A gang of moralizing cranks

Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADA’s hypocrisy

By Sally Jenkins

First of all, Lance Armstrong is a good man. There’s nothing that I can learn about him short of murder that would alter my opinion on that. Second, I don’t know if he’s telling the truth when he insists he didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France — never have known. I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that he’s not the mastermind criminal the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.

A federal judge wrote last week, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.” You don’t say. Then when is a judge, or better yet Congress, going to do something about it?

Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time I’ve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these “doping” investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. It’s the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletes’ antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.

The Crisis of Democracy Has Reached Act Two

We have forgotten that societies created government, not the other way around

By Gregory R. Copley

It would be a mistake to think that the Western economic crisis is being managed toward a successful conclusion; that perhaps it can escape from disaster. Rather, most Western societies have moved closer to the brink of economic — and therefore political and social — instability because they have forgotten the fundamentals of social reality which determine the value of currencies, property, and products. 

To be more precise, elected political leaders almost always choose to place short-term stability — frequent, stop-gap tactical fixes — ahead of structural solutions. Perhaps, indeed, even if they understood and desired enduring structural renovation, the complex mass of societies and now-ingrained political practices (what we call Western democracy) could not be persuaded to accept painful corrective moves by any measure short of societal collapse or conflict. 

It is inconceivable that economic recovery can occur in the absence of a recovery of productivity. Despite this, Western economies have not only failed to stimulate real productive growth, they have consistently discouraged investment in production. Western governments have also consistently, in recent decades, discouraged the development of any incentives for their populations to become actively engaged through individual initiative and freedom to act in the fight for economic recovery. Rather, at this juncture in Western “democracy”, all governmental efforts are directed at two principal endeavours: 

•     Providing bread and circuses to the base of the electorate as a  palliative, narcotic, soporific indulgence; and 
•     Extracting the means — the funds — to sustain the bread and circuses and the bloating governmental structures through punitive taxation and increasingly draconian tax collection regimes. 

Is India About to Alter the World's Energy Future?

The Sleeping Elephant is Awakening 

By Raymond Tham

Since 1951, the Indian government has somehow managed to fail in every single attempt to reach its annual target of increasing the nation’s electricity production capacity. But while the nation continues to struggle with crippling blackouts and power shortages till today, an energy plan, conceived during the 1950s, may fundamentally alter the nation’s, and quite possibly the world’s, energy future.

Thorium, like its Norse god and Marvel superhero namesake, is expected to change the world.

Late last month, India suffered two consecutive power grid failures, which crippled the nation’s social and economic infrastructure: On July 30th, nearly 300 million Indians were affected by a massive blackout; and on the very next day, more than half of the population had no access to electricity after three of the nation's five power grids failed at lunchtime.

As engineers struggled to fix the world’s worst blackout in history, many analysts questioned whether the Indian government could meet the nation's increasing appetite for energy.

“The turmoil caused by the back-to-back grid failures is almost at the scale of a national emergency,” wrote Times of India journalist Ranjan Roy in an op-ed piece.

“A power crisis has been staring us at the face . . . and successive governments have failed to prevent a disaster,” he later noted.

Asia’s simmering political tensions defy conventional wisdom

Where Nationalism Still Matters

by Guy Sorman

Too often, we see East Asia only from an economic perspective, marveling at the undeniable success of China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea. Yet these nations have another story to tell, one that owes less to current economic performance than to much older instincts: nationalism and ethnic resentment, the forces that kindled World War I in Sarajevo. Today, those forces underlie disputes in places that we ignore or know nothing about, such as the Senkaku Islands, the Dokdo Islands, and the Spratly archipelago. And those disputes may spark military conflicts between rival Asian countries.

Such thinking goes against the theory that trade must soothe centuries-old enmities, that commerce annihilates even the temptation of war. Isn’t this the lesson of Jean Monnet’s brilliant vision, the European Union? Wars disappeared in Europe when replaced by trade. And Asian countries certainly cooperate with one another commercially; the products that we buy after they’re exported from one Asian country or another are actually composed of pieces that travel from factory to factory in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

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