Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State

A mandate that is off the rails

By George Will

Texting while driving is dangerous, especially if you are driving a train. A commuter train engineer was texting on Sept. 12, 2008, near Los Angeles, when he missed a stop signal and crashed into a freight train. Twenty-five people died.

Congress supposedly is incapable of acting quickly, and we are supposed to regret this. In 2008, however, Congress acted with dispatch. We should regret that it did. Herewith another lesson about the costs of the regulatory state, especially when it is excited, eager to make a gesture and propelled by an uninformed consensus.

On Jan. 6, 2005, nine people had been killed in Graniteville, S.C., by chlorine gas leaking from a derailed freight train, but Congress did not spring into action. In 2008, however, California’s 53-person congressional delegation was 12 percent of the House and 24 percent of a House majority. So in less than a month after the commuter train collision, Congress, with scant opposition from railroads, and without meaningful cost-benefit analyses, passed legislation requiring most railroads to implement, by 2015, positive train control (PTC), a technology to stop trains by overriding some human mistakes.

So far, railroads have spent more than $2.7 billion on a system estimated to cost $10 billion to $14 billion — plus perhaps $1 billion in annual maintenance. PTC has not been installed, partly because it is not sufficiently developed. CSX Corp., which includes railroads among its assets, says the railroad industry is the nation’s most capital-intensive — and the $11 billion combined capital investments of all U.S. railroads in 2010 were approximately equal to the cost of PTC. The 2015 mandate will not be met.

The Federal Railroad Administration estimates that were PTC to be installed on thousands of locomotives and tens of thousands of miles of track, it would prevent perhaps 2 percent of the approximately 2,000 collisions and derailments, preventing seven deaths and 22 injuries annually. But because a dollar spent on X cannot be spent on Y, the PTC mandate must mean the sacrifice of other investments crucial to railroad safety (and efficiency).

Japan's Easy Money Tsunami

The more things change, the more they stay the same

by David Howden

The Bank of Japan has just embarked on one of the most inflationary policies ever undertaken. Pledging to inject $1.4 trillion dollars into the economy over the next two years, the policy is aimed at generating price inflation of 2% and further depreciating the Yen. The idea is to fight “deflation” and increase exports.

The end result of this policy will be an assuredly larger balance sheet at the Bank of Japan (projected to nearly double to $2.9 trillion). Despite being lower than it was 25 years ago, the Japanese Stock Index has increased by 70% since November of last year. However happy people have been about higher stock prices, eventually the economic effects will be harmful; indeed the recent stock price crashes foreshadow still more troubles to come.

In my own contribution to Guido Hülsmann’s recent edited book The Theory of Money and Fiduciary Media, I take a critical look at these exact policies – expansions of the money supply aimed at stimulating output by way of manipulating the exchange rate. At the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Ludwig von Mises’ The Theory of Money and Credit, we can see that Mises had already grappled with the issues of currency depreciation in a manner superior to modern monetary economics. Furthermore, with the refinement of his business cycle theory in his book Human Action, we find that Mises also outlined the detrimental effects of such expansionary monetary policies.

The exchange rate determines the price a foreigner will have to pay for a domestically produced good. Increases in the money supply will generate inflationary price pressures that will in turn increase prices. This leads to a higher exchange rate, which means it takes more domestic currency to purchase a unit of foreign currency. This makes it cheaper for foreigners to buy our goods so exports increase. Conclusion: countries can stimulate exports and increase the number of jobs in export industries by inflating their money supply.

Unfortunately, this is not the end of the story.

Towards the end of poverty

The world’s next great leap forward

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again

The Economist

In his inaugural address in 1949 Harry Truman said that “more than half the people in the world are living in conditions approaching misery. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of those people.” It has taken much longer than Truman hoped, but the world has lately been making extraordinary progress in lifting people out of extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2010, their number fell by half as a share of the total population in developing countries, from 43% to 21%—a reduction of almost 1 billion people.

Now the world has a serious chance to redeem Truman’s pledge to lift the least fortunate. Of the 7 billion people alive on the planet, 1.1 billion subsist below the internationally accepted extreme-poverty line of $1.25 a day. Starting this week and continuing over the next year or so, the UN’s usual Who’s Who of politicians and officials from governments and international agencies will meet to draw up a new list of targets to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were set in September 2000 and expire in 2015. Governments should adopt as their main new goal the aim of reducing by another billion the number of people in extreme poverty by 2030.

Take a bow, capitalism

Nobody in the developed world comes remotely close to the poverty level that $1.25 a day represents. America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short. They lack not just education, health care, proper clothing and shelter—which most people in most of the world take for granted—but even enough food for physical and mental health. Raising people above that level of wretchedness is not a sufficient ambition for a prosperous planet, but it is a necessary one.

Classical Liberalism’s Impossible Dream

The Emperor is naked

By Robert Higgs

I can understand why someone might embrace classical liberalism. I did so myself more than forty years ago. People become classical liberals for two main reasons, which are interrelated: first, because they come to understand that free markets “work” better than government-controlled economic systems in providing prosperity and domestic peace; second, because people come to believe that they may justifiably claim (along more or less Lockean lines) rights to life, liberty, and property. These two reasons are interrelated because the Lockean rights provide the foundation required for free markets to exist and operate properly.

Like Locke, classical liberals recognize that some persons may violate others’ rights to life, liberty, and property and that some means of defending these rights adequately must be employed. On this basis they accept government (as we know it), but only with the proviso that the government must be limited to protecting people against force and fraud that would unjustly deprive them of life, liberty, and property. They believe that government (as we know it) can perform these functions, whereas private individuals without such government would be at the mercy of predators and hence that their lives would be, as Hobbes supposed, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Nobody wants that.

So, to repeat, I can understand why someone might become a classical liberal. However, as the years have passed, I have had increasing difficulty in understanding why someone would remain a classical liberal, rather than making the further move to embrace genuine self-government in place of the classical liberal’s objective, “limited government.” My difficulty arises not so much from a dissatisfaction with government’s being charged with protecting the citizens from force and fraud, but from a growing conviction that government (as we know it) does not, on balance, actually carry out these tasks and, worse, that it does not even try to carry them out except in a desultory and insincere way—indeed, as a ruse.

A nightmare vision of the welfarist trap

Benefits is a timely reminder that left-wingers weren't always such big fans of welfarism

by Neil Davenport 

Among a broad spectrum of British left-wingers, the welfare state is treated as the most sacred institution in British society. Unemployment benefit, child benefit, incapacity benefits, housing benefit… all are held up as paragons of a left-inspired virtue. Nothing agitates left-leaning commentators more than Lib-Con proposals to slash welfare payments. Apparently the poor, the plebs and ‘the vulnerable’ could not cope without the army of welfare professionals providing them with support and sustenance.

Yet this hagiographical account of the welfare state is a fairly new turn on the left. Left-wingers weren’t always so taken with welfarism. It seems that the more the left’s faith in ordinary people’s capacity to sort their lives out has declined, the more it has endowed the state with extraordinary qualities, virtues and powers.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, some radical sociologists deplored the expansion of welfarism, viewing it as an extension of bureaucratic control over the citizenry. Sociology texts asked, ‘Who benefits from benefits?’, and the answer was often: the establishment and those at the top of the class system. Following Marx’s point that very early systems of welfare were a ‘disguised form of alms’, radical sociologists argued that welfare simply ‘bought off’ the lower orders and encouraged them to identify with and respect state structures.

In the 1980s, many a crusty anarchist would point out the inconsistency among some left-wingers of being anti-state while simultaneously claiming welfare benefits. In promoting the idea that the state was ‘neutral’, and that it might possibly be coaxed to improve poor people’s lives further, welfarism actively discouraged political independence of the state and its offshoots.

It was this radical tension - of being politically opposed to the state while advocating economic dependence on it - that was explored in Zoe Fairbairns’ dystopian feminist novel, Benefits. Written in the febrile political atmosphere of late-1970s Britain, Benefits is about a future state’s sinister attempts to control women’s fertility, and to encourage responsible parenting, through the introduction of a universal ‘wages for housework’ benefit.

Although rarely out of print since it first appeared in 1979, Benefits has recently been re-issued, with a new introduction by Fairbairns, for the e-reader age. It is now being marketed as a political attack on ‘anti-welfarist Tories’, yet as Fairbairns points out, anyone who views Benefits as simplistically ‘anti-Thatcherite’ is missing its key point: that welfare benefits can become a weapon of social engineering and control. On top of critiquing aspects of welfarism, Benefits lays into radical feminism’s self-defeating slogan, ‘The personal is political’, while passionately championing women’s liberation and equal rights - feminism’s one-time aims.

Bush Wasn’t a Conservative and Obama Isn’t a Liberal

Tyranny and the Rule of Law

By Mary Theroux

Americans need to stop picking the politicians they support based on how those politicians self-identify. Each of us needs to know what values we hold, and when all the evidence shows that the guy claiming to represent those values doesn’t, give up the party line.

Conservatives are supposed to be for limited government—both in size and centrality of power—restrained foreign adventuring, and economic liberty. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2011, the Independent Institute warned repeatedly against the terrorist attacks being used as the premise for vastly expanding the size and scope of government power—as such crises have historically been used to do, as chronicled in Robert Higgs’s brilliant Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government.

Michael Barone dismissed such warnings in the Wall Street Journal, confidently declaring that since Republicans held both the House and the Presidency, runaway government would not be a problem. The Republican House, of course, proceeded to grant the Republican Executive unprecedented budgets and powers, quadrupling the size of the federal government under their “Conservative” watch.

Likewise, conservatives figured they could “trust” a Republican to tell them the truth about things like imminent threats, and provided full support for expansionary wars. The supposed conservative in the White House was also the first Republican president to support the federal department of education, bringing on “No Child Left Behind.”

The entire litany of non-conservative positions and acts under President George W. Bush could not fit in a Beacon post.

Modern-day liberals are supposedly in favor of peace and civil liberties, especially those protected by the First and Fourth Amendments, and to be defenders of the economically disadvantaged.

And thus was Barack Obama brought to power, promising peace and preemptively awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, heralded as the great liberal hope.

7 Major Myths About Immigration

Separating Myth from Reality

By Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Now that the Senate is finally debating a bill that would overhaul the immigration system, legislators would do well to separate myth from reality.

Myth 1: There are more immigrants than ever and these immigrants break the mold of previous waves.

Between 1860 and 1920, fourteen percent of the population was foreign-born. The average for the 20th century is 10-plus percent. The proportion is not different today—about 13 percent. Until the 1880s immigration originated in northern and western Europe but in subsequent decades they came from southern, central and eastern Europe, which was culturally, politically and economically different. Not to mention Asians, who arrived in significant numbers.

Myth 2: Immigrants migrate because they are very poor.

The poorest people migrate internally. Rich countries such as South Korea have sent many migrants to the U.S. while Bangladeshi women, who are very poor, have migrated little even in Asia, the region with the highest rate of migration. Europe was a net exporter of people until 1980. Family ties, occupational preference, distressed conditions at home and historical ties matter. U.S. involvement in Cuba, the Philippines and the Dominican Republic in the early the 20th century was a critical factor in the movement of citizens from those countries to America. Business interests were key at various times in pushing for the legal hiring of Mexicans.

Myth 3: These immigrants are culturally different and threaten the American way of life.

Immigrants are religious, family-oriented, entrepreneurial and no more prone to crime than natives. Seventy percent of Hispanics who moved to the U.S. in the last two decades are Catholic (one fifth are “born again” Christians) and 23 percent are Protestant. One in two undocumented households has couples with children; only thirteen percent of them are headed by single parents—against one third of native households. The percentage of immigrant workers who are self-employed mirrors that of natives. Immigrant-led gentrification has revived neighborhoods from New York to Florida. Adjusted for age, the proportion of immigrants who are criminals mirrors that of natives.

That's no way to run a country

Penalties for politicians 

By Glenn Harlan Reynold

We entrust an inordinate amount of power to people who don't feel any pain when we fall down.

As scandals explode across Washington -- from the IRS scandals, to the Benghazi scandal, to the HHS donations scandal, to Pigford and more -- one thing that I've noticed is that the people involved don't seem to suffer much. There are consequences, but not for them. Likewise, Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., left office in disgrace, but wound up with surprisingly lucrative consulting gigs.

This reminds me of something writer Robert Heinlein once said: "Any government will work if authority and responsibility are equal and coordinate. This does not ensure 'good' government, it simply ensures that it will work. But such governments are rare — most people want to run things, but want no part of the blame. This used to be called the 'backseat driver' syndrome."

Government officials are happy making and executing plans that affect the lives of millions, but when things go wrong, well ... they're willing to accept the responsibility, but they're not willing to take the blame. What's the difference? People who are to blame lose their jobs. People who are "responsible," do not. The blame, such as it is, winds up deflected on to The System, or something else suitably abstract.

But when you cut the linkage between outcomes and experience, you make learning much more difficult. When you were a toddler learning to walk, you fell down a lot. This was unpleasant: shocking, at least, and often painful. Thus, you learned to fall down a lot less often.

But imagine if falling down didn't hurt. You wouldn't have learned not to fall, or at least, you would have accumulated a lot more bruises along the way.

Given the low penalties for failure it faces, our political class is one for whom falling down is usually painless and even -- given the surprisingly common tendency of people who have presided over debacles to be given promotions rather than the boot -- actually pleasurable. The leaders move society's arms and legs, but we're the ones who collect the bruises.

Is It Fixable?

Short Answer : NO 

By Simon Black 

In the 15th century, the highest standard of living in the world belonged to China. Places like Nanjing had reached the pinnacle of civilization with incredibly modern infrastructure, robust economies, substantial international trade, great healthcare, and a rising middle class.

Across the globe, Europeans were living out short, mud-filled, brutish lives in squalid poverty, dying off by the thousands from the bubonic plague. They were practically Neanderthals compared to the Chinese, and explorers like Marco Polo wrote fanciful tales of wealth and opulence in the east.

If you had told a Chinese merchant at the time that, over the course of the next several hundred years, global primacy would shift to Europe (and a relatively unknown American continent), you would have been laughed at. It was simply unthinkable given how advanced China was over the west.

And yet, it happened. History shows us that the great things about western civilization (Industrial Revolution, technological achievement) and the not-so-great things about western civilization (imperialism, slavery, genocide) caused the tables to turn and primacy to shift from east to west.

Ironically, the tables are turning yet again, and its driven by a number of factors.

At the tail end of World War II, a new global financial system was concocted that was heavily biased to disproportionately benefit the United States. Over the subsequent decades, foreign countries would obligingly mop up US government largess and finance out of control retail consumption.

Keynesian Economics, R.I.P.

After 77 years, the long run had arrived for Keynesian Economics

by Burt Abrams

In 2009, Keynesian economists in the Obama administration were downright giddy with excitement. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed by congress was the “biggest peacetime fiscal stimulus in U.S. history” that promised to return the economy to full employment in short order. The Act’s $787 billion (equivalent to about 5% of our national output) in tax cuts and spending came from federal borrowings that added to our national debt, a small price to pay for pushing the economy back to full employment, or so we were told. Sufficient time has now passed to assess the impact of ARRA. The Congressional Budget Office contends the Act’s biggest effect hit in 2010 and by 2013 the Act’s effects had become negligible. The graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis showing real output before and after ARRA tells a different story.

The shaded area of the graph measures the period of our Great Recession. Positive economic growth returned in the second quarter of 2009, before ARRA had a chance to impact the economy. But notice the big jump up in GDP in 2010 and subsequent drop as ARRA’s impact petered out. You don’t see it? Neither do I. In fact the graph seems to be consistent with a economic recovery following the Federal Reserve’s pushing of it’s federal funds interest rate down near zero in November, 2008. The economy continues to recover slowly, seemingly hampered by a variety of government policies and uncertainties (e.g., wasteful subsidies and expenditures, expansions to unemployment insurance and Medicaid, uncertainties about Obamacare, concerns about future tax burdens, etc.). What we don’t see is any noticeable impact of the “biggest peacetime fiscal stimulus in U.S. history.” Calls for even more Keynesian fiscal stimulus and government borrowing seems pointless at best and, at worst, downright dangerous given all we know about public indebtedness.

To help put the nail in the Keynesian coffin, I’ve taken the liberty to compose an appropriate obituary. Feel free to dispense it widely.

Detroit Heads to the Pawn Shop

Desperation has hit a new low in Detroit

by Walter Russell Mead

Last week, Emergency Manager (and bankruptcy lawyer) Kevyn Orr decided to list the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts among the city’s assets in preparation for a possible bankruptcy. If the city goes through with it, it could be forced to sell off any of its assets—which now include the museum’s collection.

Museum administrators are outraged, but the choice may be keeping the art or paying for vital public services. According to Orr, the city has “long-term obligations of at least $15 billion, unsustainable cash flow shortages and miserably low credit ratings that make it difficult to borrow.” But as the WSJ reports, the city may not have a choice:

“Kevyn Orr doesn’t want the collection sold,” Mr. Nowling said. “But in bankruptcy, it could be eyed by creditors.” [...]

But legal experts say that in a municipal bankruptcy, it is possible for a city to sell assets, even cultural icons. James Spiotto, a bankruptcy attorney and author on municipal-finance issues based in Chicago, said that “in order to provide essential government services like public safety, roads and education, certain other programs are going to be curtailed or eliminated. So it’s not surprising that the sale of art is on the table.”

The collection, which include treasures by Bruegel, Rodin and van Gogh as well as Diego Rivera’s famous “Detroit Industry” murals, is ostensibly worth billions of dollars, but those measures can’t really capture what such artistic treasures mean to a community.

Unfortunately the city is already struggling to keep the lights on. Local businesses recently had to step in to buy the city police cars and ambulances. Meanwhile, Detroit has closed nearly a quarterof the city’s firehouses, and the department’s equipment is beginning to fall apart. At this point, the city may need the money more than it needs the art.

Oscillating between liberal and conservative Keynesianism for 60 years should be enough

The Fiscal Debate Continues

by Peter Boettke

As a public debate over austerity in the Eurozone and the US continues a significant side of the debate continues to assert that what is needed is Keynesian economics 101.  Another side of the debate, which isn't really paid attention to beyond lip-service, argues that all we have had for the past 60+ years is Keynesian policies and the legacy of which is what we must confront now.  The democratic states of the west since WWII have simply oscilated between liberal Keynesianism and conservative Keynesianism, and we have never moved in the actually implementation of public policy into an "After Keynesian macroeconomics" world, let alone returned to the more orthodox teachings of pre-Keynesian macroeconomics.  Instead, we have lived in an age of "economic illusion" where common sense economics was denied, and governments used the tools of monetary and fiscal policy to distort market signals, disrupt the coordination of economic plans, and deceive an unorganized and ill-informed public.

The reason why the situation isn't worse is because of the great gains achieved during that 60+ year period due to technological innovations, and the opening up of trading opportunities throughout the globe.  As Adam Smith argued long ago, the power of self interest enables a market economy to overcome any number of impertinent obstructions that human folly may thrust upon it.  But a market cannot overcome an infinite number of obstructions; there is a tipping point.  There also is a question of arithmetic -- which is very often unpleasant for current generation politicians as they strive to spend more, and pass the payment to others.  Sooner or later the bill comes due, and in the case of many public expenditures there is no connection whatsoever to "investment" that paid off through time.  Instead, the fiscal commons just produced an overspending in the "here and now" and a promise to pay a "big bill" down the road.  That big bill has accumulated over those 60+ years, and policy makers now the Eurozone and the US are grappling with that reality.  Like their predecessors, they would like nothing better than a justification to send this bill down the road to future generations so they can continue to spend.

A fight Netanyahu cannot win

Netanyahu Tries to Bust Up Israel's Port Monopoly

By David Wainer and Calev Ben-David 

Two years ago, Alon Hassan, the union chief at Israel’s Ashdod port, wanted to invite work colleagues to his daughter’s bat mitzvah. When he and his co-workers walked off the docks during a weekday, they nearly paralyzed one of the country’s largest trade gateways, enraging importers whose cargo was left stranded offshore.

Israel’s high-tech companies have earned a global reputation for their business acumen. Yet when it comes to raw economic power, it’s hard to beat the unionized port workers calling the shots at the country’s dominant ports in Haifa and Ashdod. These state-owned facilities process about 90 percent of the nation’s exports and imports—and their inefficiency is costing businesses, according to the Manufacturers Association of Israel.

Even so, dockworkers enjoy the fruits of this powerful duopoly. Port hands earn average annual salaries of about 450,000 shekels ($123,000), the highest among state-owned company workers and more than four times the nation’s average salary. When 45 openings for stevedores were announced this year, 3,000 job seekers applied. The port employees and other public sector workers are represented by Israel’s organization of trade unions, Histadrut, which declined to comment.

Israel’s government has struggled for years to weaken the port unions for a simple reason: More than 40 percent of the country’s $247 billion in gross domestic product comes from exports. A port strike could pummel Israel’s economy, which is isolated because of its lack of trade relations with most of its Arab neighbors.

Digging tunnels to survive

Gaza held hostage to Egypt's turmoil

By Ramzy Baroud 

An air of uncertainty is engulfing most matters related to Egypt. Since the Egyptian revolt started over two years ago, the country remains hostage to a barefaced power struggle with many destructive implications that have polarized society in unprecedented ways, perhaps in all of Egypt's modern history. 

While in Egypt nothing is sacred and no one is safe from the massive campaigns of defamation, as demonization and sheer lies are launched by one political camp against the other, Palestinians find themselves in a most precarious position. 

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in particular, are heavily dependent on their Egyptian neighbors. Six years of an Israeli siege, originally imposed to punish Palestinians for electing Hamas in an election viewed widely as transparent and fair, has culminated into a drama with international dimensions. 

This drama of course involved the Palestinians, but also Israel's traditional benefactors - lead, as always, by the United States - Arab countries, Iran, Turkey and more. Aside from the vicious nature of a siege imposed to punish a civilian population for making democratic choices, the siege has morphed to acquire multiple meanings. 

On one hand, it further cemented the division of Palestinian political elites, as the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) invested in ensuring the isolation of its Hamas political opponents. Notably, this took place after their brief but bloody encounters in Gaza in 2007. 

On the other, the siege positioned Hamas, whose survival was at stake, forcefully in a regional camp that involved Iran, Syria and the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah. 

The last development in particular was exploited by Israel in every way possible and certainly without much context. It subsequently attacked Gaza at will, killing and wounding thousands in the course of few years, in the name of fighting Middle Eastern radicals hell-bent on erasing Israel off the map. 

Message in a bomb

A warning shot for Turkey-Qatar axis

By Alper Birdal and Yigit Gunay 

A bombing in the Turkish town of Reyhanli on May 11 killed 51 people but was largely ignored by Turkish media. Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed the Syrian government - with no evidence.

Turkish hacker collective RedHack claims here that Turkish intelligence knew in advance that the Syrian jihadi outfit Jabhat al-Nusra was preparing three car bombs to be detonated inside Turkey. Erdogan remains mum. 

The Reyhanli massacre was subjected to a press ban in Turkey after the ruling party's clumsy attempt to cover it up fell short. But as far as the massacre is concerned, we believe it is possible to make a strong guess about the perpetrators. 

Turkish media also did not really reflect upon why Syrian armed groups suddenly started losing Al-Qusayr, in western Syria. The fighters in Al-Qusayr belong to the Al-Farouq brigade. This is the group the leader of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD, the Kurdish in Northern Syria, ideologically close to the PKK in Turkey), Salih Muslims, referred to as in, "We have made a deal with them in Aleppo." 

It is also the same murderous organization who said after having cutting out the heart out of a dead soldier and eating, "What is the problem? I have been butchering Alawites." 

A spokesperson of the Al-Farouq brigade, Yazeed Al-Hassan, explained that their recent setbacks were "the result of the recent decrease of shipments from Turkey". The fact is that Saudi Arabia has stopped its weapons transfers through Turkey and moved their supply channels over to Northern Jordan. 

Erdogan went to the US without visiting Reyhanli to offer his condolences to the families of the victims of the bombings. 

In previous weeks, the leaders of three Arab countries had visited Washington: King Abdullah II of Jordan, Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, and the Saudi minister of Foreign Affairs, Saud Al Faisal. 

Afghanistan: Is it really the end game?

Cutting a deal, if still possible, may be the best option

By Conn Hallinan 

There is nothing that better sums up the utter failure of America's longest war than international forces getting ambushed as they try to get the hell out of the Afghanistan. And yet the April 1 debacle in Balochistan was in many ways a metaphor for a looming crisis that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States seem totally unprepared for: with the clock ticking down on removing most combat troops by 2014, there are no official negotiations going on, nor does there seem to be any strategy for how to bring them about. 

"I still cannot understand how we, the international community and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 - elections, new president, economic transition, military transition - and negotiations for the peace process have not really started," as Bernard Bajolet, the former French ambassador to Kabul and current head of France's foreign intelligence service, told the New York Times. 

When the Barack Obama administration sent an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the "surge", the goal was to secure the country's southern provinces, suppress opium cultivation, and force the Taliban to give up on the war. Not only did the surge fail to impress the Taliban and its allies, it never stabilized the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Both are once again under the sway of the insurgency, and opium production has soared. What the surge did manage was to spread the insurgency into formerly secure areas in the north and west. 

With the exception of the current US commanders in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved. 

Shoot and talk
Afghanistan has lost more than 2 million people to the wars of the past 30 years. Huge sections of the population have been turned into refugees, and the country is becoming what one international law enforcement official described to the New York Times as "the world's first true narco state". According to the World Bank, 36% of Afghans are at or below the poverty line, and 20% of Afghan children never reach the age of five. 

The war has cost American taxpayers over US$1.4 trillion, and according to a recent study, the final butcher bill for Iraq and Afghanistan together will top $6 trillion. The decade-long conflict has put enormous strains on the NATO alliance, destabilized and alienated nuclear-armed Pakistan, and helped to spread al-Qaeda-like organizations throughout the Middle East and Africa. 

Jail time would do the trick for a lot of bankers, politicians and bureaucrats

Why Some Money Launderers Are "More Equal" Than Others

by Michael Krieger

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

                            - George Orwell’s Animal Farm

It’s been many, many years since I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the message conveyed in it will remain with me forever.  The book is many things, but more than anything else, it is a portrayal and critique of human nature and the political systems that we create. For those that need a refresher, or have not read the book, here’s the basic plot.

There’s a farm headed by a Mr. Jones, who drinks so much he becomes unable to take care of the farm and feed the animals.  Over time, the animals (in particular the pigs), decide human beings are parasites and the pigs lead a revolt and run Mr. Jones off the property.  They change the farm’s name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm and create a list of 7 commandments.  They are:

1.                 Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.

2.               Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.

3.               No animal shall wear clothes.

4.               No animal shall sleep in a bed.

5.                No animal shall drink alcohol.

6.               No animal shall kill any other animal.

7.                All animals are equal.

Rather quickly, the pigs assume leadership over the farm and one pig in particular, Napoleon, consolidates power after running his primary competitor off the property.  It goes downhill from here fast.  The pigs start to walk on two legs, drink alcohol and sleep in beds, amongst other things. Understanding that their new lifestyle in in direct contrast with their original seven commandments, they simply decide to make some adjustments.  The adjustments are:

1.                 No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.

2.               No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.

3.               No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Rather quickly, even these adjustments becoming too binding for the glutinous and power hungry pig oligarch class.  They decide to just condense everything down to one commandment:  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The above process is one for the ages, a process that has been reenacted time and time again by our species over the millennia.  It is exactly what is happening in these United States right now.

Leviathan Fail

The State faces humiliation and bankruptcy, and that’s the good news

By Jonah Goldberg

In Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock distinguished between the government and the State. Sadly, these terms have become interchangeable in everyday parlance: “Statism” is simply a more euphonious and serviceable word for “governmentism.” But until the New Deal, while virtually everyone would have recognized that the United States had a government, whether it had a “state” would have been a much more complicated question. For Nock, the government is the machinery created by the Founders to protect our individual rights, our shores from foreign enemies, and, well, that’s about it. Even a police force was an iffy proposition for Nock. “When Sir Robert Peel proposed to organize the police force of London, Englishmen said openly that half a dozen throats cut in Whitechapel every year would be a cheap price to pay for keeping such an instrument of tyranny out of the State’s hands,” Nock wrote. “We are all beginning to realize now that there is a great deal to be said for that view of the matter.”

The State — properly capitalized — is a different creature altogether from mere government. It is an instrument of will. It seeks to tell people how to live. Worse still, it uses force to do so. Worst of all, its paramount purpose is not answering the question “What’s best for the people?” — that is at most a secondary consideration — but “What is good for the State?”

Kevin Williamson’s new book is quite possibly the best indictment of the State since Our Enemy, the State appeared some eight decades ago. It is a lovely, brilliant, humane, and remarkably entertaining work.

Though he sometimes sounds like a reasonable anarchist, Williamson is not in fact opposed to all government. But he is everywhere opposed to anything that smacks of the State. There’s an old line about how to carve an elephant: Take a block of marble and then remove everything that isn’t an elephant. Williamson looks at everything we call the State or the government and wants to remove everything that shouldn’t be there, which is quite a lot. In what may be my favorite part of the book, he demolishes, with Godzilla-versus-Bambi ease, the notion that only government can provide public goods. In fact, most of what government provides are nonpublic goods (transfer payments, subsidies, etc.), and a great deal of what the market provides — from Google and Wikipedia to Starbucks rest­rooms — are indisputably public goods.