The free market is the engine of our civilization. It works. Works best if it is not interfered with by government. Works as a spontaneous system of co-operation and division of labor.

On which subject, here is part of a splendid short essay by Jonah Goldberg. He writes:

No one in the world knows how to make the newspaper you are holding (and, if you’re reading this on your phone, computer, iPad or Kindle, no one knows how to make those things either).

Even the best editor in the world has no clue how to make a printing press or the ink, or how to operate a communications satellite.

This is hardly a new insight. In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, “I, Pencil.” It begins, “I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.” It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

The pencil tells the story of its own creation. The wood comes from Oregon, or perhaps California. The lead, which is really graphite, is mined in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The eraser, which is not rubber but something called “factice” is “made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride.”

To make a long story short, the simple act of collecting and combining the ingredients of a pencil involves the cooperation of thousands of experts in dozens of fields, from engineering and mining to chemistry and commodity trading. I suppose it’s possible for someone to master all of the knowledge and expertise to make a pencil all by themselves, but why would they?

The lessons one can draw from this fact are humbling. For starters, any healthy civilization, never mind any healthy economy, involves unfathomably vast amounts of harmonious cooperation. …

These days there’s a lot of buzz about something called “cloud computing.” In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number crunching doesn’t actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.

Do a Nexis search and you’ll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a “revolutionary” advance in information organization. And in one sense, that’s obviously true. But in another this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman’s head. So are the intangible but no less real lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and contained in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution …

More relevant, the modern market economy is the greatest communal enterprise ever undertaken in the history of humanity. Friedrich Hayek did the heavy lifting on this point over half a century ago in his essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The efficient pricing of markets allows millions of independent actors to decide for themselves how to allocate resources. According to Hayek, no central planner or bureaucrat could ever have enough knowledge to consistently and successfully guide all of those economic actions in a more efficient manner. …

According to progressives, the financial crisis discredited “market fundamentalism” and created a burning need for a more cooperative society where “we’re all in it together.” It’s an ancient argument, with many noble intentions behind it. But it rests on a misunderstanding of one simple, astounding, irrefutable fact. The market economy is cooperative, and more successfully so than any alternative system ever conceived of, never mind put into practice. Admittedly it doesn’t feel that way, which is why everyone wants to find a better replacement for it. But they never will, for the same reason no one can make a pencil.

Find Leonard Read’s classic essay I, Pencil here, either to refresh your memory and enjoy it anew, or to learn its lesson for the first time. It is essential to the proper education of every generation.

From the Religionof Peace:

“When not complaining about ”Islamophobia’, the Muslim community

busies itself with racking up dead Christians. Two weeks ago, a

young family was beaten to death by an Islamic mob in Pakistan.

Last week, a Protestant pastor was gunned down in Russia.

Christian children were hacked to death in Nigeria over the weekend.

And, on Monday, two Christian brothers falsely accused of blasphemy

were murdered while in handcuffs outside a courtroom (pictured).”

The Dove World Outreach Center, a nondenominational church in Gainesville, Florida, has announced an “International Burn a Koran Day” on the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

This is barbaric and counter-productive.

We are adamantly against the burning of books.

We are adamantly against the burning of copies of the Koran.

So is Robert Spencer, one of America’s foremost experts on Islam, and one of the strongest critics of it. He sensibly writes:

This church’s plan to burn the Qur’an on September 11 is stupid; I disapprove of it and of many other things about the pastor, the church, and the church’s approach to the jihad threat. I don’t support the burning of books; it’s tactically stupid, as it will make the mainstream media portray the church as a bunch of Nazis, and it’s wrong in principle: the antidote to bad speech is not censorship or book-burning, but more speech. Open discussion. Give-and-take. And the truth will out. There is no justification for burning books.

Marisol’s comments here are apposite: “‘International Burn a Koran Day’ does a grave disservice to the cause of spreading awareness about Islamic teachings and the threat that Sharia poses to our way of life. It is a gift to Islamic groups who would so dearly love to portray all of us who criticize and question Islamic teachings (and triumphalist mosques) as frothing reactionaries.”

It would be far better to prescribe the Koran as compulsory reading in all institutions of learning and non-Muslim religious assembly, to have it on open display in all public libraries, to read it aloud in classrooms and theaters, to serialize it in periodicals and daily newspapers, to endow the giving away of copies free of charge, and to place one in every hotel room.

It is an immoral, misogynistic, anti-human text, and the more widely it is read the more likely will Islam be to lose respect and protection, and the less likely to succeed with its proselytizing and jihad.

Talk about getting married and being tied down!

Here, another imam (see our post below, The etiquette of wife-beating) gives another correct interpretation of Allah’s merciful instructions.

Men are told to Hajr disobedient wives before beating them. The root meaning of the verb means to isolate, or tie up and leave alone. English interpretations of the Quran translate it as “forsake”, saying it means to have the wife sleep alone until she comes to her senses (to properly obey her husband).

But is that the correct translation? How does one of Islam’s most famous expositors, Al Tabari, explain Hajr? “It does not mean forsake, because to just leave her and not talk to her is useless for the woman, since she is arrogant and does not want to listen or talk to her husband. If he leaves her alone, he will be doing exactly what she wants! The correct explanation of the verse means to tie her to the bed – like the Arabs tie a camel – and have sex with her by force.”

An interview with an Egyptian Muslim cleric:

Sa’d Arafat: Allah honored wives by instating the punishment of beatings.

Interviewer: Honored them with beatings? How is this possible?!

Sa’d Arafat: The prophet Muhammad said: “Don’t beat her in the face, and do not make her ugly.” See how she is honored. If the husband beats his wife, he must not beat her in the face. Even when he beats her, he must not curse her. This is incredible! He beats her in order to discipline her.

In addition, there must not be more than ten beatings, and he must not break her bones, injure her, break her teeth, or poke her in the eye. There is a beating etiquette. If he beats to discipline her, he must not raise his hand high. He must beat her from chest level. All these things honor the woman.

She is in need of discipline. How should the husband discipline her? Through admonishment. If she is not deterred, he should refuse to share the bed with her. If she is not repentant, he should beat her, but there are rules to the beating. …

Interviewer: With what should be beat her? With his bare hand? With a rod?

Sa’d Arafat: … He can beat her with a short rod. … The honoring of the wife in Islam is also evident in the fact that the punishment of beating is permissible in one case only: when she refuses to sleep with him.

Interviewer: When she refuses to sleep with him?

Sa’d Arafat: Yes, because where else could the husband go? He wants her, but she refuses. He should begin with admonishment and threats…

Interviewer: Allow me to repeat this. A man cannot beat his wife…

Sa’d Arafat:  …over food or drink. Beatings are permitted only in this case, which the husband cannot do without.

All clear now?

According to this report, a few Muslims, acquiring higher education in the West or in Western disciplines, are daring to declare openly that they reject Islam – and not just Islam but all religious belief.

A handful of Pakistani Muslim youths are beginning to question the existence of God and in the process giving up Islam to become atheists.

Still a small number, the trend seems to be telling of pressures that the image of militant Islam has had on them. A Facebook group has been floated for Pakistan’s agnostics and atheists by Hazrat NaKhuda, a former Pakistani Muslim.

At last count, the group had over a 100 members. In a thread started on the discussion board on “How did you become an atheist”, Hazrat writes, “I used to be a practicing Muslim. I used to live in Saudi Arabia. I have done two Hajs and countless Umrahs. Used to pray five times a day. When I turned 17-18, I realized that the only reason I was a Muslim was because my parents were Muslims”.

Hazrat is a young computer programmer from Lahore. Another member, posted on the discussion board: “I’m an agnostic simply because I see little or no evidence for the existence of God. Some time ago I decided that I’d never believe anything unless it has a firm basis in reason and as far as I know … there’s little or no evidence for the existence of God.”

The group, open strictly to members, has young Pakistani students studying in New York University to Oxford University to the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences as members.

One of them wrote that the moot question is not “how did you become an atheist” but “how did you become a believer”. …

What will happen to these free thinkers at the hands of their erstwhile co-religionists?

Islam punishes apostates with death, but these intrepid young men are prepared to make their apostasy known directly to the Pakistani authorities:

More serious issues, like whether there should a column marked “no religion” while applying for passports, have also been discussed. “Last time I went to get my passport renewed, I found there is no option called “no religion”. Next time I go to make my passport I don’t want to put in Islam as my religion,” said one member.

From small beginnings great movements grow. A hundred or so down, only a billion and a half to go!

(c) M Westrop 2010

Notice the Hassidic sheep

And the weeping crocodile

“The human race,” quoth an anonymous wit, “is divided into adults and women.”

If we accept the division for the sake of argument, we would observe that many females belong in the adult column, but almost all feminists, along with all leftists, belong in the other. (Homosexuals are well distributed into both, the division having nothing to do with sexual preferences or who’s macho or who’s effeminate.)

Generally, but most significantly in the realm of public affairs, adults think, women feel.

One of the few exceptions among feminists is brave, intelligent, principled Phyllis Chesler.

Recently, on August 25, she gave an address at a Yale University conference on global anti-semitism.

Her speech, titled The History and Psychological Roots of Anti-Semitism Among Feminists, Their Gradual Palestinianization and Stalinization, is well worth reading in full. Here are a few passages from it:

I could not have predicted the rapid and extreme Stalinization and Palestinianization that would take place among academics and activists in general. I could never have imagined that the western intelligentsia, the “good” people, including feminists, would make so tragic an alliance with Islamic barbarism and misogyny.

I became a feminist leader in 1968-1969. I remain one. Most of the other feminists of my generation are no longer engaged in the historical moment. …

For the last decade, Jewish and non-Jewish feminists have marched in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel rallies, signed newspaper ads and petitions to divest from and boycott Israel—yes, even gay and lesbian feminists who would be tortured to death in Muslim countries, did so. These professed “humanitarians”—who carry on about the recent Turkish assassination flotilla—do not take as strong a stand against stoning or forced face-veiling. Some feminists think [face-veiling is] “liberating” or even the ultimate feminist choice. Most feminists do not take a stand against forced marriage, child marriage, first cousin marriage, polygamy, and honor-related violence, included honor killing. They fear that doing so might be seen as “racist” or as culturally insensitive. …

In October of 2004, a small group of San Francisco-based feminist activists … traveled to Duke University … to support the Palestine Solidarity Movement Conference that was taking place there. …

They did not have a balanced or particularly feminist agenda. Although many activists were lesbians or pro-gay, they had not come to protest the Palestinian persecution and torture of suspected homosexuals in Gaza or on the West Bank nor did they seem to know that Israel has granted political asylum to Palestinian homosexuals, including those who have literally been tortured and nearly killed by other Palestinians. Instead, these American feminists wore keffiyas, political buttons and tee-shirts that read “We are all Palestinians.”

The American and European Left and feminist and gay movements have made a marriage in Hell with Islamist terrorists. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over their devotion to communist dictators who murdered one hundred million of their own people in the service of a Great Idea, have now fatefully joined the world Jihadic chorus in calling for the end to “racist” Zionism and to the Jewish Apartheid and “Nazi” state. …

She notices the immaturity of these leftists and feminists:

These westerners share an extraordinary psychological rage which requires a scapegoat and cleaning messianic promises, a refusal to look within, an overwhelming need for group approval, an inability or refusal to think as independent individuals, an adolescent in-your-face rebelliousness towards certain authorities—coupled with an adolescent, slavish adoration of other authorities, a desire for cathartic violence, for the ecstasy of mob action …

And their often stunning stupidity:

In 2007, a Jewish Israeli feminist researcher at Hebrew University, doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, blamed Israeli soldiers because they refused to rape Arab and Palestinian women; she claimed this constituted “racism” against Palestinians.

Earlier this year, 2010, a team of researchers led by a female Harvard social scientist blamed Israel in the pages of The Lancet, a British medical journal, for an increase in Palestinian wife-battering in Gaza and on the West Bank. The researchers did not even consider the role that radical Islamification might play in the oppression of women or the fact that Gaza is ruled by terrorist gangsters and this might cause an escalation of violence towards women. Honor killings (and a relevant, recent study actually existed) were not included in their measures of violence against Palestinian women. Why? Because that cannot be blamed on Israel or on the West. …

In the summer of 2010, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and former spokesman for the PLO, …

– who, it is said, arranged for Obama’s fees at Harvard to be paid presumably by some rich Arab or Arabs –

… a man who also happens to be a friend and former dinner companion of President Obama, signed an appeal for money to send yet another aid ship to Gaza named “The Audacity of Hope,” the title of Obama’s second autobiographical book. He publicly challenged the President, saying that “if the name [of the boat] is a problem for the administration, it can simply insist that Israel lift the siege: end of problem, end of embarrassment.” …

We’re perfectly sure he won’t be embarrassed. Though he might pretend to be.

Such feminists, leftists, and gay liberationists have not thought through what their lives might be like under Islamic rule. In fact, they still deny that there’s a “problem” with Islam and insist that the main problem is with American and Israeli colonialism, imperialism, and militarism. …

They should try converting to Islam to test their theory.

We like her whole speech, except the end of it where she says:

I have not come here today to bash feminists [as such]. I am one. As I’ve said, I don’t understand what happened to the best minds of my Second Wave generation. However, our feminist work is certainly not worthless and was not done in vain.

We say it was almost entirely done in vain. Worse, it was done to the detriment of generations of children. We regret that Phyllis Chesler still wants to describe herself as a feminist. To us she is a thinking adult. She is an asset to the cause of individual freedom, the cause that feminism is hysterically against.

Obama’s chief economic adviser, Christina Romer, admits that the Keynesian economic policy she (among others) advised Obama and the Democrats to adopt and implement, which they did eagerly as it was the redistributionist policy they wanted, was wrong and has failed.

The Washington Post reports:

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her “valedictory” before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be.

She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad.

The response to the collapse was inadequate.

And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.” …

At week’s end, Romer will leave the council chairmanship after what surely has been the most dismal tenure anybody in that post has had: a loss of nearly 4 million jobs in a year and a half. … She was the president’s top economist during a time when the administration consistently underestimated the depth of the economy’s troubles – miscalculations that have caused Americans to lose faith in the president and the Democrats.

Romer had predicted that Obama’s stimulus package would keep the unemployment rate at 8 percent or less; it is now 9.5 percent. … The economy lost 350,000 jobs in June and July. …

When she and her colleagues began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize “how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy.” They “failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be.”

Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. “To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would.” Her defense was that “almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction.”

That miscalculation, in turn, led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent. …

The truth is that the Obama administration is pretty much out of options. … “What we would all love to find – the inexpensive magic bullet to our economic troubles – the truth is it almost surely doesn’t exist,” Romer admitted.

Okay, there is no magic bullet – but there is the invisible hand.

It’s also called the free market.

Free marketeers would lower taxes, remove the minimum wage and the multifarious bureaucratic burdens on employers, and above all forbid government interference in the market. That is to say, they would reverse the policy of high spending by the state which Romer advised, Obama and the Democrats wanted, and even President Bush was seduced into attempting.

Economically wise conservatives have been telling liberals for decades, Keynes was wrong, Hayek was right.

Will the Republicans remember that when they regain Congressional power in November?

We never thought of John Bolton as a candidate for the presidency because for years we’ve thought of him as the ideal Secretary of State; how he alone out of all the Secretaries of State of the last hundred years (at least) would not be corrupted by the left-tilting career diplomats; and how his clarity of thought and deep knowledge of the world would disperse the fog in the minds at Foggy Bottom.

But now that it has been proposed that he stand for the presidency, and he has hinted that he might be willing to do so, we see him as a potentially great president.