More Drugs … More Drones … More Credit-Pushing Drivel

Get used to it

by bill bonner

“Dad, I’ve got to do something,” begins a panicky letter from one of the children. “When I changed my job status I lost my health insurance. The best policy I can find is $550 a month. What should I do?” “Don’t buy the insurance,” we suggested. “It’s a waste of money. Just don’t get sick,” we added helpfully.

There are two ways a government can rip off its citizens – force and/or fraud. Health care uses both. Back in the time of Genghis, Attila, Caesar and Napoleon, things were simpler. People were conquered. They submitted. “Insurgents” were disposed of. Houses were looted. Maidens were deflowered. Those were the good ol’ days – before health insurance! But even in the oldest of days, a man on his own couldn’t keep a whole population under his heel. He needed help. Thus were born the ruling elites, sharing power among at least enough people to control the armed forces. There are governors of all sorts. But if they don’t control the military and police, they will soon be governed by them.

The beauty of democracy is that it defrauds the average person into believing that he has been taken into the ruling elite. He thinks that, ultimately, he decides what government does. Naturally, he deserves a share in the spoils. All government is an exercise in larceny. All governments take things away from some people – power, money, dignity, freedom – to bestow favors on the ruling elite and its clients. The masses willingly and eagerly comply, as long as they think they can get something out of it – that is, someone else’s property.

A Zombie War

The argument in Congress, which when last we checked was holding up the whole parade, was over how health-care insurance works. Roughly, $2.2 trillion is spent annually in America – more, per capita than in any other nation – on health-related consumption. The fight is over who gets the money and who gets the care. It is a zombie war… As far as we know, no one suggests the obvious solution: Let people decide for themselves. To win elections, governments need to give as well as take. So, in addition to public safety and national security, they offer free health care, free education, free highways, and free elections to determine who gets what. As near as we can tell, most of the money spent on health care is simply wasted. Just compare life expectancies.

France has a nationalized system. It costs considerably less per person than the US system. Britain, France, Germany – all the developed countries have health-care programs partly or wholly run by the feds. All spend substantially less than the US and all have about the same or better life expectancies.

A Predictable Game

Every step toward socialism signifies a reduction in the overall economic means and the consumption of capital

BY JR NYQUIST

President Barack Obama says that Wall Street should be concerned by the government shutdown. But this shutdown is only partial, and the effects aren’t as dire or threatening as the president would like us to believe. The real threat to Wall Street is government deficit spending and our gradual drift toward socialism; that is to say, toward ever-increasing government intervention in the economy. A massive government intrusion into the healthcare industry via The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (of 2010) is the reason for the present government shutdown. Some members of Congress wish to delay the full effect of this legislation which may indeed place the entire system upon a slippery socialist slope.

“To the socialist, the coming of Socialism means a transition from an irrational economy [to a rational economy],” wrote Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. “Under Socialism, planned management of economic life takes the place of anarchy in production….” Here the socialist does not know rational from irrational. In terms of healthcare, the government proposes that all Americans shall have health insurance regardless of the cost to the government or to individual payers. By such enactment the government is driving up the price of health care for everyone by forcing millions of previously uninsured persons into the market. It is, in fact, akin to what the government did to the business of buying and selling family homes during the previous decade (when the government encouraged a large number of loans to persons who would never otherwise qualify– producing a bubble in the housing market).

Government intervention in the economy is seldom helpful. More typically, it degrades and demoralizes. Such was the intervention that produced the housing bubble. Such was the “war against poverty.” Such shall be the result of offering everyone high-quality health care by means of legislation. To put it bluntly, the Affordable Care Act doesn’t guarantee a larger number of doctors for a larger number of insured persons. But if it did so, the increase of doctors would take place upon a false basis; for the economy cannot sustain what it cannot afford.

Does the impracticability of the Affordable Health Care Act signify its imminent defeat in Congress? In this regard we may predict with a high degree of certainty that the present attempt to stop ObamaCare will fail. As Mises noted several decades ago in his book on Socialism, the socialists believe in the excellence of government intervention and control. Furthermore, he added, “It is false to imagine that the socialist ideology dominates only those parties which call themselves socialist or … ‘social.’ All present-day political parties are saturated with the leading socialistic ideas.” Such is the situation of today.

No new "Little Red Book" - that's official.

China has strayed too far from Maoist ideology, and has no other holy scriptures left to chant

By Xi Wang
A Chinese military scholar is working on a fresh book of quotations from late supreme leader Mao Zedong, according to a report, indicating a growing nostalgia in the ranks of the ruling Chinese Communist Party for the country's Maoist past. However, official news agency Xinhua has disputed the report as "erroneous".

The cutting-edge Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily said at the weekend that the new version of what had been widely known as the "Little Red Book" would be edited by a scholar from the People's Liberation Army (PLA), and be published in time for the 120th anniversary of Mao's birth in December.

And the book's editor, Chen Yu, a researcher with the Academy of Military Sciences under the PLA, confirmed the story to Hong Kong media, calling it a work of "scientific research".

"It is merely a publication of scientific research, not a re-publishing of the previous quotations from Chairman Mao," Chen told the South China Morning Post.

But the official news agency Xinhua rejected the report about the new book.

"We understand through concerned government departments that the story circulating on the Internet that the 'new edition of Chairman Mao's Quotations' may be published within this year. This is purely an erroneous report," according to Xinhua. But it made no comment on whether, or when, Chen's book would eventually be published.

Must-have accessory
The book became a must-have accessory for the politically correct revolutionary during the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) after it was first published by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) News in 1964. Party historian Han Gang told the Southern Metropolis Daily that Chen's project comes at a time of huge social tension and complex conflicts, as well as clashing values.

"The new edition of the Quotes of Chairman Mao represents a symbolic return to the past, but it certainly isn't just simple nostalgia," Han was quoted as saying.

"It probably expresses more a sense of unhappiness with our present reality."

Analysts said the new selection of Mao quotes likely reflects a sense among many in the Party that it has strayed too far from its ideological roots.

"I think that this represents a longing for past glories on the part of the Chinese Communist Party," US-based scholar and rights activist Liu Qing said in a recent interview. "This is a common death-bed phenomenon."

Corruption, abuse of power
Liu said Chinese leaders, who have repeatedly warned that the party could lose power if rampant corruption and abuse of power are allowed to continue unchecked, have "admitted" that the regime is sick to the core. 

Hitching to Gomorrah

Perhaps our civilization will go quietly, nicely.

by Theodore Dalrymple 

When I was sixteen years of age my parents allowed me to hitch-hike my way round England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Switzerland. Perhaps they were pleased to disembarrass themselves of a youth who, around them at least, was sullen and uncommunicative; but what would nowadays seem a decision of parental irresponsibility did not then seem at all extraordinary. I doubt that many parents now would give their sixteen year-old son such permission; but I am not sure whether this tells us more about the increased dangerousness of the world or a change in parental attitudes towards risk.

Certainly it seemed a gentler, and therefore a freer, world in certain respects. Sometimes I would hitch-hike on my own, sometimes with a French friend. I remember once arriving together in the northern industrial city of Leeds late one rainy day; the youth hostel was closed for the night and hotels were beyond our means. We went to a police station and a friendly desk-sergeant, seeing that we were naïve but well-behaved adolescents, put us in a cell overnight on his own authority, that is to say without any reference to the rules that almost certainly would prevent him nowadays from acting in this way. The following morning, at an early hour unfamiliar to most of the middle classes, a policeman woke us from our bed of concrete and gave us a cup of tea before sending us on our way. We thought the world was a friendly place.

In the countryside we practised what the French call ‘camping sauvage,’ wild camping, without fear or interference: that is to say we pitched our tents whenever we were tired and wherever we could find what seemed to us a good enough corner. In Europe, at least, such camping is now strictly forbidden, verboten, vietato, prohibido, the inevitable consequence, I suppose, of the vast increase in the numbers of people moving around. People who wish to camp are now dragooned into camping sites, where there are all kinds of facilities for them. It is one of the ironies of the world that the freer people are to roam, the less worthwhile it is to do so, and the more constrained by regulations their supposed freedom is.

Humanitarian Wars and Their NGO Foot-Soldiers

Governmental funding of NGOs has been an increasingly effective tool for mobilizing popular support for governmental policies

by Daniel McAdams

In February, 2011, Soliman Bouchuiguir told a lie. It was a big one. As the head of the Libyan League for Human Rights, Bouchuiguir initiated a petition that was eventually signed by 70 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) demanding that the US, EU, and UN “mobilize the United Nations and the international community and take immediate action to halt the mass atrocities now being perpetrated by the Libyan government against its own people.”

The petition invoked the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine, a 2005 UN policy shift away from respect for national sovereignty toward green-lighting “humanitarian intervention,” including with military force, anywhere human rights are suspected of being violated.

Bouchuiguir’s petition was designed to tick all the necessary boxes of the R2P criteria. It reported that Libyan leader Gaddafi was deliberately killing peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders. He was using snipers to fire on Libyans at random, using helicopter gunships and fighter jets to attack, and even firing artillery shells into the crowd. The petition was where we first saw the oft-repeated line that the Gaddafi regime was employing foreign mercenaries against his own people.

Speaking in support of his petition before the UN Human Rights Council a few days later, Bouchuiguir claimed that Gaddafi had already killed 6,000 of his own people and was determined to kill many more. Based on his testimony and the petition signed by the 70 NGOs, Libya was suspended from membership in the UN Human Rights Council. On the strength of that suspension the issue was moved along rapidly to the UN Security Council, where teeth would soon be put into the campaign for military intervention.

A troubled young mother is shot dead and our ruling class applauds

The praetorians are way out of control 

By ESTHER GOLDBERG

An unarmed 34-year-old woman suffering from postpartum depression is surrounded by the authorities while sitting in her car, and gunned down in cold blood. She is blocked in. She cannot move. And yet she is killed by heavily armed security officers. Her one-year old child witnesses this from the back seat. Why is this not a national tragedy?

Miriam Carey was a young African-American woman who wanted to better herself. She went to college and graduated with a BA degree in health and nutrition science. She became a dental hygienist. One of her neighbors noted that it was obvious she was educated. She gave birth to her daughter a year ago and began to suffer from postpartum depression. She displayed some irrational behavior and was put on medication.

Thus far it’s not an uncommon story. About 50% of women who give birth suffer from postpartum depression. A friend of mine was on medication for more than 8 years after her daughter was born. This might conceivably happen to my daughter. Or to one of Obama’s daughters, come to think of it.

Then, on October 3, Miriam crashed her car into a security barrier near the White House. She was surrounded by security men shouting at her and pointing high-power guns. Was it so irrational to try to escape, to protect her daughter from men pointing pistols at her? A chase ensued, and she then crashed her car into a median somewhere in the vicinity of the Congress. She was blocked by security forces from several agencies. She could not move. She was unarmed, and alone save for her daughter. In her car, unprotected. And then she was killed.

After the Boston Marathon killings, Boston police spent over 2 hours in a stand-off gun fight with the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. They threw flash-bang grenades to disorient him. They brought in a negotiator to talk him into giving himself up. Eventually he did, and he walked out alive. But Miriam was not given that chance. She was trapped in her car, just sitting there. And they killed her. They emptied multiple rounds of ammunition before dragging her body from the car, her one-year old child witnessing all this from the back seat.

Are we so dead to any instinct of what is owed a mother that we are not shocked by this? We have read of police who kill without asking questions, and are inured to it. But a mother? I would have thought that ordinary Americans would be revolted by this. And then the murdering police get a standing ovation from the men and women of the Senate. Yes, kill Miriam. Take no chances. Our lives are precious. Her life and the life of people like her are not.

'Confusionists', Mao and urban morality

"Spiritual pollution" and the New China

By Francesco Sisci 
BEIJING - It is hard to understand and reconcile the appeal of Maoist thought and its communist drive in China with the freewheeling turbo-capitalism one sees in the same country nowadays. The simple - and certainly true - answer is that people miss the egalitarian spirit even though they do not pine for the poverty and social and political duress of the past. 

Perhaps there is also a more complicated element to the picture. In the early 1980s, China launched a campaign against "spiritual pollution". It was aimed at rooting out the Western values seeping through society that were considered the ultimate cause of the Wall of Democracy movement in Xidan. A couple of years before, those demonstrations asked for political and economic reforms. The institutionally materialistic Communist Party saw correctly that a "spiritual" element needed to be addressed while China was in the process of implementing economic reforms. 

The cure, one can say now, was wrong - incoming Western values were helping rather than thwarting economic reforms - but the analysis was right. A huge change was occurring in the Chinese mindset and that had to be addressed as the real root of all evils. 

Checkmate in Baghdad and Geneva

A bear toying with a cocker spaniel

by G. Murphy Donovan 

“Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.” - JFK

War is a messy business. Serial wars get even more untidy over time. Often, it’s hard to know where one begins and another ends. Such is the case today as the Arab spring looks like another Muslim winter. America and Europe stumble from one conflict venue to another wondering what happened to all those rosy assertions about jasmine, justice, moderation, and modernity. The Islamic world is a mess and no one has a clue as to where or how the sequential mayhem ends. In Syria, the nanny states of the West are again perched on the brink of another sectarian and/or tribal abyss.

Nonetheless, the optimism of intervention still prevails. Today you hear argument after argument about the responsibilities of power and success – or preaching about very selective humanitarian concerns. If you read enough foreign policy analysis you might come to believe that someone has the answer, or that somehow Europe and America have the “responsibility” to make the Third World well. Never mind that the very words “developing” and “emerging” have become geo-political oxymorons, triumphs of hope over experience.

Ironically, the grand strategy, if there is one, when you strip away the boilerplate, can be summarized with a single word - that word is “more.” More is the mantra of imprudent expectations; bailouts at home and flailouts abroad. If one “investment” doesn’t work, surely the original sacrifice wasn’t big enough. No thought seems to be given to developing a new game plan. More aid, more pandering, more troops, more drones, or more missile strikes; but never more common sense. It’s always more, and more is never enough.

And now "more" is accompanied by “red line” moralizing, the color coded version of chicken. Alas, the no-fault/default cultures of Europe and America are unlikely enforcers of any kind of norms and standards in the less civilized world. The West insists, ironically, on measures of accountability and restraint that have been abandoned in Europe and America. Political decay, especially in the First World, has consequences.

All the rhetoric about global responsibility is a rehash of the “white man’s burden” trope. Worse still, the hand-wringing and preaching seems to validate “orientalism,” guilt driven theories that excuse and forgive Muslim pathology because the chaos is thought to be the results of European racism, colonialism, or exploitation.

The Folly of Scientism

Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole

By Austin L. Hughes

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.

Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”

Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

Government Shutdown Jitters

Even the soundest government, the toughest morale and the most robust society bear only a certain maximum of state activity, state finance and state intervention

BY JR NYQUIST

In a book written in 1944 under the original title of Civitas Humana, the economist Wilhelm Roepke asked, “Has there ever been such lack of character, so little civic courage, so much conformity and cynical opportunism, so many weak knees as in our generation?” In 2013 we can answer in the affirmative; for if Communism was allowed to run rampant after 1917, and National Socialism after 1933, we have added appreciably to the mix with our own variation on the theme. America is collapsing under a regime of regulation and social engineering that has not been fully understood, not even by the so-called conservatives. As a consequence, our national government continues to plunge toward bankruptcy while our society is helpless to do anything. Even attempts by the U.S. House of Representatives are bound to prove futile, especially given the overall media climate.

Every year the federal budget grows and overgrows. Decade after decade the government gets more intrusive. Regulations pile on regulations. The national economy is struggling. At the same time we avert our eyes. As Christopher Lasch once observed, “If the designation of contemporary culture as a culture of narcissism has any merit, it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of ‘evolutionary’ solutions….” Lasch believed our problems were driven by social pathologies which he listed as follows: “the emergence of the egalitarian family, so-called; the child’s increasing exposure to other socializing agencies besides the family; and the general effect of modern mass culture in breaking down distinctions between illusions and reality.”

This last item, where the line between reality and illusion has been fudged, helps to explain why the country is able to move forward on false economic principles so readily – as if nothing bad is happening. The fact is, of course, that this advance toward catastrophe is ongoing and inexorable. We are in grave danger, yet we do not act effectively to avert the danger.

“The first and perhaps the worst danger of all,” Roepke warned, “is the overburdening of the nation – something which in itself is already a characteristic feature of the modern interventionist ‘welfare’ state….” This overburdening strikes at the heart of sound economy, financial sense, and lawful order. Bankruptcy from runaway state expenditure occurs in concert with a plethora of evils, and may lead to lawlessness, corruption, societal demoralization and even anarchy. “Even the soundest government,” Roepke continued, “can be burdened only with a certain optimum of activity. If this is over-reached then the balance between the collective organization and the individual is destroyed.”

Machiavelli’s enterprise

The effectual versus the imagined truth

by Harvey Mansfield

Machiavelli's philosophical musings on truth are just was important as his work on politics.

Five hundred years ago, on December 10, 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a letter to a friend in Rome describing one day in his life as an exile from Florence and remarked casually that he had just completed writing The Prince. This momentous book, together with its companion, the Discourses on Livy, neither published until after his death, announces an enterprise affecting all human beings today: the creation of the modern world.

Machiavelli is famous for his infamy, for being “Machiavellian,” but his importance is almost universally underestimated. The extent of his consequence is not appreciated and the size of his ambition is little known. He makes it possible, even easy, to suppose that his ambition is confined to place-hunting with Lorenzo de’ Medici and service as drill-master of the Florentine republic—as if his thought was bounded by his employment opportunities. Of course everyone senses his greatness as a writer, a master of Italian prose with a gift for an acute phrase, often worth citing for effect but almost never actually avowed for use. “I am a Machiavellian” is something one doesn’t hear. But in addition to his insights, which in truth are deliberately exaggerated, he does not receive much respect as a guide to the future. But a guide with foresight is just what Machiavelli is, if one adds that he made the future to which he guides us.

To see how important Machiavelli was one must first examine how important he meant to be. In theDiscourses he says he has a “natural desire” to “work for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone.” A natural desire is in human nature, not just in the humans of Machiavelli’s time, and the beneficiaries will be everyone, all humanity—not just his native country or city. He goes on to say that he has “decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone.” He will benefit everyone by taking a new path; he is not just imitating the ancients or contributing to the Renaissance, that rebirth of the ancients, though obviously his new path makes use of the them. In the middle of The Prince he declares: “I depart from the orders of others,” also emphasizing his originality. One soon learns that he departs from the tradition of thought that begins with Greek, or Socratic, philosophy, as well as from the Bible. All this he refers to elsewhere as “my enterprise.”

Orwell’s Big Brother: Merely Fiction?

Orwell’s collectivist world of the future is doubtless a nightmare – but is it merely a dream?

By Murray N. Rothbard

In recent years, many writers have given us their vision of the coming collectivist future. At the turn of the century, neither Edward Bellamy nor H. G. Wells suspected that the collectivist societies of their dreams were so close at hand. As collectivism sprouted following World War I, many keen observers felt that there was a big difference between the idyllic Edens pictured by Bellamy and Wells and the actual conditions of the various “waves of the future.”

Notable among these revised forecasts of the world of the future were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Both of their future worlds, evil as they were, had saving graces. Huxley’s future was spiritually dead, but at least the masses were happy; Ayn Rand’s dictators were timid, stupid men who permitted a renascent individualist to escape from the strangling collectivist world and begin life anew.

George Orwell’s collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no hope at all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect on the reader is devastating. Orwell’s future is run by a Party whose job is the total exercise of Power, and it goes about its job with diabolic efficiency and ingenuity. The Party represents itself as the embodiment of the principles of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. These principles turn out to be: blind, unquestioning obedience to the Party, and equally blind hatred of any person or group the Party proclaims as its enemy. These emotions are the only ones permitted to anybody; all others, such as personal and family love, are systematically stamped out.

The Anglosphere miracle

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk

by Daniel Hannan

There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilization.” What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization—and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.

—Winston Churchill, 1938

The liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England.

—John Adams, 1763

When I was four years old, a mob attacked our family farm. There was a back entrance, a footpath into the hills, and my mother led me there by the hand. “We’re going to play a game,” she told me. “If we have to come this way again, we must do it without making a sound.”

My father was having none of it. He had a duty to the farm workers, he said, and wasn’t going to be driven off his own land by hooligans bussed in from the city.

He was suffering, I remember, from one of those diseases that periodically afflict white men in the tropics, and he sat in his dressing-gown, loading his revolver with paper-thin hands.

This was the Peru of General Velasco, whose putsch in 1968 had thrown the country into a state of squalor from which it has only recently recovered. Having nationalized the main industries, Velasco decreed a program of land reform under which farms were broken up and given to his military cronies.

As invariably happens when governments plunder their citizens, groups of agitators decided to take the law into their own hands. It was the same story as in the Spanish Second Republic, or Allende’s Chile: The police, seeing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to protect property.

Knowing that no help would come from the authorities, my father and two security guards dispersed the gang with shots as they attempted to burn down the front gates. The danger passed.

Not everyone was so lucky. There were land-invasions and confiscations all over the country. The mines and fishing fleets were seized. Foreign investment fled and companies repatriated their employees. The large Anglo-Peruvian community into which I had been born all but disappeared.

Only many years later did it strike me that no one had been especially surprised. There was a weary acceptance that, in South America, property was insecure, the rule of law fragile, and civil government contingent. What you owned might at any moment be snatched away, either with or without official sanction. Regimes came and went, and constitutions were ephemeral.

At the same time it was assumed, by South Americans as well as by expatriates, that such things didn’t happen in the English-speaking world. As I grew up, attending boarding school in the United Kingdom but returning to Peru for most of my vacations, I began to wonder at the contrast.

Sundown in America : The Keynesian State-Wreck Ahead

Sundown in America is well-nigh unavoidable

by David A. Stockman

The median U.S. household income in 2012 was $51,000, but that’s nothing to crow about. That same figure was first reached way back in 1989--- meaning that the living standard of Main Street America has gone nowhere for the last quarter century. Since there was no prior span in U.S. history when real household incomes remained dead-in-the-water for 25 years, it cannot be gainsaid that the great American prosperity machine has stalled out.

Even worse, the bottom of the socio-economic ladder has actually slipped lower and, by some measures, significantly so. The current poverty rate of 15 percent was only 12.8 percent back in 1989; there are now 48 million people on food stamps compared to 18 million then; and more than 16 million children lived poverty households last year or one-third more than a quarter century back.

Likewise, last year the bottom quintile of households struggled to make ends meet on $11,500 annually ----a level 20 percent lower than the $14,000 of constant dollar income the bottom 20 million households had available on average twenty-five years ago. 

Then, again, not all of the vectors have pointed south. Back in 1989 the Dow-Jones index was at 3,000, and by 2012 it was up five-fold to 15,000.  Likewise, the aggregate wealth of the Forbes 400 clocked in at $300 billion back then, and now stands at more than $2 trillion---a gain of 7X.

 And the big gains were not just limited to the 400 billionaires. We have had a share the wealth movement of sorts--- at least among the top rungs of the ladder. By contrast to the plight of the lower ranks, there has been nothing dead-in-the-water about the incomes of the 5 million U.S. households which comprise the top five percent. They enjoyed an average income of $320,000 last year, representing a sprightly 33 percent gain from the $240,000 inflation-adjusted level of 1989.

The same top tier of households had combined net worth of about $10 trillion back at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term.  And by the beginning of Barrack Obama’s second term that had grown to $50 trillion, meaning that just the $40 trillion gain among the very top 5 percent rung is nearly double the entire current net worth of the remaining 95 percent of American households.

So, no, Sean Hannity need not have fretted about the alleged left-wing disciple of Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers who ascended to the oval office in early 2009. During Obama’s initial four years, in fact, 95 percent of the entire gain in household income in America was captured by the top 1 percent. 

Some other things were rising smartly during the last quarter century, too. The Pentagon budget was $450 billion in today’s dollars during the year in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Now we have no industrial state enemies left on the planet: Russia has become a kleptocracy led by a thief who prefers stealing from his own people rather than his neighbors; and China, as the Sneakers and Apple factory of the world, would collapse into economic chaos almost instantly---if it were actually foolish enough to bomb its 4,000 Wal-Mart outlets in America.

Still, facing no serious military threat to the homeland, the defense budget has risen to $650 billion----that is, it has ballooned by more than 40 percent in constant dollars since the Cold War ended 25 year ago. Washington obviously didn’t get the memo, nor did the Harvard “peace” candidate elected in 2008, who promptly re-hired the Bush national security team and then beat his mandate for plough shares into an even mightier sword than the one bequeathed him by the statesman from Yale he replaced.

Toilet Paper Only in the Hereafter

The Hygienically Challenged Crack-Up Boom

by Pater Tenebrarum

Readers may recall that we have reported on the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela before. At the time our suggestion to the Venezuelan authorities was to simply replace toilet paper with the country's currency, the Bolivar, as evidently there is more than enough of that to go around.

The great leader Hugo Chavez is no longer among the quick. He therefore doesn't have to grapple with the problem anymore – we are assuming that there are no toilet paper shortages in the Hereafter. So one way of getting a decent wipe nowadays if you're a citizen of Venezuela is to follow the great leader of the revolution into the Great Beyond.

Back in May of this year, Venezuela's rulers made the following promise: 

"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper. We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down." 

But wouldn't you know, in spite of their near complete control over the country's economy, the darn capitalists have somehow thwarted them again!

Obviously, the revolution has a lot of work left to do in order to create the socialist Utopia Venezuelans have been assured will be theirs. The Land of Cockaigne, where the roasted chickens will fly into the comrade's mouths unbidden and toilet paper will be abundant – its creation continues to be obstructed by the machinations of evil capitalist hoarders. So the revolutionaries have decided to strike at the root of the problem. 

Bloomberg writes: 

“Venezuela's government is known for its state-must-do-it-all mindset, inherited from late President Hugo Chavez and his radical followers, known as Chavistas. But late last week, the notoriously inefficient government went above and beyond to shine its populist credentials: It stepped right into Venezuelan bathrooms.

On Sept. 20, President Nicolas Maduro and a new economic panel ordered national price regulator Sundecop to “temporarily” seize plants owned by Manufacturas de Papel CA, orManpa, the company that supplies 40 percent of the country’s demand for toilet paper and personal-care paper goods. Their reasoning? To oversee production, because consumers can't seem to find enough rolls of toilet paper. 

(emphasis added)

We hereby predict that the toilet paper shortage is going to get worse. It is not the only thing in short supply in Caracas these days: 

“It's not just bathroom tissue that's lacking: In recent months, food items such as cooking oil and powdered milk have nearly disappeared from store shelves.

What Does It Mean To ‘Punish’ Syria?

No man may know the future; but we may know something of the past beyond reasonable doubt

by Theodore Dalrymple

The President of France, M. François Hollande, has spoken repeatedly of ‘punishing’ Syria. It is not easy to know precisely what he means by this, since he has also stated that the object of such punishment would not be to overthrow a regime whose one object appears to be to remain in power at all costs, among other reasons in order to avoid just punishment (for its extreme brutality is certainly of no recent date). This regime seems also to have no qualms about inflicting death upon the citizenry under its jurisdiction, so a little collateral damage consequent upon symbolic bombing will hardly cause it to change heart. It is difficult, indeed, to see what purpose M. Hollande’s punishment could possibly serve, other than the relief of the virtuous feelings of M. Hollande himself.

To say that the President of France is now viewed with contempt by many of his countrymen is considerably to understate matters. During a televised debate in the last presidential election, M. Hollande made a famous pseudo-extemporaneous speech in which he said emphatically ‘Moi, président, I would do this, moi, président, I would do that, moi, président , I would do the other thing…’ After his election, a satirical television programme changed a vowel and called him Mou président (Soft or feeble president), and that is how most Frenchmen now see him – Mou président.

Perhaps, then, his belligerence towards Syria is best seen as an attempt to prove to his electors that he is a firm and decisive leader in the face of evil. If so it certainly has not worked, quite the contrary, for he has yet to persuade his countrymen that any of their vital interests are at stake or that his proposed strategy would result in benefit rather than harm. They are perhaps aware that theirs is the first country in the world in which massacres were carried out in the name of the Rights of Man. And the fact that France could not possibly do anything without the leadership of the United States, whose decision to act against Syria had not been taken at the time M. Hollande made his own threats, has made him appear even more maladroit, weak and foolish than usual.

The wish of the leaders of Britain and France to interfere militarily in distant countries consorts ill with their policy of reducing expenditure on the armed forces the better to preserve their ability to keep their populations quiet, or quiescent, by means of government subventions of one kind or another. But even that aside, M. Hollande’s choice of word, punish, seems to me odd and ill-chosen: for one can rightfully punish only those whom one has some constituted authority: and France has not been the mandatory power in Syria since the end of the 1940s. It seems unlikely that the United Nations, given the stance of Russia, will ever give France (or any country else) the supposed legal authority to act against Syria, and therefore if M. Hollande acts at all it will have to be on his own moral authority, of which he has very little.

There is yet more: for as punitive as M. Hollande wants to be towards Syria, over whom he has no jurisdiction, he is as lenient to criminals and delinquents in what the French call the Hexagon, which roughly captures the cartographic shape of their country, for which he does have considerable responsibility. Here his policy is not to imprison malefactors, but to give them the kinds of punishments that, across the Channel, have been proved not to work, neither as deterrents, correctives or – most importantly – as preventives.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

Once famous as a land of opportunity, the Golden State is now awash in inequality, growing poverty, and downward mobility that’s practically medieval

Farmworker Cristina Melendez, 36, and her mother Maria Rosales, 60, working on the vegetable garden outside the mother's apartment in Fresno, Calif. on June 1, 2013. Rosales, now a U.S. citizen, brought Melendez to work in California's fields when the girl was 13, hoping farm work would be a spring board to a better life, but Melendez has yet to find a way out of the cycle of poverty.

by Joel Kotkin

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.