Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s fading populist

The country’s president has drawn little sympathy in spite of ill-health

By John Paul Rathbone and Benedict Mander

When Pope Francis held an audience with Cristina Fernández in March, his first with any head of state, the meeting of the two Argentines was a study in contrasts. While the former was serene and dressed in white, Ms Fernández wore widow’s weeds and appeared coquettish, her eyes circled in kohl.

“Oops, can I do that?” she said, touching his sleeve and giggling like a schoolgirl. “I never imagined I would meet the Pope,” she mumbled, crossing her hands across her chest.

It was an unusual show of humility from a politician known for her imperious style and sharp tongue. As she once said: “The only thing to fear is God – and me a little, too.” But this week Ms Fernández was cast in another unfamiliar role: that of invalid.

Following a bump to her head two months ago, Ms Fernández, 60, was diagnosed with blood on the brain and rushed to hospital. Although this is a routine procedure, her forced exit has provoked a near constitutional crisis and brought Argentina’s problems to a climax worthy of an Almodóvar movie.

Ms Fernández’s populist model, part of the region’s “pink tide”, is receding. The Asian-driven boom in commodity prices, which has powered Latin America’s third-biggest economy for a decade, is ending. Ignored by world leaders – delegates at last month’s Group of 20 leading nations meeting in St Petersburg unplugged their headphones as she spoke – her popularity has also slumped at home. Ms Fernandez’s frequent migraines and delicate health have led some to wonder if she is a “woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown”.

The debut of this bus driver’s daughter on the world stage, when her husband, Néstor Kirchner, unexpectedly won the 2003 election, was almost as dramatic. They met as law students, and before entering politics shared a legal practice recovering foreclosed properties – the perfect background in a country that had defaulted on $100bn of bonds.

America’s default on its debt is inevitable

How can a creditor cry foul when the government to which he is lending has repeatedly said that the value of the money he lent will shrink?

By James Grant

“There is precedent for a government shutdown,” Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, remarked last week. “There’s no precedent for default.”

How wrong he is.

The U.S. government defaulted after the Revolutionary War, and it defaulted at intervals thereafter. Moreover, on the authority of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the government means to keep right on shirking, dodging or trimming, if not legally defaulting.

Default means to not pay as promised, and politics may interrupt the timely service of the government’s debts. The consequences of such a disruption could — as everyone knows by now — set Wall Street on its ear. But after the various branches of government resume talking and investors have collected themselves, the Treasury will have no trouble finding the necessary billions with which to pay its bills. The Federal Reserve can materialize the scrip on a computer screen.

Things were very different when America owed the kind of dollars that couldn’t just be whistled into existence. By 1790, the new republic was in arrears on $11,710,000 in foreign debt. These were obligations payable in gold and silver. Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, duly paid them. In doing so, he cured a default.

Hamilton’s dollar was defined as a little less than 1/20 of an ounce of gold. So were those of his successors, all the way up to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in the whirlwind of the “first hundred days” of the New Deal, the dollar came in for redefinition. The country needed a cheaper and more abundant currency, FDR said. By and by, the dollar’s value was reduced to 1/35 of an ounce of gold.

By any fair definition, this was another default. Creditors both domestic and foreign had lent dollars weighing just what the Founders had said they should weigh. They expected to be repaid in identical money.

Language to this effect — a “gold clause” — was standard in debt contracts of the time, including instruments binding the Treasury. But Congress resolved to abrogate those contracts, and in 1935 the Supreme Court upheld Congress.

The “American default,” as this piece of domestic stimulus was known in foreign parts , provoked condemnation in the City of London. “One of the most egregious defaults in history,” judged the London Financial News. “For repudiation of the gold clause is nothing less than that. The plea that recent developments have created abnormal circumstances is wholly irrelevant. It was precisely against such circumstances that the gold clause was designed to safeguard bondholders.”

The lighter Roosevelt dollar did service until 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon lightened it again. In fact, Nixon allowed it to float. No longer was the value of the greenback defined in law as a particular weight of gold or silver. It became what it looked like: a piece of paper.

Yet the U.S. government continued to find trusting creditors. Since the Nixon default, the public’s holdings of the federal debt have climbed from $303 billion to $11.9 trillion.

A Corrupt System That Rewards Stupidity

Paying no price for being wrong is a stupid way of making decisions

by Marc Faber

For the greater part of human history, leaders who were in a position to exercise power were accountable for their actions. If they waged wars or had to defend their territories from invading hostile forces, they frequently lost their lives, territories, armies, power and crowns. I don’t deny that some leaders were irresponsible, but in general, they were fully aware that they were responsible for their acts and, therefore, they acted responsibly.

The problem we are faced with today is that our political and (frequently) business leaders are not being held responsible for their actions. Thomas Sowell sums it up well:

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

When political leaders or economic policymakers are seen to fail, the worst that will happen to them is that they won’t be re-elected or reappointed. They then become a lobbyist or an adviser or consultant, and give speeches, earning in the process a high income on top of their pension.

Similarly, many corporate executives and fund managers who have no personal stake in the business that employs them will receive generous pensions even if they fail to do their job properly and are dismissed. (This doesn’t apply to hedge fund managers, most of whose wealth is invested in their funds.) In other words, probably for the first time in history, we have today a system where leaders are not only not punished for their failures, but are actually rewarded…

Recently, Warren Buffett said that the Fed was the world’s largest hedge fund. He is wrong. The world’s largest hedge funds are owned by people who are risk takers with their own money, since they are usually the largest investors in their funds. The academics at the Fed are playing with other people’s money.

However, if we consider that the Fed, led by its chairman, is the most powerful organization in the world — because by printing money, it can finance the government (fiscal deficits) and wars, manipulate the cost of money (interest rates), directly intervene in the economy by bailing out failing institutions (banks) or countries (Greece, etc.), intervene in the foreign exchange market and even influence elections — then the question arises whether it makes sense that so much power should be given to Fed members, who are “group thinking” academics and most of whom have never worked in the private sector. In my opinion, the enormous power of the “academic” Fed is a frightening thought. My friend Fred Sheehan recently quoted from Johann Peter Eckermann’s conversation with Goethe, Feb. 1, 1827. We talked about the professors who, after they had found a better theory, still ignored it. From Eckermann and Goethe:

“‘This is not to be wondered at,’ said Goethe; ‘such people continue in error because they are indebted to it for their existence. They would have to learn everything over again, and that would be very inconvenient.’ 

“‘But,’ said I, ‘how can their experiments prove the truth when the basis for their evaluation is false?’ 

“‘They do not prove the truth,’ said Goethe, ‘nor is such the intention; the only point with these professors is to prove their own opinion. On this account, they conceal all experiments that would reveal the truth and show their doctrine untenable. Then the scholars — what do they care for truth? They, like the rest, are perfectly satisfied if they can prate away empirically; that is the whole matter.’”

Environmentalism as Religion

Carbon Calvinism and the Theology of Ecology

By Joel Garreau

Traditional religion is having a tough time in parts of the world. Majorities in most European countries have told Gallup pollsters in the last few years that religion does not “occupy an important place” in their lives. Across Europe, Judeo-Christian church attendance is down, as is adherence to religious prohibitions such as those against out-of-wedlock births. And while Americans remain, on average, much more devout than Europeans, there are demographic and regional pockets in this country that resemble Europe in their religious beliefs and practices.

The rejection of traditional religion in these quarters has created a vacuum unlikely to go unfilled; human nature seems to demand a search for order and meaning, and nowadays there is no shortage of options on the menu of belief. Some searchers syncretize Judeo-Christian theology with Eastern or New Age spiritualism. Others seek through science the ultimate answers of our origins, or dream of high-tech transcendence by merging with machines — either approach depending not on rationalism alone but on a faith in the goodness of what rationalism can offer.

For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism. It has become “the religion of choice for urban atheists,” according to Michael Crichton, the late science fiction writer (and climate change skeptic). In a widely quoted 2003 speech, Crichton outlined the ways that environmentalism “remaps” Judeo-Christian beliefs:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

In parts of northern Europe, this new faith is now the mainstream. “Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are nonreligious and don’t worship Jesus or Vishnu, don’t revere sacred texts, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world’s great faiths,” observes Phil Zuckerman in his 2008 book Society without God. Instead, he writes, these places have become “clean and green.” This new faith has very concrete policy implications; the countries where it has the most purchase tend also to have instituted policies that climate activists endorse. To better understand the future of climate policy, we must understand where “ecotheology” has come from and where it is likely to lead.

From Theology to Ecotheology

The German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the word “ecology” in the nineteenth century to describe the study of “all those complex mutual relationships” in nature that “Darwin has shown are the conditions of the struggle for existence.” Of course, mankind has been closely studying nature since the dawn of time. Stone Age religion aided mankind’s first ecological investigation of natural reality, serving as an essential guide for understanding and ordering the environment; it was through story and myth that prehistoric man interpreted the natural world and made sense of it. Survival required knowing how to relate to food species like bison and fish, dangerous predators like bears, and powerful geological forces like volcanoes — and the rise of agriculture required expertise in the seasonal cycles upon which the sustenance of civilization depends.

Our uniquely Western approach to the natural world was shaped fundamentally by Athens and Jerusalem. The ancient Greeks began a systematic philosophical observation of flora and fauna; from their work grew the long study of natural history. Meanwhile, the Judeo-Christian teachings about the natural world begin with the beginning: there is but one God, which means that there is a knowable order to nature; He created man in His image, which gives man an elevated place in that order; and He gave man mastery over the natural world:

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. [Genesis 1:28-29]

In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. This belief in progress was inherent in modern science, which, wedded to technology, made possible the Industrial Revolution. Thus was the power to control nature achieved by a civilization that had inherited the license to exploit it.

To White, this was not a positive historical development. Writing just a few years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s eco-blockbuster Silent Spring, White shared in the concern over techno-industrial culture’s destruction of nature. Whatever benefit scientific and technological innovation had brought mankind was eclipsed by the “out of control” extraction and processing powers of industrial life and the mechanical degradation of the earth. Christianity, writes White, “bears a huge burden of guilt” for the destruction of the environment.

White believed that science and technology could not solve the ecological problems they had created; our anthropocentric Christian heritage is too deeply ingrained. “Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.” But White was not entirely without hope. Even though “no new set of basic values” will “displace those of Christianity,” perhaps Christianity itself can be reconceived. “Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious.” And so White suggests as a model Saint Francis, “the greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history.” Francis should have been burned as a heretic, White writes, for trying “to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule of creation.” Even though Francis failed to turn Christianity toward his vision of radical humility, White argued that something similar to that vision is necessary to save the world in our time.

The Press and Dr. Faustus

Too late, American journalists realize their mistake

By  Victor Davis Hanson

In the old Dr. Faustus story, a young scholar bargains away his soul to the devil for promises of obtaining almost anything he wants.

The American media has done much the same thing with the Obama administration. In return for empowering a fellow liberal, the press gave up its traditional adversarial relationship with the president.

But after five years of basking in a shared progressive agenda, the tab for such ecstasy has come due, and now the media is lamenting that it has lost its soul.

At first, the loss of independence seemed like a minor sacrifice. In 2008, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews sounded almost titillated by an Obama speech, exclaiming, “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” Earlier, New York Times columnist David Brooks had fixated on Obama’s leg rather than his own: “I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president, and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

For worshiper and former Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, Obama was divine: “Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.” TV pundit and presidential historian Michael Beschloss ranked the newly elected Barack Obama as “the smartest guy ever to become president.”

For a press that had exposed Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Monica Lewinsky affair, and had torn apart George W. Bush over everything from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina, this hero worship seemed obsessive. The late liberal reporter Michael Hastings summed up a typical private session between President Obama and the press during the 2012 campaign: “Everyone, myself included, swooned. Swooned! Head over heels. One or two might have even lost their minds. . . . We were all, on some level, deeply obsessed with Obama, crushing hard.”

Sometimes the media and Obama were one big happy family — literally. The siblings of the presidents of ABC News and CBS News are both higher-ups in the Obama administration. The White House press secretary’s wife is a correspondent for ABC’s Good Morning America.

Venezuela running out of time

Inflation Spikes in Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro doesn’t understand inflation, apparently. Whenever the leader is asked why his country’s inflation rate is soaring at over 49 percent, he delegates a government official to give the typical response: because of speculators, saboteurs, and America, that’s why!

Like many leftist regimes before it, Venezuela spends heavily on social welfare, stifles private industry and fixes its exchange rate so as to not reflect the true value of its currency. Meanwhile, the Central Bank pumps more currency into circulation to artificially maintain the rate of inflation. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be working anymore. The AP:

Venezuela’s Central Bank says prices have risen nearly 50 percent since last September as the country struggles to rein in a quickening rate of inflation and widespread shortages….

Officials say speculators are to blame for soaring prices and shortages.

This has eerie echoes of past Latin American socialist regimes, most notably Chile’s Salvador Allende. The Allende regime’s overzealous agenda of redistribution, wage increases and fiscal stimulus drove the country deep into debt and drove inflation to a peak of 86 percent before Chile defaulted on its loans (at which point inflation rose above 600 percent). Earlier this year Venezuela devalued its currency, the fifth time it has done so since 2003. As is often the case with distorted currencies, a prominent black market for dollars has emerged.

While Hugo Chavez mostly evaded blame for his country’s problems, Maduro doesn’t enjoy the same uncanny adoration as his predecessor. Currency manipulation and the official runaround can’t obscure the ugly facts of economic ruin, and the Venezuelan people are learning some unpleasant truths about the path their country has chosen. 

Homeland Security set for next Wall St collapse

Next time will not be different

By Ellen Brown 
Reports are that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in a massive, covert military buildup. An article in the Associated Press in February confirmed an open purchase order by DHS for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. According to an op-ed in Forbes, that’s enough to sustain an Iraq-sized war for over 20 years. 

DHS has also acquired heavily armored tanks, which have been seen roaming the streets. Evidently somebody in government is expecting some serious civil unrest. The question is, why? 

Recently revealed statements by former UK prime minister Gordon Brown at the height of the banking crisis in October 2008 could give some insights into that question. An article on BBC News on September 21, 2013, drew from an explosive autobiography called Power Trip by Brown's spin doctor Damian McBride, who said the prime minister was worried that law and order could collapse during the financial crisis. 

McBride quoted Brown as saying:

If the banks are shutting their doors, and the cash points aren't working, and people go to Tesco [a grocery chain] and their cards aren't being accepted, the whole thing will just explode.

If you can't buy food or petrol or medicine for your kids, people will just start breaking the windows and helping themselves.

And as soon as people see that on TV, that's the end, because everyone will think that's OK now, that's just what we all have to do. It'll be anarchy. That's what could happen tomorrow.

How to deal with that threat? Brown said, "We'd have to think: do we have curfews, do we put the army on the streets, how do we get order back?" 

McBride wrote in his book, "It was extraordinary to see Gordon so totally gripped by the danger of what he was about to do, but equally convinced that decisive action had to be taken immediately." He compared the threat to the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Fear of this threat was echoed in September 2008 by then US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, who reportedly warned that the US government might have to resort to martial law if Wall Street were not bailed out from the credit collapse. 

In both countries, martial law was avoided when their legislatures succumbed to pressure and bailed out the banks. But many pundits are saying that another collapse is imminent; and this time, governments may not be so willing to step up to the plate. 

What triggered the 2008 crisis was a run, not on the conventional banking system but in the "shadow" banking system, a collection of non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but are unregulated. They include hedge funds, money market funds, credit investment funds, exchange-traded funds, private equity funds, securities broker dealers, securitization and finance companies. Investment banks and commercial banks may also conduct much of their business in the shadows of this unregulated system. 

The shadow financial casino has only grown larger since 2008, and in the next Lehman-style collapse, government bailouts may not be available. According to President Barack Obama in his remarks on the Dodd-Frank Act on July 15, 2010, "Because of this reform, ... there will be no more taxpayer funded bailouts - period." 

Governments in Europe are also shying away from further bailouts. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) in Switzerland has therefore required the systemically risky banks to devise "living wills" setting forth what they will do in the event of insolvency. The template established by the FSB requires them to "bail in" their creditors; and depositors, it turns out, are the largest class of bank creditor. (For fuller discussion, see my earlier article here.) 

When depositors cannot access their bank accounts to get money for food for the kids, they could well start breaking store windows and helping themselves. Worse, they might plot to overthrow the financier-controlled government. Witness Greece, where increasing disillusionment with the ability of the government to rescue the citizens from the worst depression since 1929 has precipitated riots and threats of violent overthrow. 

The Population Control Holocaust

"Progressives" vs "Black Children"

Babies born in China in spite of the one-child policy are declared “black children” and have no right to food, health care, or education. If female, they are frequently killed, either at birth, or if apprehended later, at orphanages where they are gathered. Shown above is Mei Ming, a two-year-old girl tied to a chair in a “dying room.” The bucket below her is to catch her urine and feces as she dies over the next several days from starvation and neglect. The above photo was taken by a British TV crew during their filming of the 1995 documentary exposé The Dying Rooms. The Chinese government denies the existence of dying rooms.

By Robert Zubrin

There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.

While Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)
Until the mid-1960s, American population control programs, both at home and abroad, were largely funded and implemented by private organizations such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood — groups with deep roots in the eugenics movement. While disposing of millions of dollars provided to them by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Milbank Foundations, among others, the resources available to support their work were meager in comparison with their vast ambitions. This situation changed radically in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. Congress, responding to the agitation of overpopulation  ideologues, finally appropriated federal funds to underwrite first domestic and then foreign population control programs. Suddenly, instead of mere millions, there were hundreds of millions and eventually billions of dollars available to fund global campaigns of mass abortion and forced sterilization. The result would be human catastrophe on a worldwide scale.

Among the first to be targeted were America’s own Third World population at home — the native American Indians. Starting in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall began to make use of newly available Medicaid money to set up sterilization programs at federally funded Indian Health Services (IHS) hospitals. As reported by Angela Franks in her 2005 book Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy:

These sterilizations were frequently performed without adequate informed consent....  Native American physician Constance Redbird Uri estimated that up to one-quarter of Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized by 1977; in one hospital in Oklahoma, one-fourth of the women admitted (for any reason) left sterilized.... She also gathered evidence that all the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma were sterilized in the 1970s....

Unfortunately, and amazingly, problems with the Indian Health Service seem to persist ... recently [in the early 1990s], in South Dakota, IHS was again accused of not following informed-consent procedures, this time for Norplant, and apparently promoted the long-acting contraceptive to Native American women who should not use it due to contraindicating, preexisting medical conditions. The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center reports that one woman was recently told by her doctors that they would remove the implant only if she would agree to a tubal ligation. The genocidal dreams of bureaucrats still cast their shadow on American soil.

Programs of a comparable character were also set up in clinics funded by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in low-income (predominantly black) neighborhoods in the United States. Meanwhile, on the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, a mass sterilization program was instigated by the Draper Fund/Population Crisis Committee and implemented with federal funds from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the island’s major hospitals as well as a host of smaller clinics. According to the report of a medical fact-finding mission conducted in 1975, the effort was successful in sterilizing close to one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age.

Better Dead Than Red

However, it was not at home but abroad that the heaviest artillery of the population control onslaught was directed. During the Cold War, anything from the Apollo program to public-education funding could be sold to the federal government if it could be justified as part of the global struggle against communism. Accordingly, ideologues at some of the highest levels of power and influence formulated a party line that the population of the world’s poor nations needed to be drastically cut in order to reduce the potential recruitment pool available to the communist cause. President Lyndon Johnson was provided a fraudulent study by a RAND Corporation economist that used cooked calculations to “prove” that Third World children actually had negative economic value. Thus, by allowing excessive numbers of children to be born, Asian, African, and Latin American governments were deepening the poverty of their populations, while multiplying the masses of angry proletarians ready to be led against America by the organizers of the coming World Revolution.

Venezuela’s Impending Collapse

After a certain amount of looting, there’s little left to steal

BY MONTY GUILD

We predicted Venezuela’s collapse when Hugo Chávez came to power, and we’ve reiterated this opinion every few years since. The movement towards economic collapse is accelerating. In addition to enriching himself from the public purse, Chávez was profoundly incompetent, and his policies have laid waste to the Venezuelan economy.

We’ve Seen It Many Times Before

A familiar pattern was repeated in Venezuela, just as it has been repeated numerous times before in Latin America and in other developing countries: ignorant and self-serving leaders sell a bill of faulty goods to the uneducated and poverty-stricken masses.

While making grandiose promises of social and economic transformation that would help the people, Mr. Chávez did nothing to lay the groundwork for real growth. For example, his policies did nothing to encourage education or inspire entrepreneurship. Rather, he squandered the national resources that he appropriated, using the national oil company to provide unsustainable handouts internationally and domestically. These handouts can’t last, as he allowed the oil company’s infrastructure to deteriorate and failed to reinvest to maintain and upgrade their facilities. His program was not about growth — it was about wealth redistribution; first to himself, his cronies, and then eventually to the poor. Without growth, the end of the redistribution is close at hand.

Why Is Venezuela’s Strategy Failing?

First, waste. Natural resources, one of the foundations of a country’s wealth and strength, have been distributed to other countries in acts of grandstanding and foolish posturing. Venezuela did this with its oil for several ideological co-travelers in Latin America.

Resources are also wasted through corruption and inefficiency. The state operation of large enterprises tends to become corrupt because the appointment of managerial staff doesn’t depend on competence, but is a matter of distributing political spoils to supporters. Competent technocrats get fired for not kowtowing to the powers that be, and they get replaced by less competent bureaucrats — whose sole qualification is unquestioning support for the regime, not the ability to excel at their job.

Thus, the state oil firm ended up saddled with managers and executives who are not geologists or petroleum engineers — and who aren’t even competent in management itself, let alone the technicalities of the business. The consequence? Falling oil production, increased handouts, and outright theft — and lo and behold, the economic surplus that could have been reinvested in the country’s economy is gone. So, the promises of social programs made to the country’s poor at the start of the whole process can’t be kept. And one of the bones tossed to them — suppressed domestic prices for energy — ensures extravagant waste of petroleum resources in the domestic economy itself. Ultimately, it has led to the squandering of the geological asset that national oil reserves represent for the nation.

Second, much of Venezuela’s program was based upon confiscation. But if you take enough from the rich, they eventually leave — taking financial, intellectual, and entrepreneurial capital with them. So after a certain amount of looting, there’s little left to steal.

I, Airplane

Made on Earth

by DON BOUDREAUX

The above nearly speaks for itself.  Many U.S. imports are indeed inputs used to make manufactured goods in the U.S. And, of course, each of these parts is itself the result of creative minds and parts and raw materials from all around the world.  As Cato’s Dan Ikenson would say, Boeing jetliners are “Made on Earth.”

‘Climate Change Deniers’ Gagged by LA Times

Al Gore Tickled Pink

The above graphic is Figure 1.4 from Chapter 1 of a draft of the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The initials at the top represent the First Assessment Report (FAR) in 1990, the Second (SAR) in 1995. Shaded banks show range of predictions from each of the four climate models used for all four reports since 1990. That last report, AR4, was issued in 2007. Model runs after 1992 were tuned to track temporary cooling due to the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in The Philippines. The black squares, show with uncertainty bars, measure the observed average surface temperatures over the same interval. The range of model runs is syndicated by the vertical bars. The light gray area above and below is not part of the model prediction range. The final version of the new IPCC report, AR5, will be issued later this month.

So the LA Times has concluded it would be best to shut up the people who dare remind us that the actual observations say something completely different from 'AGW' models. Even if said contradictory observations can be found smack in the IPCC report, which incongruently keeps asserting that the 'models' should be take precedence over reality.

by Pater Tenebrarum

After 15 years of no 'warming', even while CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by one third (from about almost nothing to still almost nothing), what is left to do for those whose livelihood and professional pride depends on keeping the doomsday story going?

For the scientists among them it would be a good time to ponder the validity of their models, which have consistently made predictions wide of the mark since they were first created. It may be a good time to have a dialogue with the many scientists who have long proposed alternative theories of the planet's climate cycles (that these cycles do exist and that we have been in a warming cycle for  thousands of years is not denied by anyone) – alternatives to 'AGW', or 'anthropogenic global warming' that is.

However, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in the 1960s, science tends to work within 'accepted paradigms' that are not necessarily progressing toward the truth. Revolutionary theories that are not in keeping with the accepted paradigm may be rejected for a long time, until their correctness can no longer be denied. One should not even blithely assume that all 'later' science is necessarily better than 'earlier' science. At times valuable knowledge even gets lost and must be rediscovered (economics is a case in point). 

Anyway, many supporters of the AGW theory appear eager to shut off dialogue with opponents altogether. A friend pointed us to a tweet by Al Gore in this context, in which Gore informs us gleefully that: 

The @latimes no longer prints letters that deny manmade global warming. Why? Because they're "factually inaccurate." 

In other words, the LA Times seemingly believes itself to be in possession of the scientific 'truth' and those not accepting the 'facts' it has ascertained beyond doubt have hereby been excommunicated. The 'truth' you see, needs to be protected from naysayers. 

The Arbiters of 'Truth'

The LA Times letter editor's arrogant and patronizing attempt at explaining his decision can be read here. We want to just pick out one sentence that requires instant rebuttal. In an accusing tone he thunders: 

“Many say climate change is a hoax, a scheme by liberals to curtail personal freedom”. 

The 'liberals' (which really should be called leftists or socialists for the sake of precision) are mainly what Lenin would have referred to as 'useful idiots' in this case. Most sure have swallowed the AGW story hook line and sinker.

Speaking of 'factual inaccuracies', can you spot the factual inaccuracy in what the  LA Times letter editor wrote?

Again, absolutely no-one is denying that there is 'climate change'. The planet's climate has changed since day one about four billion years ago and will never crease doing so.

What is at issue and is definitely up for debate is if there is such a thing as 'man-made global warming'. That is obviously a big difference. That proponents of the AGW theory (among them virtually every government) want to 'curtail our freedom' is undeniable. Economic freedom is just as important an aspect of freedom (in our opinion possibly the most important) as other aspects of it.