The Art of the Impossible

Politics is the art of the impossible 

By Thomas Sowell

Someone called politics "the art of the possible." But, in the era of the modern welfare state, politics is largely the art of the impossible.

Those people morbid enough to keep track of politicians' promises may remember how Barack Obama said that ObamaCare would lower medical costs — and lots of people bought it.

But if you stop and think, however old-fashioned that may seem these days, do you seriously believe that millions more people can be given medical care and vast new bureaucracies created to administer payment for it, with no additional costs?

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free red tape. Bureaucrats have to eat, just like everyone else, and they need a place to live and some other amenities. How do you suppose the price of medical care can go down when the costs of new government bureaucracies are added to the costs of the medical treatment itself?

By the way, where are the extra doctors going to come from, to treat the millions of additional patients? Training more people to become doctors is not free. Politicians may ignore costs but ignoring those costs will not make them go away.

With bureaucratically controlled medical care, you are going to need more doctors, just to treat a given number of patients, because time that is spent filling out government forms is time that is not spent treating patients. And doctors have the same 24 hours in the day as everybody else.

When you add more patients to more paperwork per patient, you are talking about still more costs. How can that lower medical costs? But although that may be impossible, politics is the art of the impossible. All it takes is rhetoric and a public that does not think beyond the rhetoric they hear.

The Ides of March

The American Republic and the Long Shadow of Rome

by Stephen M. Klugewicz

“Beware the Ides of March!” Thus the soothsayer warned Emperor Julius Caesar on the 15th of March, 44 B.C. On that day, Caesar, who had overturned the Roman republic and made himself a tyrant, was assassinated by a group of Senators, including his friend, Brutus. In the eponymous play by William Shakespeare, the Senators begin to stab Caesar, who tries to resist the assault until he sees Brutus also wielding a knife against him. “Et tu, Brute?” Caesar utters in disbelief before collapsing.

The figure of Brutus—the assassin of the tyrant— cast a long shadow over American history. “Brutus” became the pseudonym of one of the most famous Antifederalist authors (probably Robert Yates of New York), who wrote essays in opposition to the proposed Constitution of 1787, which he believed dangerously consolidated power in the central government. In setting up their own republic, the American Founders looked to the Roman Republic as a model for what they should be and to the Roman Empire embodied by Caesar as a portent of what they feared the republic could become. Americans feared that liberty was fragile and that the republic could be undone by the ambition of one man.

The Framers of the American Constitution were indeed wary of the rise of a Caesar —after all, King George III was in their minds—and designed the presidency with great care in an effort to prevent any abuse of executive power. Under the Articles of Confederation, there had been no executive, no judicial branch. The government consisted of a unicameral legislature, which lacked, among other powers, the authority to tax either the people directly or the states. All that the Congress could do was request money from the states. It was the perceived weakness of this government that sparked the call for the Philadelphia convention of 1787.

The debate about the structure of the executive branch was a source of much contention among the delegates at Philadelphia. At least twelve of the fifty-five wanted the executive power diffused among two or more men. Though a strong executive was considered dangerous by many, there was among other delegates a fear of making the executive too weak. As colonies and now young states, Americans had seen that legislatures could act just as tyrannically as executives. And this was true even of their experience with England. Many—perhaps most—of the American colonists’ complaints in the 1760s and 1770s were directed against Parliament, not the king.

Homage to Orwell

Revisiting George Orwell’s classic account of the Spanish Civil War, 75 years on

by Mick Hume 

George Orwell could have been killed twice in the Spanish Civil War. Once when he was shot in the throat by General Franco’s fascist forces; then when he was hunted by official Communist agents who, with the backing of Stalin’s Soviet Union, stabbed the revolution in the back and imprisoned, tortured and killed leading leftists and anarchists who were ostensibly on the same Republican side. Orwell learned the hardest way that the war against fascism in Spain was also a civil war against Stalinism.

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s famous account of his time in Spain from his arrival in Barcelona on Boxing Day 1936 to his escape in June 1937, has just reached its seventy-fifth anniversary. Like its author, the book almost didn’t make it either. The radical journalist and author’s usual publisher, Victor Gollancz, turned the book down without even seeing the manuscript, insisting that he would not publish anything ‘which could harm the fight against fascism’ by criticising the Communists.

Most of those from Britain and Europe who went to write about and fight in the Spanish Civil War took a similarly one-eyed view and followed the pro-Soviet line. What was unique about Orwell was that he hated fascism, but also stood apart from the official Stalinist-dominated left of his time. The radical maverick wrote about what he saw in Spain, rather than simply what he was told was true – although he also warned his readers to ‘beware my partisanship’ when seeking an objective account. He questioned the ‘official’ Stalinist-dictated account of events in Barcelona and elsewhere that was accepted around the world. This heresy made him the subject of a hate campaign when Homage to Catalonia was finally published in 1938, a campaign which continued well into the 1980s.

Is America Ensnared in an Endless War?

When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal

by Patrick J. Buchanan

So said Richard Nixon in his interviews with David Frost. Nixon was talking about wiretaps and surreptitious entries to protect lives and safeguard national security in a violent and anarchic war decade.

The Nixon haters pronounced themselves morally sickened.

Fast forward to our new century. For, since 9/11, we have heard rather more extravagant claims by American presidents.

Under George W. Bush, it was presidential authority to waterboard, torture, rendition and hold enemy aliens in indefinite detention at Guantanamo.

Under Barack Obama, we don’t have a Nixon “enemies list” of folks who are not to be invited to White House dinners. Rather, we have a “kill list” — a menu from which our constitutional law professor president selects individuals to be executed abroad.

Not only in Afghanistan, but Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and who knows where else. And not just foreigners, but Americans, too.

When may Obama order an American killed?

According to a Justice Department “white paper,” any “informed high-level official” can decide a target is a ranking operative of al-Qaida who “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and if we cannot apprehend him, order him eradicated with a Hellfire missile.

As law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argues: “For a threat to be deemed ‘imminent,’ it is not necessary for a specific attack to be underway. The paper denies Congress and the federal courts a role in authorizing the killings or even reviewing them afterwards.”

And they called Nixon the imperial president.

Tempi Cambi: Tradition and Modernity in The Godfather

Independence must be purchased with blood and sorrow

By Mark Malvasi

America, that bright, shining land of freedom, opportunity, and progress, is irredeemably corrupt.  It is in the hands of debased and hypocritical politicians, judges, businessmen, and their servants, such as the debauched Hollywood film maker Jack Woltz, the belligerent New York police captain Mark McCluskey, the rapacious Las Vegas gambler Moe Greene, and the contemptible Nevada senator Pat Geary, who are motivated by the desire for wealth and power.  None of these men exercises self-control.  All are driven by lust, anger, greed, vanity, and prejudice, easily losing their tempers and getting unnecessarily carried away.  Unless he has power, or has powerful friends, a man who finds himself in such a depraved and perilous world is alone, isolated and vulnerable.  In America, it’s every man for himself.  Conflicts are resolved according to the strict letter of the law, which is considered the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy and truth.  If one prevails at law, then nothing more is required.  One is innocent, or is at least legally blameless.  Yet, for the victims, this system does not yield probity or righteousness any more than it promotes responsibility and moderation among those clever enough to exploit the law to secure their own advantage.  All pretense to the contrary notwithstanding, America has only the letter of the law,  formal, cold, abstract, and still America has no objective legal standard that applies equally to everyone.  That is why for justice men must go on their knees to Don Corleone.

The undertaker Amerigo Bonasera is the first to make such an appeal. Bonasera “believes in America” and has desired nothing more than to be a good citizen.  He obeyed the law and raised his daughter in the “American fashion,” which means that he asked no questions when she began dating a young man, the son of a powerful United States senator, who was not an Italian.  Free from parental interference, his daughter can make her own choices.  When she resisted her date’s sexual advances, however, he and a friend beat her so cruelly that she was hospitalized with serious and disfiguring injuries.  “Now,” a grieving Bonasera laments, “she will never be beautiful again.” As an honest American, Bonasera reported the incident to the police and brought charges against his daughter’s assailants.  They were tried and convicted, but the judge, acceding to political influence, suspended the sentence.  “They went free that very day,” Bonasera complains, and they mocked him as they left the courtroom.

Listening with compassion to a father’s tale of anguish and heartbreak, Don Corleone nevertheless responds with a sarcasm and disdain that reveal his ethical code.  He wonders why Bonasera has come to him with this problem, since in the past he assiduously refused to do so.  “We have known each other many years. . . .,” the Don reminds him, “but until this day you never came to me for counsel or help.  I can’t remember the last time you invited me to your house for coffee though my wife is godmother to your only child.  Let us be frank.  You spurned my friendship.  You feared to be in my debt.” When Bonasrea protests that he sought to avoid trouble in his adopted land, the Don reproaches him further.  “You found America a paradise. You had a good trade, you made a good living, you thought the world a harmless place where you could take your pleasure as you willed. . . . After all, the police guarded you, there were courts of law, you and yours could come to no harm. You did not need Don Corleone.”[1]  In this moment of desperation, Bonasera has abandoned his previous scruples, only to enter the Don’s home on the day of his own daughter’s wedding and insult him by asking him to commit murder for hire.

Obamacare Will Be No More Successful Than Soviet Central Planning

Markets find ways to make things better and cheaper. Obamacare forbids that.

By John Stossel

Most Americans -- even those who are legislators -- know very little about the details of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare. Next year, when it goes into effect, we will learn the hard way.

Many people lazily assume that the law will do roughly what it promises: give insurance to the uninsured and lower the cost of health care by limiting spending on dubious procedures.

Don’t count on it.

Consider just the complexity: The act itself is more than 906 pages long, and again and again in those 906 pages are the words, “the Secretary shall promulgate regulations ...”

“Secretary” refers to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Her minions have been busy. They’ve already added 20,000 pages of rules. They form a stack 7 feet high, and more are to come.

Our old health care system was already a bureaucratic and regulatory nightmare. It had 16,000 different codes for different ailments. Under our new, “improved” system, there will be more than a 100,000.

Government likes to think regulations can account for every possibility. Injured at a chicken coop? The code for that will be Y9272. Fall at an art gallery? That means you are a Y92250. There are three different codes for walking into a lamppost -- depending on how often you’ve walked into lampposts. This is supposed to give government a more precise way to reimburse doctors for treating people and alert us to surges in injuries that might inspire further regulation.

Why Read Old Books?

Reading Thucydides or Dante for the comfort that we are not alone

By Victor Davis Hanson

We all know the usual reasons why we are prodded to read the classics — moving characters, seminal ideas, blueprints of our culture, and paradigms of sterling prose and poetry. Then we nod and snooze.

But there are practical reasons as well that might better appeal to the iPhone generation that is minute-by-minute wired into a collective hive of celebrity titillation, the cool, cooler, and coolest recent rapper, or the grunting of “ya know,” “dah,” and “like.” After all, no one can quite be happy with all that.

Classics are more than books of virtues. Homer and Sophocles certainly remind us of the value of courage, without which Aristotle lectures us there can be no other great qualities. Instead, the Greeks and Romans might better remind this generation of the ironic truths, the paradoxes of human behavior and groupthink. Let me give but three examples of old and ironic wisdom.

The Race Goes Not to the Swift.

The problem with Homer’s Achilles ^[1] or Sophocles’ Ajax ^[2] was not that they were found wanting in heroic virtue. Rather they were too good at what they did, and so made the fatal mistake of assuming that there must be some correlation between great deeds and great rewards.

The Changing American Family

During the past 20 years, the American family has undergone a profound transformation

By Herbert S. Klein

For all the changes in fertility and mortality that Americans have experienced from the colonial period until today, there has been surprisingly little change in the structure of the family until the past quarter century. Until that point, the age of marriage changed from time to time, but only a minority of women never married and births outside marriage were traditionally less than 10 percent of all births.

But this fundamental social institution has changed profoundly since 1980. In fact, if one were to define the most original demographic feature in the post-1980 period in the United States, it would be the changes that were occurring in both families and households for all sections of the national population. The traditional American family has been undergoing profound transformations for all ages, all races, and all ethnic groups. Every aspect of the American family is experiencing change. These include the number of adults who marry, the number of households that are formed by married people, the number of children that are conceived, the economic role of mothers, the number of non-family households, and even the importance of marriage in accounting for total births.

The proportion of persons over 15 years of age who had never married reached historic levels in 2000 when a third of the men and a quarter of the women were listed as never having married. The decline in marriage among whites is occurring at a slower pace than among blacks, but both are experiencing rising trends in unmarried adults. By 2000, 22 percent of adult white women and 42 percent of adult black women had never married. This rise in the ratio of persons never married is also reflected in historical changes in the relation between families and households. Non-family households had always existed as a small share of the total households in the United States, usually made up of elderly persons with no families left. But now they are formed by young adults, many of whom never married, or by older persons who no longer reside with children. Also, the proportion of two-parent households, even in family households with children, is on the decline, as single-parent-plus-children households are on the rise. As late as 1960, at the height of the Baby Boom, married families made up almost three-quarters of all households; but by the census of 2000 they accounted for just 53 percent of them, a decline that seems to have continued in the past few years. Non-family households now account for 31 percent of households, and families headed by a single parent with children account for the rest, making up to 27 percent of all such families with children. Black families experienced the fastest decline of dual-parent households; by the end of the century married couples with children accounted for only 4 out of 10 of all black family households with children. But no group was immune to this rising trend of single-parent households.

Why France's gay marriage debate has started to look like a revolution

The bitter battle over gay marriage is a symptom of a broken political system

By John Laughland

Paris: Revolutions are often sparked by an unexpected shock to an already weakened regime. As commentators in France remark not only on the crisis engulfing François Hollande’s government but also on the apparent death-rattle of the country’s entire political system, it could be that his flagship policy of legalising gay marriage — or rather, the gigantic public reaction against it, unique in Europe — will be the last straw that breaks the Fifth -Republic’s back.

Opposition to the bill has electrified the middle classes, the young and much of provincial France. On Sunday 24 March, in the freezing cold, the 4km stretch from the Arche de la Défense to the Arc de Triomphe was full of people protesting against the bill. On 13 January, also chilly, the Champ de Mars was similarly crammed. When Johnny Hallyday or the World Cup got crowds like that, people talked of two million. But the police, evidently acting under political orders, have claimed that both demonstrations — which are without doubt the largest public movements in French history — garnered a few hundred thousand at most. Credible accusations surfaced in Le Figaro on Monday night that the film taken from police helicopters on 24 March and released by the Prefecture has been manipulated to reduce the apparent numbers of demonstrators.

Such lies are the sign of a rotten regime. Outbursts such as that of Elie Peillon, the son of the Minister of Education, who on 13 January tweeted that ‘those gits’ demonstrating should be publicly hanged, make Marie-Antoinette’s seem delicate by comparison. Had the mobilisation in Paris taken place in Tahrir Square, the world’s media would be unanimous that a ‘French spring’ was about to sweep away an outdated power structure, especially since the demonstrations (including the daily ones held throughout last week, which culminated in a massive impromptu rally of 270,000 people on Sunday afternoon) are attended by an overwhelming number of people in their late teens and early twenties.

By the same token, had the Moscow security forces tear-gassed children and mothers — as the CRS did on the Champs Elysées on 24 March — or had they dragged away by their necks youngsters who were peacefully sitting on the lawn after the demo — as the riot police did on the night of 18 April — then the worldwide moral policemen on CNN would be frantically firing their rhetorical revolvers. Such repression would be interpreted as a sign that the regime was desperate. Indeed, had the Ukrainian police removed the ‘tent village’ which formed in central Kiev at the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004 — as the Paris police bundled more than 60 anti-gay marriage campers into detention on the night of 14 April — then one suspects that Nato tanks would have rolled over the Dnieper to their rescue. A dozen people were even booked by the police for wearing anti-gay-marriage T-shirts in the Luxembourg gardens, where they were having a picnic, on the grounds that this constituted an unauthorised political assembly.

10 Lessons from Cyprus

Here are the likely lessons future historians will draw from Cyprus’s sorry experience in the euro

By Desmond Lachman

Lessons for Cyprus

1. Joining the euro was a tragic mistake.

Before joining the euro, Cyprus should have considered that its banking- and tourism-based economy had nothing in common with the rest of the European economy. It should also have recognized that if its economy got hit by a major negative external shock, Cyprus would not be supported by fiscal transfers from the European Union or by lower European Central Bank (ECB) interest rates. Cyprus is now paying a very high price for this mistake, as its economy is likely to contract by at least 25 percent over the next year.

2. Allowing unregulated banks to grow so large was a blunder.

It is bad enough that light regulation of the Cypriot banking system allowed that system to grow to more than seven times the size of the Cypriot economy, mainly due to large Russian deposit inflows. However, it is unconscionable that the bank regulators allowed Cypriot banks to buy Greek government bonds amounting to 150 percent of the size of Cyprus’s GDP. This combination was an accident waiting to happen — and it did happen when the Greek government defaulted on its bonds in 2012. The net result was bank losses close to €10 billion, or 60 percent of Cyprus’s GDP.

Searches and Seizures: Reasonable or Unreasonable?

The balance between liberty and security in criminal cases

by Richard A. Epstein

Matters of criminal procedure were not much in evidence in the aftermath of the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Nary a peep of protest was raised against the massive lock-down and manhunt that followed hard on the heels of that senseless tragedy.

But now that some degree of normalcy has returned, it is important to think about these procedural issues. To that end, two recent Supreme Court cases address law enforcement and the Fourth Amendment. Florida v. Jardines deals with searches in connection with illegal drug trafficking and Missouri v. NcNeely addresses compelled blood tests on suspected drunk drivers.

Both of these cases return to fundamental questions that have previously divided the Court. What is remarkable about the Supreme Court’s recent Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is that these divisions are not apparent. The opinions in both cases lack reference to the endless theoretical debates between the hard-nosed originalists and the equally insistent defenders of the “Living Constitution.” In consequence, these close decisions have generated strange alliances that have transcended the deep five-to-four conservative-liberal split.

Stockman says it like it is

“The Great Deformation – The Corruption of Capitalism in America”

by DETLEV SCHLICHTER

David Stockman’s new book “The Great Deformation” is a brilliant, penetrating analysis of the present state of the US economy and the US political system, and a detailed account of how the nation got into this mess. The book will upset Democrats and Republicans alike, and quite a few other constituencies as well, which can, in this case, be safely accepted as proof that Stockman’s narrative is spot on.

Stockman is an angry man and he admits so himself early in his 719-page tome. That anger adds bite and verve to his writing and keeps what is in fact a detailed historical account and economic analysis always highly entertaining. The book is long but never boring. Furthermore, Stockman does not let the anger cloud his judgement, which remains, in my view, relentlessly accurate throughout.
When dissecting Washington politics and Wall Street deal-making Stockman naturally draws on his experience as the director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan and his many years as an investment banker and private equity investor, and in so doing he reflects on much of his own professional life with commendable candor. But the book goes beyond these specific periods, and Stockman applies the analytical skills and insights acquired on these jobs to the critical examination of a wide spectrum of policy areas and historic periods. Stockman’s command of these topics and the masses of statistics and financial reports involved, and his powers of analytical dissection are impressive. But what is probably even more important for the success of his analysis is that it is based on an accurate understanding of essential economic relationships, in particular the importance of sound money. This is why the narrative that he develops captures America’s present challenges so truthfully and comprehensively. I very much shared Stockman’s anger when I started reading, but even more so when I had finished.

Venezuelans Resist an Illegitimate and Violent Regime

Venezuelans voted for change and now has no choice but to resist 

By Roger Noriega

Is the election in Venezuela over? Apparently not. The self-declared winner, Nicolás Maduro, is behaving very much like a man who knows he lost on April 14. In resorting to violence and brute force to silence the opposition’s demand for an honest recount, Maduro has signed the death warrant for chavismo’s legitimacy.

Numerous videos of soldiers and other chavista thugs chasing, beating, and shooting unarmed protesters have circulated around the world since last month’s election. Last night, video from Venezuela’s national assembly showed opposition members being beaten as they protested a gag rule imposed by assembly president Diosdado Cabello.

Post-election analyses have shown that even many of those who had supported caudillo Hugo Chávez before his recent death were among a majority of Venezuelans who voted for change last month. And that majority now has no choice but to resist the Cuban-backed regime that cannot hold on to power, let alone govern, unless it uses violence against the Venezuelan people.

French Fears, French Fantasies

The specter of 1934 is haunting France today — but this time the popular front is coming from the right

By Roger Kaplan 
What happened on 6 February 1934 is known to every Frenchman of a certain age, but of the younger generation one cannot say, because history has been banned (the word is not too strong) from the curricula of public schools. There are practically no private ones in France and Catholic schools must conform to the state’s standards, while yeshivot are after-school schools.

Indeed observers of the downward spiral of the once vaunted French public education system have singled out the elimination of history as a pedagogical as well as a cultural folly, among many others such the abandonment of Latin and excusing girls of the Muslim faith from gym class. They also cite the absence of zero tolerance against juvenile thugs attacking teachers — often Jews — with brazen effrontery. This overall civilizational cave-in is not unrelated to the education ministry trend toward “universal baccalauréat,” which essentially meant gutting the content from the high school-exiting cum university-entrance exam.

Now the schools are fields of ruins. That France’s immigration policies since the 1970s are partly to blame no serious observer denies, but immigrants as such are not the reason the governing classes have allowed, even encouraged, the erosion of the social fundamentals — such as schools — that make governing possible and coherent.

The True Crisis in the Asia-Pacific

A microcosm of the larger competition being waged for Asia’s future

By Michael Mazza

The Asia-Pacific’s most dangerous crisis may be going overlooked due to North Korean threats. Despite the Obama administration’s ‘pivot’ to the region, Asian allies worry that the United States will not continue to be a steadfast partner.

North Korean bombast has been using up all of the oxygen in the Asia-Pacific, but what may be the region’s most dangerous crisis is raging on a few hundred miles to the south. With front pages focused on Kim Jong-un’s threats and the United States’ shows of force, the ongoing Sino-Japanese impasse has gone overlooked in recent weeks. Even so, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the latter conflict’s long-term implications for peace in Asia.

As tensions in the East China Sea have heated up over the past year, analysts, journalists, and businessmen have been asking two questions: Could Japan and China really come to blows over the Senkaku (or, in Chinese, “Diaoyu”) Islands? Would the United States really allow itself to be drawn into a conflict over a handful of obscure, uninhabited rocks? These questions are based on an errant assumption that the roiling conflict is, at heart, about ownership of the Senkakus. It is not.

Sympathy for the Devil

When the search for motives leads to moral alibis

By Lee Harris

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Americans are again searching for motives. It is our way of dealing with acts that shock and outrage our collective sensibilities. We looked for motives after the Oklahoma City bombing and after 9/11. We looked for them in the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, when we asked ourselves what motive a young man could have to kill first graders. But what exactly are we doing when we go in search of a motive for such crimes?

The concept of a motive is an essential part of any criminal investigation. When detectives are confronted with an unsolved crime, they begin by asking who might have had a motive to commit the crime in question. For example, a woman is found dead under suspicious circumstances. Only weeks before, her husband had taken out a large insurance policy on her life. Here we have a possible motive for him to kill his wife, namely, his desire to collect her life insurance. Needless to say, a possible motive is not enough to convict the husband of his wife’s murder, but it is enough to cause those investigating the case to focus more intensely on the husband as a possible suspect.

The Federal Financial Triangle

What would it mean for the world’s principal central bank to have negative net worth?

By Alex J. Pollock

As odd as it may seem to us now, under the National Banking Act from 1863 to 1913, local banks with national charters were the official issuers of U.S. currency, and the government had no central bank. Hundreds of national banks in towns and cities all across the country were issuing dollar bills. They were replaced in this essential role by the Federal Reserve Banks under the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Consistent with their responsibility as the issuers of U.S. paper money, national banks were prohibited during this period from making any real estate loans at all. Today, in contrast, the Federal Reserve is a huge investor in real estate loans. It owns over $1.1 trillion of them — and keeps buying more — in the form of mortgage-backed securities (MBS). This would have greatly surprised and highly displeased the authors of the Federal Reserve Act.

But don’t worry about the credit risk of these mortgage loans: the MBS the Fed keeps buying at the top of the market are guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Whoops: Fannie and Freddie both went completely broke, suffering staggering aggregate losses of $246 billion, which wiped out all their capital and a lot more.

 Governments fly myths as banners of truth

by Mark Grant
The bigger the real-life problems, the greater the tendency for people to retreat into a reassuring fantasy-land of abstract theory and technical manipulation.

Many people have little or no understanding of what is presently taking place in Europe. This is because it is reported nowhere, discussed in public by no one and carefully hidden in the data supplied by the European Central Bank.

What I will discuss today is the prime mover, in my opinion, of the destabilization of the European economies and yet, like the debt to GDP ratios on the Continent; just because it isn’t counted does not mean that it does not exist. I will endeavor to explain it as simply as possible.

A bank in some European country such as Spain lends money but the collateral, Real Estate or commercial loans, are going bad. The bank then securitizes a large pool of this collateral and pledges it at the ECB to receive cash. In many cases to take the pool the country has to guarantee the debt. So Spain, in my example, guarantees the loan package which is then pledged at the ECB and is a contingent liability and which is not reported in the debt to GDP ratio of the country but nowhere else that you will find either. “Hidden” would be the appropriate word.

War and the Messianic State

Robert Nisbet on the alliance between militarism and collectivism

"The power of war to create a sense of moral meaning is one of the most frightening aspects of the twentieth century."– Robert A. Nisbet (1953)

by Gary North

From his first book in 1953 until his final book on social theory in 1988, conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet warned against war as the destroyer of both social stability and liberty. He viewed war as the social force above all forces in society that can lead, and has led, to the centralization of the state, which has made mass politics possible. It undermines men's faith in local associations, which therefore undermines the cultural pluralism and localism that retard centralization and bureaucratization.

Oxford University Press published The Quest for Community in 1953. Its subtitle was A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. The book was published early in the Cold War. He finished the manuscript in 1952. In 1952, the United States detonated the first H-bomb. In 1952, the truce which ended the Korean War in 1953 had not been signed. Josef Stalin was still alive when he wrote it; he died in 1953. Joseph McCarthy was gaining influence. The conservative movement was, more than anything else, an extension of the anti-Communist movement. The nation had just elected a general to be President.

There was a free market side of the conservative movement. F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom appeared in 1944. It was condensed in the Reader's Digestin 1945. Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson appeared in 1946. Ludwig von Mises' Human Action appeared in 1949. But it was not this intellectual stream which caught the attention and widespread support of conservatives in 1953. It was the anti-Communist crusade.

This is why Nisbet's book seemed unlikely to become a foundation stone in the development of the conservative intellectual movement in America. It appeared in the same year that Russell Kirk's Conservative Mind appeared. Prior to 1953, there was no intellectual conservative movement in the United States. Nisbet in 1952 had never heard of Kirk. Hardly anyone had heard of Nisbet.

Nisbet's book remains in print, six decades later, published since 2010 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which was founded in 1953 as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. The ISI was an early attempt to create intellectual leadership for the fledgling movement. It was co-founded by William F. Buckley and libertarian Frank Choderov.

Nisbet began his public criticism of the modern warfare state in 1953. His final book on social theory began with a criticism of the Pentagon as a betrayal of limited government. This was in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall went down, three years before the Soviet Union committed suicide. The world had lived under the threat of nuclear war the entire time. The fall of the USSR in December 1991 served as the headstone of the French Revolution, the movement that Nisbet had spent his entire academic career criticizing for its totalitarianism. The totalitarian impulse was alive and well in 1953.

The Euro: a Step Toward the Gold Standard?

The gold standard emerged without formal agreements

by Andreas Hoffmann

In a recent piece Jesus Huerta de Soto (2012) argues that the euro is a proxy for the gold standard. He draws several analogies between the euro and the classical gold standard (1880-1912). Like when “going on gold” European governments gave up monetary sovereignty by introducing the euro. Like the classical gold standard the common currency forces reforms upon countries that are in crisis because governments cannot manipulate the exchange rate and inflate away debt. Therefore, to limit state power and to encourage e.g. labor market reforms he views the euro as second best to the gold standard from a free market perspective. Therefore, we should defend it. He finds that it is a step toward the re-establishment of the classical gold standard.

There has been much criticism of the piece that mainly addresses the inflationary bias of the ECB. I actually agree with much of it. In particular, imperfect currency areas have the potential to restrict monetary nationalism. This can be welcomed just as customs unions that allow for free trade (at least in restricted areas). But I have some trouble with De Soto’s conclusions and the view that adhering to the euro (as did adhering to gold) gives an extra impetus for market reform – in spite of the mentioned e.g. labor market reforms in Spain. In fact, if the euro was to proxy the gold standard, some countries should have already left the euro and reintroduced national currencies when facing high refinancing costs and negative growth rates. But euro introduction went along with several steps far beyond “simply going on gold”: