The “doctor” will see you now

Dr. Mengele, I Presume

Josef Mengele

by Michael Walsh

As you can read here, I’ve been following the horrific tale of “Dr.” Kermit Gosnell, the alleged Butcher of Philadelphia, ever since the story broke last year. In fact, in the guise of my crazy-lefty character, David Kahane, I wrote a big piece, “The Charnel House of Blackmun,” about it shortly after the grand jury issued its stomach-turning report on this latter-day Mengele‘s crimes. An excerpt:

For us, a day without an abortion somewhere in this great land is like a day without a sermon on climate change: The world is a drab and bitter place, in which the cheery hosannas of the unborn dead cannot be heard, praising the glory of a Gaian world they will never pollute with their presence. Forget that Baudelaire dude and the gimp, Verbal Kint: The Master’s greatest trick was not convincing the world he didn’t exist, but persuading women that it was morally affirmative to murder their own children. Medea, take a bow!

Now, you may quibble that Medea killed children who were, you know, actually ambulatory, but to us and Peter Singer, that is a small matter, a mere detail, a bagatelle of a bump in the road on our way to a more perfect nihilism. Which is why I’m here to celebrate a great American named Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., a man who was standing up to the forces of bigotry and intolerance and unreasoning pedophobia by providing abortion services at his Women’s Medical Society in Philadelphia — until, unaccountably, the state of Pennsylvania arrested him… 

Well, one man’s “baby charnel house” is another man’s monument to the House that Blackmun Built, and surely reasonable men and women of good conscience can agree to disagree, even if Roe is long-since settled law and if you troglodytes so much as try to touch one hair of its sacred little head, we’re coming after you with scissors, suction, a pair of pliers, and a blowtorch… Once you accept the proposition of abortion pretty much on demand, including post-“birth,” this seems to us a distinction without a difference, but there’s no accounting for the lengths to which you Christianist Javerts will go in order to hunt down innocent women’s-health specialists.

While it’s true that the alleged details of Dr. Gosnell’s practice can make you squeamish right-wingers uncomfortable, our brave women are made of sterner stuff. They know the parasitic clumps of cells in their wombs — punishment-by-“baby” for the simple, innocent, joyous act of sexual intercourse — are being eliminated for a higher, nobler cause than mere Christianity. We progressives don’t believe in the afterlife, unless we’re trying to fake some sort of “faith” on television, but we do believe in, shall we say, an eternally resonating resonance that proclaims to the universe: We were here. We lived. We killed. Mission accomplished.

The Wreck of the Euro

Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

What does it mean for the euro that, on paper at least, Spaniards, Italians, and Cypriots are much wealthier on average than Germans? That’s the question Wolfgang Münchau tackled in a must-read column in the Financial Times.

Here are the outlines of his argument. A new survey by the European Central Bank has concluded that median German household wealth ranks among the lowest in the entire Eurozone. The median German family is worth €51,000 whereas the median Cypriot household is worth €267,000. Those are eye-popping figures, and the German press is apoplectic over them. Münchau cautions that the median is not the best measure in this case. But even if one were to look at the mean, Germans are worth €200,000 per household, while Spanish net wealth is somewhere around €300,000. There’s another correction to take on board; Germans haven’t bought into home ownership the way many Europeans (and Americans) do. But put in all the caveats and corrections you want, and the numbers are still striking and, to many Germans, infuriating. Why should German households be paying tax money to bail out rich Cypriots?

But anybody who’s traveled in Europe understands that these numbers have something wrong with them. Germans are significantly richer than Italians and Greeks. The answer, says Münchau, must be that varying price levels across the eurozone are responsible.

On the surface, this is not actually as bizarre as it might seem. Price levels vary. The American experience with the dollar is not totally different. A dollar in New York isn’t the same thing as a dollar in other parts of the country. A salary of $150,000 in Manhattan is worth a lot less than a salary of $150,000 in Omaha or Baton Rouge. And while $500,000 can’t buy you a decent sized apartment in Manhattan, it can buy quite a nice house in much of the country. European countries work like this, too. Milan is a lot more expensive than most of the rest of Italy, for example.

But there is a perverse European twist to this state of affairs. In America, it’s the richer parts of the country that have the highest price levels. But in Europe it’s the other way round. Prosperous Germany has lower prices than the dead broke Club Med countries. In American terms, imagine that real estate in Manhattan was cheaper than in Detroit, or that prices in Buffalo, New York, far outstripped prices in Silicon Valley.

Dutch Delusion

Europe's Core, She Rots Some More

By Raul Ilargi

A report published Thursday by the real estate industry in the Netherlands states that the average home price is now 18% lower than it was at the peak in 2008, while detached homes lost 20%-25% (March 2013 YoY prices fell 6.8%, says Eurostat). A separate, earlier, report estimated that 20% of homes, or over 1 million, are now underwater.

Today's report comes hot on the heels of a study issued Wednesday by a government commission, which took a full year to prepare and 121 pages to explain what went wrong in the Dutch housing bubble, and what should be done now to correct it.

The core problem is simple: from 1995 to 2008 home prices more than tripled (rose 200%+). Hence, if we round off to a 20% drop from peak levels, or 60% from 1995 levels when prices were a third of what they were in 2008, there's still an increase of about 150% from the starting levels that needs to be dealt with. We can discount for, and let's be generous, perhaps 50% for overall price inflation, but that still leaves us with a 100% increase, which is quite a bit more than the 60% absorbed so far.

This means that, seen from the 2008 peak perspective, a 20% price fall has been completed, and another 33% drop is needed to get back to where it came from. Some may cite reasons why prices should remain elevated, but that smacks too much of the "this time is different" argument; one might as well argue the opposite. A main point raised is that demand outstrips supply, but demand is not what people want; it's what they will be able to afford. And the Dutch economy is shrinking.

Well, you see the problem by now, of course: like many other nations, the Dutch today feel quite strongly that they have suffered enough already, and someone somehow needs to revive the housing market. But like everyone else, the Dutch wish to wish away the problem of the not yet corrected part of the pricing model. In their case, they want 200% (1995+100%) to be the new normal (a.k.a. the new black).

Not surprisingly, the government report says that A) all parties are to blame, and B) the government needs to get more involved, i.e. make sure loans become available for people who now can't get them, a.k.a. people who are not the most likely prime candidates to buy a home that's still some 33% overvalued. Though, admittedly, sucking in those last remaining suckers would prop up moribund builders, agents and lenders for a while longer. Whether that's a government's task is at the very least highly questionable (obviously, other countries, including the US, work on similar resuscitation efforts).

The most hilarious I've seen to date coming out of the Netherlands (a good second was:" build more homes"!) is the proposal for the government to artificially raise home rents so people will be more likely and tempted to buy a home. An act which, incidentally, has recently been stripped of its most flagrant artificial incentives.

China's collars are turning white

Economic rebalancing - Industrial eclipse

The Economist

EARLIER this year, we noted that China's output of services was poised to overtake its industrial production, probably as soon as this year. That would represent an interesting milestone for China's economy, which is renowned for the hum of its assembly lines, the belch of its smokestacks and the clang of its construction sites. Today's GDP report brings that crossover even closer. In the past four quarters (running from the second quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013), services and industry accounted for the same amount of China's GDP (see chart)*. Indeed, services trumped industry in each of the past three quarters. That hasn't happened since 1961, as far as I can tell. 

I should point out that China's service sector (which includes transport, wholesaling, retailing, hotels, catering, finance, and real estate among other things) is still unusually small. In other economies at China's stage of development, services typically account for about 55-60% of GDP. Prices for services have also been rising faster than industrial prices, contributing to the shift in their favour.

I should also point out that both sectors are highly seasonal, with services typically peaking in the first quarter and industry peaking in the second. So industry (which includes construction, mining and utilities, as well as manufacturing) may bounce back in April, May and June. Nonetheless, the industrial eclipse is edging a little closer. 

When hunger came to Egypt

The question is how long Egyptians can go hungry before the Morsi regime loses its capacity to govern

By David P Goldman

Egyptians are getting hungry. The fall of the Egyptian pound to just 60% of its 2012 exchange rate against the dollar has priced everything but bread out of the reach of the poorer half of the population, and the bread supply is now at risk.

The news late last week that Libya and Qatar may lend US$5 billion to Egypt was overshadowed by reports that Cairo owes $5 billion to the oil companies that produce oil and gas on its territory. Half of the amount is overdue, and oil companies reportedly expect to wait years for payment. Egypt's arrears on trade credits from suppliers of oil, wheat, and other essential items probably exceed its $8.8 billion cash reserves, leaving the country flat broke. 

With a trade deficit running at $32 billion, the Libyan and Qatari money covers just a couple of months; stiffing the oil companies might have covered the past couple of months. If the Egyptian government finally comes to terms with the International Monetary Fund for a $4.8 billion loan, that will cover another few weeks.

Egypt's Exports, Imports and Trade Balance 

Egypt's finances have been in free fall since the mid-2000s, when prices for food and other essential imports soared while export earnings for cotton and other products stagnated. At $60 billion, the country's trade deficit is a seventh of its gross domestic product. The 40% fall in the exchange rate of the Egyptian pound from 6 to the dollar late last year to 8.25 on the black market last week will raise the cost of imports even further. 

The half of Egyptians that lives on $2 a day no longer eats beans, let alone milk products. 

The price of fava beans, the country's second-most important food staple, has already risen by 40% this year, to 5,000 Egyptian pounds (US$728) per ton from $3,000 Egyptian pounds in January. Imports of proteins have collapsed, according to theEgyptian Gazette:

''As for frozen food imports, namely meat, fish and chicken products, they fell by 25 per cent during the first three months of the year, compared to the same period a year before due to the surge in the dollar," said Alaa Radwan, a member in the Food Stuff Industries at the FECC. Radwan, who is also head of the Association of the Meat, Fish and Chickens Importers, explained that banks had suspended offering importers with letters of credit, demanding them to seek dollars from the parallel market, which caused frozen food prices to increase by 25 per cent to 39 per cent.

The price of imported milk products, which account for 60% to 65% of consumption, has risen by 60% since January, the Gazette reported. 

The only basic foodstuffs still available to poor Egyptians are state-subsidized bread, sugar and oil. That may change drastically during the next several months.

Germans are losing patience with being cast as the euro zone’s scapegoats

The biggest risk for the euro right now is not that Greece leaves, it’s that Germany leaves

The Economist

HITLER moustaches and swastikas defiling pictures of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, have become a recurring motif in the iconography of the euro crisis, most recently in Cyprus. Scapegoating is inevitable during financial upheavals, says Marcel Fratzscher, president of DIW Berlin, a think-tank. Germany, he suggests, has taken the place of the IMF during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, with Mrs Merkel playing the role of Michel Camdessus, the then IMF boss who was pictured in 1997 with folded arms, standing over a humbled Indonesian president signing up to harsh austerity measures. But scapegoating can be dangerous if the goat is powerful and it begins to feel victimised.

The Germans are not yet openly angry. That would be out of character in a people who have, since the second world war, been eager to atone for the past and be good European partners. In one recent poll, 34% of Germans even said they empathised with the wrath of the southern Europeans. But the mood is shifting. The southerners may see Germany as forcing excessive austerity on them and showing insufficient solidarity, but Germans have a different view.

First, they feel they have already shown solidarity. Almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall they still pay a solidarity tax to eastern Germany. Some also transfer taxes to weaker German states such as Bremen. Many conclude that, once in place, solidarity ceases being voluntary and instead becomes a yoke. They also bear much of the risk of euro bail-outs, even though a study released this week by the European Central Bank showed that the average German household has less wealth than the average Spanish, Italian and Cypriot one (though this is partly because German households tend to contain fewer adults and are more likely to be in rented accommodation).

Second, they argue that Germany recognised a decade ago that it was not competitive and undertook painful reforms that are now paying off. The crisis countries should follow suit. And third, Germans think the euro crisis was largely caused by rule-breaking (even by Germany itself), which must not be repeated. As one diplomat puts it, “solidarity is important, but it should follow rules. It is not just ad hoc giving.”

Together, these attitudes often have the sound of a morality tale. Indeed, the English term “moral hazard”, which has no direct German translation, has become a staple of discourse in Berlin. Originating in the economics of insurance, it refers to the incentives to take risks when other people stand to pay for any damage. The fear is that German rescue money could cause the crisis countries to duck their reforms.

The Germans are not alone in these views. The Dutch, Finns and Slovaks broadly share them. What makes Germany different is that it is big and central. To historians such as Brendan Simms of Cambridge University, author of a new book, “Europe: the Struggle for Supremacy”, this sounds eerily familiar. Europe has long grappled with the “German question”. Sometimes Germany was too weak, sometimes too strong. Or, as Henry Kissinger, a former American secretary of state, put it, referring to Germany just after unification in 1871, it was “too big for Europe, but too small for the world”. Today, Mr Simms argues, “it sits uneasily at the heart of an EU that was conceived largely to constrain German power but which has served instead to increase it, and whose design flaws have unintentionally deprived many other Europeans of sovereignty.”

The question is whether Germany can use its power by unapologetically leading. Given Germany’s past, its political culture militates against even trying. As Joschka Fischer, a former foreign minister, jokes, “it’s nice to go to a conference of ‘young leaders’, but you don’t want a conference of ‘junge Führer’.” Most Germans worry that others might again come to hate or fear them. Their neighbours are less concerned. As Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, put it in a speech in Berlin in 2011, “I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity.”

Family Meltdown

Two can live more cheaply than one

By Robert Samuelson 

The discouraging March employment report, with a job increase of only 88,000, raises questions well beyond the dreary state of today's labor market. Prolonged high unemployment may be silently shredding the social fabric in ways that last for decades. Even before the Great Recession, men with a high-school diploma or less faced lower wages and a harder time finding work. This made them less attractive as husbands, contributing to the growth of single-parent families. Stubbornly high unemployment almost certainly aggravates these destructive trends.

It's hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent. Among whites, the increase was from 11 percent to 36 percent; among African-Americans, from 56 percent to 72 percent; among Hispanics, from 37 percent (1990) to 53 percent. Or look at the share of children living with two parents. Since 1970, that's dropped from 82 percent to 63 percent. Among whites, the decline is from 87 percent to 73 percent; among African-Americans, from 57 percent to 31 percent; among Hispanics, from 78 percent to 57 percent.

Just what caused these changes remains controversial. In his 2012 book "Coming Apart," Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute cited shifts in cultural norms. Having a child out of wedlock became more common and acceptable; the sexual revolution enabled men to get sex without marriage. The waning power of religion undermined the importance of family. Feminism and expanding welfare programs made it easier for women to survive -- through jobs or aid -- on their own. Liberalized divorce led to more breakups.

But there's also a more strictly economic case. In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage -- which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated -- to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women. Women are more independent economically; men are weaker. Marriage has lost much of its pecuniary pull.

One cheer for Labour’s new welfare policy

Calculating welfare entitlements on an individual's work history is a good idea. 

by Rob Lyons 

It’s an uncomfortable fact for Labour Party supporters and Guardianistas everywhere that, as Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland noted last week, ‘on welfare, the voters are on the Tories’ side’. Which may be the reason why, last weekend, Labour politicians did something shocking: in a bid to connect with voters, they actually said something sensible about the welfare state.

According to Sunday’s Observer, ‘detailed work is underway in the party’s policy review on how to revolutionise the way the system works and address concerns that it promotes a “something-for-nothing” culture. One central idea under consideration is the creation of a flexible payments system offering higher benefits to those who have been employed for longer and have therefore made more National Insurance contributions.’ It’s ‘about linking what you take out to what you have put in’, according to a ‘senior party source’.

Of course, it is pretty woolly stuff. For example, Labour’s shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, wrote elsewhere in the Observer that ‘we must do more to strengthen the old principle of contribution’, but then he could only offer the example of prioritising social housing for those ‘who work and contribute to their community’.

Yet while Labour’s proposals currently lack clarity, the principle of welfare entitlements flowing from a contributions scheme - something that was at the heart of the original vision for welfare - makes a good deal more sense than what the state does at the moment: hand out small amounts of money to people regardless of their work history.

We still worship at the altar of funny money

The Correlation Between The Gold Standard And Stupendous Growth Is Clear

Campaign poster showing William McKinley holding U.S. flag and standing on gold coin “sound money”.  Between 1870 and 1912, a period of forty-two years, industrial production in the United States rose by 682%.

By Nathan Lewis

For some reason, it is conventional wisdom today that the years 1870-1914, the era of the Most Perfect Monetary System Ever Created, was a time of chronic recession and disaster.

But how could that be? The United States was the world’s greatest economic success story of the last two centuries. When did that happen? It didn’t happen during the Civil War and the Great Depression. It must have happened — logically — during times of peace and prosperity.

That’s why Professor Brian Domitrovic says the usual story you hear about the gold standard years is completely wrong.

The United States actually did not return to a gold standard until 1879. However, by 1870, most of the rubble of the Civil War, including the floating “greenback” dollar, had been cleared up. Between 1870 and 1912, a period of forty-two years, industrial production in the United States rose by 682%.

Freedom can never be ‘granted’ to us

Keeping our eyes peeled for ‘phony freedoms’

by Brendan O’Neill 

I was doing my weekly shopping recently, when I saw there was a brand of toilet paper called ‘Freedom’. I started wondering, what kind of freedom is being offered by this toilet paper? Is it a ‘freedom to’ or is it a ‘freedom from’?

I thought it could possibly be a ‘freedom to’, in the sense that purchasing and using this toilet paper would give a person the freedom to wipe their bottoms, something they would not be at liberty to do if they did not own toilet paper.

But then I thought the toilet paper could also be providing a ‘freedom from’ – most obviously a freedom from stains. A freedom from uncleanliness, and also from the social ostracism that often accompanies that particular form of uncleanliness.

Now, of course, that’s ridiculous. This is really hygiene we’re talking about, not freedom. Cleanliness might be next to godliness, but it is not next to freedom of speech or freedom of association as one of the great liberties of the modern age. The Chartists did not demand freedom from skidmarks.

Only a crazy toilet paper company, desperate to catch people’s attention, would denigrate freedom in this way, right? Actually, you’d be surprised. These days, even in the upper echelons of the political classes, people talk seriously about the ‘freedom’ to have a hygienic bottom.

So the UN has made access to sanitation into a human right. Last year, on something called World Toilet Day, it declared: ‘Eliminating inequality can start in the most unlikely of places: a toilet.’ Apparently, ‘the humble toilet can be a stepping stone to… greater human dignity, freedom and equality’.

Now, I am all in favour of more toilets, of everyone in the world having access to a clean, flushing, preferably Gaddafi-style gold-plated toilet. And making that happen will involve further industrialising vast swathes of the earth. But I doubt very much that having a toilet will set people free – cleaner, yes, but freer?

The Currency of Power

America’s Food-for-Votes Program

by WENDY MCELROY

During his 2012 bid to become the Republican nominee for President, Newt Gingrich repeatedly called Barack Obama “the food-stamp President.” From the time Obama assumed office in January 2009 through October 2012, the number of people on food stamps spiked from 31.9 million to 47.5 million, according to the U.S. government’s own data. That is a rise of nearly 50 percent to a peak of 1 in 7 Americans and 1 in 4 children participating. The program's cost has more than doubled in four years, from $30 billion to $72 billion. So, it seems, there was plenty of bread to go with the electoral circus.

The food stamp program's new name is Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Critics claim it is economically unsustainable, widely abused, and the harbinger of a colossal welfare state. Advocates insist SNAP is the result of recession—a humanitarian necessity—and that food is a human right. But it is difficult to square food-stamp humanitarianism with other policies issuing from the White House, which add up to an attempt to make people dependent. 

Ulterior Motives?

The recession—which was largely caused and is continued by the government—itself is an inadequate explanation for the surge in food stamp recipients. The Obama administration has been recruiting people for its food stamps program with a zeal that outstrips simple humanitarian concern. In an article entitled “Obama Encouraging Americans to Get on Welfare,” Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute commented, “The Obama administration clearly doesn’t believe that enough Americans are receiving welfare.” He continued,

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week issued an order giving the Obama administration greater authority to waive work requirements included in the 1998 welfare reform law. This comes on top of a new ad campaign, using Spanish-language soap operas, to encourage more Latinos to sign up for food stamps. The administration even gave a special award to an Agriculture Department worker who found ways to combat the “mountain pride” discouraging Appalachian residents from taking full advantage of food stamps and other welfare programs. One message was loud and clear: More Americans should be getting welfare.

And that’s not all.

The State and Civil Society

The Attack on Tax Havens

by Pater Tenebrarum

Ever since the 2008 crisis, there has been an intensifying attack on so-called tax havens. We recall that one of the instigators of this debate was former UK prime minister Gordon Brown. Brown is a socialist who has often been conspicuous for his inimical stance toward gold. Not only did he sell the bulk of the UK's gold at the very bottom of a 20 year bear market, he later urged the IMF several times to sell its gold as well. Nothing seemed to qualify him for this self-appointment to the role of international gold reserves adviser, but there it was anyway. His reasoning was denounced by the very countries he was ostensibly trying to help. Officially, the IMF was supposed to sell gold so it could forgive loans made to poor countries by means of the profits that it was going to book (due to the difference between the valuation of gold on its balance sheet and its market price). Unfortunately most of the countries concerned are major gold producers and are therefore not at all interested in any activities that might pressure the gold price. And yet, even knowing that, Brown carried on and on, which suggests that there were ulterior motives. We were not at all surprised when Brown of all politicians was at the forefront of those vehemently denouncing tax havens after 2008 – which happened out of the blue, and apropos of nothing (what do tax havens have to do with 'crisis prevention'? Nothing at all). The connection between Brown's hostility toward gold and toward tax havens can however be easily established by considering the closing paragraph of Alan Greenspan's late 1960's essay entitled 'Gold and Economic Freedom': 

“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.” 

Egypt Is Too Big to Save

The funds required to jumpstart the economy as is would be similar to those needed for the reconstruction of Iraq

By Mahmoud Salem

Two years after the popular revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak, Egypt appears headed toward a "failed state" scenario. While Cairo has not yet defaulted on its debts -- an economic hallmark of nearly all erstwhile states -- it already meets many of the other political conditions associated with comprehensive failure. In Washington, the discussion is narrowly focused on the implications of the rapidly deteriorating economic situation, with little appreciation that the financial morass is inextricably linked to the government's increasingly authoritarian politics. If the ruling Islamist party does not change its approach, the economy will not improve, and the state will move closer to collapse.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS

Since the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) came to power, governance in Egypt has exhibited several classic characteristics of failed states:

Inconsistent and selective application of law. On March 27, an Egyptian court overturned President Muhammad Morsi's November 2012 decision to replace the sitting prosecutor-general with Talaat Abdullah, a crony who has since focused investigations solely on the MB's political opponents. The ruling renders all of Abdullah's investigations illegal. By ignoring the verdict and going after activists even more aggressively, the state -- personified in the president, his government, and the prosecutor-general -- has shown its willingness to undermine rule of law.

Deterioration of services. Basic public services such as electricity and gas are falling apart, with most Egyptians experiencing daily power cuts.

Unaccountable security apparatus. The interior minister, a Brotherhood loyalist, deploys the police to clash with opposition protesters while protecting the MB thugs who beat and torture demonstrators.

Delegitimization of the state. Due to a legally faulty election law issued by the Morsi-appointed upper house of parliament, the legislative elections originally slated for this month have been delayed until November. Meanwhile, the opposition is now refusing to participate in elections because Egyptian institutions cannot guarantee the fairness of the process. When Secretary of State John Kerry tried to mediate last month, the MB undercut his efforts by publicly calling for elections without any of the promised changes to the electoral law, which were the basis of his mediation. The situation is pushing Egypt toward failure, and the MB government shows no sign of seeking a solution.

The "Unseen" Genocide

What I saw at the Gosnell trial

Three rows of seats reserved for the media remained empty Thursday morning April 11, 2013 in courtroom 304 at the Justice Center in Philadelphia where abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial. Gosnell is charged with seven counts of murder for killing seven born-alive children, and also a patient. The man at the rear of the courtroom is David P. Williams, of Delaware Right to Life, who covered the trial for his pro-life blog.

By J.D. Mullane

It is hard to decide the most appalling images to emerge Thursday at the murder trial of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. What happened in his abortion clinic is beyond any morbid Hollywood horror.

Tiny severed feet and hands stored in jars over a sink in the “procedure” room.

Digitalis injected into the stomachs of pregnant women to stop the beating hearts of their unborn babies so that they would be born dead.

Survivor babies whose spinal cords were severed, whose brains were removed with suction, whose tiny bodies were placed in a waste bin for disposal.

Then there is commonwealth exhibit C-147, depicting a large baby balled in the fetal position, bloody, stuffed in a bin. “Big enough to walk me home,” joked Gosnell when he saw the child’s remains, testified Ashly Baldwin, a clinic employee.

Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing seven born-alive babies and causing the death of Karnamaya Mongar, 41, an immigrant from Nepal who had sought an abortion at his West Philadelphia clinic. The clinic was busy, doing brisk cash business, catering not only to local women in West Philadelphia, but also women from the affluent surrounding suburbs of Bucks and Montgomery counties. Gosnell’s reputation for no-wait abortions was so well known, women would fly in from other states.

The Gosnell silence

Murder, abortion and the media

In Philadelphia, a doctor is on trial for the gruesome murders of eight people inside his low-rent office. A former assistant testified that she personally witnessed the physician commit at least 30 murders. Most of the patients were "beheaded," another assistant said, adding that there was "blood all over the place." If you have not heard of this doctor's trial for committing a terrifying, decades-long string of serial killings, there is a reason. He is an abortionist.

His name is Kermit Gosnell. He was arrested after a 2010 FBI raid at his offices, which were described this way in the grand jury report: "There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs."

The sensational nature of this case alone justifies massive media coverage. The doctor ran a filthy, uninspected clinic for decades as state regulators looked the other way. He infected women with diseases by using unsterile equipment. Two of the women who came to him for abortions died. But Kermit Gosnell is not a household name for one reason: His crimes raise uncomfortable questions for supporters of unlimited abortion on demand.

Gosnell delivered babies who were more than 24 weeks old. He then severed their spines at the neck. He called this "ensured fetal demise." Really, he beheaded them. The world of the abortionist is governed by euphemisms. 

Gosnell's trial is about more than a blood-soaked house of horrors. That the media would cover. Its real news value lies in what it says about the artificial lines we draw in the name of protecting a woman's "right to privacy." It is OK to forcibly, brutally end one baby's life, but not another's. This trial provokes the obvious question: Why? For too many reporters, it is a question they don't want to think about.

Abortion, The Mainstream Media, And The Limits Of Shaming

House of Horrors

The "Women's Health Society" abortion clinic at 3801 Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia was operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell for 30 years. Gosnell is on trial for allegedly murdering viable babies whose mothers had come to him seeking abortions.

by Pete Spiliakos 

We seem to be in a moment when the national mainstream media either has, or is about to prominently cover the Gosnell horrors. The week-long prolife campaign to increase coverage seems to have finally broken down resistance to covering the Gosnell trial in the most prominent forums of the most popular outlets. The New York Times hasn’t put the trial on its front page yet, but that might well be coming.CNN led off with the story yesterday. Conor Friedersdorf (in a wonderful essay) is correct to wonder how the Gosnell story hasn’t become a prominent national story earlier given all the story’s many horrible news hooks. Megan McArdle admits that her own pro-choice sympathies might have inclined her to shy away from the story. I would like to think that most journalists at mainstream outlets are similarly rethinking their coverage of abortion, but I doubt it. Friedersdorf and McArdle are pro-choice on abortion, but they are also libertarians rather than liberals. While most mainstream media outlets will surrender to the pressure and cover this story more, I think that most of their liberal staff members will consider this a defeat at the hands of their enemies rather than a lesson on how to do their jobs better.

First let’s be clear what I mean by “mainstream” media. It isn’t MSNBC. Like many (but not all) programs on Fox News, MSNBC exists to make money by making its viewers feel better about being on either the conservative or liberal ideological team. MSNBC has a mutually beneficial relationship with Fox News and conservative talk radio in which each side trolls the other. Most people don’t get their news from either MSNBC, or Fox News or talk radio. The mainstream media like ABC, NBC, CBS, and the New York Times might be called culturally biased news. The vast majority of the journalistic and editorial staff for these outlets have left-of-center staffs, but they don’t think of themselves as partisans. They think of themselves as journalists first and think of advancing their policy preferences second or third or almost never.

The personal and collective biases that come from working in an overwhelmingly left-of-center environment blends into the work, but their self-understanding as journalists places some limits on the impact of those biases. They will write stories about the promised benefits of Obamacare, but if some unflattering information comes out, they will report that too. Bias still shapes the coverage. Positive stories will have a coherence that make the case for Obamacare in a the negative stories won’t make the case for Republican opposition. You can see the reverse on Fox News’s excellent Special Report With Bret Baier (which is an example of conservative culturally biased news.) On Special Report, the benefits of Obamacare are mentioned but not emphasized while the drawbacks of the law are spotlighted. The “mainstream” media won’t connect the anti-Obamacare dots for the reader or viewer, but they will eventually get around to reporting those dots – if only in a scattered and confusing way.

Market and Government failures and solutions

Is Market Failure a Sufficient Condition for Government Intervention?

By Art Carden and Steve Horwitz

1. Introduction

We are unapologetic defenders of the economic way of thinking, not merely because it helps us understand why—as economist Joseph Schumpeter explained—capitalism allows factory girls to buy more and better stockings for progressively decreasing amounts of effort, but because with good economic analysis, some of the great atrocities of human history could have been avoided. For example, the Progressive eugenics movement of the early twentieth century was offensively anti-economic, even though some who were called "economists" encouraged it.1 As Bryan Caplan has pointed out, the Holocaust found some of its roots in Malthusianism, the idea that population growth would outstrip the growth of agricultural output.2 The disasters of central planning in the USSR, China, and elsewhere speak for themselves. We don't exaggerate when we say that sound economic reasoning could have saved tens, if not hundreds, of millions of lives.

But economic knowledge incompletely applied can be dangerous. In introductory economics classes, students learn about several types of "market failure," which occurs when some attributes of the market prevent it from producing an efficient outcome. In the context of twentieth-century neoclassical economics, these represent failures of the actual market to reach the equilibrium of the perfectly competitive model. In this framework, market failures are possible when there are externalities (uncompensated costs or benefits that spill over onto people who are not party to a trade); public goods (goods that are non-rival in consumption and for which it is prohibitively costly to exclude non-payers); asymmetric information; and market power like monopoly (when there is one seller of a good or service), monopsony (when there is one buyer of a good or service), or natural monopoly (when the cost structure of the industry makes it more efficient for a single firm to produce the entire market's output).

Externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, and market power provide necessary—but insufficient—conditions for intervention to be justified. They certainly are not talismans that provide interventionists with carte blanche to tinker with the members of a society as if they were pieces on a chessboard. Too often, critics of markets think that merely invoking these terms destroys the case for free markets.3 Unfortunately, non-economists often do not understand these terms. Indeed, understanding these terms clearly is only a first step toward a clear understanding of social phenomena. Let's consider each of these concepts in turn.

2. Externalities

Critics of the market sometimes invoke externalities, which refer to costs or benefits of economic activity that fall upon people not party to the actions in question. A classic external cost (or "negative externality") is pollution. Suppose that steel firms produce in a way that sends chemicals into the air that dirty people's hanging laundry or cause them to feel ill, even though they did not purchase the steel. If someone who purchases steel bears these costs, we simply recognize it as part of what was purchased—i.e., the cost is "internal" to the exchange. Another classic example is the railroad that cuts through farmland and throws off sparks that occasionally cause fires on the property of nearby farmers. A classic external benefit (or "positive externality") is education. If we pay a university to educate us, some of the benefits of that exchange accrue to the rest of society by virtue of our higher productivity or more virtuous behavior.4 Just as the victim of pollution has borne a cost without a benefit, the rest of society gets a benefit from our education without bearing a cost.

Educational Freedom

The Role of Coercion in Education

By Arnold Kling

Most of us went to school when we were younger, and we cannot imagine otherwise. However, it may be worth contemplating radical alternatives to the notion of school. The conflict between schooling and libertarian principles appears to me to have widened in the age of the Internet.

On the one hand, the Internet greatly enhances the opportunities for independent learning. As Will Richardson points out in his e-book, Why School?,(1) learners now face an abundance of educational resources, rather than the scarcity that prevailed when schools became the norm. Moreover, new knowledge is being created at remarkable rates, making lifelong learning essential.

When we think of school, we think of learning that has coordinates in time and space. I took algebra in 8th grade in Clayton, Missouri. I attended college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania from 1971 to 1975. However, outside of school, learning can take place anywhere, at any time. The Internet makes us keenly aware of this fact, and as Richardson points out, traditional classrooms can seem backward and stifling when compared to what we can learn by ourselves using the Web.

On the other hand, the political pressure to prop up the schooling model may be stronger than ever. President Obama, during his 2008 campaign, spoke of making sure that everyone could go to college. In his 2013 State of the Union address, he called for universal pre-school. Meanwhile, the watchword for many conservatives and Republicans is "accountability," which in practice appears to mean top-down control over schools using test scores as a metric.

Notwithstanding these political forces, I predict that within a decade or two, the idea that learning can be located in time and space will no longer seem natural. The essence of the revolution that I foresee will be our embrace of anywhere-anytime learning. It could be that schooling as an institution will adapt to this paradigm, but I would bet against it.

Deschooling Society

The keys to an educational freedom agenda were identified over forty years ago by Ivan Illich, in his book Deschooling Society.(2) The first key is what he calls disestablishment:

...the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional disestablishment of the monopoly of the school.

However, a second key is also necessary:

To make this disestablishment effective, we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. This guarantee would not exclude performance tests of competence for a function or role, but would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given school with the largest expenditure of public funds or—what is equally likely—has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job.