Politics

Chocolate for Thought

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , ,

There is a pervasive feeling among thinking people that this country is not just facing a severe economic crisis but that we are losing something exceptional. That something is American exceptionalism precisely. Lech Walesa, the blue-collar hero of Polish freedom from communism put it well in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal. There is only one of America and if it ceases being itself, the world is left in the dark, goes the thinking. It’s not reasonable to count on the debt-ridden government pension-sucking Europeans to hold up the flashlight. The fact is that several European countries are disappearing because they don’t make enough babies to replenish themselves. That’s the ultimate form of pessimism. (And no, this is not a racist statement, I am completely pleased with the fact that brown-skinned Mexicans and their children are keeping the American population growing. They make good immigrants. See my article on Mexican immigration, with Nikiforov, in the Summer 2009 issue of the Independent Review.)

Unfortunately, there is an innate humility among Americans which makes it difficult for them to think aloud about American exceptionalism. If there were not, twenty years of cultural relativism in the schools would make the very thought difficult to formulate: “Everybody is equal. We are not any better than those who suck their grandmothers’ brain – but only after they die, or than those who practice horrendous sexual mutilation on little girls, or than those who still practice slavery. Only American slavery was atrocious. Slavery in exotic locales is kind of nice, actually, if you look at it in its proper cultural context.”

One way to overcome this shyness and diffuse sense of equality in order better to grasp what we are losing is to consider Swiss exceptionalism about which no one gives a damn, not even the Swiss. It turns out that in the main respects, there is not one America, there are several. Switzerland is one. Continue reading →

Coyotes: How Government Bureaucrats Think

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty, Politics , ,

In my area of central California coyotes recently attacked two small dogs that were romping around. Both dogs survived. The attack took part in a public park of some sort. The reaction of the rangers (How I hate this semi-heroic designation for cops in green uniforms!) :

We are going to enforce leash laws more strictly. The attack would not have happened if the dogs had been on leash.

Why not regulate coyote behavior while you are it? You might add to the list of forbidden things on the signs posted everywhere:

Coyote attacks on dogs not allowed.

Somewhere in the depths of the bloated California bureaucracy there might even be a subsidized artist to design a cute symbol signifying the same thing, for coyotes who can’t read. While we are at it, why not a sign in Spanish also?

There is another approach to all this: Dogs like to run around. In fact, most of them need to run around to be healthy. Dogs who run are happier than dogs who don’t.

Coyotes will eat anything, small dogs when they get a chance. It makes them happy. Dog owners know this. They are morally responsible for their dogs. They are the ones to decide what’s the greatest risk for their pet: unhappiness and a constricted life vs the risk of a very rare wild animal attack. Continue reading →

Let’s Celebrate Loopholes

Warren Gibson Economics, Politics , , ,

I’ve just finished my income tax return. (Have you finished yours?) Silly me, I do it myself using TurboTax – all 59 pages of my federal return plus 80 for California. I’ve got investment income, including partnerships and foreign stock dividends, two small businesses, social security and a pittance of wage income from San Jose State University. And a bunch of deductions and credits.

The whole process puts me in a foul mood, and my wife and even the cats know to steer clear till it’s done. One reason is obvious: the mind-numbing complexity, even with TurboTax. Even more galling is the humiliation and gross indecency of dropping my pants financially. This is the land of the free?

The New York Times had an interesting article in last Sunday’s Magazine, “What’s the Easiest Way to Cheat on Your Taxes?.” The article led off with the assertion: “If economists ran the tax system, there would be virtually no exemptions or loopholes.” To which I say, just a cotton-pickin’ minute! If I ran the tax system, and assuming I couldn’t set the rate at zero, exemptions and loopholes would stay and maybe even multiply.

How can I say this after belly-aching about the complexity of my return? Simple – the complexities provide me enough tax-cutting opportunities to outweigh the damage to myself, my wife and the cats. I’ll leave the details out just in case the gentle folk at the IRS read this humble blog.

Why do I do it myself? Partly because I don’t want to spend hundreds or maybe thousands on a professional preparer, but also because his interests would not align exactly with mine. His primary goal would be to cover his rear, especially with the IRS cracking down on professional preparers. My goal is to achieve the right mix of boldness and caution in claiming deductions and credits.

A good bit of ink has been spilled (and electrons) about “fair taxes” lately. It’s unfair, says the Community Organizer in the White House, that Warren Buffett’s average tax rate (or was it his marginal rate?) is lower than his secretary’s. Conveniently overlooked is the fact that his dividend income has already been taxed at the corporate level. As Gene Epstein showed recently in Barron’s, when you add in that corporate tax you get a much different story. The rich pay a substantially higher percentage of their income than most of us on this basis.

So what is a fair tax anyway? The same percentage for everyone? No exemptions, no deductions? Why is that any fairer than a head tax – a levy of so much per person? How about a regressive head tax, since poor people tend to use more government services than rich people?

What of two people earning the exact same income? Surely fairness demands that they pay the same tax – equality before the law and all that. But suppose Mr. A is a struggling young man with lots of debt, trying to start a family while Mr. B has inherited millions. Both earn the same income but is it fair that they pay the same tax? I leave it to you.

When you get right down to it, there just isn’t any such thing as a fair tax, simply because taxes are coercive exactions – theft, if you will.

Still why wouldn’t a flat tax with no deductions be at least a small improvement, as Steve Forbes and other conservatives advocate? The late Murray Rothbard demolished that idea in The Case Against the Flat Tax. Here’s his comment:

“The closing of ‘loopholes’ under a flat tax will mean a merciless and continuing search-and-destroy mission by which the government will root out and obliterate every little hideyhole in which many of us have been able to squirrel away a bit of our own earnings and are own property, and keep them safe from the ever-expanding maw of the federal government.”

I concur. Let’s celebrate all the loopholes, not just those that protect some of our own income, but any break for anybody at all.

Ethnography of Liberalism: I

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , ,

There used to be an academic discipline called “Ethnography.” It was an inherently humble endeavor, the description of others, of usually exotic, far away, little-known groups. I mean head-hunters of Borneo, and Pygmies from central Africa. Ethnography had little pretension to “explain” as does modern Anthropology for example. I am engaged in a continuous study of the Left. I am doing daily, indefatigable ethnography of that quaint but interesting tribe.

In spite of my public identity as a conservative, I am proud to say I have good entries into the liberal world of my small ultra-liberal and “progressive” town. I don’t know the liberal establishment and I think it does not know me, or it ignores me. I am in daily touch with the rank-and-file though. (I will not blow my cover by telling you how. You will have to take my word for it.) Because of my previous life in academia, I also know liberals. and even progressives, outside of my immediate area. I am talking of people with whom I have personal contacts at will, not National Public Radio.

Old-fashioned ethnographers used to exploit “native informants.” Those were local indigenous people who were willing to talk, trustworthy and who, the ethnographer had reasons to believe, were well-informed. Lately, I have been having short and long-distance conversations with a younger man, a very moderate liberal, a liberal-leaning centrist, you might say. I have known the man for a long time. He is intelligent, very hard-working and resourceful. He has even demonstrated an entrepreneurial bent. More importantly, I know him well enough to be sure that he prizes his personal credibility. My liberal friend is a valid native informant. I am not building a straw-man to burn later in triumph. Continue reading →

How ’bout Communism?

Jacques Delacroix History, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

Note: Most of my adult life and all of my childhood were dominated by the threat of Communism. People of my generation who wanted to know understood well the horrors of Communist societies. We knew of the slave-labor camps, of the mass executions, of the constant spying on ordinary citizens by the secret police, of the betrayals of friend by friend that were everyday life in Communist countries. We were well aware also of the grinding poverty in those countries.

I am concerned that thinking individuals who are in their twenties and even in their thirties now might know little about the reality of Communism as it was practiced. It seems to me that no one asked them to study the matter. A Russian friend of mine is going back to Russia this summer for a couple of months. If a few readers ask, I will request of my friend that he contribute to this blog from there, drawing on the memories of older friends and relatives who survived the Soviet period.

There was once a “Communist” movement whose followers were often motivated by generous impulses and by economic ignorance, in more or less equal parts. There has never been a Communist state, whatever that would be. Historically several Communist parties did achieve political power. None did so through democratic means, although the Czechoslovak Communists may have come close, in 1948. We will never know because the presence of a large contingent of the Soviet Red Army in the country forever mars the analysis. Continue reading →

Mali: Let It Collapse, Duh! Part 2

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I just came across an article in the New York Times via Bill Easterly, and it is very discouraging. The article is, of course, about the aspirations of Azawad, the breakaway region of Mali that just declared its independence. The article outlines the slim-to-none chances Azawad has of breaking free from the shackles of colonial legacy and African despotism:

“[…] there is little likelihood that anyone will defeat the Tuaregs on the battlefield anytime soon.

Still, they face slim odds of establishing a nation. Just ask Ahmed Abdi Habsade, a government minister in Africa’s other unrecognized state, Somaliland. ‘We have many problems,’ Mr. Habsade said in a telephone interview from Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa. ‘The country cannot get donations from the U.N. or other governments. We are not having a budget to develop our country.’

Somaliland, which sits in the northwestern corner of Somalia, has been a de-facto independent nation for the better part of two decades, and an oasis of calm in the chaos that has swept up Somalia. Its claims to independence date from the colonial era, when it was a British protectorate while Somalia was controlled by Italy. The two states merged after independence, but the Somalilanders had almost immediate regrets, and have been trying to break free ever since.

Somaliland has had successes, including holding peaceful elections, yet it has struggled without an international stamp of Continue reading →

Karl Marx Was Right (Pretty Much)

Jacques Delacroix History, Politics , , , , ,

Karl Marx spent a lifetime arguing that the motor of history, what caused social change, was the “class struggle.” (Marx said other, more complicated things in relation to the class struggle. I don’t care to talk about them right now because they are obscure and there is little agreement among Marxists about what they mean.) Marx also did not assign enough importance to technological progress, it’s true. That would happen largely as a result of ever greater densities of population, irrespective of any political system. Many people in close contact in cities are more likely to come up with better ways to get things done than few people who barely ever meet anyone outside their small group. Literacy also helped of course by helping preserve accumulated knowledge. With these major lacunas, I think Marx was mostly right.

Marx had an elaborated conceptualization of social class that he never really completed. First, what “class” is not, according to Marx (also according to Delacroix). Class explicitly does not refer to “the rich and the poor” as many think. That would have been of limited usefulness when Marx was writing and it would be utterly useless now. The fact is that the distribution of wealth in modern, capitalist societies (the ones Marx had in mind) is continuous, that is, there is not break-up point. Next to the person, or family who owns $1,000, 000 there is one that owns $999,000, and next to that one, there is another that owns $998,999. Likewise, next to the person or family who owns $50, there is one that has $51 in wealth. And so forth. Moreover, who owns what is not fixed except at the lowest end. I was poor when I was thirty, I am not anymore. People who own vast wealth are liable to lose large portions of it in a day or two, thanks to the normal operation of the stock market, for example. Thus, there is frequent re-shuffling and rich and poor are pseudo-categories and therefore, useless.

Marx explained at length that what social class one belongs to is determined by one’s “relation to the means of production.” This is a bad translation of the bad German that prevailed at the time Marx was writing. Generations of Marxists everywhere have striven to conserve this opaque language because it made them sound profound, not least in their own eyes, and because it made them look like possessors of higher, “scientific” knowledge. Let me dispose of the scientific claim right away. It’s pure propaganda, deliberate bullshit, one of Marx’s public relations achievements. He made his claims seem more serious than they otherwise would have seemed by calling them “scientific” at a time when the word conveyed much intellectual prestige. Again, it’s bullshit. What makes anything scientific is that it can be refuted by comparison with reality. Another way to say nearly the same thing is to say that scientific claims can be tested. (Don’t worry about the “nearly” in the previous sentence; the statement is good enough for our purpose.) Marx’s claims cannot be tested in a rigorous, logical manner. All Marxists can do is to cry, “See, Marx said so,” after the fact, whenever something develops more or less according to one of Marx’s many unclear predictions. One issue about which Marx was clear was the class struggle. More on this below.

The world in which Marx lived was different from ours in important respects two of which are crucial for understanding the idea of social class in the 21st century.

1 When Marx was observing and writing, in the second half of the 19th century, land was losing much of its age-old importance as a source of income, in comparison with manufacturing and mining, and later, railroads. While agricultural productivity was making steady gains in the richest countries, manufacturing and, in its wake, mining, were growing explosively thanks to the Industrial Revolution. (Note what I am not saying: Income from agriculture was not shrinking in absolute terms, it was expanding.) It was clear to most observers then that the quick way to riches was to capture the fast rising income generated by those industries. The best spigot was thus the material industries of manufacturing, mining and later, railroads.

The claimants to this income were uncommonly well-defined. On the one side were a small number of mostly family-based companies like the Krupp in Germany, the Schneider in France, the Rockefeller in America, and so on. These highly visible companies owned the manufacturing plants, the mines, and later the railroads. Here is a useful digression: Marx seemed not to have understood the importance of publicly owned companies in which small people and other groups could invest their small savings. He probably thought big corporations would remain in a tiny number of hands forever. Correspondingly, he did not understand well the role of stock exchanges either. He was wrong on this, wrong by large omission.

The other claimants to manufacturing, mining and railroad income were also highly visible. They were the masses of workers flocking to the cities and mining centers from the countryside. Those people were visible because of where they lived, near the centers of cities. Originally, they were also poorly paid and overworked. Marx observed that they were in a favorable situation to organize along labor union lines and also politically to an extend unimaginable by their peasant forebears. This, because of their geographic concentration and because of their ability to realize that they shared a certain type of misery.

From these accurate observations, it was fairly natural to predict that there would eventually be a clash between the super-rich owners of the means of production, manufacturing plants, mines and railroads, and those who toiled for them. It looked like there was at any time, a zero-plus sum game being played: Whatever the owner took, the workers did not get, and vice-versa: capitalists (owners) vs proletariat (industrial workers, broadly defined).

But everyone who was not a worker was not a capitalist in that sense, and everyone who was not a capitalist was not necessarily an industrial worker. The lawyers who serviced the capitalists could be expected to join with them. The tavern owners whose own income came from workers’ drinking would side with the workers, and so forth. This scheme makes it clear that a starving lawyer could be in the capitalist camp and a prosperous pub owner in that of the workers. Hence the idea that people would line up politically according to their “relationship to the mean of production.” This is a more sophisticated idea and also one much more applicable than the “rich vs poor” of the popular imagery of social class.

2. The second big difference between Marx’s time and ours is the size of government. Throughout the 19th century, governments everywhere were small and poor. There was no income tax; they derived revenue largely from customs (border taxes) and from excise taxes. Governments then were a fiscal burden on everyone if not equally, then commonly, but a fairly light burden most of the time.

Today, governments in the developed world are large to huge. They consume anywhere between 40% approximately and 70% of Gross Domestic Product. They are also everywhere by far the largest accessible source of income.

Superficially, the amorphous, ill-defined “service sector” seems even larger since it accounts regularly for more than 70% of GDP (in rich countries including the US). However, it’s fragmented, heterogeneous, controlled (to the extent that is is controlled) by a myriad of owners. Much of it is not very profitable, as opposed to 19th century manufacturing, for example. The services workforce is also extremely fragmented and it tends to be transient. It would be difficult for that workforce, or for anyone else to get together to capture anything of value. There is not much to take from the service sector and it would be hard to get.

By contrast, the large to very large chunk of money that is in governments’ hands at any one time is easy to capture. It does not take much more than a well-engineered vote to get one’s own hands on it. Furthermore, unlike the private sector’s funds that depend on the vagaries of the market and on management’s competence, government grants in various forms tend to have a long shelf life. The WWII subsidy to chinchilla farmers was only repealed about ten years ago, fifty years late! Civil service pension funds are another case in point. Obtaining money from government entities is well worth the effort. The government is both a big spigot and an easy one to turn on.

I know I promised to tell you that Marx was almost right. Well, what we see in America today is a classical Marxian class struggle. The classes in conflict are not those Marx described because he was writing almost 150 years ago and he had not foreseen the monstrous growth of government. (No one else had.) The Obamanian/Obamist faction of the Democratic Party has engineered and is engineering an alliance between the main social class of today, government workers, on the one hand and a few other, opportunistically selected groups, on the other hand.

First among the government workers class allies are the small minority of workers in labor unions (maybe 7 or 8% of all employed and unemployed people). Labor unions have always used government to grab what their own muscle failed to achieve. Second, are the majorities of racial minorities. Many – but not most – are poor for reasons that ceased a long time ago to be related to racism. The largest racial minority, so-called “Latinos,” is heterogeneous and many of its members are immigrants or one generation removed from immigration. The Obamists are trying to grab them before they meld into the traditional American dream.

The second largest minority is “blacks.” Only about half of so-called “African-Americans” are descendants of slaves with a historical grievance that is supposed to be addressed by affirmative action. Many in that half, of southern church background, are addicted to resounding speeches about injustice and to the idea that the remedy to their ills can only come from government. They will vote for the best “injustice speech” giver irrespective of what they gain afterwards. (Usually nothing. The Democratic Party had been using and abusing blacks for thirty years.) The other half of Americans with African blood are immigrants and their children. Like Obama himself, in my book, they have no historical claim on the nation. That second half of the second minority might surprise us soon, politically. They are experiencing normal American social mobility, like general Colin Powell for example, the son of Jamaican immigrants. They are at best temporary members of the Obamian recruits, I think. He, and his Left-Democrat conspirators cannot count on them for the long haul.

A flat and slow-growing economy is always especially hard on immigrants. That’s the main reason western Europe has always – until now – had worse immigrant problems than we have. Immigrants in America open a small business and their kids go to college and they become the doctors and lawyers and engineers our normally expanding economy requires. Immigrants in France, for example, go to college and then remain underemployed forever because the French escalator is hardly moving at all.

There are no other racial minorities in America today that want to be considered minorities. They are all doing well without recourse to government favor. Many may have voted for Obama without understanding what they were doing. If I were an American communist trying to take over by legal means, I would not count on them further. In the same breath, I would refer to the scarce but disproportionately influential American Jews. I think more than 75% voted for Obama. That was a downright perverse and obstinate vote. I don’t think many are communists. I suspect many more are coming to their senses right now. (I may be placing too much confidence in an unsystematic sample here. All the Jews I know are conservatives. Ten years ago, I did not even know of Jewish conservatives.)

Finally, the Obamists exercise control over a large under-class that they are trying to enlarge yet: All those who are not working but who exist temporarily or permanently thanks to government payments. Marx had described something like this when he spoke of the politically unstable lumpenproletariat, the sub-working class “dressed in rags.”

So, here we are: On the one side, the large and growing class of government employees and the small allied class of union members. Both classes earn considerably more in wages and benefits than the employed in the private sector, nearly twice as much on the average. One bus driver in my small town belongs to both classes, as a government employee and as a union member. Last year, he earned $160,000 (that’s with overtime, let’s be frank). The job requires a high-school education. (I hope he is the one bus driver in this town who is not habitually gruff.) This is the same town where coffee shop baristas with a college degree earn $9/ hour if they are lucky, with no benefits. (I am speaking of Liberal Arts and Environmental Studies majors. Again, let’s be frank!)

To summarize: Government employees and union members owe their superior earnings to their relationship to the means of re-distributing income forcibly, government. They seek to extend and consolidate their hold on government with the help of precariously allied ethnic minorities and of unstable recipients of welfare under various names. On the other side is everyone else, everyone who does not work for government and who pays the taxes that feed the others. They too are defined by their relationship not to the “mode of production,” (see above) but to the spigot of government.

Here is a key figure: Almost 50% of Americans paid no federal income tax last year. That’s a lot of people who are not against the government confiscating legitimate income though legal means.

Once you start looking at the events and policies of the past 18 months as elements of a normal class-struggle, you gain much clarity. And, incidentally, this thesis does not contradict my repeated statements that the Obama administration and the President himself, are not very bright. They are relying on an old play-book that tells them pretty much what to do and that does not require much inventiveness.

I am astounded – if I say so myself – by the predictive power of my historical explanation. We even have the third highest elected official in the land ( third in order of succession to the President) engaging overtly in fascist intimidation: Speaker Pelosi threatened around August 16th “to investigate” those who oppose a mosque near Ground Zero! (See my column on this: “The ‘Ground Zero’ Mosque Issue Clarified”)

And, by the way, for those of you who got Cs in public school, or Bs in private school because the school needed the tuition, no, I am not confused. The Obamians are a species of communists and, communism is just one brand of fascism. See my two essays on the topic on this blog:“Fascism Explained,” and “How About Communism?”

Ron Paul Visits UCLA: the Recap

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics

It was great.  We had the largest crowd yet for a Ron Paul rally.  The applause and the loudness made Ron Paul’s wife and granddaughter, who were sitting just off to the side of Ron Paul, giggle a lot.  Los Angeles is wild!

He kept it short and simple.  He talked about the decline of the dollar, the need for reform in the area of currency, and the threat to our economic freedom that the Federal Reserve poses.

He stuck it to both parties when it came to civil liberties, and excoriated the PATRIOT Act and NDAA.  He bashed on the TSA and explained to the crowd of mostly college students the dire necessity of legalizing drugs.  He explained that pharmaceutical drugs are much more dangerous than marijuana, and that they get subsidies from the federal government and are behind prohibition.

He denounced the military-industrial complex.  He talked about the need to bring our troops home from around the world.  From Japan.  From South Korea.  From Germany.  From Uganda.  And from the Middle East.  He talked about engaging the world through free trade and the need to treat other nations as we would like to be treated.  Unlike South Carolina, Los Angeles went wild with applause for his calm argument in favor of a rational and humble foreign policy.

He talked about the freedom to choose, the importance of tolerance, and about the need to abolish – outright – the 16th Amendment.

While waiting around for Ron Paul to speak, the crowd did the wave for a while, and chanted on and off again ‘President Paul’, ‘Ron Paul’, and of course ‘End the Fed’.  While I am loosely associated with the libertarian groups on campus (I have to work if I am not studying; I am paying my own way through college), it was great to see their hard work pay off.  These guys spent months working to get enough signatures from around LA County to bring Ron Paul to UCLA.

It was a night to remember, that’s for sure.  I can’t believe the Republican Party had repudiated this man (I can totally believe that an intellectually bankrupt Left could do such a thing, though).  The times are a’changin’ though, and change is in the air.  The younger generation of Americans are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and this is the libertarian fountain of progress.

Best of all, hearing Ron Paul speak replenished my thirst for individual liberty and justice for all.

Some Musings on China: Why We Need Not Fear Beijing

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The recent ouster of Bo Xilai from the Communist Party can provide an interesting glimpse into the political mechanisms of the Chinese state. The fact that Mr. Bo was dismissed for “corruption” charges means that he was probably doing something right, or that he was too sloppy with his privileges and embarrassed the wrong people. We all know that socialism, in all its forms, leads to benefits for the few at the expense of the many (remember the bailouts of Western financial institutions?), but Mr. Bo’s ouster deserves a closer look, because he was a fairly prominent politician, and was actually slated as a possible successor to Hu Jintao, the Communist party’s current boss.

What I want to focus on is the fact that Mr. Bo was ousted at all. This move means that Beijing is becoming increasingly responsive to the demands of its citizens. Indeed, as China continues to liberalize its markets, democratic initiatives, whether real or appeasing, will continue to bubble up throughout the fascist state. This is because democracy is the natural political order that arises out of market-based institutions (private property, international trade, etc.). The world will have to be careful with China’s democratic transition though. Democracy is not a good thing in itself, especially democracy that is based upon an allegiance to a state. I am thinking of France in the 19th century and Germany in the 20th, although the democracies that sprung up during the post-colonial revolutions can also be good examples.

The main ideas behind the post-colonial revolutions were state sovereignty and democracy – not liberty – and the results, I think, speak for themselves. Continue reading →

Immigrants – A Story Pregnant with Deep Meaning

Jacques Delacroix Politics , , , , ,

They are a pretty young couple. He is a thin, blond Dutchman in his early thirties. Yasmina, his younger wife, is a honey-skinned beauty, and all curves. The day I met them, she was wearing a short, tight silky dress over a black push-up bra that was doing its job quite well, indeed. She is Pakistani by way of Toronto. They have come to seek their fortune in California.

Peter, the Dutchman, is working for a local software company. He is a language specialist in a generic sense, if there is such a thing. He began an advanced degree in Sanskrit, at Oxford. He did not finish because he could not “raise” the 35,000 pounds ($50,000) required. He spent a couple of years in India studying Sanskrit with a guru. When I asked him why he had not sought admission to an American doctoral program that would have supported him, one way or another, as is the custom, he gave me an answer I did not quite understand. It was something about changing priorities and about the infernal American demand for scholarly publications. Peter and Yasmina met at Oxford, where she completed an undergraduate degree. Or maybe not.

A Muslim by birth, Yasmina drinks wine with gusto, a sure sign of aristocratic upbringing. She speaks English perfectly and very fast. Peter discusses wines with much competence. His parents own a winery and vineyard in the heart of Continue reading →

Catching the Killer Kony: What Trends for Tools Can Tell Us About Political Structures

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

I am more than amused at the current trend of teenage boppers and serious college students catching up with the decades-long war happening in the Congo basin. It makes feel superior! If we really want to solve the problem of war in the Congo basin (and everywhere else in the post-colonial world) then we are going to have start looking at the political structures that have been left behind by the colonialists and enhanced by the indigenous (and socialist-educated) elite.

I have a quick blurb that may be of use. I say “may be” because I have decided to use Nigeria as an example rather than Uganda because it is a region I am much more familiar with, but the underlying concept is still the same. My more intelligent readers will no doubt grasp this nuance right away, but it may be harder to grasp for those readers not well-versed in social theory. I would, as always, be grateful for critiques and comments alike.

Religion has virtually nothing to do with the current conflict tearing Nigeria apart, and everything to do with the legacy of British imperialism (which went hand-in-hand with socialist legislation in the late decades of the 19th century). Continue reading →

Iraq, War, and the Litmus Test of Rationality: Ron Paul Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics, Religion , , , , , , ,

The Republican Presidential debates have been on TV for the past, what?, five or six months now, and I am proud to admit that I haven’t watched a single one of them.  By definition I am a left-leaning libertarian who thinks that free markets, limited government, and a humble foreign policy are the best tools to achieve social harmony, prosperity, and world peace.

So I had basically made up my mind on who I was going to vote for prior to the whole campaign season: Gary Johnson.  Now, co-editor Fred Foldvary has some very pertinent critiques of Governor Johnson’s tax policy proposals, but on the whole, I still think he is by far the best man to get my vote.

Because Gary Johnson does not have any baggage, a solid record while in office, and a personality that does not attract the worst of the worst to his message, he was essentially dead on arrival when he announced his Presidential campaign.  The media and its horse race would have none of it.  So he bolted the Republican Party and is now fighting for the Libertarian Party’s nomination.

I think this is a big mistake.  I think he should have stayed in the Republican Party and planned ahead for 2016.  Now, he is going to be the next Ron Paul, who also bolted the Republican Party to run as a Libertarian in 1988.  That move has cost him politically, and it is a shame that Johnson was too hot-headed with the national Party apparatus’ dismissal of his campaign. Continue reading →

Yes, Jacques Delacroix, Iran IS Surrounded

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Over at his other blog, Jacques Delacroix has made it a habit of trying very, very hard to discredit the facts that Ron Paul spouts during the televised Presidential debates (I don’t think he has bothered to read any of the relevant literature that Ron Paul has put out over the years, especially on foreign policy).

This is fair enough, and, as a senior citizen (what else could it be?), Ron Paul is prone to sometimes babbling on out of turn about unrelated topics or topics that the media establishment deems unimportant (like free trade, sound money, and honest friendship).

Anyway, Dr. Delacroix wonders aloud in a recent piece about Ron Paul’s statement concerning the 45 U.S. military bases surrounding Iran.  He writes (in a tone none too condescending):

Reminder: I have said before that Ron Paul lives in an imaginary world as far as international policies are concerned.

The “imaginary world”, is, of course, referring to Paul’s argument that the U.S. is not a benevolent actor in international affairs but rather a bellicose, juvenile world power struggling to assert its primacy across the globe.  This could be accomplished if it were not for the constitutional restraints placed upon the executive branch, of course, but I am digressing.

Here is a map of the bases and airports that the United States uses for military purposes in the Arabian Gulf:  Continue reading →

Ugly Conservative Sacred Cows

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , ,

Sometimes, it’s wrong to be right. Here are three issues where conservative Republicans seem to this conservative Republican to be wrong, from a practical standpoint, at least. That’s at least from a practical standpoint. They may also be morally wrong. I won’t deal with this today. Those three issues are sacred cows of contemporary conservatism, ugly cows that hardly anyone dare slaughter. I will just have to do it.

Illegal immigration

The thought that some immigrants begin their lives in this benevolent, generous country by violating our laws is infuriating. It’s especially infuriating to the American and legal resident relatives of candidates to legal immigration who stand politely in line, often for years, sometimes to no avail. (I have a short essay on [my other] blog on legal immigration into this country. Here is a summary: for most people in the world, it’s completely impossible. I address this matter succinctly in the second half of a piece on Social Security: Bizarre Conservative Ideas About Immigration). And, incidentally, if you don’t know it already, I am an immigrant myself, a legal immigrant. (You may even want to read excerpts from my memoirs: “I Used to Be French…”)

The question is what to do about illegal immigration? Many conservatives declare that they favor muscular responses. Chief among those are militarizing the border with Mexico and mass deportation of illegal aliens in this country (most of whom are Mexicans).

The first time a member of the armed forces kills a twenty-year old Mexican trying to cross in order to buss tables in San Jose will also be the last time. We are not like that. Those who claim to want to put the military on the border have not thought things through. The military does most good when it’s shooting and when it gives the impression that it will shoot if necessary. Do you really expect them to shoot peaceful young men, and worse, women who commit an illegal act in order to make a living? (Said illegal act was only a misdemeanor for years, like illegal parking, by the way.)

I don’t care how tough conservatives they think they are. It does not sound credible. If you keep declaring that you want to do the inhumanely absurd and the absurdly inhumane it makes you lose credibility. You need your credibility for other struggles, struggles we might actually win quickly.

The severe determination to evict millions of illegal aliens sounds like bad science fiction the minute you think about it seriously. There are probably more than ten million of them, maybe more. They are concentrated in certain states such as California. Texas and Illinois. Nevertheless, there are illegal aliens in every state by now. They go to school with our children; they work in the businesses we patronize; they share our exercise machines; they worship in our churches. One immigrant who told me he came here illegally from Mexico is now president of the local branch of my bank. He is a good bank president, by the way. In part that’s because he possesses the common immigrant vigor. In part it’s because he is Mexican by culture. But I am getting away from my topic.

And, of course, if you think about it (please, do) you will soon figure out that many illegals, who came as babies, don’t know well any language other than English. Many have American brothers and sisters. You are not going to round them up. The very popular attempt to expel the small minority of illegals who have committed crimes is not even going well. And, no, it’s not all Obama’s fault. The logistics alone are daunting.

Moreover, if you polled a hundred “tough on illegal immigration” conservatives, you would find the following:

A small number would claim not to know any illegal alien. Most of those would be factually wrong. A larger number, when pressed, would request exceptions to the mass deportation order, exceptions for illegal aliens they know well: for Maria or for Luis. Maria and Luis would be their own illegals, their special lawbreakers, who happen to be good and meritorious illegal aliens. It’s the other guy’s illegal aliens they really object to! Those other illegal aliens are rabble. (Personally, I hate the Mexican who uses a leaf-blower every Monday morning at 8 on the dot. I want him deported, whether he is illegal or not.)

I develop these arguments extensively with respect to Mexican illegals specifically in an article co-authored with another immigrant, Sergey Nikiforov, published in The Independent Review.

In brief, this is not a good time (2/21/12) to argue about illegal aliens. It will invariably make you sound callous, inhuman and thoughtless plus impractical. Wait until you have the power to deal with the issue in a compassionate, humane, thoughtful and rational way.

You don’t need to die for every hill all at once.

Homosexual Marriage

First, don’t bother to correct me. I know that the politically correct term is “same-sex marriage.” Political correctness interferes with my rational thought. And by the way, it’s not two guys who just happen to be good friends who are itching to get hitched! Let’s not be ridiculous.

Don’t let your visceral revulsion masquerade as rational argument. Don’t allow yourself to push your religiously-based condemnation on me who is not religious. Don’t push it on others who might otherwise make good allies in the conquest of power. Doing either is un-conservative. It makes you look like the worst of Communist totalitarians. (Fidel Castro used to put homosexuals in prison until some of his rare smart advisors talked him out of it.)

And don’t make absurd and devious arguments by naming laws directed against homosexuals getting hitched: “Defense of Marriage Act.” Whatever homosexuals do in private, or even on the public street may be disgusting to you but it does nothing to undermine heterosexual marriage. That particular institution does not need external attacks. It self-destructs from within every minute of the day. What do you expect any way? Do you really think that if the door were terminally slammed on homosexual marriage, the percentage of first heterosexual marriage ending in divorce would slip from, say 50% to 49%? Please, take the five seconds it takes to answer this question in your mind.

And, it you think about what you already know concerning the fragility of heterosexual marriage, you must know that banning alcohol – with the death penalty for the second offense, perhaps – would almost certainly do more to preserve the institution than any prohibition applied to homosexuals.

Think through that one too, please.

My own opinion on the issue: I think no group should be allowed to use the armed force of government to change the meaning of a common word, such as “marriage.” That’s essentially what militant homosexuals are trying to do. I am completely opposed on principle. However, I don’t think it will create a precedent if they succeed. The acceptance of the idea that marriage may involve two women, or two men, or three, will not usher the day when “lie” comes to mean “truth,” by government decree and under threat of jailing.

Conservatives need to be mature enough to fight in important battles and not to pick fights based on unreasoned rage.

And, incidentally, in case you are wondering, I am not one of the brave conservative homosexuals forced to stay in the closet. I am not a homosexual but strictly a normal, vulgar T&A kind of guy.

Imposing standards of performance on schools

There are many different reasons to be appalled at the whole educational establishment, K through high-school senior and beyond, including the university, and even some graduate and professional schools. I don’t like the word “appalled.” It sounds effeminate and left-liberal. So, in truth, I am not appalled but I am really pissed off. And, as a former teacher, I could tell you stories that would make your hair stand on end. And your hair wouldn’t come down until the next morning at best. What you know is not the half of it!

To pare down the causes of our disillusionment, to get down to its core:

The more numerous the national educational establishment and the more loaded with benefits, the more unassailable its privileges, the less Johnny knows how to read.

It began with elementary school that promoted “students” who couldn’ t spell their name; it’s crept to the colleges that now offer numerous remedial classes for freshmen they admitted under their own power. I can testify personally that I know an expensive university that awards degrees each year to people who cannot line up two grammatically correct sentences in any language. Some of these same students major in a foreign language. They can’t line up anything in the foreign language either. After four years and tens of thousands of dollars, they end up illiterate in two languages. N.S. !

There is a natural tendency to want to remedy this rolling disaster with a formula that seems to succeed in business:

Evaluate, punish or reward

There are several reasons why this is likely to be counterproductive.

First, the evaluation is not as easy as current plans seem to assume: It’s for schools as for computers: Give the best schools very bad students and they will only turn out mediocre students. Give mediocre schools excellent students, they will turn them mediocre. It’s not easy to figure out what does what although it’s possible to do in principle. Children are not like so many pounds of flour. They are intensely reactive and they come into the school system with built-in strengths and built-in defects. The relevant research would be quite expensive and it would take a long time to conduct.

It’s true that liberal teachers unions use these very arguments to protect their members from scrutiny and from accountability. This does not mean that this view is incorrect. You don’t want to create a worse situation by punishing good teachers that work with difficult human material and by rewarding bad teachers that are able to pick the low-hanging cherries.

Second, don’t be surprised if teachers sabotage evaluations done by existing school hierarchies. They will do this even when they approve of the fact of being evaluated and even if they approve of the evaluation tools. Education has been a rotten, intellectually corrupt field for so long that the hierarchies it generates cannot be seen as respectable by respectable teachers.

The solution to this last problem often seems to be to use “objective” evaluation tools, mechanical evaluation devices that do not make room for supervisors’ corruption. I agree that it’s possible in principle to develop such evaluative devices. By administering them according to a “before and after” pattern, it’s also possible to remedy at once the first and second objections I raise above.

Doing so creates a third problem that is so serious that it may be worse than the original problem any evaluations are supposed to remedy.

As someone who devised hundreds of tests, let me say that I don’t see how it would be possible to reformulate the evaluation tools for any area or especially, nationally with much frequency. Doing so would be extravagantly expensive, too time-consuming. So, the teachers and their school “superiors” would quickly become aware of the contents of the tests, of what, very precisely the tests are actually testing. If the rewards and punishments were not significant, see above. If they were significant, you can be completely sure that most teachers, 80%, 90%, 95 % would immediately start teaching narrowly to the test.

How would you not expect teachers to do more or less this since their welfare and that of their children, even their retirement would depend exactly on their teaching to the test? I mentioned their retirement because economic self-advancement is normally done on a percentage basis. The raise you did not get this year will stay with you your whole life, literally. It will increase in relative size with every year. (I know how costly this sort of purity is because I followed such a strategy throughout my teacher career and I never caught up economically with my lackluster but conformist colleagues.)

The best possible outcome of this scenario is that after a while, American kids would read and write pretty much as well as say, Koreans, or Estonians.

Do you see where I am going? This is something very valuable that the current disastrous American education promotes or, that at least, it avoids destroying. For lack of a better word, that’s called “creativity.’ Americans have more of it than others. Look around from the Internet to giant double rolls of toilet paper in public facilities to country music!

Ideally, we would have a Johnny who would know how to read and write and who would also remain occasionally creative. I am afraid, we don’t know how to produce such a result. It does not mean that it cannot be done. It does not depend on a drastic, sudden reform though, It’s not a matter of getting tough, no more Mr Nice Guy!

Note that I am evoking here the possibility of a successful endeavor. I have not even begun to discuss the real likelihood of massive, systemic cheating in and ill-implemented “evaluate, punish, reward “ program. Look at the Atlanta school system for an example of how massively wrong this strategy can go.

I have no conclusion for this butchery proposal in three parts. I don’t need to know what ought to be don’t to stop doing what I shouldn’t do. I hope you will offer one conclusion or more.

Fascism Explained Part 2

Jacques Delacroix Liberty, Politics , , , , ,

[Continued from Part 1]

Why are leftists and their friends so often anti-Semitic?

It was not just Hitler, Stalin also tried to deflect the problem of his country on to “the Jews.” That happened after the Nazi extermination camps had been discovered, largely by Russians soldiers.

Melanie Kirpatrick had a piece on Hugo Chavez’ persecution of Jews in Venezuela [recently]. Hugo Chavez is one of the heroes of the Hollywood Left. In the same issue of the WSJ, an American Professor writes from Beirut, Lebanon about official Lebanese anti-Antisemitism. He reports that the television series, “The Nanny” is banned in Lebanon because the heroine Fran Drescher is Jewish! The real reason is that Lebanese have to appear as friends of the Palestinians (although they probably killed more Palestinians  over the years than Israelis did). The Palestinians are the other darlings of the Left. Anti-antisemitism is transitive! (Look up that word, knucklehead.)

I know, I know, most American Jews vote mostly on the Left. They espoused Obama as if he were the long-awaited Messiah. After the Cairo speech, they are not so sure. This does not tell me anything about the Left. It tells me about human folly and obduracy.