We've Become a Society of Self-Deluded Children

We've Dug A Pretty Damn Big Hole For Ourselves

by James H. Kunstler

The diminishing returns of technology are insidious, and they are ever with us. By this I mean the slow erosion of the quality of life, despite the impression that technological wonders only make our lives better.

The most obvious example is what happened to the telephone over the past thirty years. We computerized every phone system in America to “improve communications.”  The net effect is that after all that time and expense (billions of capital investment), it is now nearly impossible to get a live human being on the phone, whether you are calling a Fortune 500 corporation, a non-profit charity, or your best friend. Has that improved communication? What you get instead are robots that waste big chunks of your time forcing you to listen to complex call-routing menus – often ending in futility.

Companies and institutions assume that they benefit from the “efficiency” of not having to pay gangs of human receptionists. But they only succeed in annoying their customers and clients, who are treated as pests to be avoided. In effect, phone systems became firewalls, not communication enhancers.

Add to that the more recent phenomenon of cell phones and smart phones, which, for all their charms, 1) don’t work in all locations, 2) drop calls frequently, 3) have lousy sound quality, 4) feature time delays that make people talk over each other constantly, 5) erode real-time social relations with distracting apps and web features, and 6) possibly harm people’s brains by constantly rinsing them in microwaves.

A larger issue of technology’s effect on culture is the erosion of a shared sense of what is going on in the world based on reality. Increasingly and insidiously, the consensus about how the world operates is based on things that constitute unreal cultural constructions, especially TV shows, the daily Web-flow, computer games, and pseudo-informational memes based on gossip, make-believe, and wishes. The self-referential nature of this process, by the way, is what generates the cultural mood of irony, especially among young people, who are the most thoroughly and immersively hostage to a cognitive field of rapidly degenerating show-biz artifacts that become more ridiculous with each iteration, self-reference, or mutation – until daily life seems like little more than a continuous Gong Show of implausible made-up spectacle. You might end up thinking that Federal Reserve Chair Khloe Kardashian is releasing a new cologne which can be used as an alternative fuel one hundred times more powerful than gasoline and exported worldwide to reduce the trade deficit, save Social Security, and make America energy-independent.

This is a time in history when it’s hard to take anything seriously, including our fate.

Confidence in European project slowly destroyed

SaxoBank CEO: "We Must Re-Evaluate The European Union"

by Lars Seier Christensen

I have been interested in politics since I was a kid. That is why I remember Denmark’s European Economic Community (EEC) referendum, although I was only nine years old. Election nights were always exciting and I was allowed to stay up a little longer than I otherwise would be allowed to in our home in Loegstrup, outside of the town of Viborg in the western part of Denmark. Here, we had supper at 5pm, I then did my homework and went to bed at a proper time. It was a bourgeois home; my father was, by most accounts, conservative, but voted for The Liberal Party, as did most people in the countryside.

I remember the referendum on October 2, 1972, in a positive light. Denmark stepped onto the main stage and the support of the people was absolutely clear. Voter turnout was over 90 percent and almost two out of three Danes voted for Denmark’s entry into the EEC.

The EEC was perceived as something positive in our home, as it was in most of bourgeois Denmark. I stayed unconditionally positive for many years to come. Even in the Young Conservatives, we were supporters of a European union and some of us even wore blue and yellow EU socks as a symbol of this attractive, long-term plan. But despite this very positive starting point for our view of the EU, I must confess that, over time, this support and optimism evaporated. Massive central bureaucracy, European arrogance and lack of respect for the independence, history and culture of the national states slowly destroyed confidence in the project.

When I look back, I must admit that it took me too long to recognise what the European project really was. But I also have to state that this recognition came much later to many others and some of our career politicians obviously still do not get it. But the Danes, the citizens, the people have smelled the rat. From this point on, it will just be more and more uphill for the EU supporters when new measures need to be adopted, although there is no reason to believe that they will not be trying over and over again.

Earth Day's good news

We need a dose of realism about real environmental challenges 

By Bjørn Lomborg
Shale gas revolution has curtailed U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Year after year, we are treated to a message of environmental doom and gloom and admonitions on Earth Day. On the back of this sentiment in wealthy countries, governments have invested billions of dollars in inefficient, feel-good policies such as subsidizing solar panels and electric cars.
But there are far better ways to improve environmental prospects for humanity and our planet. On Earth Day, we need more fracking, more wealth, smarter investments and fewer inefficient subsidies.

German taxpayers have poured $130 billion into subsidizing solar panels, but ultimately by the end of the century, this will postpone global warming by a trivial 37 hours. The electric car is even less efficient. Its production consumes a vast amount of fossil fuels, and mostly it utilizes fossil fuel electricityto be recharged. Even if the U.S. did reach the lofty goal of 1 million electric cars by 2015 — costing taxpayers more than $7.5 billion — global warming would be postponed by only 60 minutes.

These beguiling policies cost a fortune but make little difference to the environment because the technologies are still not ready. That's why we need to invest more in long-term research and development for green innovation. This would be much cheaper than current environmental policies and would end up doing more good for the climate.

If we could make solar panels 2.0 or 3.0 cheaper than fossil fuels, we could get everyone, including the Chinese and Indians, on board for a greener future.

Moreover, our focus on solar and electric cars diverts us from the world's most deadly environmental problems. In wealthy countries, most environmental indicators are getting better. We have cleaner air and cleaner water, and we suffer fewer environmental risks. But air and water pollution kill 6 million people each year and harm billions worldwide.

Wealthy countries largely solved these problems through economic development.

Poor countries should have the same opportunity to develop — so they, too, can have clean drinking water and switch to cleaner energy sources, instead of using dung and twigs for fuel.

We can also directly intervene in poor countries. Many charitable organizations are involved in solving these problems by improving access to clean water and sanitation. By addressing these challenges, we do far more good for our planet.

Earth Day also presents an opportunity to recognize our own environmental achievements. In spite of decades of political wrangling, which failed to produce a meaningful global climate policy, it was ultimately the shale gas revolution that curtailed U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Fracking has caused a dramatic transition to natural gas, a fuel that emits 45% less carbon dioxide than burning coal. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed that in 2012, carbon dioxide emissions was 12% lower than the peak in 2007. The shift from coal to natural gas is alone responsible for a reduction of between 8%-9% of the entire U.S. CO2 emissions. In fact, it amounts to twice the reduction that the rest of the world has achieved over the past 20 years.

All energy projects have risks, and though the dangers of well contamination from fracking have probably been exaggerated, tighter regulation would reduce risks further. Also, natural gas is not the ultimate energy breakthrough because it is still a fossil fuel. Even so, fracking is likely the best green option of this decade. And if fracking happened worldwide, emissions would likely decline substantially by 2020. Over the coming decades, we need to drive down the cost of green energy through smart investments in green innovation.

This Earth Day, we need a dose of realism about real environmental challenges — such as the air and water pollution that make life so miserable for billions — and the real opportunities that exist for environmental innovation, to make our planet a better place.

Boston: what turns nice guys into nihilists?

It isn't the lure of foreign jihad but rather the confusions and self-loathing of Western society itself that can turn youngsters violent

by Frank Furedi 

Everybody is asking the same question: what turned these apparently ordinary brothers into cold-blooded Islamic terrorists? By all accounts, Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev were, as Americans say, ‘regular guys’. They were two young men who grew up in the United States and, in the words of President Obama, lived ‘as part of our communities and our country’.

Like the so-called Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad – another nice guy turned terrorist – the Tsarnaev brothers appeared to have flourished in their new home of America, where their family had moved after fleeing Chechnya. Yet these young men harboured a deep-seated hatred towards the American way of life, with Tamerlan in particular making no secret of his contempt towards his adopted home. As far back as 2009, he stated in a local newspaper interview that he was concerned about the breakdown of ‘values’ and the excesses of Americans. ‘People can’t control themselves’, he said. ‘I don’t have a single American friend… I don’t understand them.’

Since the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism was discovered, expert profilers have focused on young, first-generation immigrant men with so-called ‘identity issues’. Unfortunately, this emphasis on individual identity crises provides little insight into what turns young men into nihilistic murderers. In particular, it does not explain why an individual enduring identity crises should become an individual who hates the community in which he resides.

‘Why do they hate us?’

With the rise of so-called homegrown terrorism, the question ‘why do they hate us?’ has morphed into questions like ‘what is it about us that they hate?’ and ‘why don’t they want to be like us?’. Throughout the West, officials and analysts are perplexed to discover that a significant section of Muslim youth has become sympathetic to a radical Islamic outlook. Press reports frequently discuss the way in which young people, living the lives of typical Western teenagers, suddenly become radicalised and turn into bitter enemies of their country; observers always seem confused and alarmed by this speedy process of what they refer to as ‘radicalisation’.

Take the following account of the life of Hasib Hussain, one of the men responsible for the London bombings on 7 July 2005: ‘He liked playing cricket and hockey, then one day he came into school and had undergone a complete transformation almost overnight… He started wearing a top hat from the mosque, grew a beard and wore robes. Before that he was always in jeans.’

America declared war on two losers

Why did the most powerful military nation on Earth freak out over a 19-year-old idiot in a backward baseball cap? 

by Sean Collins 

Soon after the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, pundits on the left and right started speculating about the culprits. Both projected their prejudices and fantasies, in the hope that the identity of the attacker would in itself discredit their political opponents. As it happens, both got it wrong.

Liberals were hoping the bombers would turn out to be right-wing, Tea Party-loving nutcases. Dina Temple-Raston of National Public Radio ventured: ‘April is a big month for anti-government, and right-wing, individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary. There’s Hitler’s birthday. There’s the Oklahoma City bombing. There’s the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.’ David Sirota in Salon blurted out: ‘Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.’ Sirota turned out to be correct – the bombers were white (Caucasians, literally) and Americans (one a naturalised citizen, the other a long-time resident) – but clearly not in the way he and other liberals had hoped for.

Conservatives had also leapt to a conclusion – that the perpetrators were Islamic terrorists. The day after the bombs went off, the Wall Street Journal referenced the botched car-bombing attempt by Faisal Shahzad in New York’s Times Square in 2010, and warned: ‘The Boston bombing is above all a reminder of the continuing need for heightened defences against terror threats. As the years since 9/11 without a successful homeland attack increased, the temptation was to forget how vulnerable the US is, and to conclude that the worst is over.’ Did conservatives guess correctly? Well, many thought so when it was revealed that the bombers, the Tsarnaev brothers, were Muslims, but two brothers with a family background in Chechnya certainly wasn’t expected or predicted in advance.

Emboldened by discovering the bombers’ ties with Islam, conservatives have been the most vocal in the aftermath of last Friday’s manhunt, eagerly slotting the bombers into an old motif: the global war against Islamist terrorism. Michael Mukasey, former attorney general under George W Bush, announced: ‘Make no mistake, it was jihad.’ Republican congressmen Peter King and Lindsey Graham rushed to claim that the Tsarnaevs are ‘enemy combatants’ (who can be denied legal rights), rather than common criminals.

But the evidence that the Tsarnaevs are soldiers in a war is lacking, to put it mildly. They are Muslims, their family is ethnically Chechnyan, and they watched and posted a few jihadist videos. The older one, Tamerlan, spent six months overseas in 2012, and was considered suspicious by Russian intelligence and America’s FBI. That’s about it. No evidence of being part of a coordinated effort, nor of having membership in a group like al-Qaeda. It seems pretty clear that the Tsarnaevs were the ones who were responsible for setting the bombs off, and represent no one but themselves.

Slap the label ‘global terrorism’ on a violent act, and all sorts of fearful images and associations are generated, but the reality of the Tsarnaevs was much more mundane. How can anyone take the two brothers as serious ‘combatants’? Their bomb was crude (gunpowder and metal parts in a pressure cooker), the target site was ‘soft’ and not terribly spectacular in symbolic value, and the number killed by the bombs (three), while deeply tragic, was not exceptional when comparedwith death rates in American cities like Chicago, which averaged about three homicides every two days last year.

The brothers’ amateurism was revealed during the events of Thursday evening, when they bragged to the owner of the car they hijacked: ‘Did you hear about the Boston explosion? I did that.’ They then stole $45 from the driver and, failing to get cash out of his ATM (and getting caught on the bank camera in the process), robbed a small convenience store. Then, following a shootout with police, one brother drove over the other’s body as he escaped. Not exactly the most organised or well-funded of global conspiracies.

A city shut down, liberty surrendered

‘A bomb can’t beat us’ rings hollow

by Wendy Kaminer 

Some of the stories we tell about ourselves in the aftermath of terror such as the Boston bombings are true. Many people react reflexively with bravery and compassion, rushing towards an attack to aid its victims. Many open their homes to strangers.

Some of the stories we tell are naive: ‘This is a progressive town, the People’s Republic’, a teacher at the Cambridge, Massachusetts high school attended by the Tsarnaev brothers remarked. ‘How could this be in our midst?’ he wondered, as if progressivism were a cure for all evil. DzhokhorTsarnaev was ‘not an outcast; he was not bullied’, the Cambridge school superintendent stressed, as if bullying were the cause of all evil.

Some of the stories we tell are bravado. When people praise Boston’s proverbial toughness, I shrug. Boston is home to over 600,000 individuals; some are resilient and others are not. Bravado has its virtues though, in times of grief and terror. It’s self-medicating. Maybe acting tough can help you feel tough. Maybe you can approximate the person you wish yourself to be.

But not all our bravado is helpful or harmless. Some of the stories we tell about the nation are delusions that cloak weaknesses and wrongs, which fester unacknowledged. Red Sox player David Ortiz brags that ‘nobody is going to dictate our freedom’, and I assume he hasn’t heard of the Patriot Act or wholesale warrantless wiretapping, much less the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Crime novelist Dennis Lehane can be excused for declaring that ‘they messed with the wrong city’, but don’t take seriously his confidence that not much will change. ‘Trust me’, he adds implausibly, ‘we won’t be giving up any civil liberties to keep ourselves safe because of this’.

Of course we will. We’ve been surrendering liberty in the hope of keeping ourselves safe for the past decade. The marathon bombings will hasten our surrender of freedom to the watchful eye of law enforcement. The Boston Globe is already clamouring for additional surveillance cameras, which are sure to be installed to the applause of many Bostonians. You can rationalise increased surveillance as a necessary or reasonable intrusion on liberty, but you can’t deny its intrusiveness, or inevitable abuses.

You shouldn’t deny the fear that drives the diminution of freedom. You’ll only end up looking foolish. ‘A bomb can’t beat us’, President Obama assured Bostonians three days after the attack. ‘We don’t hunker down… we don’t cower in fear.’ Yes we do. Less than 24 hours after Obama left town, hundreds of thousands of us were ‘sheltering in place’.

Think Again: Austerity

The big spenders are wrong: Maintaining sustainable budgets is essential to economic growth

BY ANDERS ASLUND

In the current global financial crisis, austerity has become a term of abuse -- one that connotes unnecessary pain and suffering on the part of already-hurting citizens. But that couldn't be further from the truth. What austerity actually means is "measures to reduce a budget deficit" or responsible fiscal policy. And that's hardly the only misconception that has clouded our economic thinking of late.

Although you'd never know it, the so-called global financial crisis is really a public debt crisis -- and the countries that have reigned in their spending are now growing briskly while the profligate founder. Here are five other myths about austerity that have muddied the waters.

1. "Growth Requires Fiscal Stimulus."

Wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. Sustainable long-term economic growth requires sound public finances as well as capital, labor, human capital, technology, and strong institutions. British economist John Maynard Keynes, the original proponent of stimulus spending, argued in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that classical economic theory is "applicable to a special case only" and "that the duty of ordering the current volume of investment cannot safely be left in private hands." But stagflation in the 1970s taught us that the relevance of Keynesianism was limited to brief periods of recession. Even Keynes envisaged that budgets should be balanced over the course of the business cycle.

For a fiscal stimulus to be permissible there must be what economists call "fiscal space" for it. In other words, the public debt accrued through stimulus spending must be sustainable. The trouble is, fiscal space is difficult to establish, and it's typically much smaller than we think. During a severe financial crisis, moreover, public debt usually doubles, meaning that there is virtually no fiscal maneuverability. By the end of 2011, for example, eurozone public debt averaged fully 98 percent of GDP, and by the end of 2012, the six biggest Western economies had the following debt-to-GDP ratios: 83 percent in Germany, 89 percent in Britain, 90 percent in France, 107 percent in the United States, 126 percent in Italy, and 237 percent in Japan. None of these countries has any fiscal space.

We may be witnessing an African economic miracle

By almost every measure and in most countries, life is getting better in Africa

By dan o’ brien

This week the Government and an organisation run by former president Mary Robinson hosted a conference in Dublin on some of the problems and challenges in the developing world. Quite rightly, the event focused on what has yet to be done. But in so doing it may have downplayed progress.

There has been a sustained surge in economic growth across Africa. There is a strong link between economic and political progress, and the two tend to be mutually reinforcing. For decades, bad economics and bad politics fed off each other in Africa. The continent appeared to be trapped in a vicious circle of decline. Now it looks to be in the early stages of a virtuous cycle as the institutional, political and security underpinnings of economic growth strengthen.

A foundation stone for the African renaissance has been greater security in a region that has been plagued by violence since wars of independence began in the middle of the last century.

Now the continent is becoming less bloody. In the 1990s, there were 328,000 fatalities in conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the Conflict Data Program at Sweden’s Uppsala University. In the 2000s, fatalities were down by between a half and two-thirds.

The Beginning of the End for Hezbollah

The camel passes, but the desert remains

By Michael J. Totten

The Middle East taught me pessimism. Much of the region goes in circles instead of progressing, and I’ve seen one country after another circle the drain.

Optimism is very American. It’s not exclusively American, and of course we have our own setbacks and failures, but things have generally trended toward the better in American life since the nation was founded.

The Middle East, though, teaches another way of looking at history’s trajectory. My own naïve optimism was dashed on the rocks in Lebanon and Iraq and hasn’t recovered. I never even bothered with optimism in Egypt. There’s nothing there to be optimistic about.

And I rarely meet anybody who actually lives over there who isn’t a pessimist. Expecting the best while everyone around you is expecting the worst is a difficult thing to pull off. It probably isn’t advisable even to try.

But I’m finding a bit of homegrown optimism in some quarters of Lebanon now, despite the fact that the economy is on its back and the Syrian war threatens to blow the country to pieces again, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t report it. The place has a serious case of the jitters and everyone knows this summer will be the third bad one in a row, but the medium and long term might be a little bit better, at least for some.

Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault

‘Why work?’

Robert Nielsen, 45, said proudly last year that he had basically been on welfare since 2001

By SUZANNE DALEY

It began as a stunt intended to prove that hardship and poverty still existed in this small, wealthy country, but it backfired badly. Visit a single mother of two on welfare, a liberal member of Parliament goaded a skeptical political opponent, see for yourself how hard it is

It turned out, however, that life on welfare was not so hard. The 36-year-old single mother, given the pseudonym “Carina” in the news media, had more money to spend than many of the country’s full-time workers. All told, she was getting about $2,700 a month, and she had been on welfare since she was 16.

In past years, Danes might have shrugged off the case, finding Carina more pitiable than anything else. But even before her story was in the headlines 16 months ago, they were deeply engaged in a debate about whether their beloved welfare state, perhaps Europe’s most generous, had become too rich, undermining the country’s work ethic. Carina helped tip the scales.

With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad —Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both. While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating.

But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. The population is aging, and in many regions of the country people without jobs now outnumber those with them.

Some of that is a result of a depressed economy. But many experts say a more basic problem is the proportion of Danes who are not participating in the work force at all — be they dawdling university students, young pensioners or welfare recipients like Carina who lean on hefty government support.

The old guard is back in charge

The Eternal Comedy of Italian politics

The Economist

WHAT we are witnessing in Italy is remarkable, and at times scarcely believable. On April 20th, after five failed attempts to elect a new president, an electoral college that includes the members of both chambers of parliament, plumped for the incumbent, Giorgio Napolitano, who is 87 years old. Nicholas Spiro, a sovereign risk analyst, called it “the clearest indication yet of the utter dysfunctionality of Italian politics”.

Desperate to retire, Mr Napolitano had ruled himself out as a candidate. But the leaders of the two biggest mainstream parties, Pier Luigi Bersani, the secretary general of the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), and Silvio Berlusconi, the de facto leader of the conservative People of Freedom (PdL), had earlier gone to the Quirinal palace to beg him to stay on. Poor Mr Napolitano wearily agreed.

In the ballot that followed he received 738 votes out of a possible 1,007. It is the first time in the 65-year history of the Italian republic that a president has been voted in for a second term.

The insistence on Mr Napolitano’s return was both an extraordinary admission of defeat, and an equally striking act of defiance. It came against a background of almost deafening calls from the younger generation of Italians for new faces, new policies and a form of politics less oppressively dominated by the country's almighty parties.

The most obvious and radical expression of their demands is in the Five Star Movement (M5S), co-founded by a former comedian, Beppe Grillo. But it is also clearly discernible in the radical Left, Ecology and Freedom (SEL) party and in parts of the traditional parties, notably the moderate faction within the PD that looks to Matteo Renzi, the young mayor of Florence. The mainstream party leaderships ignored them all.

Limit Austerity, EU appartchik Barroso Says

Same Old, Same Old

By ALESSANDRO TORELLO, FRANCES ROBINSON and PAUL HANNON

A top European Union official signaled his support Monday for relaxing Europe's austerity drive, in what could be a significant break for countries struggling to hit tough budget targets amid persistent economic weakness.

In a speech, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the policy of austerity pursued by the EU in recent years no longer has the public backing needed to work.

"While I think this policy is fundamentally right, I think it has reached its limits," Mr. Barroso said. "A policy to be successful not only has to be properly designed, it has to have the minimum of political and social support."

His comments are the latest in a series of public statements that indicate a shift in European economic policy is under way. They also coincided with the release of new figures that showed some of the euro-zone countries with the most aggressive austerity programs were having the least success in narrowing their deficits.

The International Monetary Fund last week said the bloc should ease back on austerity, while a number of governments outside the EU have made the same call, arguing that its belt-tightening is holding back the global economic recovery and could end up being self-defeating.

The policy's support among economists has also taken a beating. A study published last week by three economists at the University of Massachusetts found basic flaws in an influential paper from 2010 by the U.S. economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that said high government debt levels hurt economic growth.

In his speech, Mr. Barroso hinted that some countries could be given longer to get their budget deficit in line with EU rules, which ostensibly limit it to 3% of gross domestic product.

"Even if the policy of correcting deficit is fundamentally correct, we can always discuss fine-tuning of pace," he said. He noted, however, that EU finance ministers would have to agree to any change in the timelines.

Spanish Finance Minister Luis de Guindos said on Sunday that his new budget plans to be presented later this week will emphasize economic growth and reduce the stress of spending cuts.

How Government Killed the Medical Profession

We’re about to experience the two-tiered system that already exists in most parts of the world that provide “universal coverage.”

by Jeffrey A. Singer|

I am a general surgeon with more than three decades in private clinical practice. And I am fed up. Since the late 1970s, I have witnessed remarkable technological revolutions in medicine, from CT scans to robot-assisted surgery. But I have also watched as medicine slowly evolved into the domain of technicians, bookkeepers, and clerks. 

Government interventions over the past four decades have yielded a cascade of perverse incentives, bureaucratic diktats, and economic pressures that together are forcing doctors to sacrifice their independent professional medical judgment, and their integrity. The consequence is clear: Many doctors from my generation are exiting the field. Others are seeing their private practices threatened with bankruptcy, or are giving up their autonomy for the life of a shift-working hospital employee. Governments and hospital administrators hold all the power, while doctors—and worse still, patients—hold none.

The Coding Revolution

At first, the decay was subtle. In the 1980s, Medicare imposed price controls upon physicians who treated anyone over 65. Any provider wishing to get compensated was required to use International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes to describe the service when submitting a bill. The designers of these systems believed that standardized classifications would lead to more accurate adjudication of Medicare claims.

Europe, a Troubled Region

As goes the money supply, so too goes the overall economy

BY STEVE HANKE

The most recent banking crisis in Europe erupted on the Island of Cyprus. Among other things, one result of the final EU-IMF bailout package was the imposition of capital controls, or restrictions on currency convertibility.

Currency convertibility is a simple concept. It means residents and nonresidents are free to exchange domestic currency for foreign currency. However, there are many degrees of convertibility, with each denoting the extent to which governments impose controls on the exchange and use of currency.
The pedigree of exchange controls can be traced back to Plato, the father of statism. Inspired by Lycurgus of Sparta, Plato embraced the idea of an inconvertible currency as a means to preserve the autonomy of the state from outside interference.
The temptation to turn to exchange controls in the face of disruptions caused by hot money flows is hardly new. Tsar Nicholas II first pioneered limitations on convertibility in modern times, ordering the State Bank of Russia to introduce, in 1905–06, a limited form of exchange control to discourage speculative purchases of foreign exchange. The bank did so by refusing to sell foreign exchange, except where it could be shown that it was required to buy imported goods.
Otherwise, foreign exchange was limited to 50,000 German marks per person. The Tsar’s rationale for exchange controls was that of limiting hot money flows, so that foreign reserves and the exchange rate could be maintained. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Before more politicians come under the spell of exchange controls, they should reflect on the following passage from Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek’s 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom:

“The extent of the control over all life that economic control confers is nowhere better illustrated than in the field of foreign exchanges.

The debt-ridden EU stares bankruptcy in the face

Wherever we now look at the EU, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess

All the EU crises go back to the most widely misunderstood of all the treaties, the Single European Act, which Margaret Thatcher was ambushed into accepting in 1985

By Christopher Booker

Shouldn’t it be making more headlines than it has that the European Union is today insolvent – since its astronomic debt in unpaid bills is nearly twice as large as its annual income? Such is the crisis lately highlighted by its parliament’s budget committee, which finds that the EU now owes 217 billion euros, or £182 billion, as compared with its current year’s income of just £108 billion. Much of this represents “cohesion funding” relating to Eastern Europe, in contracts agreed under the EU’s current budgetary arrangements. But when, at the end of this year, those arrangements come to an end, the rules strictly prohibit the EU from rolling forward its debts from one period to the next. So, in eight months’ time, it will lurch into bankruptcy.

Wherever we now look at the EU, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess. There is the ongoing slow-motion train crash of the euro. There is rising panic over the policy of unrestricted immigration, which threatens at the year’s end to flood richer countries such as Britain with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. As Europe’s economies stagnate or shrink, the EU’s environmental policies fall apart, with the growing refusal of many countries, led by Poland and Germany, to accept curbs on fossil fuels.

What all these signs of breakdown have in common is that the policies giving rise to them all go back to the most widely misunderstood of all the European treaties, the Single European Act, which Margaret Thatcher was ambushed into accepting in 1985. This was the treaty she said was not necessary, because initially she thought all it was about was making the workings of the original Common Market more effective under the existing rules.

What she didn’t realise, because she was not properly briefed by her officials, was that it was always intended to be about very much more than just a “single market”. As its name indicated – and as Richard North and I for the first time set out in detail in our book The Great Deception – the Single European Act was always planned, by Jacques Delors, François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl and the other European leaders who ganged up against her, to be the first of two treaties that would take the old “Community” a further giant step forwards to being a “Single Europe”. The other, the Treaty on European Union, was to be agreed at Maastricht five years later.

The Single European Act was the treaty that set in train the plan to create a single currency (which was why, up to the last minute, Mrs Thatcher considered vetoing it). It opened the door to unrestricted immigration by turning Europe into “a space without frontiers”. It created that Cohesion Fund, and it was the treaty that gave the EU the power to dictate environmental policy, under which, as early as 1991, it drew up its Strategy to Limit Carbon Dioxide Emissions in response to the panic over global warming.

It was because Mrs Thatcher was so misled about these wider purposes that she herself never explained to the British people that it was about so much more than the “Single Market” – although even this was to produce that unprecedented avalanche of directives which, far from boosting Europe’s prosperity, has left it the least dynamic economic bloc in the world.

Up From Totalitarianism

A remarkable ex-Marxist on God, socialism, and Princess D

By JOSEPH SHATTAN

LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI WAS a philosopher and historian of ideas. He received his doctorate in 1953 for his study of Spinoza. Under different circumstances, he might have led a satisfying but obscure academic life, publishing dense scholarly works that hardly anyone read, and remaining largely aloof from the world’s troubles and turmoil.

It was Kolakowski’s misfortune, however, to be born in Poland in 1927, on the eve of that nation’s darkest hour. As a teenager, he endured the Nazi occupation, lived among Poles who risked their lives saving their Jewish compatriots, and taught himself Latin, French, and German, as well as philosophy. In 1959, he was appointed to the chair of the history of modern philosophy at Warsaw University, but soon found himself in hot water with the authorities because of his political views. In 1968, Poland’s Communist government expelled him from Warsaw University and banned him from teaching and publishing. After a brief stay in Canada and the U.S., he settled in England and was senior fellow at All Soul’s College, Oxford, until his retirement.

Throughout his lifetime, Kolakowski never ceased to write. His masterwork, Main Currents of Marxism, traced the trajectory of what Kolakowski called “the greatest fantasy of the 20th century,” which began in an attempt to create a perfect society, and ended up as the foundation for “a monstrous edifice of lies, exploitation and oppression.”

But Kolakowski was the author of some 30 other books, as well as countless articles, nearly all of which were directed at general audiences, and dealt with the most urgent issues of our time. His daughter, Agnieszka Kolakowska, has brought together many (but by no means all) of his essays in a splendid collection called Is God Happy?

As might be expected, many of these essays deal with Marxism, socialism, and communism. For example, in a devastating response to British leftist E.P. Thompson, who accused Kolakowski of betraying the socialist idea, Kolakowski explained why that idea was flawed from the outset:

All attempts to examine [the socialist] experience lead us back not only to contingent historical circumstances but to the very idea of socialism and the discovery of incompatible demands hidden in this idea.…We want a society with a large autonomy of small communities, do we not? And we want central planning in the economy. Let us try to think now how both work together. We want technical progress and we want perfect security for people; let us look closer how both could be combined. We want industrial democracy and we want efficient management: do they work well together? Of course they do, in the leftist heaven everything is compatible and everything settled, lamb and lion sleep in the same bed.” [“My Correct Views on Everything,” 1974]