South Korea

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I apologize for the dearth of posts lately. I have been reading a lot of books the old-fashioned way, chasing girls down so that I can  smell their hair and generally just enjoying life post-graduation.

  1. Will Wilkinson blogs about the drug war’s inherent racism at Democracy in America.
  2. Rebecca Liao writes about Democracy in China for Dissent.
  3. Randy Barnett on the future of federalism after the “gay marriage” SCOTUS decision.
  4. Uganda versus South Korea. An interesting take on development by Andrew Mwenda.
  5. The Economist has a great piece on the violence in Turkey.
  6. Fascinating ‘comments’ thread on Hayek and Pinochet. I am going to dedicate a long piece to this thread shortly. American Leftists are just classical liberals who have come to think of themselves as superior to their neighbors. Leftists in Europe and Latin America are murderous.

North Korea’s “Artificial Earthquake”: What is to be Done?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , ,

Foreign policy has been awfully quiet these days. President Obama has been murdering people left and right on a whim, and nobody in Washington seems to care. You can imagine what the reaction would be in Washington if a Republican had been the one flaunting the rule of law. The Economist has a good article on this development if anyone is interested.

One newsworthy item that concerns American foreign policy has been centered on the Korean peninsula, a place that the United States first became involved militarily during the 1950’s. Given that our government is currently mired in two foreign occupations at the peripheries of the Islamic world (Afghanistan and the Balkans) as well as being embroiled in conflicts along the Sahel (thanks to President Obama’s attacks on the Libyan state), one should naturally be curious as to why the current affairs of the Korean peninsula are of interest to the United States government.

To make a long story short, the US government currently has some 50,000 troops stationed along the border of the North-South divide (drawn up in the 1950’s after a devastating war was fought between communist and conservative factions within Korea, China, and the United States), and has an alliance with the South that guarantees military help in case of a war with the communist North. The later state is actively attempting to build a nuclear weapon.

As a rule, I think it is appropriate that when citizens of a republic hear about other nations and events, the subject matter ought to revolve around how beautiful the geography of a said nation is, or how beautiful the women are, or how bad the food is, or which team won the national championship, and in which sport. That American citizens are hearing about a possible escalation of military tension in the region is, by itself, not a bad thing nor a surprising thing, but when our military and our tax dollars are suddenly involved in the escalation itself, then American citizens have ample cause to be worried, angry, and tense. These are not qualities that are often sought out by individuals on a daily basis, and when a government that claims to be republican in nature begins to cause these said psychological factors within it’s borders, then citizens ought to question the supposed republicanism of their government. Continue reading →

The Fiscal Cliff

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Economics, Politics , , , , , , , ,

The “fiscal cliff” is the economic plunge that will occur in the U.S.A. if Congress does not change the big tax hikes and spending reductions that will otherwise start on January 1, 2013. The income tax rate cuts enacted at the beginning of the ozo years (2000 to 2009), as well as the payroll tax cuts that followed the Crash of 2008, were temporary and are scheduled to expire at the close of 2012.

Congress enacted the Budget Control Act of 2011 to require “sequestration” – automatic sharp spending reductions in 2013 – unless it enacted the recommendations of a “supercommittee,” which then failed to achieve a consensus on raising revenues and cutting spending.

Now in mid November 2012 the economy is a train heading towards the cliff, and if Congress does not lay down a track to make the train veer off to the side, the economic train will plunge into another depression. Continue reading →

“European Project Trips China Builder”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

That is the headline of this piece in the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

Chinese companies have wowed the world with superhighways, high-speed trains and snazzy airports, all built seemingly overnight. Yet a modest highway through Polish potato fields proved to be too much for one of China’s biggest builders […]

It remains unfinished nearly three years after contracts were awarded to Chinese builders. The Polish government is warning there will be detours around the highway’s “Chinese sections” when the soccer championships begin […]

The project raises questions about Beijing’s strategy of pitching state-directed construction firms as the low-cost solution to the world’s infrastructure needs […]

Covec [the state-run construction company responsible for the failures] was thin on management expertise, lacked financial skills and didn’t understand the importance of regulations and record-keeping in public works projects in the West, according to numerous people involved in the project […]

Organizing actual construction proved harder. To manage the project, Covec brought in Fu Tengxuan, a 49-year-old railway engineer, who spoke only Chinese and appeared to have little authority, telling colleagues that headquarters in Beijing needed to approve even the purchase of an office copier […]

Although the funding of Chinese projects in other areas such as Africa and Asia is often murky, analysts say that Beijing regularly foots the bill […] Continue reading →