The Taxi Driver

Don’t turn Norway into Europe’s 11 September

Sections of the European liberal elite are trying to make moral mileage out of this rampage just as shamelessly as the right did with 9/11

By Brendan O’Neill 

When it was reported on Friday that there had been an explosion and an horrific mass shooting in Norway, many observers assumed that al-Qaeda or some other radical Islamist group had struck at the heart of peaceful Scandinavia. ‘Norway’s 9/11’, said the front page of the Sun on Saturday, with the subheading: ‘“Al-Qaeda” massacre.’ Yet when it was revealed that the alleged bomber and shooter is a Norway-born, blonde-haired, farm-owning Aryan, observers quickly bought into the idea that we were faced with something very different from an al-Qaeda attack. This wasn’t ‘Norway’s 9/11’ after all, but something more akin to Columbine-on-steroids, a right-wing madman letting off steam in a most barbaric fashion. As one Norwegian police official put it: this was ‘probably more Norway’s Oklahoma than its World Trade Centre’.

Yet this simplistic categorisation of contemporary terror assaults - where violent outbursts get slotted into files marked ‘Radical Islamist Fury’ or ‘Right-Wing Anger’ - makes too fine a distinction between acts that are actually very similar. Just because something like 7/7 in London was executed by men with dark hair and brown skin who claimed to be fighting on behalf of the Muslim ummah, while the bombing of Oslo and massacre on Utoya were carried out by a white guy who claimed to be protecting European Christian culture, that doesn’t mean these are diametrically different actions. What they have in common is far more important than what separates them. And, stripped of their pseudo-political garb, what unites today’s various terror tantrums, what makes these kind of people possible in the first place, is a very powerful culture of estrangement in modern society.

In much of the media, particularly amongst the respectable broadsheet press, there was a palpable sense of relief when it was revealed that the alleged killer is white with far-right tendencies. This means he is the kind of person we can unambiguously hate. Where Islamist terror attacks, from 9/11 to 7/7, induce in some liberal observers torn and tortured feelings, where they want to condemn the violence but also feel the need to explain it as a natural reaction to evil Western foreign policy, Anders Behring Breivik is someone they can despise in an uncomplicated way. This means that while the attacks may not be ‘Norway’s 9/11’, they could well be the cultural elite’s 9/11 - in the sense that this is an act which the influential liberal classes may seek to politicise in an opportunistic fashion, to make moral mileage out of, in the same way that the right did after 11 September 2001.

Indeed, it is striking the extent to which, post-Utoya, left-leaning observers are already adopting the role normally played by the right in the wake of Islamist terror attacks. That is, they’re ratcheting up the politics of fear, only over the rise of far-right violence rather than radical Islam, and are pinning the blame for these actions on ‘backward European attitudes’ in the same way the right pins the blame for Islamist terror on ‘backward Muslim culture’. So one liberal observer said, almost with a sense of glee, certainly relief, that the attacks in Norway show that the threat to modern society comes not from Muslims but from ‘the heart of darkness [that] lies buried deep within ourselves’, within the ‘white Nordic male’. He said the attacks highlighted xenophobic attitudes in Norway, ‘the rage with which Islamophobia is being spread’. Another commentator blamed the violence on Norway’s ‘racist demons’: ‘Many Norwegians don’t want their idyll spoiled, by either joining the EU, or by turning multicultural - and it is this nativist side of the country that has now turned horrifyingly murderous.’

It is grotesque to depict Breivik as some kind of inevitable product of Norwegian culture, of the Norwegian people’s apparently ‘nativist’ and selfish attitudes. Such collective guilt-mongering, where one cold-blooded killer is seen as an expression of an entire people’s warped national traits, is just as objectionable as when elements on the right claim that something like 9/11 or 7/7 are the logical end results of backward Islam and the outlook of its billion-odd barmy adherents. What we are witnessing post-Norway is a PC exploitation of an act of terror. The prejudices of the right following Islamist terror attacks have been replaced by the equally problematic prejudices of the cultural elite. So all the chattering classes’ pet fears - from their belief that a great number of ordinary people in Europe are xenophobic to their hatred of anyone who is anti-EU (Norway has been slated for ‘not wanting to join the EU’) - are starting to get an airing on the back of these violent assaults. Where the right blames isolated acts of al-Qaeda terror on Islam, the cultural elite blames an isolated act of right-wing terror on ‘raging’ Islamophobia. But is it really any more progressive to locate the origins of modern terrorism in the apparently backward beliefs of the white European hordes than it is to find it in the strange habits of the brown Muslim mob?

The speedy moralisation of the Norway attacks, the shameless liberal aping of what the right does after Islamist assaults, suggests that the political classes’ primary instinct post-terror is to score points. Because if they were to put aside their already-existing prejudices and look at modern-day terror tantrums in a cool-headed fashion, they would surely note that there is not that much difference between what Breivik did in Norway on Friday and what Mohamed Atta did in New York on 9/11 or what Mohammad Sidique Khan did in London on 7/7. All of these terror attacks, executed by educated and not poor young men, seem driven by an extreme sense of estrangement. Indeed, for all of Breivik’s rambling complaints about multiculturalism, where he allegedly declared war against that political ideology and its ‘cultural Marxist’ cheerleaders, the most striking thing is how much his outlook, like that of the 7/7 attackers, seems to have been moulded by the estrangement-inducing politics of multiculturalism.

Some commentators, including us at spiked, have argued that acts such as 7/7 are more an extreme expression of the multicultural outlook than they are a traditional form of Islamic fundamentalism. Multiculturalism’s celebration of identity over solidarity, its promotion of the politics of self-pity and victimhood, of a perception that minority identities are continually under threat from the post-colonial and xenophobic attitudes of both society’s rulers and its native masses, found its most fanatical expression in the London bombings. In the bombers’ extraordinary levels of self-pity, combined with their arrogant belief that their Muslim identity gave them the right to hector the British throng, we got a glimpse of how far the multicultural ethos can be pushed. Breivik, for all his anti-multicultural pretensions, is not that different. Indeed, it is remarkable how much his so-called critique of multiculturalism seems bound by the parameters of multiculturalism itself.

In his claim that he wanted to protect ‘white Christian identity’ from being overrun and crushed by an external powerful force - in this case Muslim immigrants - Breivik is merely indulging in an alternative form of multiculturalism. In different ways, both the 7/7 bombers and Breivik express the same sense of cultural paranoia, of cultural siege and victimhood. In recent years the right-wing critique of multiculturalism has ironically been shaped by the ethos of multiculturalism itself. From the English Defence League (which Breivik apparently had contact with) to authors who fret about Muslim immigration into Europe, there has been an attempt by right-wing elements to transform whiteness and Christianess into threatened identities, under siege from an almost colonialist tidal wave of Otherness. This sounds remarkably similar to the outlook of radical Islamists. Both groups accentuate and advertise their victim status and effectively compete for the respect of the overlords of identity-management in the multiculturalist elite. Where right-wingers warn of the rise of ‘Eurabia’, Islamists fret about the return of Christian crusaders; where right-wing activists claim their ‘white identity’ is not being accorded respect, Islamists claim their ‘Muslim identity’ is treated badly. The outlook of both groups is informed very powerfully by the victimology and craving for recognition inherent in multiculturalism.

Breivik’s alleged hatred of multiculturalism actually seems to be driven by a belief that it does not sufficiently respect his cultural identity; his violent act can be seen as a crazy, barbaric attempt to expand the remit of the politics of multiculturalism. (This is not to argue, by the way, that the EDL or anti-immigration thinkers bear any responsibility for Breivik’s violence. They do not.)

What ties something like 7/7 to the Norway attacks is today’s specific culture of estrangement. The nurturing of cultural particularism, the promotion of self-obsession over socialisation, of individual identity over collective citizenship, can create a sometimes volatile atmosphere. It can give rise to social envy, identity-based competition, a profound sense of cultural disconnection. Modern terrorism looks like the most extreme expression of these problems. Indeed, for all their grand political talk, it is notable that both the 7/7 cell and Breivik launched attacks, not against their alleged enemies (Western imperialists and Muslim crusaders respectively), but against the everyday inhabitants of their own societies. Theirs is a haughty violence of estranged rage, rather than anything to do with traditional political outlooks. Their tantrums have more in common with the outlook of Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver, though on a far more terrifying scale, than they do with the politics of the past.

Who is this stranger?

Our Ten-Trillion-Dollar Man

by Victor Davis Hanson

Borrowing Is No Longer Stimulus?

The Congressional Budget Office not long ago forecast that Barack Obama’s $1 trillion-plus annual deficits — scheduled over the next decade — would result in almost another $10 trillion in aggregate debt. Going back to the pre-Bush tax rates this time won’t balance the budget. Slashing discretionary spending will not. So large has the splurge become, and so hooked are the constituencies of federal money, that massive cuts to entitlements necessary to stave off financial implosion may well prompt Greek-like protests.

That staggering sum was apparently conventional wisdom until the November 2010 election. But now there is fear that at some point in the future, Obama will not be known as the first African-American president. Nor will he be cited even as the hope-and-change phenomenon of 2008. Instead, posterity shall know him as the single greatest borrower in American presidential history, a novice who nearly wrecked the U.S. economy by borrowing over $4 billion a day without any feasible proposal how to pay back such a vast sum — taking a post-recession recovery and turning it into a stagflationary mess. In the third year of his tenure, Obama is still left only with “Bush did it” as an explanation of what went wrong.

Obama has managed the nearly impossible: the greatest peacetime deficits in U.S. history — about $1.5 trillion per year — in his first three years achieved almost no economic expansion. Instead, unemployment is chronic and stays over 9.2%; growth is stagnant; gas is sky-high — and the president seems stunned that none of what he had promised came to pass. All his liberal nostrums have been tried and been found wanting. There is no successful EU model, no winning blue-state statist paradigm for guidance.

Remember that his key advisors — Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, Summers — have now quit and did not last even three years, their policies orphaned by the very parents who spawned them. Even the president joked that “shovel-ready” was a joke. When he evokes “stimulus” and “investment,” in response, we do not even think “borrowing” and “taxes,” but rather “he’s clueless again.” The old argument that we simply did not borrow enough (say, $5, $6, $7 billion a day?) is laughable beyond the point of caricature, given that the administration followed the Bush record of record peacetime debt. The only mystery is whether the massive Obama borrowing was a product of incompetence, a poorly thought out gorge the beast way of increasing taxes and redistributing income, or a more cynical effort at creating a permanent constituency of millions of new food stamp recipients and federal workers. Or more than that still.

Your Debt And None Of Our Own

Obama himself recently proposed a massive deficit budget that not a single Democrat in the Senate could vote for; then suddenly he flipped, and said that red ink of the sort that he ran up was now unsustainable. When did the president of the United States metamorphosize from the greatest Keynesian in presidential history to a fiscal hawk — January? March? April 1?

As he calls for higher taxes, he still has not offered any plan whatsoever that details where the president himself would cut. Remember that he conceded in December that higher taxes were bad; but by July they were then good again. He courts Wall Street one day for campaign money, yet on another calls them “fat cat” bankers and deplores their jets. Food stamps recipients now number 50 million — and we dare not imagine that even one has taken a dime without good cause.

The would-be employer is told to hire, but on what confident supposition, what rationale? That he knows well the tax rate to come, the health care costs to come, the regulations to come, the pro-business, veteran CEO appointee to come, the next presidential slur to come? Apparently Obama believed that capitalists were so greedy, so wealthy, so money-hungry that they would not mind much the redistributive obstacles he erected.

He talks grandly of getting America back to work, as his subordinates try to close down a Boeing aircraft plant, layer more regulations and burdens on energy production, reverse the order of creditors in the Chrysler mess, and take over GM — even as he continues the old “spread the wealth” and “redistributive change” adolescent rants with newer, sillier faculty lounge concoctions, claiming that at some point we have made enough money and that he himself has hundreds of thousands of dollars in income that he does not need and thus should have higher taxes on. (If so, please, help the Treasury out by offering to pay the gas for the Costa del Sol, Vail, and Martha’s Vineyard first-family freebies). One expects such banalities from the college dorm lounge, but not the middle-aged president of the United States.

Carter 2.0

Abroad the misdirection, confusion, and petulance mirror-image the debt mess. In Libya we have no mission aim, no methodology, and no desired outcome — our consolation only that Libya is a tiny country compared to a nearly 30-million person Afghanistan or Iraq. Obama went to the Arab League and the UN, but not the U.S. Congress for authorization — but to do what? Help the rebels? Enforce a no-fly-zone? Kill Gaddafi? Overthrow the government? All, some, or none?

All such mission objectives have come and gone. Now Italy has joined Germany and half of NATO in opposing the effort — apparently on the logic that either Obama will eventually give up on an oil-rich Gaddafi, or that he should, given the bleak replacement prospects. France, which cooked up the campaign, is fence-sitting. Is this the new multilateral “leading from behind”? The only reason I can think why we bombed Gaddafi, and then allowed him to survive, is that we ourselves are terrified of the possible end-game and aftermath, given that we have little idea of who the rebels are, and even less whether they would be better, the same, or worse than the horrific status quo. If and when they storm Tripoli, expect a pogrom against any sub-Saharan African in Gaddafi’s pay, or, rather, any sub-Saharan African in general still in Libya.

The uncertainty in Libya is like that in Afghanistan, which the president once praised as the good war, then failed to meet his commanders for months, then escalated, then suddenly decided to start pulling out in fears of reelection in 2012, even as he appointed his fourth ground commander in less than three years. All that was sort of like pontificating that drilling new oil does not lower gas prices, but pumping previously drilled oil out of the strategic petroleum reserve apparently might in time before November 2012. Or was it similar to praising campaign finance reform, then being the first president to reject it? Or was it analogous to blasting Goldman Sachs and BP after hitting them up for cash and becoming their most favored recipient?

Bush Obama Did It.

Remember the Obama 2007-8 demagoguery on the war on terror? We live now in Lala land where the bad Bush’s Guantanamo, Predators, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, Iraq, Afghanistan, wiretaps, and intercepts have become the good Obama’s protocols. We, the public, are supposed to nod and in Orwellian fashion get with the new Ministry of Information line, screaming at Bush on the big screen as the bad becomes good, the old good bad.

Remember the Cairo mythological speech, the falsehoods about an Islamic-enhanced Enlightenment and Renaissance, a multicultural Cordoba (with few Muslims in the late 15th century?) being an Islamic beacon of tolerance during the Inquisition? Remember the administration commentary on the underwear bomber, on Maj. Hasan, on the Ground Zero mosque, on trying KSM in New York? The al Arabiya interview, the sermons to Israel, the bowing to Saudi royals?

Juxtapose all that with the Obama’s administration outlawing of “jihadist,” of “terrorism,” of “Islamist.” His team instead gave us “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” seemed to think that the Muslim Brotherhood is secular, and proclaimed that Israel — not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Iran, not Syria (recall Assad the “reformer”) — is the problem in the Middle East.

Obama Is Obama

So we have what we have always had — the most partisan and the least experienced man in the U.S. Senate as president, elected by a perfect storm of events (e.g., the 2008 meltdown, the media adulation, the anemic McCain candidacy, the furor over Bush and the Iraq war, the orphaned election without a single incumbent, etc.), in which no one was allowed to ask “Who is this stranger?” and “What has he ever done?”, in which the media finally gave up its last shred of impartiality and became a megaphone, as we were assured that Mr. Obama’s most intimate associates were really total strangers, his once praised avid church-going was merely sporadic, his most partisan voting record was in truth bipartisan, and his bad habits of saying disturbing things were simply a symptom of racialist, raise-the-bar nitpicking on behalf of his Neanderthal critics.

In short, Obama came into office with all the Carteresque assumptions on how to take over a private-sector economy and outsource foreign policy to international bodies. He now finds to his utter amazement — as Carter discovered in late 1979 after Teheran, Afghanistan, and Central America — that in the real world none of what worked in word worked in deed. Those who assured Obama that his Harvard lounge fantasies were real have either quit, are now offering new advice, or are criticizing him for once taking them at their word.

So what is he left with? Not much other than hoping that all the ten-trillion-dollar man’s printed money finally starts inflation to coincide with the 2012 election. Otherwise, we get only the same-old, same-old: blame Bush for the deficit each week; or a slur about starving granny with Social Security cuts; or a speech from an African-American congresswoman from the floor of the House attesting to the racism behind doubting Obama can do the job. Nothing much more than that.

The Wages of the 1960s

Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.

If you didn't invite me to the big take-off, don't invite me to the crash landing

Debt-Ceiling Chicken

By Thomas Sowell

The big news, as far as the media are concerned, is the political game of debt-ceiling chicken that is being played by Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But, however much the media are focused on what is happening inside the Beltway, there is a whole country outside the Beltway -- and the time is long overdue to start thinking about what is best for the rest of the country, not just for right now but for the long haul.

However the current debt-ceiling crisis turns out, the current economic turmoil in financial markets around the world should cause some serious thoughts about the long run, and about the whole idea of a national debt-ceiling.

Some people may have been shocked when the credit-rating firm Moody's recently suggested that the debt-ceiling law be repealed, in order to avoid fiscal crises which can throw world financial markets into turmoil that can injure countries around the world.

Anyone who wants to show that Moody's is wrong should be prepared to show the actual benefits of the debt-ceiling, not its goals or hopes. That will not be easy, if possible at all.

Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions. The United Nations, for example, survives as a glorious idea, despite how corrupt, counterproductive and even dangerous its actions are.

The national debt-ceiling law should be judged by what it actually does, not by how good an idea it seems to be. The one thing that the national debt-ceiling has never done is to put a ceiling on the rising national debt. Time and time again, for years on end, the national debt-ceiling has been raised whenever the national debt gets near whatever the current ceiling might be.

Regardless of what it is supposed to do, what the national debt-ceiling actually does is enable any administration to get all the political benefits of runaway spending for the benefit of their favorite constituencies -- and then invite the opposition party to share the blame, by either raising the national debt ceiling, or by voting for unpopular cutbacks in spending or increases in taxes.

The Obama administration is a classic example. When all its skyrocketing spending bills were being rushed through Congress without even being read, the Democrats had such overwhelming majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives that Republicans had all they could do to get a word in edgewise -- even though their words had no chance of stopping, or even slowing down, the spending of trillions of dollars.

Now that the bill is coming due for all that spending and borrowing, Republicans are suddenly being invited in to share the blame for either raising the national debt ceiling or for whatever other unpopular measures will be legislated.

Many years ago, someone said, "If you didn't invite me to the big take-off, don't invite me to the crash landing." This was Obama's big spending spree, but "bipartisanship" requires Republicans to either split the bill or be blamed if the government shuts down or defaults.

What would happen if there were no national debt-ceiling law?

Those who got the political benefits from handing out trillions of dollars of the taxpayers' money (plus borrowed money) would also get the clear and sole blame for the resulting skyrocketing national debt and all the unpopular consequences.

Those people who want serious and substantial spending cuts are absolutely right in what they want. There are not only government programs that need to be cut but whole government agencies, including Cabinet-level Departments, that are not merely useless but positively harmful on net balance.

There are a lot of things that could be cut, and should be cut, instead of defaulting on the nation's debts. But that is not likely to happen, if Obama and his media chorus can instead blame the Republicans for forcing a government shutdown or a credit default.

Regardless of how the current crisis is resolved, Moody's suggestion of repealing the national debt-ceiling law deserves some very serious thought, because that law is the crucial factor in the political games that allow big spenders to blame others for the consequences of their own irresponsibility.

Those who say that the reckless spending and reckless borrowing of the Obama administration are the roads to ruin are absolutely right.

Too many policies and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do.

Can rich countries afford to overpay for things ?

Bill Gates on the World’s Energy Crisis

By Chris Anderson

Bill Gates, head of charity, is every bit as brilliant and hyperrational as Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, ever was. The cochair of the world’s biggest foundation can hold forth on the impact of polio in India, the challenges of fixing American high schools, and the necessity of distributing better seeds to small farms in Africa. But he really gets amped up about the future of energy. “If you gave me the choice between picking the next 10 presidents or ensuring that energy is environmentally friendly and a quarter as costly, I’d pick the energy thing,” he told the audience at theWired Business Conference in May. Gates fielded questions from Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson (and some audience members), geeking out on energy technology, policy, and economics. In these highlights from the hourlong session, Gates argues that nuclear power is still safer than all other energy options, rich countries aren’t spending enough on R&D, and installing solar panels on your roof is not helping to reduce CO₂emissions. It’s merely “cute.”

Chris Anderson: How has Fukushima changed your perspective on nuclear power?

Bill Gates: What happened in Japan is terrible, and there are many reasons it should have been avoided. It’s a 1960s plant design, generation two, put into service in the early 1970s. Emergency planning and execution were quite weak. The environmental and human damage is clearly very negative, but if you compare that to the number of people that coal or natural gas have killed per kilowatt-hour generated, it’s way, way less. The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events—Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima—so it’s more visible. Coal and natural gas have much lower capital costs, and they tend to kill only a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians.

Anderson: Do you think that it’s possible for a leader to overcome the political opposition to nuclear, post-Fukushima?

Gates: Energy sources are highly regulated, as they should be, and many of them require government involvement in the early stages to get the technologies going and work out rights of way—they inescapably involve politics. Politicians have to deal with deaths, whether they’re from coal mines or particulate. But voters seem to want energy that lets them drive around and heat their homes.

The good news about nuclear is that there’s hardly been any innovation in the past three decades, so the room to do things differently is quite dramatic. The difference between today’s designs and one from the 1960s is night and day. We understand heat pipes a lot better today. We understand what the decay of heat looks like. There’s this company, TerraPower, which former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold and I have spun out of his invention group, Intellectual Ventures. We’ve got a new nuclear design, a generation four. On paper it’s quite amazing.

And when I say on paper, I really mean in a supercomputer where we simulate everything. In almost every realm, software simulation changes the game. With those generation-one and -two designs, they never could simulate the disasters. We can simulate Richter-10 earthquakes. We can simulate 70-foot waves coming into these things. It’s very cool. And we basically say no human should ever be required to do anything, because if you judge by Chernobyl and Fukushima, the human element is not on your side.

The problem is that plant design doesn’t move at the speed of computers, so the best case is that by 2020 one of these will get built and that by 2030 you could have hundreds of them. And then, if it’s really as economical as we say, it starts to make a big impact.

Anderson: When you look at the big picture, where should we be focusing besides nuclear? On massive solar plants in the desert? On middle-size stuff for office roofs? Or is there a reinvention that could be done right in the home?

Gates: If you’re going for cuteness, the stuff in the home is the place to go. It’s really kind of cool to have solar panels on your roof. But if you’re really interested in the energy problem, it’s those big things in the desert.

Rich countries can afford to overpay for things. We can afford to overpay for medicine, we can overpay for energy, we can rig our food prices and overpay for cotton. But in the world where 80 percent of Earth’s population lives, energy is going to be bought where it’s economical. People are going to buy cheap fertilizer so they can grow enough crops to feed themselves, which will be increasingly difficult with climate change.

You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price to get anywhere. It’s great to have the rich world, because we’re there to think about long-term problems and fund the R&D. But we get sloppy, because we’re rich. For example, despite often-heard claims to the contrary, ethanol has nothing to do with reducing CO₂; it’s just a form of farm subsidy. If you’re using first-class land for biofuels, then you’re competing with the growing of food. And so you’re actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture. For rich people, this is OK. For poor people, this is a real problem, because their food budget is an extremely high percentage of their income. As we’re pushing these things, poor people are driven from having adequate food to not having adequate food.

The most interesting biofuel efforts avoid using land that’s expensive and has high opportunity costs. They do this by getting onto other types of land, or taking advantage of byproducts that aren’t used in the food chain today, or by intercropping.

Anderson: What’s intercropping?

Gates: Intercropping means you’re exploiting holes in the calendar year, making use of periods when farmers have chosen to leave the land fallow. It can actually be beneficial, particularly if the crop is leguminous. Like, you grow alfalfa or soybeans in those periods, and it restores nitrogenous compounds to the soil.

The future of banking is being defined in Africa

Africa's mobile economic revolution

Half of Africa's one billion population has a mobile phone – and not just for talking. The power of telephony is forging a new enterprise culture, from banking to agriculture to healthcare

Mobile phones in Uganda's capital, Kampala: 10 million people across the country own a phone

By M. Fox

Earlier this month, on a short bus ride through the centre of Kampala, I decided to carry out an informal survey. Passing through the Ugandan capital's colourful and chaotic streets, I would attempt to count the signs of the use of mobile phones in evidence around me. These included phone shops and kiosks, street-corner airtime vendors and giant billboard ads, as well as people actually using their mobile phones: a girl in school uniform writing a text message as she hurried along the street, a businessman calmly making a call from the back of a motorcycle taxi swerving through heavy rush-hour traffic. Not only were half of the passengers on my bus occupied with their handsets, our driver was too, thumbing at his keypad as he ferried us to our final destination. After five minutes, I lost count and retired with a sore neck. There was more evidence here than I could put a number on.

My survey underlined a simple fact: Africa has experienced an incredible boom in mobile phone use over the past decade. In 1998, there were fewer than four million mobiles on the continent. Today, there are more than 500 million. In Uganda alone, 10 million people, or about 30% of the population, own a mobile phone, and that number is growing rapidly every year. For Ugandans, these ubiquitous devices are more than just a handy way of communicating on the fly: they are a way of life.

It may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.

The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouringKenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office. It is cheap, easy to use and, for millions of Africans unable to access a bank account or afford the hefty charges of using one, nothing short of revolutionary.

Safaricom didn't invent mobile banking: it existed previously in countries such as Norway and Japan, but on a small scale and with nothing like the seismic effect it had in Kenya. The established banks weren't happy at first – they tried to shut down M-Pesa soon after it started – but now they are getting in on the game, and it is estimated that by 2015 global mobile transactions will exceed one trillion dollars. According to California-based mobile-banking innovator Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay: "Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here… It's going to change the world."

The mobile banking phenomenon spread quickly to other countries in the developing world. Uganda's largest telecom company, MTN Uganda, created its own version, MobileMoney, in March 2009. Within a year, 600,000 Ugandans had signed up. Now, thanks to aggressive recruitment drives to win more subscribers – MTN agents trolling the streets for new customers are known as "foot soldiers" – the service has more than 1.6 million users.

MobileMoney outlets are everywhere in 2011: the distinctive canary-yellow buildings and kiosks that house them are dotted around not just Kampala but the greater part of the country. The MTN network reaches 85% of Uganda, and MobileMoney is available everywhere MTN has coverage. Many of the villages I travelled through, however minor or remote, had at least one tell-tale splash of yellow.

Mobile phones carry huge economic potential in undeveloped parts of Africa. A 2005 London Business School study found that for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country, GDP rises by 0.5%. As well as enabling communication and the movement of money, mobile networks can also be used to spread vital information about farming and healthcare to isolated rural areas vulnerable to the effects of drought and disease.

The only lesson of history is that it doesn't teach us anything

The euro bail-out is a conspiracy against democracy

 The bail-out of the euro represents the introduction of socialism on a continental scale - with the British government's cynical endorsement

 By J. Daley

How very appropriate that tanks should have been rolling through the streets of Brussels on the day that Europe dismantled another pillar of democracy. The military display, as it happened, was commemorating Belgium National Day, not the triumphal march toward financial union, but the coincidence was one of history’s better jokes. Europe is now galloping toward the final realisation of its great post-war dream: the abolition of independent nation states whose governments are answerable to their own people.

It is important to realise what is at stake here. When you exercise your right to vote for one party or another in national elections, you are, more often than not, doing so on the basis of its fiscal policies: that is, what it proposes to do about tax and spending. There could scarcely be a more important function of the electoral process than this. If the government is not accountable to you for what it does with your money, and how much it will take from you to do those things, then what is left of your power as a citizen? In what sense is your consent to being governed required? If responsibility for these decisions is to be removed from the elected governments of individual countries and transferred to a pan-European entity, then we are setting out on a course with the most terrifying political implications.

There is nothing accidental about this trajectory. The Greek (and Irish, and Portuguese, and Italian, and Spanish) crisis has been useful, as everyone now seems to be admitting, as an accelerant: having to scrape a whole cohort of eurozone countries off the floor has simply made the “need” for financial integration undeniable. The logical conclusion of an economically illiterate project has been reached. No more messing with the will of the people: resentful Germans and rebellious Greeks will be equally overridden in the name of – what? An international welfare state in which wealth is redistributed not just from the hard-working to the non-working classes of one’s own country, but from industrious nations to failing ones. The traditional socialist model of the wealth of the richer being taken by the state to give to the poorer is being applied on a continental scale, with the inevitable result that southern Europe will become a permanent basket case, dependent indefinitely on “support” – cheap loans and periodic bail-outs – from the north. The governments of those dependent countries will simply be ciphers, as powerless as welfare recipients are likely to be in any system.

It's a free country, Isn't it?

Contra Conventional Measures of the Growth of Government

by Robert Higgs

Many of us who believe that governments continue to grow relentlessly, at least in the economically advanced countries, have been criticized by analysts who claim that in fact the growth of government has petered out or slowed substantially. The latter group perceives us to be needlessly alarmed and faults us for a failure to acknowledge the decisive turn of events associated with the so-called Reagan and Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Not to worry, they exhort us; the statists are on the run, and a brave new world of market-oriented liberalism shimmers on the horizon.

My thesis here is that these seemingly levelheaded realists are the ones who have failed to perceive correctly the ongoing growth of government.[1] A major reason for their failure is their reliance on certain conventional measures of the size and growth of government. Some of these measures have a built-in tendency to exhibit deceleration even when a more compelling representation displays continuing steady growth. Often the conventional measures miss the growth of government because it has been diverted into channels beyond the scope of their measurement.

To some extent, governments have been growing in important but unmeasured or poorly measured ways all along, and they continue to grow in these ways, perhaps more menacingly than ever before. Off-budget spending, for example, is a well-known resort of political scoundrels, but it is only one example among many of how governments employ hard-to-measure means to achieve their usual ends, especially when tax revolts, formal spending limits, or borrowing limitations frustrate their chronic desire to spend at a greater rate.

Government's Share of Gross Domestic Product

The most common measure of the size of government is the amount of government spending relative to gross domestic product (GDP). In a recent monograph on the growth of government, for example, Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht present much of their data in the form of government-spending variables relative to GDP. A major theme of their book is "Government spending [measured in this way] increased most rapidly until about 1980. Since the early 1980s, it has been growing more slowly and in some instances has even declined" (p. 3).

Now, the first thing to notice is that a surefire way to make nearly any economic magnitude appear small is to divide it by GDP, because the latter, which purports to be the total value at market prices of all final goods and services produced within a country in a year, is always an enormous dollar (or euro or peso or other currency unit) amount. Government spending of $2,855,200,000,000, as in the United States in fiscal year 2001, seems to be an astronomical amount, but just divide it by the value of GDP and, voilà, it is a mere 28 percent — surely nothing to be alarmed about, especially in comparison with corresponding figures for many European countries that exceed 50 percent.[2]

The next thing to notice is that because government spending for currently produced final goods and services is itself a component of GDP, the ratio of the former to the latter is immediately compromised. Any addition to such government spending increases the denominator as well as the numerator of the ratio. Suppose that in year one the government spends $100 dollars for currently produced final goods and services, and the GDP in that year is $500. Now suppose that in year two the government spends twice as much — that is, it increases its purchase amount by 100 percent — but nothing else changes. In year two, the government's share of GDP will be 33.33 percent (or $200/$600), as compared to 20 percent in year one. An analyst focusing on the government's spending share concludes, then, that government has grown not by 100 percent, as it plainly has by construction, but only by 66.66 percent (that is, [(33.33/20) − 1] × 100). The greater the government's initial share is, the greater is the bias in moving from its absolute spending to the share concept to measure its growth. If government had begun with spending of $100 out of a GDP of $200, then doubled its purchase amount, other things being unchanged, it would have increased its spending share from 50 percent to 66.66 percent — a mere 33.33 percent growth.

If you don't bend, you break

The Prince of Persia

Machiavelli’s got nothing on Iran’s Supreme Leader.

BY KARIM SADJADPOUR

Nobody has ever confused Niccolo Machiavelli with an Islamic revolutionary -- but he certainly knew a thing or two about revolutions. The Florentine political philosopher watched his native city overthrow, restore, and then overthrow again the powerful Medici family. And it was in this hotbed of backstabbing clans, religious favoritism, and political power plays that Machiavelli sharpened his teeth. Ah, how he would have enjoyed the Tehran of today.

Half a millennia later, the author of The Prince and intellectual father of realpolitik has found one of his most impressive students in Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- another leader well-acquainted with the exercise of acquiring, and keeping, political power. Indeed, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose rise (and now hisseeming fall from grace) was orchestrated by Khamenei, is the third Iranian head of state (preceded by Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami) whom Khamenei has outmaneuvered.

This is only the latest struggle from which Khamenei appears to have come out on top. For the last 22 years, he's woken up every morning and gone to bed every night believing not only that many of his own subjects want to unseat him, but also that the greatest superpower in the world is plotting his demise. In summer 2009, his worst fears became reality when millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest Ahmadinejad's tainted reelection. Some of them chanted slogans of "Death to Khamenei" and "Khamenei is an assassin, his rulership is annulled."

Yet after Oman's Sultan Qaboos and Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi -- who continues to hang by a thread -- Khamenei is now the longest serving autocrat in the Middle East.

It is no accident that Khamenei has succeeded thus far in beating back the challenge posed by the Green Movement. Despite his Shiite pretentions, his ruling ideology is more Machiavelli than martyrdom. It's a fact that Machiavelli himself -- who trudged around Italy with papal armies, marveling at the combination of military might and religious authority -- would have observed with a knowing smile.

Throughout Khamenei's rule, he has held to five basic tenets that reflect the philosophy of statecraft -- and stagecraft -- embodied in Machiavelli's famous treatise.

1. Deflect accountability    

Machiavelli is famous for the aphorism that it is better for a politician to be feared than loved. But he cautioned that in order to avoid being despised and hated, a prince should "delegate to others the enactment of unpopular measures and keep in their own hands the means of winning favors." A prince could not ask for a better political system for this purpose than that of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Iranian regime is uniquely adapted to grant the supreme leader the power to distribute favors and control key state institutions, while shielding him from responsibility for government failures.

The constitutional authority of the supreme leader allows Khamenei to wield power without accountability. He controls the main levers of state -- the courts, military, and media -- and has effective control over Iran's second most powerful political institution, the Guardian Council. This 12-person body, whose members are all directly or indirectly appointed by Khamenei, has the authority to vet electoral candidates and veto parliamentary decisions.

No shortcuts

The Arab Recession

They may be cheering for democracy, but for most countries affected by the Arab Spring the economic news will have them crying.

BY TY MCCORMICK 

Mohammed Bouazizi's final act of hopelessness -- setting himself ablaze in front of a government building in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on Dec. 17, 2010 -- touched off a wave of civil unrest that toppled two governments, threatens to bring down at least three others, and has redefined the relationship between the ruler and the ruled across the Arab world. But the protests, which were spurned by rising food prices and unemployment, have bequeathed a cruel irony to their makers: A worsening of the very same conditions that sparked the Arab Spring.

The economies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia are projected to shrink by a collective 0.5 percent this year, reversing 4.4 percent growth in 2010, according to a report published by the Institute of International Finance in May. In Yemen and Libya, which are still in turmoil, the numbers will likely be worse; and thegrowth forecast for the North African region as a whole has fallen from 4.5 percent in 2010 to less than 1 percent this year, according to the African Central Bank.

Even among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, some of which enjoyed revolution-induced oil windfalls, the Arab Spring has produced economic losers. Bahrain, in particular -- which sent capital and bank employees scuttling when it violently quelled protests, killing at least five demonstrators, and declared a three-month state of emergency earlier this year -- could potentially forfeit its position as one of the region's financial hubs. As Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Foreign Policy, many of the international banks that were headquartered in Bahrain "have just pulled up and gone. And they are probably not going to come back."

Capital flight has also hamstrung other Arab countries. Jordanian Finance Minister Mohammed Abu Hammour recently estimated that $500 million is "leaving the Arab world" every week as a result of the unrest. But not all the economic news is bad. Before the revolution, governments across the region were playing an "impeding role" in the economy, said Ossama Hassanein, senior managing director of Newbury Ventures, who argued that macroeconomic growth in the old regimes "came at the cost of great corruption and inefficiency." Today, he estimated that the number of entrepreneurs in the Middle East has multiplied by a factor of ten, fueled by "interest in promoting a private economy led by entrepreneurship and innovation."

The revolutionary fervor of the past year has no doubt affected the Arab word's diverse economies differently. Here is a look at some of the Arab countries that were hit the hardest during this revolutionary season -- and some that seem to have weathered or even gained from the storm.

JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images

Libya

It goes without saying that Libya's civil war has wreaked havoc on its economy. Africa's third-largest oil producer before the outbreak of unrest in February, Libya's gross domestic product grew by 10.3 percent in 2010, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is projected to contract this year, but by how much is anybody's guess. The Qaddafi government in Tripoli has already estimated that conflict has cost Libya some $50 billion dollars.