prague Spring" to the "Arab Spring" via the western intellectuals pre-conceptions

Vaclav Havel’s Velvet Revolution is no script for a democratic uprising

Playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel owed his status as anti-Communist rock star more to the West than to the Czech people.

By Mick Hume

Since his death at the weekend, former Czech president Vaclav Havel’s life and career have been hailed as shining symbols of how one high-minded moral man can overcome a corrupt political system. This reveals rather more about Western fantasies than about the real state of affairs in Czechoslovakia (and now the Czech Republic) during and since the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ against Communism.

Havel, the dissident playwright and poet who became Czechoslovakia’s first post-Communist president, defined the West’s image of a perfect revolutionary figurehead for a small faraway country of which we know little: an urbane, Western-oriented intellectual who could play the role of media-friendly Messiah figure rather than act as political leader of a radical popular movement. It is no surprise in this respect to find that he was friends with the Dalai Lama. The Western world has subsequently elevated Havel’s non-violent, largely non-political Velvet Revolution into a supposed role model for political change from the Ukraine to Egypt.

This only shows how the term ‘revolution’ has been debased and belittled to mean whatever modest degree of political upheaval suits Western appetites. There is an important lesson here for those seeking democratic change today, such as the Arab peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and now Libya, who have seen the Western elites celebrate the triumph of their ‘revolutions’, and then quickly discovered that not too much has really changed.

The truth is that, despite all of the hype in the West two decades ago that has been repeated again since Havel’s death, there was no revolution from below in Czechoslovakia in 1989. What happened in essence – as some of us argued at the time - was that the old Soviet-backed regime corroded and collapsed from within, along with states across the Eastern bloc. Havel emerged as the figurehead of the hastily constituted new democracy that stepped in to fill the vacuum. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the transition was largely stage-managed by more moderate members of the old Communist nomenclature, in order to maintain their influence and limit any popular retribution. One of Havel’s closest aides in the human-rights group Charter 77 at the time was soon to describe the much-celebrated Czech revolution as ‘a Communist coup’ – one which suited the Western authorities since it limited instability. The prominence of old state officials in the ‘new’ market economy became the source of much public complaint under Havel’s presidency.

To Havel’s Western cheerleaders, however, none of this mattered. They were simply too delighted that he had apparently shown it was possible to have a democratic revolution without unleashing serious conflict or instability – and without the sort of messy, unpredictable upheaval across society that the word ‘revolution’ surely implies.

Havel was undoubtedly a personally brave man of principle, jailed for writing plays, poems and essays that questioned and ridiculed life under the Communist regime. Yet he was never the political leader of a movement in Czechoslovakia. His orientation was always towards the West. During the brief ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, before the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the Czech resistance, Havel and his wife took advantage of the relaxed passport rules to leave the country for an extended tour of Western capitals, where they reportedly ‘immersed themselves in the counterculture of the London and New York rock scenes’. Havel’s plays began to be put on in the West, where he was hailed as the voice of the new Czech spirit of freedom.

However, once back in Czechoslovakia Havel led a relatively quiet life under the reimposed pro-Soviet regime, until he issued his famous Open Letter to Dr Husak, Moscow’s puppet Czech leader, in 1975. This was a telling insight into Havel’s mindset; it not only criticised the regime, but also attacked the Czech people for failing to live up to the intellectual’s expectations. The people, he complained, had chosen to abandon the search for truth and justice and instead to ‘succumb to apathy and indifference’. Havel meanwhile described himself as ‘the Watchman’, keeping a lonely vigil for liberty. The Open Letter was reprinted by like-minded liberal elitists across the West, consolidating Havel’s status as their poster boy for respectable Czech ‘civil society’.

It was perhaps equally telling that Havel’s international elevation would be finally confirmed after he took a stand against the persecution of a hippy rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe. Their advocacy of a druggie dropout lifestyle as an ‘alternative’ to Communism appealed to Havel’s Sixties counterculture sensibilities. When they were arrested and jailed, he was so upset he became an early spokesman for the Charter 77 human-rights group, which was seeking and finding favour in the West.

When the Soviet-backed regime finally began to collapse internally after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Havel was effectively appointed leader of the opposition by the international community and media. The term ‘Velvet Revolution’ was coined by his Western media fan club – partly to endorse the idea of ‘soft’, non-violent political change, and partly because of Havel’s affinity for Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground. He was anointed as the rock star of East European anti-Communism, and the Western hacks and statesmen were his self-appointed groupies.

Once Havel was elected president – by parliament, not the people, according to the new constitution - he returned the favour, becoming the Czech mouthpiece for all the fashionable orthodoxies of the Western elite: he proselytised against the evils of global warming, championed the wonders of European Union membership, and even sued the tabloid media for invasion of privacy. While he was still an international celebrity, his standing among his own people became far more uncertain as the promises of the Velvet Revolution remained largely unfulfilled – ‘crushed velvet’ as one Czech writer described it. He also failed to prevent the break-up of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in January 1993.

(Speaking of the EU, the UK media used Havel’s death as an opportunity to wax nostalgic about his status as a symbol of ‘another Europe’- the united, liberal, prosperous EU that they had all fantasised about before the Fall. They still don’t get it that the current anti-democratic trends across the mess of the EU had their origins in the same Euro-courts, commissions and institutions that the Havels and Guardians welcomed as the fulfillment of their dreams.)

These things are worth thinking about now, not just to counter the hagiographies of Havel or review European history, but to take some lessons for the democratic struggles of the present. Almost everything the Western elites admired about him, from his disdain for the masses to his rejection of politics, acted to hamper the movement for change in Czechoslovakia. And the West’s praise for the partial reforms as a Velvet Revolution also contained an important message of restraint, telling the Czech people that, after just two weeks of demonstrations, their fight was over, and they could go home and leave it to Havel and Co. These are worrying patterns we have seen repeated of late in Egypt and Tunisia.

Perhaps the Velvet Revolution and Havel’s political career should be seen not so much as a role model for the Arab world and elsewhere, but as a warning of what can happen if you let the West write the script for your struggle for democracy.

Decommissioning politics in favor of technocracy

The most important history lesson of 2011

From the Japanese tsunami to the economic crisis, many believe mankind is ‘dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’. But we aren’t.

By Brendan O’Neill

Everyone is talking about what a tumultuous year 2011 was. And ‘tumultuous’ - meaning a ‘disorderly commotion or disturbance’ - is indeed the most apt adjective to describe the past 12 months. For this was a year in which many important things happened, yet no one is quite clear why or how or who was ultimately responsible. History was made - lots of it - but often it appeared as if nobody was in the driving seat. If you want to know what historic breakthroughs look like at a time when the history-making human subject has been talked down for years and effectively put out to pasture, behold 2011.

Marx famously said, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. Today, man not only continues to make history in circumstances that are not of his choosing - he also doubts or denies that he is making history at all, preferring instead to see himself as the victim of forces beyond his control, the plaything of some sentient thing called History rather than the master of history.

This was a year in which agency was accorded to events that had none, and was denied in other events that truly were driven by human ingenuity and heroism. So the catastrophe in Japan in March, when an earthquake and tsunami flattened towns and villages and killed 20,000 people, was discussed by many as an example of ‘Nature’s fury’, as if she (they always see Nature as an angry woman) made a decision to punish hubristic mankind. ‘Nature suddenly decided to go “Thwack!”’, said one observer, almost with a sense of glee, and she revealed that mankind is ‘hopelessly irrelevant… dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’.

Yet the Arab Spring, which kicked off in Tunisia and Egypt in January before spreading to Bahrain and Syria, was talked about as an ‘earthquake’, a ‘flood’, a ‘storm’, an inexplicable thing which spread from one country to another like a ‘virus’. Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain came in for some flak when he said the Arab Spring was ‘a virus spreading throughout the Middle East’, but he was only expressing in un-PC lingo an idea that has become entrenched: that the Arab uprisings are a weird and contagious, almost malarial phenomenon (liberal observers prefer to say ‘meme’ rather than ‘virus’).

So we anthropomorphise natural disasters, and naturalise manmade political upheaval. We see agency in what are in truth the amoral whims of nature, with commentators calling the Japanese tsunami an ‘all-conquering aquatic bulldozer’, yet we see strange viruses at work in something human like the Arab Spring, as if that rebellion of millions against their rulers was born of some kind of herd mentality. The personification of the tsunami, the idea that we’re ‘dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’, speaks to mankind’s increasing meekness and view of himself as the object rather than subject of history. And it has very real consequences. In response to the unhinged panic-mongering over the Fukushima nuclear-power plant in ‘thwacked’ Japan, Germany promised in May to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022.

Also this year, political agency was conferred on the August riots that rocked English cities, yet was withheld from the European masses’ continuing disgruntlement with the oligarchy in Brussels. Observers decreed that the looting and burning in London and elsewhere were ‘highly political’ acts, carried out by ‘rebels with a cause’. Yet the same observers bent over backwards to delegitimate European peoples’ permanent, sometimes unspoken rebellion against the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, referring to such opposition as ‘Europhobia’, as if it were a disease of the mind (‘phobia: a persistent, abnormal and irrational aversion to a specific thing’). Small mobs of shoe thieves are talked up as rebels taking a stand against the Liberal-Conservative government, while masses of Greeks and Irish and Italians who communicate their fury with the illiberal, anti-democratic Brussels regimes through referenda or graffiti are branded ‘phobic’; once again, instinctual events are historicised while political feeling is pathologised. 

One of the most striking things about 2011 is how even political actors themselves disavowed responsibility for their actions, preferring instead to see themselves as reactants in a kind of a great experiment rather than potential authors of their destinies. That was the most tragic thing about the Arab Spring: the disconnect between the heroism and organisation that was required to get tens of thousands of people on to the streets to chase Ben Ali and Mubarak from office and how the protesters conceived of themselves - as people with no political authority, possessed only of a Twitter-style emotional angst. The Arab rebels have celebrated the fact that they are leaderless and bereft of ideology and goals (one Egyptian writer noted the ‘complete absence of ideological rhetoric’), which means they weirdly deny their own history-making potential even as they demonstrate it physically.

Indeed, across the world this year, there has been a widespread unwillingness to clarify political problems or articulate political demands. In the Spanish ‘Indignados’ movement and the Occupy movements in New York and London - laugh-out-loud caricatures of the Arab Spring - activists openly celebrate the fact that they are ‘independent of any democratic structures and party hierarchies’ and have ‘no political programme’. They even use McCain-like language about viruses, claiming their movement consists more of ‘unthought’ than thought, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation as to why they’re necessary, almost as [reflexes]’. What we have here is people making a virtue out of vacuity, where the denigration of the human subject and of the idea that man might remake his world is turned from a negative into a positive: apparently, not knowing how to clarify crises and pursue goals is not a bad thing - it’s ‘liberation from dogma’.

What these radicals seem not to realise is that their disavowal of grubby politics in favour of myopic process (the Occupy movement is now entirely devoted simply to keeping itself chugging along) almost exactly echoes the outlook of the political elites in 2011. For our rulers, most notably in Europe, have likewise made it their aim to decommission politics and replace it with technocracy, because apparently things like the economic crisis are better dealt with by experts rather than through engagement with hoi polloi. Indeed, the economic crisis is now also looked upon as a kind of tsunami that dwarfs mankind - so it apparently isn’t appropriate to have a democratic debate about it, or even to treat it as a political issue, and instead what we really need is ‘expert’ firefighting. In the ousting of democratic governments in Greece and Italy, and their replacement by unelected, Brussels-approved gangs of alleged know-it-alls, 2011’s sidelining of history-making man in preference of apolitical, lifeless managerialism reached its nadir.

This has indeed been a tumultuous year - yet while much has happened, all sides deny historic responsibility for having made it happen and eschew historic responsibility for pushing it in a certain direction. Everywhere we look, historic man is being muted and mocked, whether he’s viewed as a victim of Nature or is forcibly elbowed off the political stage (as has happened to the peoples of Greece and Italy) or is voluntarily elbowing himself of the political stage (as threatens to be the case in the Arab world). Yet the fact is that man did make history this year: Japan rebuilt itself; the Arab people got rid of tyrants; and even in Athens, so thwacked by Brussels, there is graffiti everywhere saying ‘Fuck the EU’. If we can find a new language in which to express and celebrate people’s desire for political change and historic impact, 2012 could be an exciting year.

If you are jumping out of a window, it’s a very fast way down

Reality of life after communism

A pro-democracy demonstrator drags a Soviet soldier out of his tank during the abortive coup

A former Moscow correspondent, returns to Russia 20 years after the Soviet collapse

By Leyla Boulton

A coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, the secretary-general of the Communist party who attempted the gradual perestroika (restructuring) of the Soviet Union, paved the way for the collapse of the Soviet empire and its state-run economy 20 years ago this weekend. In place of the USSR came 15 separate countries.

Chief of these was Russia, whose democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, had stood atop a tank to defy the hardline coup leaders who held Mr Gorbachev prisoner in his holiday villa on the Crimea.

By the time the coup fizzled out, the scene was set for the Communist party to give up its 84-year monopoly on power.

A team of young reformers headed by Yegor Gaidar liberalised prices and launched mass privatisation through vouchers given to every Russian.

Ensuing economic hardship, aggravated by the reformers’ compromises and missteps under President Yeltsin’s erratic leadership, triggered a backlash against change any other society would have found bewildering. Yeltsin’s replacement, Vladimir Putin, presided over an increasingly authoritarian system of government, and pandered to nostalgia for the past while allowing the economy to stagnate on the back of high oil prices.

For the 61-year-old former spymaster, the Soviet Union’s collapse was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

In contrast, Dmitry Medvedev, 45, the current president, says Russians of his age are probably the “happiest generation” for being able to appreciate how far the country has travelled since the empty shop shelves of the dying Soviet era.

I returned to Russia for the verdict of four friends.

The author was an FT correspondent in Moscow from 1990-94

The civil society activist

Lena Nemirovskaya, an art historian who used to gather foreigners and Russians around her kitchen table, set up a school in 1993 to inculcate democratic values in a new generation of politicians. “It’s like a big kitchen table,” Lena, a youthful 71-year-old, explains over dinner. “We had the illusion that with a change of generation, this Sovietness would go away, but it was not so.”

She draws some comfort however from this month’s protests after clearly-documented fraud in this month’s elections. “This is a civic movement, about giving people dignity as citizens,” she explains.

She and her husband Yuri Senokosov, a philosopher who also teaches at the school, were among the signatories of a declaration urging Russians to work together to reverse the country’s slide into authoritarian rule. “We appeal to all social forces to unite to act in order to avoid a national catastrophe,” says the grandly-named memorandum of the founding conference of the December 12 roundtable.

Her Moscow School of Political Studies has given its short lecture courses to 10,000 people since it opened its doors 18 years ago, supported by western grants and, more recently, donations from Russian business. Speakers have included Peter Mandelson, the British ex-minister, European Commissioner, and spin-doctor.

How much difference has the school made? “Our sessions have changed. People now accept criticism and the opinion of others,” she says, speaking before the latest outburst of civic activism. Her graduates include the mayors of sizable cities like Nizhny-Novgorod, the president’s speechwriter, and a deputy finance minister. But it has been a lonely struggle. “We would like this education to be less unique and for it to be available in schools,” she says, referring to a lack of civic education for young Russians.

The businessman

Misha Berger, now 58, started his conversion from journalist to businessman when he developed a “sushi index” for provincial towns to figure out where media advertising would flourish. “I travelled to many regions and since official data were unreliable or often just wrong, I would ask how many Japanese restaurants a town had. If it had five to six, there had to be an upper middle class.” By that indicator, Perm with six sushi bars was a far more attractive commercial proposition than sushi-free Krasnoyarsk.

After a distinguished career at Izvestia covering the economy from the death throes of communism to the birth of market reforms, he put up a sign saying “Berger for sale” when the paper was taken over by Vladimir Potanin, an oligarch who made clear that coverage should not touch any of the sectors covered by his diversified business empire. “I understood that if you considered all the interests of [Potanin’s] Onexim group, you would have to close down the newspaper’s economic coverage.”

He then went to set up a new daily newspaper for Vladimir Gusinsky, a media magnate who ended up fleeing abroad to escape Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on oligarchs.

Misha stayed and thrived to become director-general of United Media, a media group owned by one of the other oligarchs still standing after the crackdown. In business, Misha steers clear of political coverage to focus on business and entertainment. Yet during this month’s protests, he was working round the clock – to oversee the news coverage of the protests. And he is not afraid to voice his views.

“I have a great deal of respect for Gorbachev,” says Misha, who attended the ex-Soviet leader’s 80th birthday celebrations in London - a reminder of how the man who presided over the Soviet system’s demise is reviled, or at best forgotten, at home. “It’s a shame we have to export this feeling of pride. Here we behave as if he does not exist.”

The policewoman

A career policewoman, Galya Lebedeva-Yegorova, 56, was one of Russia’s first entrepreneurs – in the days when private businesses were not allowed.

In 1990 she used her time off duty to paint my flat. Having retired two years ago with a clutch of Veteran of Labour medals, she is contemplating a return to work as an office “menedzher” [manager]. Yet she remains a steadfast supporter of the Communist party, which feeds on resentment of the country’s conspicuous inequalities and the authorities’ failure to provide as they once did in an increasingly idealised Soviet past.

Galya shrugs off charges of widespread corruption in the police force, saying “there is nothing to steal”. She regrets the forced departure earlier this year of old-style operator Yuri Luzhkov as Moscow mayor. In his time, she says, the roads were properly cleared of snow and police enjoyed free travel on all public transport. How Elena Baturina, his property-developer wife, became Russia’s richest woman during his time in office is of little interest to her.

Since the collapse of communism paved the way for Russians to travel abroad freely, Galya has been on police exchange trips to Bulgaria, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and Israel.

She is unimpressed by the other big change since Soviet times – the abundance of goods in the shops. “There is a lot in the shops but everything is expensive,” she says, speaking in a flat that still has no washing machine.

She reminds me that in the old days, I gave her daughter and son-in-law trainers from abroad as wedding presents. “We traced their feet on pieces of paper for you because they were difficult to find here.”

Galya hints she might have been open to voting differently, had squabbling democrats such as Grigory Yavlinsky got their act together to win popular appeal. “I don’t necessarily agree with you,” she tells her husband as he declares the couple’s allegiance to the Communist party. “I might be a radical.”

The politician

At 59, Grigory Yavlinsky, an economist and founder of the opposition Yabloko (Apple) party, has been confined to the role of a latter-day Cassandra since walking out of the first democratically-elected Russian government of Boris Yeltsin in November 1990.

A charismatic and highly-intelligent figure, he has consistently warned that disaster would follow the policies implemented by others. After years in a marginalised opposition, he gets his latest chance of a “voice” – a chance to put his views to the public on state-controlled broadcast media – with his bid to run for president against Vladimir Putin in elections next March.

“If you are jumping out of a window, it’s a very fast way down,” is how he describes the price liberalisation and privatisation pursued by a team of young reformers led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais after Russia became fully independent in December 1991. “I was proposing we take the stairs. The problem is that Chubais and Gaidar were asking other people to jump out the window, while they stayed in the room.”

As a result, in the Putin era, “we have an economy without property rights, without the rule of law and where there is an enormous gap between rich and poor – three per cent who have a very high standard of living, 20 per cent who have a a western standard of living and 75 per cent of people who have no future, no prospects of a decent job, education or medical care.”

Other economists like Yevgeny Yasin, a former economics minister, argue there was no scope for the gradual approach advocated by Yavlinsky, who retorts:. “The major problem of this period is the disappointment of the people, and that’s why people are leaving.” This includes his two sons, both of whom are living in London but who would like to return to Russia when they see signs of progress.

What keeps him going? “I love my country, I love my people. I love my children. I have pessimistic thinking, but an optimistic will.”

The communion of poverty, tyranny, and death

The Green Death

By Dr Zero

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.

Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.

Another way Silent Spring forecast the global-warming fraud was its insistence that readers ignore the simple evidence of reality around them. One of the founding myths of modern environmentalism was Carson’s assertion that bird eggs developed abnormally thin shells due to DDT exposure, leading the chicks to be crushed before they could hatch. As detailed in this American Spectator piece from 2005, no honest experimental attempt to produce this phenomenon has ever succeeded – even when using concentrations of DDT a hundred times greater than anything that could be encountered in nature. Carson claimed thin egg shells were bringing the robin and bald eagle to the edge of extinction… even as the bald eagle population doubled, and robins filled the trees. Today, those eagles and robins shiver in a blanket of snow caused by global warming.

The DDT ban isn’t the only example of environmental extremism coming with a stack of body bags. Mandatory gas mileage standards cause about 2,000 deaths per year, by compelling automakers to produce lighter, more fragile cars. The biofuel mania has led resources to be shifted away from growing food crops, resulting in higher food prices and starvation. Worst of all, the economic damage inflicted by the environmentalist religion directly correlates to life-threatening reductions in the human standard of living. The recent earthquake in Haiti is only the latest reminder that poverty kills, and collectivist politics are the most formidable engine of poverty on Earth.

Environmental extremism is a breathless handmaiden for collectivism. It pours a layer of smooth, creamy science over a relentless hunger for power. Since the boogeymen of the Green movement threaten the very Earth itself with imminent destruction, the environmentalist feels morally justified in suspending democracy and seizing the liberty of others. Of course we can’t put these matters to a vote! The dimwitted hicks in flyover country can’t understand advanced biochemistry or climate science. They might vote the wrong way, and we can’t risk the consequences! The phantom menaces of the Green movement can only be battled by a mighty central State. Talk of representation, property rights, and even free speech is madness when such a threat towers above the fragile ecosphere, wheezing pollutants and coughing out a stream of dead birds and drowned polar bears. You can see why the advocates of Big Government would eagerly race across a field of sustainable, organic grass to sweep environmentalists into their arms, and spin them around in the ozone-screened sunlight.

Green philosophy provides vital nourishment for the intellectual vanity of leftists, who get to pat themselves on the back for saving the world through the control-freak statism they longed to impose anyway. One of the reasons for the slow demise of the climate-change nonsense is that it takes a long time to let so much air out of so many egos. Calling “deniers” stupid and unpatriotic was very fulfilling. Likewise, you’ll find modern college campuses teeming with students – and teachers – who will fiercely insist that DDT thins egg shells and causes cancer. Environmentalism is a primitive religion which thrives by telling its faithful they’re too sophisticated for mere common sense.

The legacy of Silent Spring provides an object lesson in the importance of bringing the global-warming con artists to trial. No one was ever forced to answer for the misery inflicted by that book, or the damage it dealt to serious science. Today Rachel Carson is still celebrated as a hero, the secular saint who transformed superstition and hysteria into a Gospel for the modern god-state. The tactics she deployed against DDT resurfaced a decade later, in the Alar scare. It’s a strategy that offers great reward, and very little risk. We need to increase the risk factor, and frighten the next generation of junk scientists into being more careful with their research. If we don’t, the Church of Global Warming will just reappear in a few years, wearing new vestments and singing new hymms… but still offering the same communion of poverty, tyranny, and death.

The failure of paper money systems

Paper money collapse

Detlev Schlichter addresses the Adam Smith Institute Tuesday 22nd November, 2011. He argues that the present financial crisis is far from over; generally misunderstood and misrepresented, it is far from being a ‘crisis of capitalism’. Detlev traces the history of failure of paper money systems and lays out why present policies pursued by various governments and institutions are misdirected and counterproductive. He describes the various endgames facing us.