A kinder, gentler empire

Dumb and dumber

By John Feffer

US President Barack Obama is a smart guy. So why has he spent the past four years executing such a dumb foreign policy? True, his reliance on "smart power" - a euphemism for giving the Pentagon a stake in all things global - has been a smart move politically at home. It has largely prevented the Republicans from playing the national-security card in this election year. But "smart power" has been a disaster for the world at large and, ultimately, for the United States itself.

Power was not always Obama's strong suit. When he ran for president in 2008, he appeared to friend and foe alike as Mr Softy. He wanted out of the war in Iraq. He was no fan of nuclear weapons. He favored carrots over sticks when approaching America's adversaries. 

His opponent in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, tried to turn this hesitation to use hard power into a sign of a man too inexperienced to be entrusted with the presidency. In 2007, when Obama offered to meet without preconditions with the leaders of Cuba, North Korea and Iran, Clinton fired back that such a policy was "irresponsible and frankly naive". In February 2008, she went further with a TV ad that asked voters who should answer the White House phone at 3am. Obama, she implied, lacked the requisite body parts - muscle, backbone, cojones - to make the hard presidential decisions in a crisis. 

Obama didn't take the bait. "When that call gets answered, shouldn't the president be the one - the only one - who had judgment and courage to oppose the Iraq war from the start?" his response ad intoned. "Who understood the real threat to America was al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Who led the effort to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe." 

Like most successful politicians, Barack Obama could be all things to all people. His opposition to the Iraq war made him the darling of the peace movement. But he was no peace candidate, for he always promised, as in his response to that phone-call ad, to shift US military power toward the "right war" in Afghanistan. As president, he quickly and effectively drove a stake through the heart of Mr Softy with his pro-military, pro-war speech at, of all places, the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Place and Space

The Space Between

by ERIC JACOBSEN

Place and Space

Place, in contrast to space, is a context-specific, meaning-rich concept. Although many use the two words interchangeably, a fairly clean distinction can be made between them. Space is more abstract and undifferentiated than place. Space often is used to express a freedom from or a potential for something—“give me some space” or “we need space for this relationship to develop.” Place, by way of contrast, describes a realm where something significant has happened or is happening; “there’s no place like home.”

Walter Brueggemann identifies place as “storied.” One way to easily visualize the relationship between space and place is to think of a college dorm room. Before a student moves in, the dorm room has everything that is needed for college life, but it’s generic, undifferentiated space. Typically, there is a desk, a bed, a closet, a mirror, and a light. Within a week or two after the student moves in, this space is transformed into a place. There are pictures on the mirror, a cover on the bed, posters on the walls, and bric-a-brac on the desk. The story of that particular semester of college in that student’s life has already begun to be inscribed on the walls.

There is a dynamic relationship between space and place. Place is good, but we sometimes need a break from it. As a person lives life, one’s narrative begins to etch meanings on a particular space, causing it to become a place. As the meanings and memories crowd a place, a person may express a desire for more space. This is why we go on vacations to be restored or sometimes long to start over.

Space can be good in and of itself as well. Space is sometimes necessary for personal growth or identity formation within a group. Often we go on retreats not to disengage, but to reconnect with God, with ourselves, or with others. Often, however, new spaces are lonely and disorienting. Strangers finding themselves in this kind of situation long to find a place that they can call home.

A Doomed Marriage

Britain and Europe

BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

There is nothing quite like self-interest for blinding people to the obvious, and it is the genius of the European Union to have placed an entire cadre of powerful but blind beneficiaries—unable and unwilling to see writing on the wall, even if inscribed in flashing blue neon lights—in strategic political and economic positions in every European country. And so the continent limps toward the abyss, its “ever closer union” resuscitating old national stereotypes and antagonisms and increasing the likelihood of real conflict.

Daniel Hannan is a British Member of the European Parliament who first came to wide notice with his brief but devastating (because entirely accurate) attack in that body on Britain’s then–prime minister, Gordon Brown, who responded to it with all the wit of a hanged sheep. Hannan has now written a short and brilliant book setting forth with inexorable logic and a fine command of the salient historical and economic facts the deficiencies of the so-called European Project, from its premises to its practices—all of which are not only wrong, but obviously wrong.

Like all people with bad habits, politicians and bureaucrats are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalizing the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else. Without the Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God—good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.

Geography Strikes Back

To understand today's global conflicts, take a hard look at a map

By ROBERT D. KAPLAN

If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don't read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government's aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources. With upheaval in the Middle East and a tumultuous political transition in China, look to geography to make sense of it all.

As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.

But this is nonsense. Elite molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and continents in hours, allowing them to talk glibly of the "flat" world below. But while cyberspace and financial markets know no boundaries, the Carpathian Mountains still separate Central Europe from the Balkans, helping to create two vastly different patterns of development, and the Himalayas still stand between India and China, a towering reminder of two vastly different civilizations.

Technology has collapsed distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it has increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale scholar Paul Bracken observes, the "finite size of the earth" is now itself a force for instability: The Eurasian land mass has become a string of overlapping missile ranges, with crowds in megacities inflamed by mass media about patches of ground in Palestine and Kashmir. Counterintuitive though it may seem, the way to grasp what is happening in this world of instantaneous news is to rediscover something basic: the spatial representation of humanity's divisions, possibilities and—most important—constraints. The map leads us to the right sorts of questions.

Dirtier Lives May Be Just the Medicine We Need

An Epidemic of Absence

By Matt Ridley

Your great-grandparents faced infectious diseases that hardly threaten you today: tuberculosis, polio, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox, typhoid, typhus, tapeworm, hookworm…. But there's also a long list of modern illnesses that your great-grandparents barely knew: asthma, eczema, hay fever, food allergies, Crohn's disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis. The coincidence of the rise in these "inflammation" diseases, characterized by an overactive immune system, with the decline of infection is almost certainly not a coincidence.

Natural experiments in recent decades support the idea that while modern hygiene defeats infection, it also promotes allergy and autoimmunity. Finns isolated in an impoverished Soviet province had more parasites and fewer allergies than Finns in Finland. Swedes in clean Stockholm had three times as much asthma as Estonians in smoky Estonia. Ethiopians and Gambians got allergies when they lost their intestinal worms. Growing up on a farm greatly cuts allergy risk.

In a remarkable new book, "An Epidemic of Absence," Moises Velasquez-Manoff draws together hundreds of such studies to craft a powerful narrative carrying a fascinating argument. Infection with parasites prevents or ameliorates many diseases of inflammation. The author briefly cured his own hay fever and eczema by infecting himself with hookworms—before concluding that the price in terms of diarrhea and headaches was too high.

I've touched on the "hygiene hypothesis" in these pages before. In its cartoon form the argument—that in a clean world our immune system gets bored and turns on itself or on harmless pollen—isn't very convincing. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff makes a far subtler, more persuasive case. Parasites have evolved to damp our immune responses so that they can stay in our bodies. Our immune system evolved to expect parasites to damp it. So in a world with no parasites, it behaves like a person leaning into the wind when it drops: The system falls over.

The Socialist Counter-revolution Begins

France's Richest Man Seeks Belgian Citizenship

A few months ago when the new French socialist president gave details of his particular version of the "fairness doctrine" and said he would tax millionaires at 75%, we said that "we are rotating our secular long thesis away from Belgian caterers and into tax offshoring advisors, now that nobody in the 1% will pay any taxes ever again." While there was an element of hyperbole in the above statement, the implication was clear: France's richest will actively seek tax havens which don't seek to extract three quarters of their earnings, in the process depriving France (and other countries who adopt comparable surtaxes on the rich) of critical tax revenues. It took three months for this to be confirmed, and with a bang at that. The WSJ reports that Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, and the richest man in France, has decided to forego hollow Buffetian rhetoric that paying extra tax is one's sworn duty, and has sought Belgian citizenship.

From the WSJ:

Bernard Arnault, France's richest man and chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, is seeking Belgian citizenship, a move that comes as President François Hollande prepares to press ahead with a controversial tax on the country's wealthiest citizens.

Georges Dallemagne, president of Belgium's naturalization commission, said Mr. Arnault's case was filed at the end of August and will be "treated like others." Mr. Dallemagne said the process would take until "early next year, at best."

Though the LVMH titan denies his move is fiscally motivated, the timing of Mr. Arnault's request is sure to intensify the debate about whether Mr. Hollande's tax policies are sparking an exodus of the country's rich.

As a reminder, it took Monsieur Hollande four months to reneg on his promise to never bailout evil banks, when just last week he bailed out the second largest French home loan specialist, in the process pledging tens of billions in taxpayer funds. Precisely what he said he would not do. We expect Hollande will also reneg on his populist promises of exorbitant taxation of the wealthy once the Arnault backlash spreads among the remainder of the French "1%", who just happen to pay the bulk of French taxes.

Suddenly, Nobody In Europe Wants The ECB Bailout

Bailout or Trap ?

By Tyler Durden

It took the ECB a year of endless behind the scenes Machiavellian scheming to restart the SMP program (which was conceived by Jean-Claude Trichet in May 2010, concurrent with the first Greek bailout). The markets soared with euphoria that this time will be different, and that the program which is a masterclass in central planning paradox, as it is "unlimited" yet "sterilized", while based on "conditions" none of which have been disclosed, and will somehow be pari passu for new bond purchases while it retains seniority for previous purchases of Greek and other PIGS bonds, will work - it won't, and the third time will not be the charm as we showed before. Yet it has been just 48 hours since the "bailout" announcement and already Europe is being Europe: namely, it turns out that nobody wants the bailout.

On one hand there's Germany for obvious reasons - not only are they footing the cost, but it is for them that the threat of an inflationary spike as a result of "unlimited" bond buys is most acute. But on the other, just as we predicted all along, are Spain and France, the biggest beneficiaries of the bailout, and whose bonds soared on expectations the ECB may buy them, who overnight have had a change of heart and say they never actually needed the bailout. Why? Because its politicians have suddenly had a change of heart and realize they will be sacked the second they hand over sovereignty over to the Troika or whatever supernational entity is in charge of the country following the submission of the bailout request.

More importantly, and as explained before, as long as the yield on the bonds of insolvent European countries is sub 8%, not one country will demand a bailout. And as long as these countries reap the benefits of cheap rates, the policies of pseudo austerity will continue (as a reminder, nobody in Europe has actually implemented austerity), where nothing changes, where budget deficits continue to pile on, where sovereign debt continues to soar, where politicians continue making the same flawed policy choices, and where the European slow-motion trainwreck continues, only with a brief delay in the final inevitable outcome.

By now everyone knows about the ECB party that sent US stocks to 4 year highs. Now comes the aftermath. From the NYT:

Greeted with initial fanfare by investors and economic officials, the unlimited bond-buying plan that the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, announced Thursday ran into immediate political problems in the crucial countries of Germany, Spain and Italy.

Guess Who’s Bailing Out Bankrupt Western Governments Now...

From rags-to-riches

 by Tim Staermose

Fourteen years ago during the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia endured a currency collapse, a severe 2-year recession, and an embarrassing IMF bailout.

Western bureaucrats wagged their fingers incessantly at Indonesia, lecturing the country about the dangers of excess and fiscal irresponsibility.

How sweet the irony is. In a stunning rags-to-riches story, Indonesia contributed US$1 billion to the IMF last week in order to help bail out bankrupt Western nations.

As I’ve written before, unlike Japan, the US, and Europe — which all seem to think the answer to an economic bust brought on by a debt-binge is to borrow and spend even more money– Indonesia took its medicine when its economy collapsed back in 1998.

The government cut spending. The economy was de-regulated and thrown open to more foreign investment.

The banking system was restructured, and after a difficult and admittedly very painful two years, the foundation was laid for new economic expansion, which continues to this day.

To be sure, the 1998 collapse of the Indonesian economy cost the incumbent political elite here their cushy positions. President Suharto’s three-decade long iron-grip came to an ignominious end. There were riots in the streets, and he was literally turfed out of office.

But so what? That’s EXACTLY what was needed. Part of the renewal process should always be to ship out the dead wood.

The Bill Clinton Myth

In government the worst rise to the top

by James E. Miller

Earlier this week, former U.S. president Bill Clinton gave the keynote address to the Democractic National Convention in an effort to lend some of his popularity to Barack Obama.  With the unemployment rate still stubbornly high at 8.1%, Obama has lost many of the enthused voters who put him into the Oval Office in 2008.  Clinton was tapped to deliver the speech not only because of his image of a wonkish pragmatist but because of his presiding over the booming economy of the late 1990s.  Like a prized mule, Clinton was dragged out to give Democrats someone to point to and say that his policies were the hallmark of smart governance.

What attracts the left, both politicians and media, to Slick Willy is the fact that he presided over a thriving economy even while raising taxes.  This coincidence was championed as a justification for higher tax rates by Obama in his own speech before the DNC.

I want to reform the tax code so that it’s simple, fair, and asks the wealthiest households to pay higher taxes on incomes over $250,000 – the same rate we had when Bill Clinton was president; the same rate we had when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest surplus in history, and a lot of millionaires to boot.

The Clinton-era tax hikes, it is alleged, provided the federal government the means to create a healthy middle class.  Or at least that’s the only casual connection that can be gathered from such a philosophy.  The left claims that economic growth is driven primarily by middle class spending.  This spending needs to be subsidized in turn by government initiatives.  As Nobel Prize winning economist and class warrior Joseph Stiglitz puts it:

Many at the bottom, or even in the middle, are not living up to their potential, because the rich, needing few public services and worried that a strong government might redistribute income, use their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending. This leads to underinvestment in infrastructure, education, and technology, impeding the engines of growth.

Stiglitz’s thinking rests on the Keynesian theory that economies are reliant on strong levels of consumption and demand.  And with the right people in office, the state is the most capable institution of spending a nation into prosperity.

How Globalization Created And Destroyed Venice

Benefits of an open society Vs political power

By Max Nisen

The story of Venice from 800 to 1350 is of incredible political and institutional change of a remarkably modern sort, sparked by international trade.

Egalitarian institutions and economic mobility threatened the power of Venice's elites, and they used their wealth and power to choke off competition, ending Venice's dominance.

A new NBER working paper from Diego Puga and Daniel Trefler takes a deep look at the data and history of how it happened.

Venice likely would not have become a center of trade if a series of events had not conspired to make it uniquely independent. It was at first the most Western outpost of Byzantium. After helping defeat Charlemagne in battle, it was granted de facto independence in 814, then full independence in 992.

As a result, it was uniquely free from the political and military pressures of the rest of Europe. Venice was also in the perfect geographic position to benefit from international trade. Midway between Constantinople (the gateway to the East) and Western Europe, it was right on the the route to Europe's population centers

ECB Head Draghi Backs Up Pledge to Save Euro

Unlimited Bond Purchases

By Spiegel

The European Central Bank has resembled a sieve this week. Ahead of Thursday's much anticipated press conference, financial websites and business papers were full of reports detailing ECB President Mario Draghi's plan for holding down the borrowing costs of debt-plagued euro-zone member states. Discretion was in short supply.

When Draghi did finally step in front of the microphone on Thursday, he confirmed what most already knew. The ECB is to launch a new bond-buying program to hold interest rates on euro-zone sovereign bonds in check. The program, called Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs), allows for unlimited ECB purchases of sovereign bonds on the secondary market. The program is to focus on bonds with a period of three years and less.

"OMTs will enable us to address severe distortions in government bond markets which originate from, in particular, unfounded fears on the part of investors of the reversibility of the euro," Draghi said in a statement. "Hence, under appropriate conditions, we will have a fully effective backstop to avoid destructive scenarios."

The decision to essentially restart the ECB's bond-buying program, which saw the bank amass over €210 billion euros worth of sovereign bonds from heavily indebted euro-zone member states in 2010 and 2011, was not uncontroversial.Particularly Jens Weidmann, head of the German central bank, the Bundesbank, and a prominent member of the ECB Governing Council, has been vocally opposed to such a move.

The Economic Irrationality of the State

As states gain power, liberty recedes

"The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens." — Leo Tolstoy

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free" — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

by Eric Englund

In 1912, Ludwig von Mises's masterwork The Theory of Money and Credit was published; and to this day, this book is underappreciated. How can this be? After all, in this book, Mises unveiled his regression theorem demonstrating commodity money, such as gold, can have its purchasing power traced back in time to the point where gold was not a medium of exchange. Mises, accordingly, eliminated the conundrum in which the marginal-utility explanation of money demand would merely be a case of circular reasoning; money emerged out of barter and his logic is irrefutable. Mises also laid the foundation for the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, which correctly deduces that economic boom-bust cycles are caused by inflationary bank-credit expansion as enabled by central banks and their governments. While writing The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises was pondering the issue of economic calculation in a socialist state. Per Murray Rothbard,

Mises writes that he was led to consider the socialist calculation problem by his work onThe Theory of Money and Credit. Here Mises realized for the first time with keen clarity that the money economy does not and cannot calculate or measure values directly: that it only calculates with money prices, the resultants of such individual valuations. Hence, Mises realized that only a market with money prices based on the evaluations and exchanges of private owners can rationally allocate resources, since there is no way by which a government could calculate values directly. Hence, for Mises his article and book on socialism was part and parcel of the development of his expanded integration of micro and macro, of direct monetary exchange, that he had begun but not completed in The Theory of Money and Credit.[1]

Without private ownership in the means of production, economic calculation is impossible. Per Joseph T. Salerno, "a single human mind … would be utterly incapable of determining the optimal pattern of resource allocation or even if a particular plan were ludicrously and destructively uneconomic."[2] To be sure, the collapse of the USSR demonstrated the harmful, resource-misallocating, and uneconomic nature of the socialist state.

Economic Fallacies And The Fight For Liberty

The statist economic policies of the Keynesians become even more irrational as the Great Recession drags on

by James Miller

It’s easy to be pessimistic over the future prospects of liberty when major industrialized nations around the world are becoming increasingly rife with market intervention, police aggression, and fallacious economic reasoning.  The laissez faire ideal of a society where people should be allowed to flourish without the coercive impositions of the state is all but missing from mainstream debate.  In editorial pages and televised roundtable discussions, a government policy of “hands off” is now an unspeakable option.  It is presumed that lawmakers must step up to “do something” for the good of the people.  Thankfully, this deliberate false choice will slowly but surely bring the death of itself.   Illogical theories can only go on for so long before the push-back becomes too much to handle.  For those who desire liberty, it’s a joy that the statist economic policies of the Keynesians become even more irrational as the Great Recession drags on. The two following examples will illustrate this point.

Former Labor Secretary, public policy professor at University of California, Berkley, and political commentator Robert Reich recently offered President Obama and Mitt Romney a proposal he thinks will help American workers.  In lieu of almost 40% of workers in the U.S. not receiving paid vacation for holidays and sick days, Reich proposes that the federal government mandate every worker receive three weeks of paid time off.  Reich calls the country’s lack of a national leave policy “absurd.”  Further, he claims that imposing an increase in mandatory paid vacation would be beneficial not just for employees but employers as well.  According to the union cheerleader, paying employees for taking time off is great for productivity because they come back with batteries recharged and higher morale.  This boost in output would more than pay for the leave and for the hiring of additional labor to offset the absence.

What Reich is arguing is that by increasing the cost of labor, somehow the unemployment rate will drop.  Or that by paying employees to take time off, the extra productivity that would take place would both pay for the hiring of more workers and make up for the loss of time devoted to labor.  And finally, Reich is assuming that employers have never taken such a policy into account and are blind to the low-hanging fruit of easy profits.

Choice not part of this future

Liberal Delusions 

by mark steyn

According to Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, invited to address the Democratic convention and the nation, America faces a stark choice this November. "During this campaign, we've heard about two profoundly different futures that could await women in this country – and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past," she cautioned. "That future could become real."

In one of those futures, women will be "shut out and silenced," rape victims will be "victimized all over again," pregnant women will "die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms," and "access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it." If you're wondering where all that is on your ballot form, just check the box marked "R."

"We know what this America would look like," warned Miss Fluke sternly. "In a few short months, that's the America that we could be. But that's not the America that we should be. And it's not who we are."

Fortunately, the America that we could be that isn't the America that we should be doesn't have to be the America that we would be. The good news is that "we've also seen another America that we could choose. In that America, we'd have the right to choose," said Miss Fluke. This would be "an America in which our president, when he hears that a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters, not his delegates or his donors. And in which our president stands with all women. And strangers come together, and reach out and lift her up. And then, instead of trying to silence her, you invite me here, and you give me this microphone – to amplify our voice. That's the difference."

So, if you're looking for an America where strangers lift up Sandra Fluke and amplify her voice, that would be the box marked "D."

"I've seen what these two futures look like," she said. "And six months from now, we're all going to be living in one future, or the other. But only one." Because you can't have two futures simultaneously, even under Obamacare.

With respect to Sandra Fluke, I think there's a third future looming. The paperback edition of my book comes out in a week or so, and you can pretty much get the gist of it from the title: "After America." For me, the likely scenario isn't that the Republicans will be terrorizing rape victims or that the Democrats will finally pass the necessary legislation to make contraception available for the contraceptively starved millions crying out for it, but that America will be sliding off the cliff – literally, as Joe Biden would literally say. And when America slides off the cliff it lands with a much bigger thud than Greece or Iceland. I'm not certain that the Republicans will be able to prevent that happening. But I know that the Democrats can't. America owes more money than anybody has ever owed anyone in the history of the planet. But millions of Americans don't see it, and millions of those who do see it don't see it as a problem.

Sandra Fluke is one of them. She completed her education a few weeks ago – at the age of 31, or Grade 25. Before going to Georgetown, she warmed up with a little light BS in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Cornell. She then studied law at one of the most prestigious institutions in the nation, where tuition costs 50 grand a year. The average starting salary for a Georgetown Law graduate is $160,000 per annum – first job, first paycheck.

We are suffocating in stuff, physically, psychologically and spiritually

Is Anybody Else Tired Of Buying And Owning Stuff?

by Charles Hugh Smith

I know this is a sacrilegious question, but is anybody else tired of buying and owning stuff? Is anybody else tired of dealing with all the junk cluttering up every corner of the room/house/nation?

Has anyone else noticed we have surplus stuff coming out our ears? And that therefore we don't really need any more stuff? Has anyone noticed the psychological consequences of constantly buying and managing possessions? Here is how correspondent B.D. recently put it:

Kids have a melt-down when they don't have the latest iteration of the (insert trendy electronica here) or if they are asked to tidy up the gargantuan collection of "stuff" they are slowly suffocating themselves with. Most kids these days don't have bedrooms anymore ... they have a small warehouse of goods in which they have a sleeping space.

Everybody has a warehouse of goods, even "poor" households. Of the four households on my block with one-car garages, we're the only ones who actually park a car in the garage. Everyone else's garage is jammed with stuff. And this is not an upscale neighborhood, it's working-class/renters.

Have you been to one of the many gigantic swap meets recently? You know, the kind with hundreds of sellers hawking everything under the sun. Our young friends (newlyweds renting one bedroom in a house, they don't own a car, both seeking fulltime work but currently living on one-part time job) recently described their visit to just such a sprawling cornucopia of over-consumption.

People are selling any and everything to raise some cash: birds, snakes, used iPhones, laptop computers, clothing, furniture, you name it. A guy was selling a guitar for $15. Our friend offered $5. The seller took $8. $8 for an acoustic guitar. Granted it was a cheap one, but $8? Was it even worth hauling it to the swap meet for $8? A set of strings costs $4.

The Conquest of the US by Spain

The transformation of America

by Ralph Raico

The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain — our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since.

Starting in the 1880s, a group of Cubans agitated for independence from Spain. Like many revolutionaries before and after, they had little real support among the mass of the population. Thus they resorted to terrorist tactics — devastating the countryside, dynamiting railroads, and killing those who stood in their way. The Spanish authorities responded with harsh countermeasures.

Some American investors in Cuba grew restive, but the real forces pushing America toward intervention were not a handful of sugarcane planters. The slogans the rebels used — "freedom" and "independence" — resonated with many Americans, who knew nothing of the real circumstances in Cuba. Also playing a part was the "black legend" — the stereotype of the Spaniards as bloodthirsty despots that Americans had inherited from their English forebears. It was easy for Americans to believe the stories peddled by the insurgents, especially when the "yellow" press discovered that whipping up hysteria over largely concocted Spanish "atrocities" — while keeping quiet about those committed by the rebels — sold papers.

Politicians on the lookout for publicity and popular favor saw a gold mine in the Cuban issue. Soon the American government was directing notes to Spain expressing its "concern" over "events" in Cuba. In fact, the "events" were merely the tactics colonial powers typically used in fighting a guerrilla war. As bad or worse was being done by Britain, France, Germany, and others all over the globe in that age of imperialism. Spain, aware of the immense superiority of American forces, responded to the interference from Washington by attempts at appeasement, while trying to preserve the shreds of its dignity as an ancient imperial power.

Variations of the Left

Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America

By Jack Kerwick,

From talk radio to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity, National Review to The Weekly Standard, what is popularly understood as “the conservative movement” has no short supply of voices. But what few people — and even fewer people among self-avowed “conservatives” — ever bother to ask is whether the popular understanding of conservatism is an accurate understanding. That is to say, are Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their colleagues on the airwaves and in mainstream publications really conservative? One person who has spent decades asking — and answering — this question is Paul Gottfried. He raises it once more in his most recent book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America.  

And it is within this work that the author resolves this key question with a definitiveness that is obvious for all with eyes to see: the contemporary expression of “the conservative movement,” Gottfried declares, has little to nothing in common with “the Old Right” of yesteryear.

In other words, most of today’s self-described “conservatives” are nothing of the sort. They are, rather, neoconservatives. As such, they compose a movement, yes, but a movement that is scarcely continuous with any recognizably right-wing tradition. On the most legible reading of it, as Gottfried amply demonstrates, the contemporary “conservative movement” is nothing more or less than another variation of leftism. Indeed, the author cleverly, and provocatively, characterizes it as “the alternative left.”  

So what does any of this have to do with the twentieth century philosopher, Leo Strauss?

'Improve' or We'll Kill You

The Liberal Way To Run the World  

by John Pilger

What is the world’s most powerful and violent "ism"? The question will summon the usual demons such as Islamism, now that communism has left the stage. The answer, wrote Harold Pinter, is only "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged", because only one ideology claims to be non-ideological, neither left nor right, the supreme way. This is liberalism.

In his 1859 essay On Liberty, to which modern liberals pay homage, John Stuart Mill described the power of empire. "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians," he wrote, "provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end." The "barbarians" were large sections of humanity of whom "implicit obedience" was required. The French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville also believed in the bloody conquest of others as "a triumph of Christianity and civilisation" that was "clearly preordained in the sight of Providence".

"It’s a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the armongers," wrote the historian Hywel Williams in 2001, "but the imperialism of the liberal way may be more dangerous because of its openended nature – its conviction that it represents a superior form of life [while denying its] selfrighteous fanaticism." He had in mind a speech by Tony Blair in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which Blair promised to "reorder this world around us" according to his "moral values". At least a million dead later – in Iraq alone – this tribune of liberalism is today employed by the tyranny in Kazakhstan for a fee of $13m.