The Rise of Sauron

Socialism and Decivilization

by Jesus Huerta de Soto

On pages 33–35 of my book Socialism, Economic Calculation, and Entrepreneurship, I examine the process by which the division of practical entrepreneurial knowledge deepens "vertically" and expands "horizontally," a process that permits (and at the same time requires) an increase in population, fosters prosperity and general well-being, and brings about the advancement of civilization. As I indicate there, this process is based on

1.   the specialization of entrepreneurial creativity in increasingly narrow and more specific fields, and in increasing detail and depth;

2.   the recognition of the private-property rights of the creative entrepreneur to the fruits of his creative activity in each of these areas;

3.   the free, voluntary exchange of the fruits of each human being's specialization, an exchange that is always mutually beneficial for all who participate in the market process; and

4.   constant growth in the human population, which makes it possible to entrepreneurially "occupy" and cultivate a rising number of new fields of creative entrepreneurial knowledge, which enriches everyone.

War on women?

The real war is on children

By Mark Steyn

The Democratic Party, never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, does have a tendency to flog him to death. So it is with a fellow called Todd Akin, a GOP Senate candidate who unburdened himself of some ill-advised thoughts on abortion and "legitimate rape," and put Missouri back in play for the Democrats. Less-ambitious political parties would be content with that little windfall, but the Dems have decided to make – what's his name again? Oh, yeah – this guy Akin the face of the Republican Party. I mean, Mitt pretty much sees "venture capitalism" as a fancy term for legitimate rape, right?

California's Barbara Boxer opened the bidding this week in her familiar low-key style. "There is a war against women, and Romney and Ryan – if they are elected – would become its top generals," Sen. Boxer told a Planned Parenthood meeting. "There is a sickness out there in the Republican Party, and I'm not kidding. Maybe they don't like their moms or their first wives." Reichsmarschall Romney and Generalissimo Ryan are both still married to their first wives, so it must be the moms. No wonder Ryan wants to throw his off a cliff.

The Fantasy of Debt

No Trade-Offs, No Sacrifices

Easy, cheap credit has created a fantasy world where everyone "deserves" everything right now, and trade-offs and sacrifice have been banished as unnecessary.

by Charles Hugh-Smith

Debt offers a compelling fantasy: there is no need for difficult trade-offs or sacrifices, everything can be bought and enjoyed now. In the old days when credit was scarce and dear, buying a better auto required substituting 1,000 brown-bag lunches for restaurant meals: yes, four years of daily sacrifice.

Sending a child to college meant no meals out (or perhaps once or twice a year), driving an old car, no vacations other than camping, working overtime to make a few extra dollars, summer jobs for every teen in the family and a hundred other sacrifices and trade-offs. All too often, only the oldest got to go away to university; younger siblings had to sacrifice their education for the greater good of the family.

If the oldest sibling was fortunate enough to earn a decent salary after graduation, he or she sacrificed to pay for the education of younger siblings.

Trade-offs and sacrifices were the core of household finances for those families that sought to "get ahead" or purchase things that required substantial cash.

Abundant, cheap credit upended the incentives to make adult trade-offs and sacrifice consumption for future benefits. Why eat 1,000 brown-bag lunches when you can buy a new car for $500 down and "easy" monthly payments? Heck, you don't even need to pay for the lunches with cash; just charge them.

How the West created modernity

City, Empire, Church, Nation

By Pierre Manent

We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where. The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert. If the will to be modern has ceaselessly overturned the conditions of our common life and brought one revolution after another—without achieving satisfaction or reaching a point where we might rest and say, “Here at last is the end of our enterprise”—just what does that mean? How have we been able to will something for such a long time and accept being so often disappointed? Could it be that we aren’t sure what we want? Though the various signs of the modern are familiar, whether in architecture, art, science, or political organization, we do not know what these traits have in common and what justifies designating them with the same attribute. We find ourselves under the sway of something that seems evident yet defies explication.

Some are inclined to give up asking what we might call the question of the modern. They contend that we have left the modern age and entered the postmodern, renouncing all “grand narratives” of Western progress. I am not so sure, though, that we have renounced the grand modern narratives of science and democracy. We may be experiencing a certain fatigue with the modern after so many modern centuries, but the question of the modern remains, and its urgency does not depend on the disposition of the questioner. So long as self-understanding matters to us, the question must be raised anew. Even if we do not claim to provide a new answer, we should at least have the ambition to bring the question back to life.

Why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States

Why the elite wants to obliterate borders

Politicians present their sniffiness about national sovereignty as something progressive and liberal. It is anything but.

by Angus Kennedy 

UK foreign secretary William Hague, in threatening recently to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrest Julian Assange, displays the same degree of contempt for national sovereignty that Western nations have shown repeatedly since the end of the Cold War. The examples of this contempt are legion, from invading countries to bring about regime change, to the unelected officials of the Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF) lecturing and threatening Greece into sacrificing itself on the altar of the interests of the European Union. And in each case, the core principles of national self-determination and of democratic sovereignty, once championed by Woodrow Wilson and Lenin alike, are more likely today to be attacked as the fig leaves of dictators.

Thierry Baudet’s The Significance of Borders is a rare counter to such views. A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.

Making America safe for the Democratic Party

On the Road to Serfdom Again

By BRADLEY J. BIRZER

In 1944, Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek published a little polemic through the University of Chicago Press entitled The Road to Serfdom. No one, least of all Hayek himself, expected the book to explode in the manner it did, especially after Reader’s Digest chose to serialize it. Based in large part on observations first made by Alexis de Tocqueville, The Road to Serfdom did much to galvanize the Right, especially in America, giving it voice and, to a great extent, unity. Any power at war, Hayek noted in his book, should consider not only what the aim of the war is, but also what the postwar world should look like. Should the current Allied powers simply rehash the mistakes made by the Western powers after World War I, the efforts of World War II would amount to little good.

To begin to understand oneself, Hayek noted, one must understand the enemy as embodied in nationalism and socialism. Yet the so-called free Allied powers had only revealed “an inner insecurity and uncertainty of aim which can be explained only by confusion about their own ideals and the nature of the differences which separated them from the enemy,” Hayek lamented. Long before the current war, he continued, the Western powers had lost their understanding of liberty as “the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.”Individualism, Hayek argued, had called for respect for the uniqueness of each individual person, each able to make choices, and each able to use his talents for the betterment of himself and his community. Slowly discovered throughout the Western tradition, such individualism had led to true progress. Now, Hayek feared, not only had the West lost its purpose, but it did not even know how to return to its foundations. Echoing Tocqueville, Hayek concluded that the West crept toward socialism, toward a soft or democratic despotism.

The Electoral College and American Liberty

The abolition of the Electoral College would result in a severe tilting of the American political system to the left

By Gary Gregg   

It’s that time again when all eyes are drawn to the spectacle that is the American presidential campaign. We watch as Romney and Ryan bus from one end of Ohio to the other and observe Obama seeming to run the Administration from Air Force I on the way to fundraisers in California or small town rallies in Iowa and Colorado. As we watch the quadrennial drama unfold, the inevitable question arises: Is this any way to run an election?

There are many problems inherent in the way America elects its chief executives. Many of us have our pet ideas of ways we think it could be changed for the better, but no reform pops up with more regularity than the abolition of the Electoral College.  Before the heat of summer begins to slide away, the Op Eds and blogs appear and polls are reported showing a majority of the American people seeming to back the system’s demise.

Hundreds of proposed constitutional amendments which would have abolished or fundamentally altered the workings of the system have failed in Congress over the last century. Now the opponents have crafted a way around the constitutional impediments to reform and are as close to altering our electoral system as they have been since the 1970s.

Everything you need to know about where things stand in Europe

Summer fun in Europe is about to come to a screeching halt

By Cyrus Sanati

It may seem like the euro crisis is on hold at the moment as European lawmakers take their summer vacations. But upon their return in September, they will almost certainly find that their house is still very much on fire.

A number of policy decisions will be made in the next month that could alter the direction of the crisis, from establishing the European Central Bank's new role as "bond-buyer-in-chief" to figuring out how to bail out Greece yet again. There are a number of large hurdles the ECB will need to hop over before the markets accept that it is in control of the chaos.

But all eyes will be on Berlin for at least one day next month as the German constitutional court rules on the constitutionality of the nation's participation in Europe's new bailout fund. If the court rules against German participation, panic will almost surely sweep through the markets as the core of the rescue operation fizzles before it is even able to get off the ground.

Abortion and Rape

A society that prefers death to life not only cannot prosper; it cannot survive

by Andrew P. Napolitano

The criticisms of the recent absurd comments by Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, who at this writing is his party's nominee to take on incumbent Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in November in a contest he had been expected to win, have focused on his clearly erroneous understanding of the human female anatomy. In a now infamous statement, in which he used the bizarre and unheard-of phrase "legitimate rape," the congressman gave the impression that some rapes of women are not mentally or seriously resisted. This is an antediluvian and misogynistic myth for which there is no basis in fact and which has been soundly and justly condemned.

Akin also stated that the female anatomy can resist unwanted impregnation. This, too, is absurd, offensive and incorrect. Medical science has established conclusively that women cannot internally block an unwanted union of egg and sperm, no matter the relationship between male and female. I think even schoolchildren understand that.

New Dawn Fades

Gotham and the Death of the West

By Mark Hackard

“It’s just a movie”, we so often hear in response to any criticism of a film’s suggestive power over the mass psyche. Thus propaganda emanating from Hollywood is made to appear a harmless diversion rather than the agent of social control and transformation it actually is. When a black-clad killer stormed the theater premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado on July 20^th and proceeded to rake the audience with gunfire, the exact same scenario was transpiring on-screen before them in a preview of the upcoming picture Gangster Squad. For victims of the massacre and the American public at large, reality and fantasy have been fused in an alchemical wedding; it is in this realm that phantasms and flickering simulacra deceive men and lure them to destruction. Here, too, death is master. [1]

As the final installment of the Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises is more than a movie, just as its hero Bruce Wayne sought to overcome limits imposed upon mere mortals. Director Christopher Nolan has crafted a film of grand and sinister sweep, though his cinematography provides only the backdrop to an explicit and inescapable theme: the ruin of the West, its reduction to ashes. Even standard liberal convention, special effects and pulverizing violence in the screenplay cannot conceal the apocalyptic vision that unfolds before us.

How A Country Rationally Exits The Eurozone

We are about to experience the Euro Exit Scenario

By Gonzalo Lira

Mish Shedlock and I have a private bet as to whether Italy or Spain will exit first—he says Italy, I say Spain. But either way, it’s gonna pretty much suck. 

The whole point of exiting the eurozone is because a country no longer has the money to finance its continuing operations. Insofar as Spain, Greece and possibly Italy, that moment will arrive shortly—possibly within days in the case of Spain. So if a sovereign government reaches this moment, it will have no choice but to exit the EMU and revert to a local currency which the government can then devalue. 

By doing this, the government simultaneously has all the cash it needs to continue operations, and also inflates away its debts. The private sector gets a shot of adrenaline insofar as foreign trade is concerned, because its goods and services become that much cheaper on the foreign markets. And the employment situation gets a boost, as those producers selling their cheap goods and services overseas begin to hire more workers to fulfill demand. 

Apocalypse Not

A history of failed predictions of doom

By Matt Ridley

"Who or what will cause the 2012 apocalypse?" This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. "Super volcanos? Pestilence and disease? Asteroids? Comets? Antichrist? Global warming? Nuclear war?" the site's authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on December 21 this year. But they have no doubt it will happen. After all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but "the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years."

Case closed: Sell your possessions and live for today.

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following-from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

China's Growth: Planning or Private Enterprise?

China is, in fact, two separate economies: the private and the state

By Paul Gregory

Introduction

China appears to have come through the world economic crisis better than many other countries. China's admirers claim that, under China's "state capitalism," planners have guided large state companies rationally and wisely through the rough seas of the world economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CPC) plans, oversees, and administers the interwoven network of state banks, airlines, railroads, utilities, oil companies, and large manufacturers, all of which make up the economy's "commanding heights" (to use Lenin's term). As Europe and the United States slump, the CPC can speedily launch infrastructure projects or shift millions of migrant workers from one locality to another. There is no messy democracy to gum up the works. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman extols: "A one party system can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century."1

But Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s and F. A. Hayek in the 1930s discredited the idea that planners can manage an entire economy. Hayek pointed out that central planners lack "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place."2 Because the planners do not have the information that rests with hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of consumers, planning fails, as it did spectacularly in the Soviet Union. Interestingly, even socialist economist Robert Heilbroner admitted as much.3 China is not an exception. Its economic growth has occurred despite the government's economic planning and because of its large, dynamic private sector.

Organized Crime

The Unvarnished Truth About Government

by David Gordon

Thomas DiLorenzo is probably best known to the public for his revisionist studies of Lincoln, but he has a wide range of economic and historical interests.[1] Organized Crime, a collection of 52 short articles by him, shows again and again his keen eye for the striking historical detail that exactly illustrates the point he wants to make.

It will come as no surprise that price controls do not work. But DiLorenzo still manages to come up with an unexpected point about this familiar topic. The Nazi leader Hermann Goering warned the American occupation authorities that they stood in danger of repeating the mistakes of his own recently fallen regime. Speaking to the American correspondent (and, by the way, later American Ambassador to Switzerland) Henry Taylor, Goering said,

Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control peoples' wages and prices — peoples' work. If you do that you must control peoples' lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried and it failed. Nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here. (p. 5)

The Fallacy of Territorial Extension

This confederated state of ours was never planned for indefinite expansion or for an imperial policy

By WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER, 1896

The traditional belief is that a state aggrandizes itself by territorial extension, so that winning new land is gaining in wealth and prosperity, just as an individual would gain if he increased his land possessions. It is undoubtedly true that a state may be so small in territory and population that it cannot serve the true purposes of a state for its citizens, especially in international relations with neighboring states which control a large aggregate of men and capital. There is, therefore, under given circumstances, a size of territory and population which is at the maximum of advantage for the civil unit. The unification of Germany and Italy was apparently advantageous for the people affected. In the nineteenth century there has been a tendency to create national states, and nationality has been advocated as the true basis of state unity.

The cases show, however, that the national unit does not necessarily coincide with the most advantageous state unit, and that the principle of nationality cannot override the historical accidents which have made the states. Sweden and Norway, possessing unity, threaten to separate. Austro-Hungary, a conglomerate of nationalities largely hostile to each other, will probably be held together by political necessity. The question of expedient size will always be one for the judgment and good sense of statesmen.

The Gathering Storm

Real choices must now be made and real consequences will leap like Cerberus from those choices

“In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now.”

                                       -George Elliot, Silas Marner
By Mark J. Grant

In the raging battle taking place in Europe between the haves and the have nots, the North and the South, those with money and those that are begging for it; there are moments when the calm sets in before the lightning strikes and the thunder booms. The silence is almost eerie and the air resonates with a certain kind of vibrant electricity that is somewhat reminiscent of Dickens and his Great Expectations which is what really seems to be driving the markets these days.

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule.”

                                  -Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

You didn’t screw it on your own

You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state

By B. Obama

Look, if you’ve been unsuccessful, you didn’t get there on your own. If you were unsuccessful at opening or operating a small business, some government official along the line probably contributed to your failure.  There was an overzealous civil servant somewhere who might have stood in your way with unreasonable regulations that are part of our American system of anti-business red tape that allowed you to not thrive.  Taxpayers invested in roads and bridges, but you might have faced city council members who wouldn’t allow you to use them.  If you’ve been forced to close a business – it’s often the case that you didn’t do that on your own.  Somebody else made that business closing happen or prevented it from opening in the first place. 

You can thank the bureaucratic tyrants of the nanny state

The myth of a post-Apartheid ‘rainbow nation’

Massacre of the miners: the ANC’s Sharpeville

Why is there reluctance to discuss the killing of 34 miners in South Africa? 

by Brendan O’Neill 

Around the world, there’s a palpable queasiness about discussing the South African police’s massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana.

In Western newspapers, thundering editorials have been notable by their absence. No world leaders have issued withering condemnations of the government in South Africa, as they would have done in a flash if something like this had happened in Russia or China. Amnesty made a half-hearted statement (‘a judge must oversee an investigation into the deaths’) and then went back to organising global protests for the release of Pussy Riot. Even in South Africa itself, there is reluctance to talk frankly about the killings. In the words of one SA observer, ‘The most striking thing about the reaction is the lack of it’. Many people refer to the massacre as a ‘tragedy’, as if it were an accident at a mine rather than an act of state terror at a mine, or simply as an ‘incident’, that catch-all word that can cover everything from a scuffle on a bus to, it seems, the killing in three minutes flat of 34 people.

Why the caginess about discussing this major event? It is because the massacre did not only kill 34 miners – it also killed, or rather threatens to kill, the myth of a post-Apartheid ‘rainbow nation’. The massacre throws into sharp relief the nature of post-Apartheid South Africa and the bald, uncomfortable fact that while it may have done away with the overt racism of the old regime, it has kept in place the economic system that the old regime nurtured and the extreme exploitation of black workers that it was underwritten by. Having held up the so-called ‘rainbow nation’ of post-Apartheid South Africa as a shining example of how only negotiated political settlements can bring peace and only multiculturalism can ensure justice, observers around the world are made supremely uncomfortable by these recent events.

New World Disorder

The world's new powers discover the old ethnonationalisms

By Patrick J. Buchanan 

After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled.

The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of The End of History. Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism.

Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.

Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines–Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path.

A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran’s northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran’s Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan’s largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.

The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years’ War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by 19th- and 20th-century European cartographers, but in blood.

Freedom is seldom lost all at once

"Issues" or America?

By Thomas Sowell 

There are some very serious issues at stake in this year's election -- so many that some people may not be able to see the forest for the trees. Individual issues are the trees, but the forest is the future of America as we have known it.

The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration, during the process of dealing with particular issues.

For example, the merits or demerits of President Obama's recent executive order, suspending legal liability for young people who are here illegally, presumably as a result of being brought here as children by their parents, can be debated pro and con. But such a debate overlooks the much more fundamental undermining of the whole American system of Constitutional government.

The separation of powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches of government is at the heart of the Constitution of the United States -- and the Constitution is at the heart of freedom for Americans.

No President of the United States is authorized to repeal parts of legislation passed by Congress. He may veto the whole legislation, but then Congress can override his veto if they have enough votes. Nevertheless, every President takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that have been passed and sustained -- not just the ones he happens to agree with.