The Gruesome Reality of Racist South Africa

For decades, the country of South Africa was the focus of an international rallying cry against the injustices of apartheid. On June 17, 1991, South Africa's Parliament abolished the legal framework for the practice of racial persecution. In 1994, Nelson Mandela and his Marxist African National Congress (ANC) assumed the reins of power. The international community looked away, satisfied that justice had prevailed. They continue to look away, even as South Africa has degenerated into another racist pit, best described by an Afrikaner farm owner: "It's politically correct to kill whites these days."

In July of 2012, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the nonprofit group Genocide Watch, conducted a fact-finding mission in South Africa. He concluded that there is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers, known as Boers. "The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental," Stanton contended. "It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes," he added - especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. "We don't know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation," he added.

The number of farm murders, or "plaasmoorde" as it is called in Afrikaans, is staggering. Over the last decade, it is estimated that at least 3000 Boers have been killed. Estimating the number of murders is necessary because the ANC has banned crime statistics from being compiled, claiming they scare off foreign investment. Moreover, the world knows little about the savagery that accompanies those killings. Many victims, including women and infant children, are raped or tortured before they are killed. Some have boiling water poured down their throats, some are burned with hot pokers, and some are hacked to death with machetes, or disemboweled. Several others have been tied to their own cars and dragged for miles.

The ANC, whose leader Jacob Zuma was reelected with over 75 per cent of the total voting delegates at the ANC National Conference held in Bloemfontein last December, denies that genocide is occurring, insisting that such attacks are part of the larger crime problem. Yet a report filed by the South African Institute of Race Relations notes that while crime has ostensibly declined between 1994 and 2011, "substantial numbers" of police stations have manipulated their crime statistics. The report sub-headline underscores the corrupt nature of crime statistics in the country: "Is this a true reflection of the crime statistics in South Africa? Who knows!" it states.

What is known is that the ANC celebrated in 100th year anniversary with a song led by President Zuma himself. "Dubula iBhunu" or "Shoot the Boer" was a line in the lyrics of an apartheid-era song, "Ayesaba Amagwala" ("the cowards are scared") that violates the South Africa constitution prohibiting the "advocacy of hatred that is based on race . and that constitutes incitement to cause harm."  Yet Zuma apparently felt no compunction to refrain from singing it, because the ANC considers it an integral part of the anti-apartheid movement that is part of their heritage.

In 2010, Julius Malema, then leader of the ANC Youth League, revived the practice of singing the song after many years. After the South Africa High Court ruled it was hate speech, the ANC appealed. Last October, the ANC and AfriForum, a lobby group that wanted the song banned from public performance, reached an out-of-court settlement.

Dr. Stanton concluded that Malema's revival of a song advocating murder moved South Africa from the fifth stage on his genocidal scale to stage six. When the South African judiciary ruled it to be unlawful hate speech, Genocide Watch put South Africa back at stage five. When President Zuma was caught on tape January 2012 singing, "We are going to shoot them with the machine gun, they are going to run/You are a Boer, we are going to hit them, and you are going to run/shoot the Boer." South Africa was raised to stage six once again.

Stage six is known as Preparation: "Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is expropriated. They are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved."

The sixth stage is followed by stage seven: Extermination.

In December, more than 200 protesters of the Afrikaner civil rights group AfriForum, which included families of murdered farmers and survivors of farm attacks, marched in the capital city of Pretoria. They were commemorating the second anniversary of the murders of farm caretaker Attie Potgieter and his family. Potgieter was stabbed and hacked 151 times with a knife, a fork, and a machete, while his wife and two-year-old daughter were forced to watch. They were then executed with shots to the head. "If you kill a rhinoceros in South Africa, you get more time in jail then if you kill a person," said Susan Nortje, 26, Mrs. Potgieter's younger sister. "I don't think people understand. We must show people what's really happening."

The group is calling for attacks on South Africa's mostly white farmers to be designated a crime of national priority. They delivered a memorandum to the country's police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, urging him to give the murder of farmers the same level of urgency aimed at rhinoceros poachers and copper cable thieves. Mthethwa was not present at the time, but police spokesman Zweli Mnisi accused the protesters of "grandstanding." "They are only representing people based on their color," he contended. "For us, racializing crime is problematic. You can't have a separate category that says, farmers are the special golden boys and girls. You end up saying the life of a white person is more important. You cannot do this," he added.

Yet according to Johan Burger, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies' crime and justice program, white farmers' concerns are legitimately "special." He reveals that it is now twice as dangerous to be a farmer in South Africa than a police officer. The overall murder rate in the nation is 31.9 per 100,000 people, 30 times that of Great Britain. For police it's 51 out of 100,000. For farmers, who are overwhelmingly white, the rate soars to 99 out 100,000. Burger rejects the notion that such a rate constitutes genocide-even as he concedes that many murderers "take out their hatred for all those past wrongs, and show who's in control now."

Like so many societies where demonstrating who's in control becomes a necessity, disarming the population becomes a priority. In 2010, the ANC-led regime changed the Firearms Registration Act, demanding that all legal guns be re-registered by July 31, 2011. In the process of re-registration, more than half the applicants were turned down, and 90 percent were turned down again on appeal. Thus, white farm families were forced to relinquish their last line of defense against the tens of thousands of criminal gangs roaming the countryside-armed with AK47s. and as Genocide Watch noted on its website last July one more step was taken as well. "The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers' weapons," it reported. "Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings."

There is also a movement, much like the one that occurred in Zimbabwe, to confiscate white farmers' land. Julius Malema led the charge, saying all whites are criminals, and that his ANC Youth League members were going to take all the land back without compensation, unless farmers relinquish 80 percent of it. At a conference in 2011, Malema reiterated his plans, contending that the nation's "willing buyer, willing seller" program, aimed at redistributing 30 percent of white-owned land to blacks within the first five years of the country's democracy (a deadline later shifted to 2014, and then to 2025), wasn't working. "You can never be diplomatic about willing-buyer, willing-seller. It has failed. You have not come with an alternative," said Mr. Malema at the time. "We are giving you an alternative; we must take the land without payment."

That is a recipe for famine, as revealed by Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti. In 2009, he told Parliament that more than half of the farms purchased for black farmers, at a cost of $891 million in government outlays, had either failed or were "declining."

Yet ANC president Zuma remains undeterred. "The structure of the apartheid economy has remained largely intact," Mr. Zuma said, in a speech given June 26, 2012 to thousands of delegates at ANC's policy conference, held every five years, where the party's pre-presidential election platform is discussed. "The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, as it has always been."

Embedded in that platform is the idea that making peace with white South Africans following the end of apartheid has "hampered" the transfer of wealth to black South Africans. Thus, a "second transition," was proposed, which even the see-no-progressive-evil New York Times was forced to concede represents a "sharp leftward shift for the A.N.C., which despite its roots has largely backed a free-market economy with minimal state intervention."

Stanton sees a bigger picture. In a speech in Pretoria, organized by the Transvaal Agricultural Union, Stanton claimed the ANC was demonizing white farmers, who have been in South Africa since the 1600s, by calling them "settlers." A Genocide Watch reports reveals the strategy behind those efforts. "High-ranking ANC government officials who continuously refer to Whites as `settlers' and `colonialists of a special type' are using racial epithets in a campaign of state-sponsored dehumanization of the White population as a whole," it stated. "They sanction gang-organized hate crimes against Whites, with the goal of terrorizing Whites through fear of genocidal annihilation."

ANC President Jacob Zuma continues to fan the flames of racial division. Last December, he admonished black South Africans for being dog owners, saying that doing so amounts to copying white culture. Zuma's office contended the message was aimed at "the need to decolonize the African mind post-liberation."

It is a post-liberation effort that remains alarmingly on track to emulate all the other historically blood-soaked efforts by Marxists, who invariably need an enemy at whom to direct their anger. White African farmers are that enemy. Pieter Mulder, leader of political party FF Plus and South Africa's deputy agriculture minister, who was focused on the excesses of Julius Malema a year and a half ago, nevertheless offered an inadvertently prescient statement about his country's future. After noting that Malema and his ilk were attempting to take the country "back to the period before 1994 when violence and even the possibility of a civil war was part of the South African debate" he revealed why such forces remain seemingly unstoppable. "We don't have a Mandela that stands up and says: `This is wrong,'" he warned.

SOURCE

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DNA tests reveal Hitler's Jewish and African roots

Socialists never let reality bother them.  It has often been claimed that Hitler had some Jewish ancestry.  That would seem to be confirmed below.  Note however that they did not have a sample of AH's own DNA  -- only that of his relatives

The Fuhrer 'would not have been happy' to learn he was more Berber tribesman than Aryan superman.

Adolf Hitler may have owed more to the 'subhuman' races he tried to exterminate than to his 'Aryan' compatriots, according to new finding published in Belgium this week.

In research for the Flemish-language magazine Knack, journalist Jean-Paul Mulders traced Hitler's living relatives in the Fuhrer's native Austria, as well as the United States.

"The results of this study are surprising," said Ronny Decorte, a geneticist interviewed by Knack. "Hitler would not have been happy."

Geneticists identify groups of chromosomes called haplogroups, 'genetic fingerprints' that define populations. According to Mulders, Hitler's dominant haplogroup, E1b1b, is relatively rare in Western Europe - but strongest in some 25 percent of Greeks and Sicilians, who apparently acquired the genes from Africa: Between 50 percent and 80 percent of North Africans share Hitler's dominant group, which is especially prevalent among in the Berber tribes of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, and Somalis.

More surprising still, perhaps, is that Hitler's second most dominant haplogroup is the most common in Ashkenazi Jews.  "The findings are fascinating if you look at them in terms of the Nazi worldview, which ascribed such an extreme priority to notions of blood and race," Decorte said.

Knack said it would now petition Russian government archives to release a human jawbone wrapped in a blood-soaked cloth, retrieved from a Berlin bunker where Hitler is thought to have committed suicide and believed to have belonged to the Fuhrer, who dreamed of engineering a Nazi superman.

"For modern science, there are no more races, Decorte said. "This pure type of 'superman' and the [Nazi] breeding programs to perfect 'purity' were sheer fabrication."

SOURCE

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Obama Keeps it Real: Fake Plant for Fake Products for Fake Cars

Here's something that slipped through the cracks thanks to the fake drama that was going on during the fake fiscal crisis coming from our fake government in Washington, DC: Another fake green company boondoggle has resulted in federal dollars being spent on .nothing.

According to a report issued by the Department of Energy's own inspector general, employees at LG Chem, a Korean company that operates a battery plant in Holland, Michigan- a plant that's supposed to support the Chevy Volt- were paid for playing video games, board games, volunteer work at Habitat for Humanity and other local charities.

Another fake-work program brought to you by the DOE and Nate Silver.

"An investigation by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Inspector General," reports Mlive.com, "blasted the federal government for negligent oversight and LG Chem for wasteful spending of a $151 million stimulus project to build batteries for electric cars. Despite spending a majority of the money, LG Chem has yet to produce a battery."

LG Chem's defense seems to be: "Oh. You mean, we were supposed to WORK for that money, not play video games?"  

Wired Magazine says, "LG Chem officials submitted those non-productive labor costs [that is, the costs for playing video games, etc.] for reimbursement because they were `unfamiliar with the types of costs that were allowable.'"

That seems to be a familiar complaint under the Obama administration.  Not being familiar with stuff is kind of rampant. See, for example Ghazi, Ben.

This is not exactly a government that recognizes boundaries, laws, the United States Constitution, common sense, Generally Accepted Accounting Practices (GAAP), or even basic shapes and colors.

These are the same guys who pay unemployment benefits to convicts serving time for murder; they pay an adult male, who wears a diaper, a disability payment so said male- so-called- can pursue the "lifestyle" of an "adult baby." Oh, and they pay the diaper changer who tends to him too.    

So, really who can blame LG Chem?

Not manufacturing a single battery for the Chevy Volt- the sole purpose for which LG Chem built a plant in Holland, Michigan- actually seems kind of like an act of mercy toward the taxpayers comparatively speaking.

Yes, wasting over $75 million in tax dollars on a plant was fool-hearted, but at least the losses end at some point, probably.

In contrast, three years into manufacturing the GREATEST CAR IN THE HISTORY of the Empire, designed by the GREATEST PRESIDENT EMPEROR EVEH! the Volt just keeps losing money, selling poorly and is still not using the batteries that LG Chem was supposed to provide.

Fake batteries for a fake Car-of-the-Year.  Gee: And some wonder why Detroit is going bankrupt?  

So, congrats to the US Senate and Korea's LG Chem on their new, low scores. Both have gone zero-for-three-years: LG Chem failed to produce a single battery for the Chevy Volt and the US Senate failed to produce a single vote for an Obama budget, fake or otherwise.

Since 2011, it's gotten so bad that Democrats have pleaded with The Big Zero to submit no budget at all.

Which leads us to the burning issue of the day.  

What's a better use of taxpayer dollars? Funding high scores on Grand Theft Auto for employees of Korean crony capitalists, or funding the United States Senate to be against raising taxes before they were for them?

Although LG Chem has reimbursed Uncle Same Ole, Same Ole about $900,000 for the fraudulent labor, the real fraud here is elsewhere.

Because the fake budget item that allowed the theft to begin with, WAS authorized by the United States Senate.

The problem it seems for LG Chem and "those non-productive labor costs" was that the costs just weren't big enough. Steal $900,000 and you're just faker.

Steal over $75 million and you're an official line item in the last budget passed by fake Democrat majority.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Train Men Not to Rape? Or Train Women to Shoot to Kill?

 Doug Giles

Last week on Hannity a “Democratic Strategist” named Zerlina Maxwell told Sean and his audience that guns are not the proper deterrent to dissuade rapists, but rather “teaching men not to rape is the key”. When I heard that chunk of stupidity I blew apple juice out of my nostrils -- and I haven’t had any apple juice in the last eight years.

That’s what you call “strategy”, Zerlina? Man, I hope she advises the Dems in the upcoming midterms and in 2016, because she’s denser than a chunk of Turkish walnut.

First off, I don’t know what planet Maxwell hails from, but here on Mother Earth I would say, aside from certain countries influenced by the religion of peace, pretty much everyone and their dog knows it’s wrong to put a knife or gun up to a woman’s noggin and then forcibly molest her.

Secondly, I don’t think, from a viability standpoint, her plan is workable. Primarily, because no matter how much men are “trained not to rape women” our society counters that tutelage by fueling notions of entitlement and narcissism within an atmosphere of violence that’s saturated with porn, where if you don’t get what you want then you act out.

From Zerlina’s zinger of teaching men not to rape, we then move to the brilliance of a girl named “Liberal Chick” who, in order to eschew an “evil gun” firearm defense in rape situations, states that we should train boys to …

1. Play with dolls so they will learn to be gentle.

2. Avoid hunting, football and other macho stupid activities that lead to rape.

3. Be vegetarians and suppress their love of eating meat that also leads to rape.

4. Purchase Prius’s instead of big SUV’s, which we all know macho, stupid rapists drive.

5. Become gay, or at least metro sexual, so that as men they will be more delicate and complex.

Look, if I were a lass I’d tell both Zerlina and Liberal Chick, “No, gracias, senoritas”. Liberal Chick’s and Maxwell’s brain farts are right up there with Democratic Congressman Salazar’s “rape whistle” and University of Colorado’s “pee your pants” prevention in molestation situations.

Given our malevolent milieu, here are three ditties that’ll greatly decrease your chances of getting raped, ladies.

1. Hone your BS Detector. The BS detector is essentially that little voice inside your head telling you to listen to the little voice inside your head. It’s an internal salvific alarm alerting you to dangerous situations. If you hone your BS Detector and listen to it when it starts screaming at you, you’ll be safer.

2. Become an expert in self-defense. In this violent environment you’re crazy to play the damsel in distress. Learn to kick some ass. Take formal training, throughout your life, as much as you can, by the best of the best.

3. Get a gun. Forget rape whistles, pepper spray and screaming for help. Get a firearm, sister. It is the great equalizer. A 5’1” petite coed with a Colt Python or a pump 20-guage, who knows how to use it, is a scary girl indeed. Think Lara Croft.

The thing that’s truly pathetic and evil is that Maxwell and her Leftist cabal, in order to forward their anti-gun agenda, will table such unworkable, scat-based nonsense to the very women they claim to champion.

SOURCE

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How the demographic shift could hurt Democrats, too

Since the November election, in which President Obama won huge majorities among minority voters, it’s been taken as gospel that the Republican Party must, for its own survival, seek to appeal to those groups by moving to the left on topics such as immigration reform. But as the nation becomes more diverse, the demographic shift can cut the other way, too: Some Democratic voters are likely to move to the right.

It’s assumed that, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white, white Democrats will continue to support the party. But a substantial amount of social-science evidence suggests a different conclusion: As the United States becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, liberal whites might start leaning Republican.

Consider a straightforward experiment I conducted last year: Over two weeks, I sent pairs of Latino men in their 20s to ride commuter trains in the greater Boston area, often cited as one of the nation’s most liberal regions.

These people were not asked to do anything out of the ordinary, just to wait for the train and ride it. The pairs I sent were native Spanish speakers, so when they spoke to each other, it was probably in Spanish. To gauge other riders’ attitudes about Latinos, I surveyed them before the experiment and two weeks into the tests. In each case, the trains and times were randomly selected and were later compared with a control group of riders on different trains. These trains originated in communities with very few Latino residents, and the men I sent to ride the trains were often the only Latinos at those stations on a day-to-day basis. In this sense, the experiment was testing how people react when a very small group of Latinos moves to a new community.

The results were clear. After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes.

Political scientists, economists, sociologists and psychologists have long noted that, under most circumstances, when people from different ethnic, racial and religious groups come into new contact, conflict ensues. Just look at the battles over busing students from different neighborhoods into public schools in the 1960s and ’70s.

And those conflicts often change the way people vote.

In the 1930s, political scientist V.O. Key found evidence that, in Southern counties with large numbers of African Americans, white voters were politically mobilized: They voted more than whites in neighboring counties and supported candidates espousing discriminatory views in greater numbers. A similar trend recurred a generation later, when liberal Sen. Paul Douglas of Illinois lost his 1966 reelection bid, in large part because of votes cast by whites living in parts of Chicago that had seen an influx of African Americans.

In a more recent example, the city of Chicago began a massive effort in 2000 to overhaul its public housing. Large and notorious housing projects, such as Cabrini-Green, were demolished, and their residents were relocated. More than 99 percent of the relocated residents were African American. The outcome of the effort was the reverse of my experiment in Boston — rather than coming into contact, groups were separated.

Did that separation result in more liberal political views? Voting patterns among white residents living near these projects before and after their demolition showed that it did. After their African American neighbors left, fewer white residents turned out to vote, and voters became less likely to choose Republican candidates, whom they had previously supported at higher levels than had residents in other parts of the city. It seems that the contact with African Americans had politically mobilized whites in Chicago, similar to how Southern whites were mobilized in the 1930s.

To explore whether there was a similar effect among minority voters, in 2008 I conducted an experiment in which I sent a letter to African American voters just before an election in Los Angeles. The content of the letter was simple: It reminded people to vote and included a map noting how often people on their block voted compared with a nearby block. In some randomly selected cases, the comparison block consisted of African American residents; in others, it was largely Latino. When the letter pointed to a majority-Latino block, African Americans were significantly more likely to vote, suggesting that they were concerned about political competition with Latinos — even though both groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

In that same year, I examined the voting of Latinos in Los Angeles and found that those who lived near predominantly African American neighborhoods were far less likely to vote for Obama than Latinos who lived farther away — suggesting that contact with their African American neighbors may have prompted them to vote against an African American candidate.

As different groups come into contact, people often have adverse reactions, and this can cause them to vote for a party that represents opposition to other groups. In today’s electoral landscape, that might mean white Democrats would be more willing to vote Republican. There is some evidence that when most people vote against their party identification — perhaps as a Reagan Democrat, just once — they return to their regular partisan identity within an election or so. However, if people make that switch during their impressionable years, in their teens or 20s, it can last a long time. And if they become familiar with members of the other group on a personal level, then the initial aversion might diminish. For example, this might be why attitudes about same-sex marriage are changing — as more people come to know gay friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members.

Of course, people might change the way they vote for reasons other than the race or ethnicity of their neighbors, such as a change in their job or the birth of a child. However, these experiments tell us that, all else equal, contact between different groups, such as native whites and Latino immigrants, leads to more conservative voting.

None of these findings bode well for Democrats. As ethnic groups mix, voters become more exclusionary and tend to vote for more racially conservative candidates — which may make it more difficult to maintain a diverse Democratic Party and could tilt the field in favor of Republicans.

SOURCE

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Amateur Beats Gov't at Digitizing Newspapers: Tom Tryniski’s Weird, Wonderful Website

A retiree with a scanner builds one of the world's largest historic newspaper sites while tax-funded projects stall.

One computer expert working alone has built a historic newspaper site that's orders of magnitude bigger and more popular than one created by a federal bureaucracy with millions of dollars to spend. Armed only with a few PCs and a cheap microfilm scanner, Tom Tryniski has played David to the Library of Congress’ Goliath.

Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages. By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site while costing taxpayers about $3 per page.[*] In January, visitors to Fultonhistory.com accessed just over 6 million pages while Chronicling America pulled fewer than 3 million views.

Fourteen years ago, Tryniski, a retired engineer, launched his website after a friend loaned him a collection of old postcards of Fulton, New York, the town where he's lived all his life. He decided to scan and share them online with his neighbors.

Fulton fell on hard times in the mid-1970s, and Tryniski is nostalgic for the thriving factory town in which he grew up. He relishes in particular the small details of life in old Fulton—wedding announcements, obituaries, school events, society gossip—the sort of information that's the bread and butter of local newspapers.So after the postcards, he digitized the entire run of the Oswego Valley News, which is the paper of record for Fulton and its surrounding county. It took about a year to finish scanning by hand the entire run of the paper, which began publishing in 1946.

Fultonhistory.com really got going in 2003, when Tryniski, a high school graduate, bought a scanner that handles microfilm for $3500 in a fire sale. That meant he didn't need access to the original newspaper copies and he could work quickly because microfilm scanners are largely automated. He installed a keyword recognition program, set up a network of PCs to do the heavy processing, and began uploading his scans to a server that's located in a gazebo on his front deck. He never bothered to change the original name of his website.

Tryniski pays all expenses for the site himself. The only significant costs are bandwidth, for which he pays $630 per month, and hard drives, which run him about $200 per month. He gets his microfilm at no cost from small libraries and historical societies. In exchange, he gives them a copy of all the scanned images analyzed for keyword recognition. Most of the papers Tryniski has digitized are from New York, but he’s rapidly expanding his coverage to other states as well. He is adding new content at a rate of about a quarter-million pages per month with no plans to slow down.

SOURCE

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Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery



Russia’s ruling party put up patriotic billboards around the city of Orel last month showing an image of a soldier in a tank and wishing residents a Happy Defender of Fatherland Day. Rather than showing a Russian soldier and tank, however, the photo actually featured an Israeli soldier in an Israeli-made Merkava III tank.

The United Russia party of President Vladimir Putin commissioned the billboards in honor of the Russian nationalistic holiday, celebrated on February 23, which is dedicated to soldiers serving in the Russian Armed Forces.

A Russian blogger identified the armored vehicle as an Israeli-made Merkava III. The photo, showing a reserves exercise by the IDF’s Armored and Engineering Corps, was quickly traced back to the IDF’s Flickr account.  

The blogger drew attention to the irony of a foreign-produced tank featuring on a sign in honor of Defender of the Fatherland Day.

SOURCE

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ELSEWHERE

British fashionista criticizes Mrs. Obama's style:  "Dame Vivienne Westwood is giving Karl Lagerfeld a run for his money in the provocative quotes stakes. Speaking to the New York Times , Westwood seemed to recoil when asked about Michelle Obama's style, saying "Don't talk about her. It's dreadful what she wears… I don't want to talk about it. Really, I can't." "She's a very nice looking lady, but it's a non-starter regarding clothes that suit her," she elaborated, before going on to compare her to the eternally-stylish Jackie Kennedy. "Jackie Kennedy was a different matter altogether. It just has to suit her and be something that makes a human being more glamorous.  That's what fashion is there for. It's there to help, not just to make you look more conservative."

U.S. unemployment is nearly double the official figures:  "The official unemployment rate is 7.7%. However, if you start counting all the people who want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.  U-6 is much higher at 14.3%. Both numbers would be way higher still, were it not for millions dropping out of the labor force over the past few years.    Digging under the surface, much of the drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years is nothing but a statistical mirage. Things are much worse than the reported numbers indicate."

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Why Jonathan Haidt is wrong

Jonathan Haidt is a remarkable man.  He is the dominant thinker on the psychology of morality today.  And he got there by doing something amazing.  He listened to what conservatives have to say about moral issues!  For someone with his liberal background that was a wrenching move.  Leftist psychologists have built up in their own minds a caricature of what conservatism is and work with that (e.g. here).  It is however a caricature that is more or less totally divorced from reality.  But since they never talk to conservatives they never find that out.  Haidt did talk -- and listen.

And what Haidt found was a real revolution in psychology.  He found that liberals were simplistic thinkers on questions of right and wrong (can you get much more simplistic than:  "There is no such thing as right and wrong"?) while conservatives had a much more complex account of moral issues. And that conclusion was precisely the opposite of what Leftist psychologists had been preaching for over 60 years at least.

I share that broad conclusion.  In my own academic career in the 70's and 80's I regularly got research published which challenged the prevailing notion that it was the conservatives who were the simple thinkers.

So where does Haidt go wrong?  I have set that out previously but the essence is that Haidt believes what people say about their own motivations.  He believes Leftists when they talk about their noble motivations of achieving equality etc.

Haidt has therefore built his castle on sand.  Ever since the work of LaPiere in the '30s psychologists have known of the large gap between people's attitudes and behaviour.  What they say about their values and intentions is a poor guide to what they will actually do in any given situation.

Why is that so?  Why can you not rely on what people report about their own inner life?  A very common answer to that which has been around for a long time is that people commonly "fake good":  They say what they think will make you think well of them.  They hide their real thoughts because they suspect that other people will disapprove of such thoughts.  And as a result, psychologists routinely use "Lie scales" or "social desirability scales" in their questionnaires to get some handle on such distortions.

I would argue that looking at what actually happens or has happened in politics (history) gives us a much more accurate interpretation of what actually drives people.

Leftists for instance are big preachers of tolerance but just listen to what they regularly say about conservatives and Christians.  Very often it is pure hate.  They have no actual tolerance at all.  They tolerate only their own views.  I document it often on my TONGUE-TIED blog.

And they rail against discrimination.  But as Haidt himself has emphasized, liberal professors discriminate heavily against conservatives in hiring and firing.  See also here.

And Leftists regularly claim to be anti-authority but in the global warming debate almost their only argument is that "the authorities" support global warming.  That the whole global warming scare relies on totally hypothetical (and improbable) "tipping points" seems generally to be unknown to them.   I document that authoritarianism regularly too  -- on my GREENIE WATCH blog.  And that arguments from authority are among the classic informal fallacies of logic seems to bother them not a bit.

And what about the great volte face from pre-war Leftism to modern-day Leftism?  Before WWII, Democrats and socialists generally energetically advocated eugenics, were great patriots, convinced racists and were by far the most antisemitic.  FDR turned back Jewish refugees and TR (founder of America's "progressive" party)  and his allies built battleships, invaded several other countries and  glorified war, seeing it as a purifying force. But Hitler had those ideas too so, when he was defeated, Leftists reversed direction and disowned most of their previous enthusiasms.  In other words, they stand for nothing. They have NO lasting principles or moral anchors.

So what DOES motivate Leftists and their Greenie fellow-travellers?  I think it's obvious if you look at real-life politics: Anger/Rage/Hate, closely related emotions that readily  morph into one-another.  Leftists are always claiming that hate motivates conservatives but that is just projection.  And projection is a good protective strategy.  It tends to make people say:  "A pox on both their houses!"

Like that great hater, Karl Marx, today's Green/Left hate just about everything in the world about them and want to change it.  And the torrent of abuse directed at those who disagree with them is patently in many cases pure hate.  Abuse is their shtick, not factual argument.  Haidt is failing to see the wood for the trees.  He is naive in a way that no psychologist should be.  He needs to look at real life political behaviour, not self-serving lies and airy theories.

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Three Takeaways from Rand Paul's Filibuster About Drone Strikes

Yesterday's 12-hours-plus filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is among the most electrifying and insipiring events in recent political memory. The point of the filibuster - which derailed a confirmation vote on John Brennan as Barack Obama's CIA head - was to call attention to the president's insufficient answers to questions about his policy of targeted killings via drones and, one assumes, other methods.

Here are three takeaways from yesterday's epic event:

1. It shows what one man can do to call attention to a hugely important issue that nonetheless is largley ignored by the mainstream media and the political establishment.

Elected in 2010, Rand Paul has rarely been the Republican - or the Democrat's - media favorite. He's been heckled big time from his own side (which initially worked against his election) and across the aisle as an irresponsible ideologue (he's a dirty tea-bagger don't you know!). Among a good chunk of his father's most devoted followers, he's been assailed as a neo-con war hawk who was willing to trim his libertarian bona fides to win favor with the D.C. party crowd. His sad-sack opponent in the general election  the GOP primary, Jack Conway, set new lows with the infamous "Aqua Buddha" ad that accused Paul of everything short of devil worship; his general election opponent in the GOP primary, Trey Grayson, had already trotted out many of the same pathetic lines.

reasonYet since showing up in D.C., Paul has been exactly what Reason dubbed him: "The most intersting man in the Senate" who has offered specific legislation and made extended arguments for a unified vision of limited government that is not only fully within some great lines of American political tradition but urgently needed in the current moment. Senators who pride themselves on their foreign policy expertise and have free-loaded for decades in D.C. haven't made a speech as thoughtful and out-front as the one he delivered a while back at The Heritage Foundation, for god's sake.

Rand Paul didn't speak or act alone yesterday, of course - and props to the dozen or so colleagues (including a Democrat or two) who joined him on stage or otherwise engaged him. But the opthamologist from Bowling Green, Kentucky almost singelhandedly brought the news cycle to a halt yesterday by insisting that the American government answer some basic questions about how, when, where, and under what circumstances it thinks it has the right to kill its own citizens.

2. It shows the power of transpartisan thought and action. Make no mistake: Despite the presence of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), yesterday's filibuster was a GOP-conducted orchestra. But what was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter? The same with reliable Rand and GOP critic Eugene Robinson and many others who up until yesterday thought little of Rand Paul.

The filibuster succeeded precisely because it wasn't a cheap partisan ploy but because the substance under discussion - why won't the president of the United States, his attorney general, and his nominee to head the CIA explain their views on limits to their power? - transcends anything so banal or ephemeral as party affiliation or ideological score-settling.

The chills started early in the filibuster as Paul said things along the lines of, "If you're gonna kill people in America [as terrorists], you need rules and we need to know your rules," and "To be bombed in your sleep - there's nothing American, nothing constitutional, about that" (these quotes are paraphrases). Those are not the words of a career politician trying to gain an advantage during the next round of horse-trading over a pork-barrel project. They are the words of a patriot who puts his country first and they inspire accordingly.

3. It ties a direct line between the abuses of power and the growth of the state.

Despite using various self-identifiers over the years (he's called himself a libertarian, a conservative, a constitutional conservative, etc.) Rand Paul has always been rightly understood as an advocate of sharply limited and small government. During his Senate race, for instance, he said questions about drug legalization should be pushed back towards the states, where different models could be tried in accordance with the wishes of the people most directly affected. He presented a budget that was heavy on spending cuts that would have balanced the budget in five years. He has called for either actually declaring war on countries such as Iraq and Libya or getting the hell out. What unites his positions is a default setting against giving the federal government a free hand to do whatever it wants irrespective of constitutional limits.

A year or so ago, we were debating whether the government had the right to force its citizens to engage in particular economic activity - that was the heart of the fight over the mandate to buy insurance in Obamacare. That overreach - and the fear that a government that can make you buy something can also theoretically make you eat broccoli - was at the heart of Rand Paul's opposition to the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruled that in fact, the federal government not only has the right to regulate commercial transactions that take place anywhere in these United States, it has the right to force them to take place.

And now, we're arguing over whether the president of the United States in his role as commander in chief in an ill-defined, barely articulated "global war on terror" has the right to kill U.S. citizens without presenting any sort of charges to any sort of court. In fact, it's worse than that, since the president won't even share his rationale for what he may or may not believe with the country's legislature.

By foregounding the issues of limited government, transparency, and oversight as they relate specifically to the most obvious and brazen threat to civil liberties imaginable, Rand Paul and his filibuster have also tied a direct line to a far more wide-ranging and urgently needed conversation about what sort of government we have in America - and what sort of government we should have.

SOURCE

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To create growth, unleash the invisible foot

Across the political spectrum, there is a growing recognition that while short-term battles over government spending are important, they would be far less ferocious and intense if our economy were growing at a faster clip. But while conservatives and liberals alike clamor for more growth, they disagree about how to produce it. The key is unleashing what the economist Joseph Berliner once called the “Invisible Foot,” the neglected counterpart to Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.”

Before we turn to the Invisible Foot, let’s think through the prescriptions for growth offered by Democrats and Republicans. President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies often argue that substantial increases in public investment will deliver robust growth. Republicans, in contrast, emphasize the notion that reductions in marginal tax rates will spur growth by increasing the incentives to work and invest. These approaches are obviously far apart, yet they face at least two common obstacles. First, the aging of the population and the high cost of health entitlements severely limit the government’s ability to increase spending or cut taxes. Second, advanced economies have by definition already taken advantage of the most obvious sources of productivity growth and so are forced to innovate to find new sources of productivity growth. And innovation is a trial-and-error process that is far more expensive and arduous than simply following the leader.

So the question of the day isn’t whether we want growth (yes, we want it badly) or whether we can dramatically increase public investment or dramatically cut taxes (neither strategy is in the cards). Rather, it is whether there is anything we can do to make the American economy friendlier to the kind of risk-taking and innovation that will eventually yield productivity gains without breaking the bank.

Enter the invisible foot. Despite sluggish growth, large U.S. business enterprises have fared reasonably well in the post-crisis years. Corporate profits after taxes have hovered around 10 percent of gross domestic product, almost twice as high as they were during the Reagan years. High corporate profits aren’t an intrinsically bad thing. Yet we’d normally expect that they would over time be reduced by competition from new entrants enticed by the prospect of making their own fortunes. This invisible foot of new competition is what drives incumbent firms to either step up their games ‑ a process that often involves burning through stockpiles of cash and shrinking profits ‑ or go out of business.

Unfortunately, this reallocation of resources ‑ from inefficient incumbents to innovative upstarts and the incumbents that manage to keep up with them ‑ stops when incumbent firms succeed in erecting regulatory and legal barriers to shield themselves against competitors, which is why regulatory reform and patent reform are so important. It is also why we ought to take care not to give large incumbents any undue advantages in our tax code.

As it turns out, the U.S. tax code does give large incumbents an enormous advantage over start-ups by subsidizing corporate debt. When businesses want to raise money for operations, they can pour their profits back into the business, they can sell shares or they can borrow. In an ideal world, we’d want business enterprises to make these decisions on the basis of what makes the most sense based on underlying economic conditions. But in the United States, we allow companies to deduct interest expenses from their taxes but not dividends on their stocks. This makes it far cheaper for companies to raise money by borrowing than by selling shares.

One reason this debt bias is a problem is that it leads companies to take on large amounts of debt, which raises the risk that they will go bankrupt. Yet there is another problem: It is much easier for some companies to borrow than for others. Specifically, well-established firms ‑ for example, large incumbents with pricing power that have been around for years ‑ find it much easier to borrow than new, unproven firms with high-growth potential, which have little choice but to rely on selling shares to finance investment. And so the tax-deductibility of interest expenses and not dividends gives the entrenched corporate Goliaths that have the option to borrow a big boost, while doing nothing for the would-be corporate Davids eager to take them on.

With this in mind, Robert Pozen of the Brookings Institution and Harvard Business School and his research associate, Lucas Goodman, have devised an ingenious plan to level the playing field. First, they call for cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. This lower statutory rate will make the U.S. a much more attractive destination for profitable investment projects, particularly since our current corporate tax rate of 35 percent is the highest in the industrialized world. To finance this substantial cut, Pozen and Goodman propose a modest 60 percent to 85 percent cap on the amount of interest companies can deduct from their tax bills, sharply reducing debt bias and keeping the proposal revenue-neutral. Firms that rely heavily on debt would cry foul, and for some the process of reducing debt levels would be painful. Yet start-ups that don’t have the option of raising money by taking on enormous amounts of debt would find themselves at far less of a disadvantage. The end result could be an entrepreneurial renaissance, as lumbering corporate dinosaurs that had used cheap credit to scare off competitors are forced to reckon with innovative new rivals.

And if reducing the debt bias really does encourage start-up activity, the implications for employment levels could be significant. As the economists John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda have observed, start-ups and young firms make a substantial direct contribution to creating jobs. Yet they can also make an indirect contribution to job creation by forcing incumbent firms out of their defensive crouch and into a fight to retain and gain market share. Consumers will also stand to benefit from this kick of the invisible foot as competition forces down prices and gives rise to entirely new products and services.

There is obviously no guarantee that reducing the tax code’s debt bias will be a silver bullet for economic growth. But Pozen and Goodman’s plan has enormous upside potential and, if designed with care, wouldn’t add a dime to the deficit. It would be foolish not to give it a try.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Regulatory barriers to innovation in Britain (and elsewhere)

What do you think of when picturing an ‘innovator’? I would hazard a guess that the skinny, t-shirted frame of a computer developer forces his way into mind. He is likely in the middle of developing a new app or website, and is keen to end his summons before your mind’s eye to get on with typing inscrutable code and eating pop tarts.

This is a shame. Not the interruption of our computer nerd - who we’ll leave alone now - but the fact that innovation has become such an internet and computer centred phenomenon. It is also, however, no coincidence. The ‘techy’ sectors have enjoyed huge advances in recent years in no small part because of the relative lack of regulation and red tape they’ve faced.

This has kept start-up costs low, compliance with legislation cheap, and product development swift. The economic benefits of this business freedom have been extraordinary. In 2010 the UK internet economy contributed £121bn to GDP, in 2016 this is set to be £225bn. This is a remarkable 86% growth in 6 years. According to McKinsey in 2011 2.6 jobs were created for every (mainly high-street) job lost. It is no surprise that London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ has grown in notoriety in recent years. We would do well to follow the advice of Dominique Lazanski’s recent ASI paper to keep the stellar growth going.

Other sectors have not been so lucky – over the decades industries like pharmaceuticals and food production, which once saw equally impressive innovation, have been overwhelmed by creeping legislative burdens. The rise of the grisly ‘ealf and safety brigade, backed by big business eager to block new entrants, has gradually put a stop to the leaping advances. The regulatory obstacles are so great now that aspirin would not be passed by the FDA (it would be red flagged because it risks causing gastrointenstinal bleeding). Similarly, rising levels of regulation contributed to the end of so-called ‘green revolution’ in food production between the 1940s and 70s, which hugely increased yields and lowered prices.

The risk of failing to comply with standards discourages businesses from engaging in the kind of innovation that can lead to radical break-throughs. It is safer to opt for more mundane improvements safe in the knowledge that they will be allowed to make it to the market-place.

I can hear the hard-hatted inspectors and boardrooms bursting to object. ‘This regulation is designed specifically for the benefit of consumers, they clamour; in its absence people would be exposed to improperly tested, and therefore potentially lethal medicines and foods. ‘Are you in favour of sacrificing human lives at the altar of innovation?’ they ask.

I can think of two replies to this. First, in the developing world millions die of starvation and disease; if more rapid advances were allowed many more lives would be saved than lost. Second, as our President Dr. Madsen Pirie argued so persuasively on the Daily Politics, the expectation of progress and improvement is an important component of a society’s well-being. Increased optimism about the development of new life-saving medicines and lower food prices would be a welcome addition to looking forward to the new iPad.

A bonfire of regulation would attract the best innovative minds from around the world and reignite economic growth and job creation in Britain. Exit double dip recession, enter double digit levels of growth. Who knows, we might even discover another drug as effective as aspirin.

 SOURCE

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"The War"

BOOK REVIEW of "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" by Patrick Buchanan.  Review by Jim Davies

There is little doubt that FDR was itching for a war, even though the American people were not.  So the theory (advanced below) that FDR supported Britain even before the war began is plausible -- JR

The book is about the origins of World War II, and there are very few who have no need of intense interest in that subject, for it affected hundreds of millions of lives and ended 50 to 80 million of them prematurely. My own ne plus ultra on the subject is A.J.P. Taylor's masterpiece of that title, but CHUW is a welcome and worthy augmentation. Interesting, that Buchanan often quotes from that work and clearly admires it; yet he is an Old Right conservative while Taylor was a socialist. Their common ground is to demolish the conventional wisdom that still infests government school classrooms and The History Channel. Buchanan, more than Taylor, begins by detailing the origins of the First World War, because that was the true, basic origin of the Second due to the vicious terms imposed on Germany at Versailles.

So the first two chapters of CHUW deal with the end of the 19th Century and the disastrous blunders of the European government leaders in the first decade and a half that followed it. Those chapters are worth the price of the book on their own, and far exceed in value the standard textbook on the subject, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which to my mind is hardly a history at all, rather a mere chronology.

Of particular interest to me was how Buchanan brings out the fact that there was no treaty obligation on the British government to take part, because the Anglo-French entente of 1905 was just that – an understanding, not a formal obligation. Thus, while all the other participants did have treaty obligations in that early form of Mutual Assured Destruction, the UK could have opted out – but for one factor: the Germans chose to attack France via Belgium, and there was in effect a 75-year-old treaty to guarantee Belgium's neutrality. Buchanan suggests that this was used in London as an excuse to join the war, the real motive being that without her participation, a German-Austrian victory was very probable, and domination of Europe by a German empire would have upset the stability of the worldwide British one. So entry hadn't much to do with pity for “little Belgium” as advertised, but a great deal to do with its centuries-old policy of opposing whichever nation in Europe stood poised to dominate the others.

At any rate, Buchanan analyses the moves in that terrible summer of 1914 and allocates blame – there was plenty to go around – and while a lot of mud sticks to the Brits, notably to Churchill who could ill restrain his enthusiasm for war, he shows that the Germans were the most eager to avoid a conflict if possible, and tried hardest to do so. Yet five years later, savage punishment for having started it was loaded on to them, the losers.

That fundamental injustice was forced by Clemenceau of France and Lloyd George of Britain, with US President Wilson ineffectively opposing and eventually concurring. Later, American public opinion correctly judged that the “treaty” had betrayed all the reasons Americans had had for joining the War, and turned away from European affairs in disgust.

Germans, of course, could not turn away, and the injustice rankled, and inevitably a leader emerged with promises to shred the treaty and reverse its provisions. By then – the 1930s – even most French and British pols had concluded that they were too harsh by far, so when Hitler skilfully reclaimed territory occupied mostly by German speakers who desired to live in a restored Germany, there was no wholehearted opposition. Not until Prague, that is, as Pat Buchanan shows; that was the turning point, on March 15th, 1939. Prague was not a Germanic city. Its part of Czechoslovakia was taken as a conquest by Hitler, and that was something up with which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did not feel able to put. So from that date, Buchanan says, he changed his mind; from appeaser, he became an opposer.

So he leads us to his Chapter 9, dealing with the pivotal, infamous “Polish Guarantee.”

I've been puzzled by that for many years. Everyone now agrees that it was by far the biggest blunder ever made in British foreign policy; on March 30th 1939, after a brief Cabinet discussion, Chamberlain announced that Britain would intervene if Polish integrity were violated. No quid pro quo, no prior discussions, even; it came as a surprise to all, including Polish Foreign Minister Beck, and to Hitler, who was furious. Just a blank check, out of the blue. Who suggested this catastrophic error, which did indeed prove, five months later, to be the trigger for World War II? That's the mystery, which I'd hoped CHUW would reveal.

It does not. Buchanan's treatment of the motivation is reasonable, but comes down to the theory that Chamberlain was a gentleman statesman who had accepted Hitler's word six months earlier in Munich, but who now felt betrayed and humiliated by the latter's grab of Prague and his demand for access to Danzig, a Germanic port in Northern Poland. So (it's alleged) he strung that trip wire for war in a fit of pique, as the quickest way to express anger.

Well, maybe. That says Chamberlain was naïve; for he knew full well in Munich in 1938 that he was accepting the word of a man who had systematically murdered some 200 of his own supporters in 1934, to foil an intra-party coup; so he was or should have been well aware that Hitler was no gentleman whose word could be trusted.

An alternative theory is that someone put him up to it. Paul Craig-Roberts, in this recent article on some “What-Ifs” of modern history, names Churchill as the villain, and it's true that he had in the late 1930s been calling on the government to oppose Hitler more firmly. But there is no hint in CHUW of any phone call or meeting between Churchill and Chamberlain, in which the former urged the latter to issue the Polish Guarantee--nor mention of any newspaper article to that effect. Churchill did applaud the announcement at once, but a few days later he backpedalled fast, having recognized with almost everyone else that it was a colossal blunder that left the fate of the British Empire in the hands of a Polish politician.

My own theory is that FDR is the one who put Chamberlain up to it, through his London Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. I've held that view for some years, but have seen no evidence to support it. The motive would be that FDR wanted a new war in Europe, which he could lead the US to join and win, as in 1917-18, bringing huge additional worldwide influence to the USA while diminishing that of Britain. He would have persuaded Chamberlain that the time had come to stand up to Hitler, and promised that if the outcome should be war, America would under his leadership once again come to pluck England's chestnuts from the fire.

CHUW gives me no support, either; Buchanan evidently found no trace of such a meeting. However, coincidentally, another recent publication does. It's a posthumous one by Herbert Hoover, a close friend of Joe Kennedy. The key passage from his Freedom Betrayed is revealed here, and confirms that Kennedy did indeed deliver that message to Chamberlain, at FDR's behest, in spite of his own personal disinclination; he was (or said he was) much in favor of appeasement throughout his London appointment. Hence, not only did FDR provoke Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, not only did he leak the Rainbow Five plan to stimulate Hitler to declare war on the US a few days later, but from the London Ambassador himself we have evidence that he even arranged for the European war to begin in the first place. And this is the President most lauded by every Statist in the land--unless it be that other mega-murderer, Abraham Lincoln.

Buchanan seems to have missed that one, but so had everyone else until Hoover's book emerged. Blame government restrictions on what can be published about its “statecraft.”

That's one of the few disappointments in CHUW, the other being a characteristic absence of relevant economic analysis. For example, Buchanan fails to expose the alleged German prosperity of the 1930s as a complete myth, being based on well-doctored statistics. However, I did learn one thing under this subject head: before FDR authorized the famous “lend lease” program in 1941, to supply the UK with badly needed materiel, he obliged Churchill to part with all the British government's gold. Not quite as altruistic as I'd thought.

Otherwise, it's a thrilling read, certain to invert many long-held suppositions. Churchill's contribution to his era is soberly analyzed, and he comes up very short. When he entered public life, Britain was astride the world, and when he left it, Britain was a second rate power, and nobody had contributed more than Churchill to the decisions that produced that decline. Time and time and time again, he blundered, and at no time more than in the early days of WWII. He had many opportunities to withdraw from that devastating conflict, but spat on them, every one. He helped achieve the destruction of one totalitarian monster, but at the cost of sicking a worse one on the whole world, as well as bankrupting his own country. Buchanan asks: “...we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars... Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization.”

He treats Hitler impartially too, though is by no means an apologist for the Nazi liquidator of six million Jews. But he acknowledges superior statecraft when he sees it, and he sees plenty. Hitler would have waged war on the Soviets, without doubt, but at every turn in the preamble to the war with France and Britain, Hitler tried hard to avoid it. That part of World War II was completely unnecessary – and but for that part, the US would have stayed out.

 SOURCE

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Congress Goes Bipartisan —Against Civil Liberties

The parties collude to defeat accountability for the national-security state

By W. James Antle III

Civil liberties are theoretically a bipartisan concern. Conservative Republicans who don’t like Obamacare’s “death panels” should be outraged by presidential kill lists. Liberal Democrats who defend due process ought to be offended by secret surveillance law. Protectors of the First and Second Amendments should have a high regard for the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth.

Yet restricting civil liberties is what actually commands bipartisan support in Washington. The same Congress that barely averted the fiscal cliff swiftly passed extensions of warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detention, assuring Americans that only the bad guys will be affected but evincing little interest in establishing whether this is really the case.

The same Congress that failed to come up with an agreement to avoid sequestration appears to have bipartisan majorities in favor of profligate drone use at home and abroad. Lawmakers are generally less exercised about the confirmation of likely CIA chief John Brennan than Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

At the very time it appears Washington is so dysfunctional that the two parties cannot get anything done, Democrats and Republicans cooperate regularly—when it it comes to jailing, spying on, and meting out extrajudicial punishments in ways that on their face contradict the Bill of Rights.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid argued that preserving the Bush administration’s national surveillance program—now for the benefit of the Obama administration—was more important than Christmas. Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss didn’t even want any amendments.

The Senate overwhelmingly rejected an amendment that would apply the same protections against unlawful search and seizure to emails and text messages that already exist for letters, phone calls, and presumably the carrier pigeon.

Despite deep divisions over taxes and domestic spending, members of both parties tend to sing from the same song sheet about the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments.

So much for the Democrats’ bedrock belief in the right to privacy or Republicans’ convictions about limited government.

Civil libertarians are currently a rump caucus in both parties. But they are at least starting to work together. In fact, a critical mass of legislators seeks to use this week’s Brennan vote to extract additional drone memos from the Obama administration.

More promisingly, liberal Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado have been teaming up with such conservative Republicans as Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, seeking to impose real checks on powers the federal government acquired to fight the war on terror—a conflict with no real boundaries or identifiable endpoint.

The core purpose of the Constitution is to balance the powers necessary for the federal government to protect the United States with the need to erect institutional barriers to protect against the abuse of those powers. But in emergencies, constitutional restraints often go out the window and it is difficult to restore them after the fact.

This is especially true when there is no transparency or public accountability. Many details about national surveillance, extraordinary rendition, and even the spending habits of intelligence agencies remain state secrets.

Some level of secrecy is undoubtedly necessary to preserve national security. But giving federal officials sweeping, routinely exercised powers without sunlight or scrutiny is an invitation to abuse. That’s why having even a small group of senators pressing for public information is important.

Eli Lake noted in The Daily Beast, “[A]t a moment when inter-party cooperation is almost nonexistent in Washington, any bipartisan alliance—especially one that includes some of DC’s most committed ideological opposites—is both unusual and noteworthy.”

Lake was referring to the bipartisan alliance between civil libertarian-leaning senators like Paul and Wyden. But until they make legislative inroads, the more usual and less noteworthy bipartisan alliance will be the one that exists between John Yoo and the Obama administration, united by a predilection for virtually unchecked executive power.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Some beautiful music

I know that few people share my love of early music.  Maybe this piece will persuade someone



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Now Hiring Ex-Cons

My column for Defining Ideas last week stressed that antidiscrimination laws can wreak havoc on job creation. The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, a federal agency tasked with enforcing antidiscrimination laws, has demonstrated just how destructive such laws can be. One instance of its folly is its “Enforcement Guidance” of April 2012, which has come to prominence after recent public hearings before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

With the Enforcement Guidance, all private employers and all state employers must use detailed and particularized inquiries before turning down a minority applicant who has a criminal arrest or conviction on his record, even though employers can turn down a white applicant with the same past record without going through such hoops.

An Upside Down Civil Rights Case

To the unpracticed eye, the EEOC ruling looks genuinely perverse. The law that was intended to end discrimination by private parties now institutionalizes it by government. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act has, as its purpose, to make it “an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual…because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Thus, the newest confection out of the EEOC orders most employers to do exactly what the law forbids. It introduces an explicit classification into the hiring equation by imposing a higher standard for refusing to hire minority workers than for others. The Enforcement Guidance also applies even when it is clear that the employer’s refusal to hire certain workers is not because of race but because of the evident risk that a criminal record could present to the employer, its other employees, and its customers.

The EEOC introduces what is termed “disparate treatment” by race in its supposed effort to prevent discrimination. The results are perverse at best. To take just one example, James Bovard, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reports that in 2010, the EEOC initiated litigation against G4S Secure Solutions “after the company refused to hire a twice-convicted Pennsylvania thief as a security guard.” Needless to say, the EEOC did not offer to indemnify G4S should they be held liable for any torts of their employee while on the job.

The legislative history makes it painfully clear that in order to overcome political opposition, the Act did nothing to prevent an employer from using whatever tests it liked to select those employees whom it thought best for the job. Indeed the law contained an explicit protection for any employer “to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race…”

Owing to the major differences in education and job history, most tests do have disparate impact by race. Under the Griggs rule, the employer could use that test only if some “business necessity” required its use, and then only if it had a near-perfect predictive power, which virtually no test ever has.

Unfortunately, this pattern of facts gives no indication of how to treat potential security guards who have committed violent crimes. The EEOC’s useless Enforcement Guidance only offers far-fetched examples at best. Additionally, the guidance neglects to tell an employer, who may receive hundreds of applications for a single position, how to make a detailed “individuated assessment” of each applicant and still remain economically viable. Nor does it say whether an employer remains in violation of Title VII by turning down ten minority applicants with criminal records after hiring the eleventh.

What makes this entire approach even more bizarre is that many agencies of the federal government make the same use of criminal conviction records that the EEOC demands that all states and private employers reject. At no point, however, does the EEOC claim that these federal agencies discriminate in any way. Nor does the EEOC address why it thinks these federal agencies are misguided in making their own considered judgments regarding the hiring of employees.

Who Benefits?

At the end of the day, what good does the EEOC hope to gain from this massive undertaking?

One of the great benefits of a competitive labor market is its self-corrective nature. The correct social question therefore is not whether this or that firm decides to hire a worthy applicant with a criminal record. It is whether any firm makes a positive hiring decision for a worthy candidate; if not, in competitive labor markets, any errors made by one potential employer can be corrected by favorable decisions by another.

Ironically, however, that redundancy is undercut by the EEOC’s uniform Enforcement Guidance. Some studies already suggest that firms are “much less likely to hire minority applicants when background checks are banned.” That result should not come as any surprise. The white male workers who are not protected by Title VII can offer employees this precious guarantee: the ability to hire and fire at will. Minority workers cannot waive their ill-conceived protections under Title VII, and thus are prevented from competing along this critical dimension. The EEOC Guidance may help some minority workers in a few cases, but it will hurt even more.

And by raising transaction costs, the EEOC will continue on its mindless job-killing path. Once again, the EEOC seems utterly oblivious to the harm that it causes to the groups that it most wants to help—and indeed to everyone else.

More HERE

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How to end overcriminalization

In June 2011, 11-year-old Skylar Capo saved a baby woodpecker from her family's cat. "I've just always loved animals," the aspiring veterinarian told her local news station. "I couldn't stand to watch it be eaten."

After rescuing the bird, Capo kept it by her side in a small cage for a few days to make sure it wasn't injured. She even took it along on a family trip to the local Lowe's hardware store. With the hot sun beating down overhead, Capo decided to carry the cage inside the store so the tiny woodpecker wouldn't get overheated in her car.

Little did she know, these acts of compassion violated a federal statute against the "possession" or "transport" of a migratory bird -- or that a Virginia game warden would be on her family's doorstep days later demanding payment of a $535 fine.

Because this story involved a little girl and a baby bird it made national headlines. But the underlying problem of overcriminalization rarely receives such attention -- which is just how big government likes it.

The proliferation of needless criminal statutes makes lawbreakers of ordinary people who have no ill intentions. As Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute puts it, they "find themselves on the wrong side the law without even realizing it."

Take Eddie Leroy Anderson, a retired logger from Idaho whose only crime was loaning his son "some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs," according to the Wall Street Journal. Anderson and his son found no arrowheads, but because they were unknowingly on federal land at the time they were judged to be in violation of an obscure Carter-era law called the Archaeological Resources Protection Act.

The government showed no mercy. Wendy Olson, the Obama appointee prosecuting the case, saw to it that father and son were fined $1,500 apiece and each sentenced to a year's probation. "Folks do need to pay attention to where they are," she said.

Statutory law in America has expanded to the point that government's primary activity is no longer to protect, preserve and defend our lives, liberty and property, but rather to stalk and entrap normal American citizens doing everyday things.

After identifying three federal offenses in the U.S. Constitution -- treason, piracy and counterfeiting -- the federal government left most matters of law enforcement to the states. By the time President Obama took office in 2009, however, there were more than 4,500 federal criminal statutes on the books.

"Too many people in Washington seem to think that the more laws Congress enacts, the better the job performance of the policymakers," Lynch notes. "That's twisted."

Not long after Skyler Capo's battle with Virginia game wardens, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese joined Lynch in testifying before a House committee exploring the problem of overcriminalization. "The federal criminal code is overly extensive," Meese testified. "There are more laws than are needed or could possibly be enforced. There are too many redundant, superfluous and unnecessary criminal laws. They should be consolidated and/or eliminated."

A compelling new study on overcriminalization by University of Tennessee professor Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) shows that there are many solutions to this problem, including an end to prosecutorial immunity, "loser pays" legislation and a ban on plea bargains.

But more drastic measures may be required. Reformers should really begin by going through the entire body of federal criminal law -- starting with all statutes that carry jail time -- operating under the presumption that every statute should be eliminated unless it can be justified as essential. The federal government, especially, has no business duplicating state functions or applying criminal penalties to advance mere social engineering objectives.

SOURCE

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Chris Christie and the future of the GOP

It's a safe bet that most conservative Republicans would rush to support a political leader with the following record, especially in a traditionally Democratic state:

-- Reversed a $2.2 billion deficit and brought it into balance without raising taxes, largely by reduced spending and eliminating wasteful and unaffordable programs, allowing for a projected fiscal 2014 budget surplus of $300 million.

-- Bipartisan pension and benefits reforms, saving the state $120 billion over 30 years.

-- Streamlining government by eliminating 5,200 government jobs.
-- Vetoing tax increase bills three times while cutting taxes for job creators.

-- Reforming the nation's oldest teacher tenure law by making it conditional on teacher performance in the classroom.

-- Reduced property tax increases to a 21-year low and capped them at a maximum 2 percent.

There's more, but shouldn't conservative Republicans be ecstatic by this record compiled by New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie?

Not the folks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which decided not to invite one of the party's superstars to its annual gathering in Washington. Apparently, the reason had to do with Christie upsetting conservative orthodoxy by saying something nice about President Obama for approving emergency aid to distressed New Jerseyans affected by Super Storm Sandy.

I'm all for orthodoxy, which some call principle. I am orthodox in many things, but in politics compromise in the pursuit of ultimate goals does not necessarily make one a compromiser.

Gov. Chris Christie is no liberal. He is proving his ideas work, which is why, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, he has a 74 percent approval rating in one of the bluest states in the country.

Most politicians would, as they say, "kill" for a number like that, but instead CPAC organizers "killed" Christie from their list of speakers.

Conservative Republicans have a unique opportunity to present a positive, forward-looking and reform-minded agenda at a time when most voters' approval of government is scraping rock bottom. Americans are aware of the current dysfunction in Washington and may be ready for a creative message if Republicans could show them how a 21st-century model would mutually benefit themselves and the nation.

Former George W. Bush aide Peter Wehner offers some suggestions in a Time magazine essay:

"First, Republicans should make front-and-center their plans to reform public institutions that were designed for the needs of the mid-20th century. Our health-care and entitlement system, tax code, schools, immigration policies and regulatory regime are outdated, breaking down, and creating substantial wreckage. If I had to boil it down to a single sentence, I'd urge the GOP to develop its reputation as the party of reform and modernization. Second, Republican leaders at every level need to conduct themselves in a manner that not just reassures voters but appeals to them. As former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has put it, 'as we ask Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they liked us, just a bit.' ... Third, Republicans must resist the temptation of defeatism, enervation, and turning against the country. It is entirely within the power of the GOP to both remain principled and appeal to a majority of Americans. An intellectually self-confident party would, in fact, be energized by a challenge of this scale."

Read this line again: "It is entirely within the power of the GOP to both remain principled and appeal to a majority of Americans."

A bold agenda that does these things reflects Gov. Christie's record in New Jersey. By not inviting him to speak, CPAC invites comparison with a pessimistic and hypercritical political environment of the past. If the Republican "tent" isn't large enough for Chris Christie, then it will resemble a pup tent for some time to come.

Republicans should be focused on deconstructing failed liberalism and styling their alternative in positive terms, not rejecting one of their own. Hating President Obama is not a policy. Intellectually defeating his policies is.

SOURCE

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The campaign against free and fair elections

The elections are only a few months behind us, but Democrats are already busy working to ensure citizens and non-citizens, the dead, felons and those registered in two or more states can cast a ballot in the next political contests.

These “new Americans,” as Democratic rising star and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley calls illegal immigrants, used-to-be Americans, those who gave up their voting rights after committing a crime and those extra-engaged citizens have one thing in common. They like Democrats.

That is why the left is busy pushing voter “access” from the top down. President Barack Obama said in his inauguration speech that, “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.” And in his state of the union speech he proposed a commission to study electoral reform to make voting faster and easier.

But that is really not the mission. The average wait time around the country is 14 minutes, hardly an overwhelming burden.

The real issue is finding ways to ensure Democratic hegemony for decades to come. That is why the party and liberal activists want federal and state reforms allowing same day registration and voting and expanded early voting – but go postal over laws requiring voter identification and refuse to acknowledge fraud and election security issues.

Instead, they say the real problem is a vast conservative conspiracy to prevent minorities and the poor from voting.

There is plenty of evidence of fraud, however. Wendy Rosen, a Democrat who ran for Congress in Maryland last year, withdrew from her race after news broke that she voted in both Florida and Maryland. The New York Daily News found that 46,000 snowbirds, mostly Democrats, were registered in both New York City and Florida. Its analysis exposed that up to 1,000 of them voted in both states in multiple elections. As the paper wrote, “The finding is even more stunning given the pivotal role Florida played in the 2000 presidential election, when a margin there of 537 votes tipped a victory to George W. Bush.” And a group in Minnesota found by comparing criminal records with voting rolls that over 1,000 ineligible felons voted in the state’s 2008 election where the U.S. Senate seat, won by Democrat Al Franken, was decided by 312 votes.

Waiting in line to vote is an inconvenience, but reducing the wait time to zero is not worth it if it jeopardizes the integrity of elections across the United States. If those on the left truly cared about free and fair elections, they would focus their efforts on ensuring those allowed to vote have appropriate identification and that voter rolls do not allow people to vote in multiple states.

Couching the lie of “voter suppression” in the guise of “voter access” makes it no less dangerous

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Dead in the Water: The Federal Flood Insurance Fiasco

By almost any analysis, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)—the recipient of a $9.7 billion bailout in the wake of Hurricane Sandy—doesn’t work. It is poorly conceived, it’s terribly mismanaged, and it encourages harmful behavior.

Of course, the same can be said for dozens of other federal efforts. What sets the NFIP apart is that, in looking to address what was at the time a clear market failure, Congress created a program that has so influenced the course of society these past four and a half decades that getting rid of it would be nearly impossible.

Before Congress set up the NFIP in 1968, only a handful of very small insurance companies wrote flood coverage as part of conventional homeowners’ policies. Although a demand for flood insurance clearly existed, nobody would sell it. This was a market failure as almost any economist would describe it. And it happened for several reasons.

Insurance works best when a large number of people who face similar but uncorrelated risks pool their risk together. But floods are heavily correlated. While they aren’t a serious concern in many parts of the country, they can be a constant menace in areas near river valleys or along coasts that face threats from tropical storms. In an era when small, local insurers that served one or two states provided most insurance, a single big flood could drive many of them out of business.

Not that the business of home insurance has ever been particularly lucrative. Over nearly any given 10-year period, the property and casualty insurance industry as a whole pays out in claims roughly as much as it takes in in premiums, and the home insurance business is one of the least attractive from an underwriting standpoint. Insurers earn their returns mostly by investing premium dollars in high quality, low-yield bonds. With very thin margins, in those years when the business is profitable at all, the main attraction to insurers of offering home insurance—required of everyone who has a mortgage—is the chance to cross-sell more lucrative products, like investments, life insurance, and automobile insurance. Indeed, no company of any size sells only homeowners’ insurance.

Most important, the data that insurers needed to make good underwriting decisions about flood risks didn’t really exist at the time Congress created NFIP. Before air conditioning and the near-elimination of malaria-carrying mosquitos made them pleasant places to live, wet areas were mostly the domain of poor “river rats” who couldn’t afford homeowners’ insurance. Because the flow of water continually changes the contours of flood-prone areas, mapping such areas remains inherently difficult and expensive and was nearly impossible given the technology of the time. And it follows that the paltry returns they expected to earn on flood insurance offered little incentive for insurers to invest in and improve these systems.

Government policy made things worse. Since the 1920s, nearly all states have passed laws to regulate how much insurers are allowed to charge. Although these laws have eased slightly since the 1960s—and vanished entirely in Illinois—they still make insurers very reluctant to take on new types of risks. They have a legitimate fear that state governments may not let them charge enough to cover their costs and, thus, face the no-win choice of either “nonrenewing” their customers or losing money.

Even worse, from the standpoint of any insurer contemplating entering the flood insurance business, Sen. Prescott Bush (father and grandfather of the Presidents Bush) succeeded in convincing his colleagues in Congress to pass a law creating a flood insurance program in 1956. While the program was never funded, its very existence in statute provided a powerful reminder that the federal government planned to nationalize flood insurance and thus was a disincentive for anyone who might otherwise have thought of investing in the market.

This combination of the nature of the flood risk, the insurance business, the limitations of technology, and the regulatory climate made it impossible to provide flood insurance in most of the country. Spurred on by the GI Bill, the new interstate highway system, and the FHA mortgage insurance created by the Housing Act of 1949, an exploding population began moving into brand new suburbs, many of them constructed in naturally flat flood-prone areas where building was easy.

Flood damages began to rise, and Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the first post-World War II storm to do more than $1 billion in damage, provided an additional potent incentive for the federal government to do something about flood insurance.

On paper, the flood insurance law passed by Congress in 1968 looked sensible: It required participating communities to take steps to avoid building in disaster-prone areas, left requirements loose enough that private companies could take on risk if they wanted to, assured that rates on all future construction would be “actuarially adequate,” and promised that the federal government would draw up the maps that the private sector needed in the first place. As an incentive for people to buy the insurance, it denied all federal aid to those who qualified for the program but didn’t buy in. Although its creators allowed it to borrow funds from the Treasury—a stop-gap measure, lest major floods had hit in its first few years—the program was intended to break even over time and, some thought, might eventually be sold off to the private sector.

Almost none of these good intentions proved justified. The requirement to purchase insurance or lose federal aid fell by the wayside as soon as hard-hit areas came crying to Congress. Government definitions of “actuarial adequacy” ended up leaving out most of the costs private companies would factor into their rates. While communities wishing to let their residents buy into the program did have to discourage the most obviously foolhardy building, poor mapping and the natural clout of local developers made these requirements a triviality. So much for a financially responsible program. “Temporary” subsidies became permanent. Congress periodically forgave the program’s debts and, following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005, authorized it to borrow $20 billion from the Treasury that it had no chance of ever paying back. On the eve of Hurricane Sandy, the NFIP still owed the Treasury more than $17 billion, with another chunk of debt taken out to pay claims from Hurricane Ike in 2008.

With Congress expected to re-authorize the program every five years, many aspects of the NFIP grew worse over time. Even as Congress corrected obvious absurdities—such as subsidies for writing insurance on coastal barrier islands and other areas likely to wash away entirely—members added various benefits and even made the private insurance industry a beneficiary of the program. Under a “write your own” (WYO) program that pays them to adjust claims and service policies, private insurers get to keep about a third of the total premiums collected, but take on no real risk. While this program isn’t enormously lucrative for insurance company home offices—the tasks they’re asked to undertake are reasonably labor-intensive—it’s not a money loser either. Most large, well-known national property insurers participate in this WYO program, and not a single one was willing to step forward and offer to take on any risk when lobbyists and activists surveyed them about the topic last year.

Over the NFIP’s 45 years of existence, moreover, it has influenced the built environment to such an extent that full-scale privatization couldn’t happen, even if insurers were willing. For those whose mortgages were issued by federally chartered banks, or were purchased by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, policy requires the purchase of flood insurance if a property faces at least a 1 percent chance of flooding in a given year. Because NFIP rates have been kept artificially low for decades, millions of people now live in places that wouldn’t be inhabited at all absent the program’s subsidies.

Under Congress’s budget rules, eliminating the program outright would actually cost more money than keeping it operating. Once it finishes paying claims from Hurricane Sandy, the NFIP will owe nearly $30 billion to the Treasury. So long as those loans are outstanding, they don’t count toward the federal budget. Discontinuing the program, on the other hand, would leave taxpayers on the hook for that debt (and for scheduled mapping improvements) without any new premium dollars coming in the door.

The legally binding insurance contracts the program offers, likewise, make it impossible for Congress not to offer bailouts like the one that took place earlier this month. Had Congress not approved the funding, flood insurance policyholders would have gone to court and won judgments ordering the government to pay the claims anyway. Furthermore, the program, to the extent it will repay its debt at all, will never reach the point where it would look attractive to private suitors.

Everybody who has taken a close look at the NFIP realizes that the program is a mess. Once the symbolic votes to end the program had passed, both Democrats and Republicans came to basically the same conclusions that changes needed to happen. A set of reforms that became law last summer was written jointly by the moderate Republican Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) and far-left Maxine Waters (D-Calif.). That bill promises to improve maps, phase out some premium subsidies, and allow the program to transfer some of its risk to private reinsurers (insurers for insurance companies).

All of these changes make sense, and no sizable organized group stood against them, but they’re hardly the kinds of radical reforms that the program would need to put itself on firm fiscal footing for the long term. Even if all of the proposed changes work as promised, the program’s finances will remain such that any state regulator who looked over its books would forbid it from operating if it were a private company, on the basis that it can’t pay the claims it will reasonably expect to receive. At best, it will take an additional round of reforms—reforms that are unlikely to until the current program expires in September 2017—for the private sector to seriously begin assuming the liability. And that assumes Congress has the political will to ask coastal property owners to see their property insurance bills soar.

Better by far that the program had never been started. International examples show that private flood insurance can work. Germany and the United Kingdom, among other countries, write almost all flood insurance through private parties. While the business isn’t a major profit center for the insurance industry, it, at least, isn’t a taxpayer liability. And building is deterred in the most flood-prone areas.

More than anything else, the NFIP offers a stern warning to anybody who wants government to solve every problem. In the case of flood insurance, even the existence of a market failure didn’t mean the public sector necessarily had a better solution. For the foreseeable future, America is stuck with the NFIP.

SOURCE

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The New Swedish Model

Among policy nerds back in the day, “Swedish model” meant the brand of social democracy practiced in Sweden in the second half of the twentieth century. (Somebody would usually crack wise about Anita Ekberg whenever the phrase was uttered.) But for a very long time, whenever the problems of socialism were discussed, it was common to hear people say as a kind of shut-up argument: “Ah, but socialism works in Sweden; what about the Swedish model?”

Swedish social democracy created an extensive welfare state—including comprehensive health care, generous unemployment benefits, and marginal tax rates commonly in excess of 70 percent. But that followed years of relatively free-market policies in the early twentieth century, which generated impressive economic growth. Government intervention in Sweden didn’t really get going until the 1960s.

The Economist on “Northern Lights”

Interventionists in the United States could learn something from what’s going on now in Sweden (although I fear they won’t). According to a recent spread in The Economist magazine:

"Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67 percent in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983, to 57%, and scrapped a mare’s nest of taxes on property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. This year it is cutting the corporate-tax rate from 26.3% to 22%."

Compare these rates with the U.S. tax rates, under the 2013 tax law, of 39.6 percent on incomes above $400,000 (filing single) and 35 percent on corporations.

But in some sense the current dramatic policy changes in Sweden are just a continuation, after an interruption of several years, of a dis-interventionist trend that began in the 1990s. The “new” Swedish model is not really that new. Indeed, Sweden has climbed to 30th out of 144 countries in economic freedom according to FreetheWorld.com, compared to the United States, which has fallen to 18th, just ahead of Germany (31st) and far outpacing France (47th) and China (107th).

So What About the United States?

The federal deficit numbers in the United States, however, look worse compared to Sweden’s. Again, according to The Economist:

"Sweden has also donned the golden straitjacket of fiscal orthodoxy with its pledge to produce a fiscal surplus over the economic cycle. Its public debt fell from 70% of GDP in 1993 to 37% in 2010, and its budget moved from an 11% deficit to a surplus of 0.3% over the same period."

The current federal deficit—the annual excess of government spending over tax revenue—is around $1.1 trillion.

The accumulated debt of the United States federal government now exceeds $15 trillion, which is roughly equal to the current gross domestic product (GDP), the dollar value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. economy in 2012. That means that the federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now slightly more than 100% percent (compared to 37 percent in Sweden).

The United States does compare favorably to Sweden in federal spending as a percentage of GDP. For the United States, that’s about 39 percent, versus over 50 percent for Sweden. Including state and local spending boosts this figure somewhat over 40% percent of GDP for the United States, but that’s still significantly below Sweden's figure. Sweden, though, with one-thirtieth the population of the United States, has a per capita GDP of $57,091 to the United States’s $48,112.

If Sweden Can Do It, Can the United States?

Some fear that a debt-to-GDP ratio above 100 percent places the United States past the fiscal “point of no return”—that is, past the point where in modern times governments have been able to significantly reduce the percentage of debt to GDP. How did things get so bad?

Milton Friedman brilliantly characterized the main alternative politico-economic systems as follows:

1) spending my own money on myself (capitalist model)

2) spending my money on someone else (Christmas model)

3) spending someone else’s money on myself (rent-seeking model)

4) spending someone else’s money on someone else (socialism)

He went on to say that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

But if Sweden, a country in which the welfare state has been so entrenched over so many decades, can make such dramatic, even radical, changes in its interventionist habits, why couldn’t the United States? A comparably dramatic reform here—perhaps “revolution” comes closer to describing what would be needed—is certainly possible, despite staggering institutional barriers, tenacious entrenched interests, and sheer economic ignorance.

The biggest obstacle, as I see it, is not having the strength of will to sustain the relentless intellectual and political battle needed to overcome all those other obstacles. And in all honesty, I find it hard to be very optimistic about that.

The Greek Model

Well into my sixth decade of life, one of the things I think I’ve learned is that radical change and the will to see it through are indeed possible—beyond any so-called point of no return—but only when it’s clearly a matter of life and death. There has to be a sense of urgency, even desperation, to the extent that you become willing to do whatever it takes to survive. But of course desperation is tricky; desperate people can easily make matters worse. It’s perhaps during crises, moments of widespread desperation, that a well-developed philosophy of freedom can have its finest moment by guiding desperate people toward real solutions.

So does the United States have to follow, say, hapless Greece—with its bloated welfare state, strangling regulation and taxation, and monetary profligacy—before our crony-capitalist system develops cracks wide enough for enough of us to see that embracing liberty and rejecting statism is our last, our best, and our only hope?

I’m afraid our economy will have to look much more like the Greeks’ before we’ll muster the will to follow the example of the Swedes.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena .  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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