The Church of Big Government

The Cube and the Cathedral

By Mark Steyn

Discussing the constitutionality of Obamacare's "preventive health" measures on MSNBC, Melinda Henneberger of the Washington Post told Chris Matthews that she reasons thus with her liberal friends: "Maybe the Founders were wrong to guarantee free exercise of religion in the First Amendment, but they did."

Maybe. A lot of other constitutional types in the Western world have grown increasingly comfortable with circumscribing religious liberty. In 2002, the Swedish constitution was amended to criminalize criticism of homosexuality. "Disrespect" of the differently orientated became punishable by up to two years in jail, and "especially offensive" disrespect by up to four years. Shortly thereafter, Pastor Ake Green preached a sermon referencing the more robust verses of scripture, and was convicted of "hate crimes" for doing so.

In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues

ECB money injection not a reason for optimism

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

Are you feeling optimistic yet? Are you confident that policy-makers have things under control? – If so, you must believe that we can solve any economic problem by throwing freshly printed money at it. Even problems that are evidently the result of previous periods of ‘easy money’– such as overstretched and weak banks.

The ECB this week allotted another €529.5 billion of new money to Europe’s banks. The banks get these funds for three years at 1 percent interest. That this is a gigantic subsidy for one specific industry does not require much explanation.

Going to the roof

Teens choosing death in Russia

By Will Englund

Russia is hard on its children, and Yelizaveta Petsylya and Anastasia Korolyova finally decided, at the age of 14, to do what thousands of other Russian teenagers have done. There was one way to assert control over their lives, and that was to end them.

The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

The main threats to democracy lie within liberal societies themselves.

By Vladislav Inozemtsev

In the late 1980s, at Cold War’s end, many believed that democracy, as obvious political best practice and key driver of strategic success, would without doubt spread and ultimately become universal. A prominent advocate of this prediction, Francis Fukuyama, stated his view in more careful and conditional terms than the many who did not read his fine print, but nuance aside, the coming global triumph of democracy was in those days a widespread expectation that many prominent observers, not least Samuel Huntington with his earlier “third wave” analysis, played a part in bringing about. It is no longer so widespread a view. The ostensible reasons are many, but let us note the three most common themes.

Life, With Dementia

Protecting the Vulnerable

The California Men’s Colony is using convicted killers to care for inmates
 who can no longer care for themselves.

By PAM BELLUCK

Secel Montgomery Sr. stabbed a woman in the stomach, chest and throat so fiercely that he lost count of the wounds he inflicted. In the nearly 25 years he has been serving a life sentence, he has gotten into fights, threatened a prison official and been caught with marijuana.

What if the tractor had never been invented?

Productivity in the economy is almost the only thing that matters

By James Pethokoukis

Recall President Obama’s strange ATM problem from last year:

There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.

Now, economists think productivity is a good thing. And automation improves productivity. As economist Paul Krugman famously put it, 

“Productivity in the economy is almost the only thing that matters.”

The Platinum Rule

The presumption of growth

By Anthony de Jasay

Platinum is worth more than gold. Though the best should not act as the enemy of the good, it is a bad mistake to lose sight of the platinum once, if by great efforts, the gold has been gained.

After watching for two years the tragic-comic Greek drama, the vicious downward spiral sucking a country into a black hole despite one futile effort after another to "rescue" it, many European governments are telling themselves (though staunchly denying it to the world): "There, but for the grace of God, go I". Softened up by this awful example, 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union [EU] have agreed to conclude treaties with one another to observe the golden rule of a balanced budget allowing only a minute deficit, and to adopt the domestic legislation, including a constitutional amendment if necessary, to implement it. True to form, Great Britain and the Czech Republic begged to be excused (which prevented the radical move of putting the Golden Rule directly into the EU treaties). The passage of the Golden Rule through 25 legislatures is hardly assured, but even the intention of making it the established European fiscal standard merits a look at its logical foundations.

Modes of Self-Denial

There is a set of fairly universal rules of conduct that comes about spontaneously as a matter of by and large everybody behaving in his or her best interest by treating others the way they wish others to treat them. A rational person will refrain from stealing the property of others in the expectation of others not stealing his, rather than he and the others all stealing from each other. Technically, these rules are conventions which are adhered to out of self-interest and by and large enforced by the threat of retaliation.

The Day It Became the Longest War

Cheers and Tears

by Charles Cooper
"The President will see you at two o'clock."

It was a beautiful fall day in November of 1965; early in the Vietnam War-too beautiful a day to be what many of us, anticipating it, had been calling "the day of reckoning." We didn't know how accurate that label would be.

The Pentagon is a busy place. Its workday starts early-especially if, as the expression goes, "there's a war on." By seven o'clock, the staff of Admiral David L. McDonald, the Navy's senior admiral and Chief of Naval Operations, had started to work. Shortly after seven, Admiral McDonald arrived and began making final preparations for a meeting with President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The elites are making a virtue of intolerance

France's criminalisation of Armenian genocide denial is only the latest outburst of twenty-first-century state intolerance

by Frank Furedi 

Last month, the French Constitutional Council struck a blow for the ideal of a tolerant and open society. It declared that the French government’s new law punishing the denial of the Armenian genocide was unconstitutional and infringed upon the freedom of expression.

Have they gone insane ?

ECB Balance Sheet Hits Record $3.9 Trillion on History-Making Bank Loans

By Jana Randow 

The European Central Bank’s balance sheet surged to a record 3.02 trillion euros ($3.96 trillion) last week, 31 percent bigger than the German economy, after a second tranche of three-year loans.

Lending to euro-area banks jumped 310.7 billion euros to 1.13 trillion euros in the week ended March 2, the Frankfurt- based ECB said in a statement today. The balance sheet gained 330.6 billion euros in the week. It is now more than a third bigger than the U.S. Federal Reserve’s$2.9 trillion and eclipses the 2.3 trillion-euro gross domestic product of Germany (EUANDE), the world’s fourth largest economy.

The ECB last week awarded banks 529.5 billion euros for three years in the biggest single refinancing operation in its history, adding to the 489 billion euros it lent in December. The flood of money, which aims to combat Europe’s sovereign debt crisis by unlocking credit for companies and households, has increased the risk exposure of the 17 euro-area central banks that together with the ECB comprise the Eurosystem.

“With the dramatic expansion of its balance sheet since last summer, the ECB has become the most active central bank in the world,” said Klaus Baader, chief euro-area economist at Societe Generale in London. “The ECB’s measures are absolutely justified, but it has to be aware of the risks on its balance sheet and think of an exit strategy.”

Why Greece Cannot Be Allowed to Live

And Why Merkel Is In Such a Hurry to Get FiskalPakt

By John Ward

Why Berlin, Washington, the German Constitution, the Fiscal Union and the Greek bailout are unstoppable forces hitting immovable objects.

Quite a few of you will already be aware of the facts I’m about to discuss. What you might not have done is put them together in order to make more sense of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s currently somewhat delicate situation.

Nine days ago on February 28th, The German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that both the existing EFSF and its planned successor the ESM are unconstitutional in the Bundesrepublik. Even as things stand now, any use of EFSF funds approved by Merkel will be illegal. This is part of the reason why she and Wolfie Strangelove don’t want to talk about boosting it just yet, on the grounds that a bazooka will be just as illegal as a pea-shooter, only much more noticeable.

The Mindset of the Modern Tyrants

Government By 'Expert'

Can Limited Government and the Administrative State Co-Exist?”

by Richard A. Epstein

The “co-exist” gives away the game. Historically, the term entered the political lexicon with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to signal his break with Stalin’s murderous policies that sought constant confrontation with the West. Coexistence meant the West could go its way so long as the Soviet bloc could go its own way too—a live-and-let-live relationship where occasional interactions would iron out any difficulties that arose. Nine months later, he announced to the West, “We will bury you.” Less than five years after that, the United States and the Soviets came to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets sought to alter the global balance of power by using Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a base for its operations.

Peaceful coexistence, therefore, does not offer an ideal paradigm of how the rule of law does, or should, interact with the modern administrative state. To see why the two are ultimately incompatible, we must consider the nature of both the “rule of law” and the “administrative state,” about which I have written more extensively in my recent book Design for Liberty.

Kill John Deere

Outlaw Productivity Gains And Technological Advances

By WALTER WILLIAMS

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 2011 manufacturing output grew by 11%, to nearly $5 trillion. Were our manufacturing sector considered a nation with its own gross domestic product, it would be the world's fourth-richest economy. Manufacturing productivity has doubled since 1987, and manufacturing output has risen by one-half.

Letters from Cuba

They don’t know everything, my love, they don’t know…

By Yoani Sánchez

Will there be microphones here? You ask me while poking your head into every corner of the room. Don’t worry, I say, my life goes on with my guts on display, letting it all hang out. There is no place dark, closed, private… because I live as if walking through a gigantic X-ray machine. Here is the clavicle I broke as a child, the fight we had yesterday over a domestic trifle, the yellowing letter I keep in the back of a drawer. Nothing saves us from scrutiny, my love, nothing saves us. But today — at least for a few hours — don’t think about the police on the other end of the phone, nor the rounded eye of the camera that captures us. Tonight we are going to believe that only we are curious about each other. Turn off the light and for a moment send them to the devil, disarm their eavesdropping strategies.

With so many resources spent on watching us, we have conjured away from them the primordial facet of our lives. They don’t know, for example, even a single word of that language made for twenty years together, that we can use without parting our lips. They would score a zero on any test to decipher the complex code with which we say the trivial or urgent, the everyday or the extraordinary. Surely none of the psychological profiles they’ve done on us tell how you comb my eyebrows and jokingly warn that I’m going to end up looking like Brezhnev. Our watchers, poor guys, have never read the first song you sang me, much less that poem where you said one day we would go to Sydney or Baghdad. Nor will they forgive us every time we escape from them — without a trace — on the diastole of a spasm.

Like Agent Wiesler in the film The Lives of Others, someone will listen to us now, and not understand us. Not understand why, after arguing for an hour, we come together and share a kiss. The astonished police who follow our steps can’t classify our embraces, and they wonder how dangerous to “national security” are those phrases you say only in my ear. So I propose, my love, that tonight we scandalize them or convert them. Let’s take the ear off the wall and in its place oblige them to scribble on a sheet: “1:30 am, the subjects are making love.”

Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?

Ctrl-Alt-Del

By Niall Ferguson

As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.

The good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve after another. The bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

Broken Windows

The police and neighborhood safety

By GEORGE L. KELLING and JAMES Q. WILSON

In the mid-1970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.

The Educational Octopus

Doomed to Failure

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.   –    Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943)

by Mark J. Perry 

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

The Way That History Went Down

Τhe origin of gross disparities is more mundane than we are led to believe

By Thomas Sowell

Different histories, geography, demography, and cultures have left various groups, races, nations, and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

In centuries past, the majority population of various cities in Eastern Europe consisted of people from Western Europe — Germans, Jews, and others — while the vast majority of the population in the surrounding countrysides were Slavs or other indigenous peoples of the region.

Just as Western Europe was — and is — more prosperous than Eastern Europe, so Western Europeans living in Eastern European cities in centuries past were more prosperous than the Slavs and others living in the countrysides, or even in the same cities.

One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that the Romans conquered it in ancient times — a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.

Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages’ centuries earlier head start.

The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back

Walking through a moral minefield

The Abortion Act, intended as a humane response to hardship, has been subverted by changing times.

By Theodore Dalrymple

The discovery that sexually selected termination of pregnancy is available in Britain should surprise no one; and if we are surprised, it can only be because we have not been paying attention for the past 40 years. Sexually selected termination is, after all, the natural result and logical extension of the way the Abortion Act has been interpreted during all this time.

Several consultants and what I suppose we must now call their customers have been caught in flagrante committing an illegal act that most people will find thoroughly distasteful. No doubt the doctors involved will now find themselves in hot water, and the chairman of the Care Quality Commission, the Orwellianly named organisation in charge of supervising the compliance of abortion clinics with the law, has already resigned.