Should the United States refrain from any intervention in the world beyond its borders except in its own incontrovertible interest?

Or should it act as the world’s policeman? Does it have a “responsibility to protect”- if so, whom from what? Populations from their rulers? Vulnerable groups from any and all attackers?

To bring the debate to the moment and the actual, should the US keep its forces in Afghanistan after 10 years of fighting savage peasants and failing to crush them? Should there still be a US military presence in Iraq? In Germany? In South Korea? Should the US be fighting – as it is –  in Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Should it not be using force to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power? And immediately against Iran’s ally, Bashar Assad, the bloody tyrant of Syria?

Should it not be outspending China on defense?

Should it not be helping Georgia liberate two of its provinces from Russia?

Should it be protecting South Sudan from its northern neighbors and their Ugandan proxies? Or the Nigerian Christians from their Muslim persecutors? Or the ethnic African Muslims of Dafur from the Arab Muslims who are raping, robbing, hounding and massacring them? Or destroying the pirates of Somalia? Or putting an end to the Arab/African slave trade?

Can those who answer yes to the first question fairly be called “isolationists”?

David Harsanyi considers, in a column at Townhall, whether the label is apt when applied to those who want America to withdraw from Afghanistan and refrain from any further participation in the NATO intervention in Libya:

There’s been a lot of talk about an alleged turn in American public opinion — particularly among Republicans — toward “isolationism.”

In a recent debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, there was some discussion about ending the United States’ commitment to the tribal warlords and medieval shamans of the Afghan wilderness. This induced John McCain to complain about the rise of a new “strain of isolationism” … McCain sidekick Lindsey Graham went on to notify Congress that it “should sort of shut up and not empower Gadhafi” when the topic of the House’s potentially defunding the military — er, kinetic, non-warlike bombing activity over Libya — came up. It would be a mistake, he vented, for Republican candidates to sit “to the left” of President Barack Obama on national security.

So if you don’t shut up and stop carping about this non-war war of ours, you are abetting North African strongmen. Makes sense. It’s the return of Teddy Roosevelt-style Republicanism, in which arbitrary power (and John McCain’s singular wisdom) matters a lot more than any democratic institution.

Sure, some on the far right and swaths of the protectionist, union-driven left oppose international trade agreements and [are] endlessly freaking us out about foreign influences.

Our interpolation: Is this protectionist section of the left aware of the left-elite’s longing for world government?

But isolationists? Judging from our conduct in the real world of economy, we’re anything but insular. So perhaps McCain simply meant noninterventionists — as in folks who have an unwavering ideological aversion to any and all overseas entanglement.

That can’t be it, either. Maybe, like many Americans, some in the GOP are simply grappling with wars that never end and a war that never started.

And with plenty of troubles here at home, it’s not surprising that Americans have turned their attention inward.

We can’t be in a constant state of war. Then again, Afghanistan is not a war per se, but a precarious social engineering project that asks our best and bravest (or, as our ally Hamid Karzai calls them, “occupiers”) to die for the Afghan Constitution, which is roundly ignored — except for the parts codifying Islamic law, that is. But all these conflicts come with the price of endless involvement. We almost always win.

When and where? Since World War Two, where has America won a hot war? Oh yes – against Granada.

But we never really go home. …

Did sometimes. From Granada after victory. From Vietnam after defeat.

This week, we learned that Obama rejected the advice of lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department who questioned his legal authority to continue this nonmilitary military involvement in Libya without congressional authorization. Instead, the administration offered a string of euphemisms concocted to bypass the Constitution.

Without any tangible evidence that this conflict furthers our national interests or any real proof that we are preventing a wide-scale humanitarian crisis, it’s not a surprise that Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we’re “leading from behind” — which is, in fact, as stupid and deceptive as the case it doesn’t make.

Are you an isolationist for questioning those who continue to weaken the Constitution? … Are you an isolationist for questioning this brand of obfuscation? Are you an isolationist for wanting American forces to win and leave the battlefield rather than hang around for decades of baby-sitting duty?

And Tony Blankley writes, also  at Townhall:

I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. …

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world.

Both Harsanyi’s and Blankley ‘s opinions are apt as far as they go.

But  the problem is deeper, the questions that need to be raised about foreign policy harder than those they are answering.

Can America have a coherent foreign policy that America itself and the other states of the world can depend upon for any useful length of time? The two political parties are now so divided ideologically that foreign policy will depend on whether the president is a Republican or a Democrat. It will necessarily chop and change. Or if relations with some states stay more or less the same for a while, they will do so unreliably.

Could the very uncertainty characterize foreign policy usefully? No foreign state being secure in its relations with the US, each would have to be vigilant, tack according to the US wind, adjust to the changes. A case could be made that a Machiavellian preference to be feared by other nations rather than loved might serve America well.

But there are other developments to be considered. In countries throughout the world – led in this by Europe –  there is an ideological tendency towards world government. The nation state is not liked: new political alignments, such as the European Union, are trying to phase it out. Democrats, for the most part, are in sympathy with the movement; Republicans are not. Democrats – like most leftists everywhere – have a vision of the UN turning into a world government; Republicans – many of them at least – would be happy to see the monstrous institution disbanded. It cannot continue long as it is: being a house of lies, it must fall down.

NATO is weakening. Letting Turkey into it was fatal. No longer secular, Turkey is now in the camp of Islam, inimical to the West.

The world as it was conceived to be after World War Two is changing kaleidoscopically under our eyes.

In relation to the rest of the world, what are American interests? How should they be pursued?

Should America concentrate on preserving itself as a fenced-in area of freedom on an otherwise unfree planet?  That would be isolationism. Should it form a union with other as-yet-free nation-states: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel? India perhaps? Honduras? Papau? …

What would such a union do, what would be in its joint interest – “spreading democracy”, “protecting civilians”, “building nations”? The questions troubling America now would trouble it jointly, and the answers remain as hard to find.

From Creeping Sharia

It is human nature to be selfish. If we weren’t selfish we wouldn’t survive. If we didn’t eat when we were hungry, warm ourselves when we were cold, seek cures for our illnesses, defend ourselves (and our children and our life-sustaining property), we’d die out pretty damn quick. Or rather, we would never have come into existence as a species at all.

We are most of us capable of sympathy with others, and we often willingly give away a thing we own to another person. Some are altruistic. A few will even give up their lives to save the lives of others. Nevertheless, we are all naturally and necessarily selfish.

Christianity and Communism require human nature to change. As it can’t, Christianity’s commandments to love our enemies and forgive those who do us harm turn many a person of good will and high aspiration into a hypocrite if not a corpse. Communist theorists have never settled the question of whether human nature must change so that the Revolution can take place, or whether the Revolution must take place in order for human nature to change. Of course it will never change, but there’s no stopping the collectivist dolts arguing about it.

Capitalism works well because it is in tune with our nature. Adam Smith called it “the natural order of liberty”. Everyone selfishly desires to provide for his needs. To pay for what he wants from others – services and goods – he has to provide something that others will pay him for. Millions do it, and the result is prosperity. Capitalism is an abstract machine most beautiful to behold in the wonder of its workings. When individuals have the incentive to achieve, acquire, and enjoy something for themselves, they’ll go to great lengths to afford it. They’ll compete with each other to provide what others want, toil to make it the better product, and set the price of it lower. The best is made available at the least cost. Everyone is both a taker and a giver, and everyone benefits. True, not everyone’s effort always succeeds, but nothing stops anyone from trying again.

Of course capitalism isn’t a remedy for every ill and discontent. But a capitalist society offers the best chance to an individual to make the best of his condition – being alive – which presents him with a tough challenge – to stay alive for a few score years, and make those years as good as his energy, cunning, and adaptability to conditions outside of his control (plus his statistically likely share of luck), can help them to be.

In a capitalist society no one has a fixed place, whether below, in the middle, or on top. A person can rise, sink, or stay. A truly capitalist society is necessarily a free society in which no one is prevented, by some ruler or ruling clique, from bettering his lot, striving, succeeding, or failing.

Capitalism is the enemy of that God of whom all the children in the British Empire used to sing at morning prayers in school assemblies before the Second World War:

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small;

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

Each little flower that opens,

Each little bird that sings,

He made their glowing colors,

He made their tiny wings.

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

He made them high and lowly,

He ordered their estate.

The children were being taught to be content with everything as it was, trusting that God the ruler up there, all wise, permanent and unchallengeable had ordained how everyone had his fixed place and should stay in it, and because He had ordained it, it must be perfect. The recognition that such a God was an indefensible authoritarian, a whim-driven cosmic dictator, an unjust and arrogant tyrant, came – perhaps unconsciously – to the choosers of Anglican hymns only after a few of the earth’s dictators had been trounced in a prolonged and terrible blood-letting.

But then Socialists took over from God. They decided what was best for humanity. They established the Welfare State. No rich men in castles, no poor men at gates. The State would provide every citizen with depressing accommodation, dull food, health care if he were judged worthy of being kept alive, indoctrination in schools. Though the Socialist State is a slave society, the citizens are not called slaves but Social Security Recipients, National Health Patients, Students, Workers. The belief of their rulers is that they’ll be content because the State provides them with “everything”; they’ll be grateful for the food however poor, the unit in the tower block however depressing, the bed in the hospital however filthy, the indoctrination however boring. The great thing about it, to the collectivist mind, is they won’t have to strive to keep alive. And no one will have cause to pity or envy anyone else, since no one will have less or worse, or more or better – except of course the rulers up there, all wise, permanent and unchallengeable who ordain that everyone else has his fixed place. They reserve plenty, choice, comfort, luxury, information, and power to themselves.

The recognition that such a State is counter to the human instinct for freedom – call it “selfishness “ if you will – should have come to every sane adult the world over when the Soviet Empire crashed. The idea of Socialism should have died then. But if it did, it was only for a short time. Like the Christian God, it rose again, and lives now in the White House, an administration indefensibly authoritarian, whim-driven, unjust, and arrogant.

Selfish human nature with its instinct for liberty, its impelling desire to possess what is good for it materially and mentally, is the force that can and must defeat it.

Jillian Becker   April 29, 2011

George Soros uses his immense wealth to promote evil on a vast scale.

In a recently published booklet titled From Shadow Party to Shadow Government* by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, the authors “distill down” Soros’s agendas to “three overriding themes: the diminution of American power, the subjugation of American sovereignty in favor of one-world government, and the implementation of a socialist redistribution of wealth.”

The booklet describes how Soros has set about achieving his aims. He has come very far.  He had to get a puppet into the presidency of the United States, and he did.

(The authors do not bring Obama’s promotion of Islam into their survey. Islam’s relevance to the grand scheme must be hard for the Shadow Party to determine. How will Global  Communism deal with Islam’s competing ambition to dominate the world? What should be done with it when it is not longer useful as a destructive force? How treat its utterly different system of suppression?)

Here’s the authors’ Conclusion:

If George Soros were a lone billionaire, or if the Shadow Party consisted of a few disgruntled billionaires, these facts and achievements would not be so ominous. But the Shadow Party is far more than a reflection of the prejudices or one special interest or one passing generation. The Shadow Party is the current incarnation of a socialist movement that has been at war with the free market economy and the political system based on liberty and individual rights for more than two hundred years. It is a movement that has learned to conceal its ultimate goal, which is a totalitarian state, in the seductive rhetoric of “progressivism” and “social justice”. But its determination to equalize outcomes, its zeal for state power and for government control as the solution to social problems, and its antagonism to America as a defender of freedom are the tell-tale signs of a radical movement whose agenda is to change fundamentally and unalterably the way Americans have lived.”

In fact, as the authors say in their distillation of themes, the movement aims even further, much further. It aims for a totalitarian world.

The puppet whom Soros got into the White House not only shares that further aim but sees himself as the chief actor in the realization of it – and is not a puppet but one of the conspirators, in the view of Leon de Winter, expressed in an article titled Wake Up, Critics: Here’s Obama’s Grand Plan. Beneath the title de Winter gives a hint: “the White House is a stepping stone”.

He too sees Soros as one of the evil operators in the shadows, but only mentions him in passing. He starts with another – David Axelrod.

[David Axelrod’s] creation of the Obama myth is one of the most impressive marketing and propaganda feats in history, carefully crafted from a simple set of rules and masterfully applied to challenging, shifting circumstances.

Axelrod knew just what he was doing. He created an African American candidate without the ghetto rap. He created an ultimate urban intellectual alternative to George W. Bush — a veritable anti-Bush. He created a pseudo-legend based upon a semi-fictional autobiography.

He created a quasi-evangelical being with the gift to heal the earth.

To create this myth, the Axelrod team had to suppress the dark pages of Obama’s life. Obama’s ideological convictions were simply too far off center, too much the result of a radical leftist ideology.

Obama was a lifelong student of Marxist and neo-Marxist thinkers, his life dedicated to a theoretic approach based on the “historical” conflict of opposing classes. Long before he received the Axelrod touch, Obama was planning the long march through the institutions as a student. …

(And if Obama ever had any friends who were not Marxists and America–haters, we have yet to hear of them.)

He has been as much a brilliant strategist and tactician as Axelrod. He has known when to lay low, and when to attack; when to aggrandize, and when to diminish.

Leon de Winter believes, as Horowitz and Perazzo do, that Obama’s intention is to transform America, but he defines the president’s vision for what America must be turned into as something less extreme:

It’s his goal to transform the nation into a European welfare state, which he can only execute when he can work around America’s original ideas as formulated by the founding fathers. The almost boundless liberty of free citizens, he believes, should be limited by a strong federal state which demands a sizeable part of the fruits of the labor of its citizens. Obama is enforcing laws and introducing institutions derived from European socialist concepts of “social justice” …

And without a doubt, it is the long-term vision of president Obama. His economic transformation will enforce a cultural and ideological transformation. Everything he is doing is driven by this vision. It is postmodern revolutionary socialist methodology at work.

His career is proof that Barack Obama can plan far ahead. … I started to understand the fascinating phenomenon of Barack Obama when it suddenly dawned upon me that his present office may not be his final ambition. …

A transformed America will, naturally, lead to a completely different balance of power in the world. Internal change will create external change. The vacuum left behind by a weakened U.S. — a world without a superpower, a globe of equal nations — should be filled by a new transnational body. This is the core dream of every progressive ideologue.

World governments or governances have been part of the Marxist curriculum for decades, driven by anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist ideologies. At the moment, the driving forces are earthism, environmentalism, and fear of manmade global warming. … The future of the globe and the human race is at stake — and in order to suppress global warming, the world needs special taxes and special tools to regulate industries and modify human behavior. Who will control these new controlling mechanisms? …

Does Obama, in word and deed, start to make sense when one starts to understand that he sees his role from a vantage point far above the presidency? Beyond the White House, there is a world for him to gain. What he achieved in Washington he could repeat on a global scale. …

As a smart, suave man, he knew exactly what he was doing when he started to climb the ladder. … Obama had the intuition to pick capable operators for his campaigning and policymaking teams.

Or did they pick him? We think Obama is more the puppet of Horowitz’s and Perazzo’s understanding than the cunning planner of de Winter’s. In our view, de Winter gives Obama far too much brain and skill. But we think it probable that in Obama’s own mind he is the future leader of the world.

De Winter also gives the Left too much by attributing sincerity to it. We do not think the “warmists” give a damn about the climate. They use “manmade global warming” to trump up a crisis and agitate that it can only be “solved” with their remedy – world government by a central Presidium.

His conservative critics dramatically underestimate him. Obama knows precisely what kind of America he envisions. He wants to mold a certain type of America in order to mold a certain type of global governance. For that, he needs another term to reach his goal.

In 2016, he will move on to higher office.

But will Soros and his bat-winged minions want this Obama guy, this upstart whom they made out of nothing, in that supreme role? With that much power? We think not.

The way they see it, we guess, is that Obama did very well for the presidency of the US, to start the destruction of the Republic and the ideals on which it was founded. Millions of people – kept uninformed about him by the complicit media –  would vote for him simply because he was black. But that quality is not necessary to a candidate for the world’s pinnacle of power.

They would drop him. If they let him survive at all, they would cast him in a minor role. Perhaps give him a sinecure with a grandiose title, or perhaps a pension, or perhaps diddly squat. Put him back in his box, the strings lying loose, the lid closed.

Of course the full plan must never be allowed to come to fruition. Not even the intermediary step which Obama fronts: the transformation of America. He must not be re-elected in 2012.

The Shadow Party must be dragged further out into the sunlight, exposed, thwarted, and exterminated.

*From Shadow Party to Shadow Government is published by and available from the Freedom Center, www.frontpagemag.com

Here’s a scandalous story of the present American government doing such positive harm to American interests that it might surprise even those who believe the worst of President Obama and his clique.

Since the very first days of this president’s administration, the drug-fueled cartel violence in Mexico has provided a stalking horse for the gun control agenda. Early on, both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder cited Mexican violence as a reason to renew the Bill Clinton gun ban of 1994. After those trial balloons were shot down, the ball was passed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who repeatedly has blamed American gun rights for Mexican violence. And more recently, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF] cited cartel mayhem as justification for an attempt to mandate the reporting of all multiple long gun sales in border states … effectively creating a registry.

But now, shocking revelations that grow bigger every day completely undercut the argument for additional restrictions. In fact, they illuminate bureaucratic arrogance, recklessness and hypocrisy of the highest order in the hallways of the Obama administration — including the spreading stench of a massive cover-up.

As it turns out, the ATF was already aware of efforts by shady characters to undertake mass gun purchases in border states, because law-abiding gun dealers reported the attempted purchases voluntarily. But ATF agents acting on “orders from Washington” encouraged gun dealers to complete these transactions against the dealers’ better judgment. Worse yet, the guns — thousands of them — then were allowed to be smuggled, or “walked,” into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels. And worst of all, these guns now are turning up at crime scenes — including where a U.S. federal agent was murdered.

The operation is called “Fast and Furious,” and it’s absolutely appalling — but it’s all true, and there is still much more to come. Attorney General Holder has attempted to deflect the call for an investigation by asking the inspector general of the Justice Department to look into the matter. …

The ATF has been stonewalling inquiries from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and now Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has joined the fray — and he has subpoena power as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. …

To their credit, numerous rank-and-file ATF agents [objected] to the “Fast and Furious” operation from the get-go. Their superiors told them they “have to break some eggs to make an omelet” and then apparently threatened the agents with career discipline if they continued their objections.

The agents also were warned that the operation had been approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department — levels that are populated by presidential appointees, not career law enforcement officials. And now the Mexican government has elevated the scandal into an international incident, launching its own investigation and warning that “sanctions will have to be carried out with the full force of law to (whoever) could have been responsible.”

Barack Obama himself was questioned about the scandal …  He quickly passed the buck, claiming ignorance of the operation and saying, “There may be a situation here (in) which a serious mistake was made, and if that’s the case, then we’ll find out and we’ll hold somebody accountable.” But a presidential effort to pin the tail on the donkey ignores the tremendous scope of “Fast and Furious,” which apparently involved personnel from not only the ATF and Justice but also the Homeland Security and State departments. Any attempt to lay this massive botch at the feet of an individual ignores systemic problems that “Fast and Furious” illustrates in the federal bureaucracy.

Our quotations are from an article by Chuck Norris at Townhall. He concludes by saying:

Proponents of gun control — including the White House — should focus on bringing U.S. government agencies into compliance with our existing laws before pushing new restrictions on the rest of us.

Read it all here.

The UN’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine (see our posts A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011; and The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011), in the name of which Obama has taken America into a third war on a Muslim enemy while insisting it is all for the good of the Muslims populations as a whole, is an extension, a perversion, and potentially a contradiction of the real responsibility to protect, which is the most important duty of the national government of every nation-state.

The chief reason to have a national government is that it’s the only or best institution for protecting the nation from foreign enemies, and every individual from harm by others to his or her person and property. That it can effect such protection is the chief virtue of the nation-state, a reason why nation-states are necessary and – if not ruled by oppressive despots – essentially good.

To interpret R2P as a high moral pretext for allowing a bunch of communist and/or Islamic nations to manipulate America and other strongly armed Western nations into using military force against states they dislike, is to take away its purpose by depriving the nation-state of its defensive power, the very thing the “responsibility to protect” needed, and so to render every state vulnerable to conspiring enemies.

The sinister purpose behind the re-interpreting maneuver is to establish “world governance” by turning the corrupt, hypocritical, worse-than-useless United Nation Organization into an institution of world government.

To achieve this collectivist end, cabals of collectivist powers, organizations, and individuals have tried a series of ploys.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and all that followed from it, was one. They hoped that they could convince governments, through heavily propagandized public opinion, that the only way to save the earth from the catastrophic man-made global warming they invented, was to hand over power to the UN, which would set about redistributing wealth equally among the  nations, thus crippling the developed world where the liberty they loathe still prevails.

Another ploy, not as widely known or as dramatic in its immediate effects as IPCC and R2P, was the World Health Report 2000, put out by the World Health Organization (WHO).

There is an excellent article about it, by Professor Scott W. Atlas in the April 2011 issue of  Commentary magazine, on which we have drawn for the following information, analysis, and comment:

[The Report’s] most  most notorious finding – that the United States ranked a disastrous 37th out of the world’s nations in “overall performance” – provided Barack Obama’s transformative health-care legislation with a data-driven argument for swift and drastic reform, particularly in the light of the fact that the U.S. spends more on health than any other nation.

Professor Scott proceeds to demonstrate that –

In fact, World Health Report 2000 was an intellectual fraud of historic consequence – a profoundly deceptive document that is only marginally a measure of of health-care performance at all. The report’s true achievement was to rank countries according to their alignment with a specific political and economic ideal – socialized medicine – and then claim it was an objective measure of “quality”. … It sought not to measure performance but something else.

That “something else” was a figment of its compilers’ collective dream. They wrote:

“In the past decade or so there has been a gradual shift of vision towards what WHO calls the ‘new universalism’,” WHO authors write, “respecting the ethical principle that it may be necessary and efficient to ration services”.

So we’d all be subjected to the lowest common standard of health care – not for the sake of good health, but for the sake of ideological equality.

Professor Atlas substantiates his case by explaining in some detail the criteria the compilers of the report used to make its ranking assessments. The report, he says “went on to argue, even insist, that governments need to promote community rating” and “a common benefit package” .

And he comments aptly:

It is a curious version  of objective study design and data analysis  to assume the validity of a concept like “the new universalism” and then to define policies that implement it as proof  of that validity.

The report endorsed wealth-redistribution and centralized administration – ie. socialized health-care, the authors’ very definition of good quality health provision. A country’s rank depended on the extent to which its health care was government controlled.

The policy recommendation preceded the research.

Just as – we would point out – the policy recommendation of IPCC preceded the research.

Automatically, this pushed the capitalist countries … to the bottom of the list.

Professor Atlas concludes:

If World HealthRreport 2000 had  simply been issued and forgotten, it would still have been a case study in how to produce a wretched and unreliable piece of social science masquerading as legitimate research. That it served so effectively as a catalyst for unprecedented legislation is evidence of something more disturbing. The executive and legislatoive branches of the United States government used WHO’s document as an implicit Exhibit A to justify imposing radical changes to America’s health-care system, even in the face of objections from the American people. To blur the line between politics and objective analysis is to do violence to them both.

The whole of Professor Atlas’s article is well worth reading.

From Australia’s SBS Dateline, an amazing documentary about China’s ghost cities.

64 million vacant properties.

Shopping malls 99% empty.

Meanwhile, people living in overcrowded slums. One man who is interviewed lives with his wife in a room at the end of a narrow alley, had to send his daughter to live with grandparents so he sees her only once a year, shares one sink and a toilet with all his neighbors in the alley, and wants the government to provide everyone with a home as “a human right”.

But of course, as a Western observer points out in the video, the entire absurd situation is a result of a centrally planned economy.

One two-bedroom apartment houses 9 people including a married couple and a government property developer who has to share a bed. He tells the interviewer that he cannot comment as he’d get into trouble for saying what he thinks.

A sociologist  fears that the communist government’s policy is creating such dangerous social division that “poor people may come out and start a revolution”.

At the request of our valued reader and  frequent commenter Frank, we have written this article on foreign aid and what would happen if it were stopped. He was prompted to think about it when he watched a news video reporting that in this time of recession and severe unemployment, hundred of millions of US taxpayer dollars are being sent abroad for the refurbishment of mosques in Islamic countries, many of which are known to incite terrorist attacks on US targets.

(Note: Requests are welcome, though we can’t promise always to grant them.)

*

“Foreign aid is the transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”

There’s disagreement on who first said that, but it doesn’t matter. The question is: is it true?

The first part is not entirely untrue: among the tax–payers whose money goes to foreign aid are many who are poor, or at least not rich, by their own country’s standards.

The second part is almost entirely true. Foreign aid is paid by the donor states to the governments of the recipient states, and very little of it goes any further. The dictators, the kleptocrats, the oligarchs, the once-elected-always-in “democratic” panjandrums, the tribal chiefs who rule weaker tribes by tradition or conquest, pocket the lion’s share of the incoming largesse, distribute some of it to their kinsfolk, chums, influential supporters and selected rivals, and only then, if there’s anything left – which would likely be by oversight for which someone gets fired or shot – it’s flung from the balcony of power, in a little glittering shower, down upon the ravenous masses who scrabble for it in the dust.

Our own sort of government is not like that. Ours is accountable to us, at least in theory. The present government of the US has acted on a different understanding, but even the worst members of the Obama administration cannot – as far as we know – be accused of the venality of, say, African dictators, or even the routine corruption that characterizes the unelected leaders of the European Union.

Now what may be virtuous in an individual can be a fault in government, and vice versa. You, sir/madam, may not kill, but governments must in war. You may not demand money with menaces, but governments must when they tax you. You may not hold someone against their will, but governments must imprison convicts. You may give away your money, but a government is a trustee of others’ money and should spend it only for the benefit of those who earned it. Generosity is a virtue in a person, a vice in a government.

Those who want a government to be a wellspring of cash to pay for all their personal needs, vote for socialism. A socialist government is extortionist, the idea being that those who earn money should be forced to hand it over for the benefit of everybody else. A central agency – which can only be government as it’s the only institution with the legal power of compulsion – must gather it in and deal it out again “fairly”.  Some toil, and all hold their hands out. The system is not just, though it’s devotees call it “social justice”.

Socialists think of an economy as a pie, of which everyone should get an equal slice. They assume there is a fixed amount of wealth in the land, established once and for all long ago by divine grant, so if some are richer than others they must have become so by theft. A few are rich – they imagine – because the many are poor: the many are poor because a few are rich. They cannot grasp, or will not learn, that wealth is created, and where it is created some become rich and many become richer. (A fine example is the “second industrial revolution” that began to the world’s wonder and glory in Silicon Valley about half a century ago. Apple orchards gave way to Apple computers – to sum it up – and where there had been hundreds of poor field workers there are now millions of prosperous industrial workers, and the persons who were free to invest their own money, time, innovative ability as they chose, not only became rich themselves, but have also benefited hundreds of millions of people all over the world. That’s what capitalism and the free market – so dreaded and hated by socialists – can do.)

Foreign aid is a socialist idea. It is redistribution of the “world’s wealth”. That pie idea again, writ very large. Equal slices. A fixed amount that needs to be distributed “fairly”.  (Ideally, to the true believers, by a world government.) Those who advocate it get a warm glowing feeling inside. Puffed up with moral pride, they simply know they are virtuous. They hold compassion to be the highest value, and bestow their compassion, by means of other people’s money, liberally on the wretched of the earth.

But have they actually done any good?

They claim to have “helped” poor countries by bringing plenty where there was  scarcity. The more realistic among them, not entirely persuaded by the pie theory of wealth, see the free grants of cash from the First World as seed money with which  to grow profitable projects that will make many an economic desert bloom.

Has the looked-for transformation ever come about? Has US aid – for instance – ever actually promoted economic success anywhere?

Well, yes. Once. Maybe. European economic recovery after the devastation of World War Two was probably boosted by the aid it received through the Marshall Plan. About $13 billion was distributed in varying amounts to the west European states, including Italy and  Germany  (and even neutral Sweden but not Spain), Britain getting the most. It’s  impossible to know whether Europe would have recovered as well, less well, or better without it. It was given, it was used (much of it to buy goods from the United States), and Europe did recover and prosper, so you could say that the aid wasn’t wasted.

But can as much be said for other hand-outs to foreign lands? If you hunt about you may light upon a successful outcome from a grant being well used here and there on our big round globe. But in general the answer is no. Aid has not proved a successful means to help poor peoples to thrive. And that isn’t all of the bad news. The rest of the story is worse. For the most part aid is squandered.  Worse still, it has often had the effect of making poor countries poorer – a point to which we shall return. And arguably worst of all, it sometimes goes to strengthen the aid-giver’s active enemies. (See our post, Aiding our enemies , March 14, 2011.)

The  redistribution enthusiasts explain, in the patient tones of saints, that the waste of what is given and the hatred directed at the giver are the direct results of the rich countries not giving enough (see for example here, here, and here). They complain that no developed country in the Western world budgets even as much as the .7% of its GDP that they promised once upon a time at some international forum, some field of the cloth of gold. The richest country in the world, the USA, allots barely .2%, and the saints who want to be generous with Americans’ money feel that the US government should hang its head in shame for being so miserly.

But if the money is squandered, what justification is there for giving any at all? If it doesn’t improve living standards, does it at least secure a strategic advantage, a port or an air base? Ensure an ally where one might be needed? Engage a supportive voice in the United Nations? Yes, sometimes, for a while, if nothing comes along to put a strain on the agreement.

Does it matter if the aid money does no good for the recipient and possibly endangers the giver? Conservative governments seem to have answered this question cynically, along such lines as: “Even if a few millions bestowed on this or that Havenotistan is spent on a gold bed for the tyrant’s wife, or a fleet of Mercedes that cannot be moved from the airport where they were landed because no one knew to put oil in them before trying to drive them away (both actual examples), the amounts are too small to fuss about … chump change … and there may be some sort of  dividend coming out of it one sunny day.”

What if consumer goods are sent rather than money? Food, say? Doesn’t that reach the people who need it? Not often. It gets diverted –  to  cartels, army top brass, transport operators, profiteers in influential positions, who will sell what they don’t keep for themselves at inflated prices when famine gets severe enough. For instance, in Somalia, after such slavering packs of wolves have chewed off  their share  –  al-Qaeda linked terrorists among them in that benighted land –  only half the food sent as aid is “distributed to the needy population”. (See our  post,, Out of Africa always something familiar, March 11, 2010.)

But, it might be objected, not all recipients are unpredictable despotisms. The biggest beneficiary of US foreign aid is Israel – $3 billion per annum. Any complaint about that?

Yes. From Israel – because of the strings attached. Israel has to use some of the money to buy American military aircraft and weapons – not the ones it wants, but the sort Israelis say they can make better themselves. Some also say they don’t really need the aid at all, which amounts to under 1% of Israel’s total GDP, but are not allowed to refuse it because tens of thousands of American jobs depend on the Israeli munitions market. If this is true, Israel is not a beneficiary but a victim of aid!

From America’s point of view, however, that’s surely one lump of aid worth giving. Or is it? The economist Peter Bauer, who was Prime Minister Thatcher’s special adviser on foreign aid, pointed out that such an arrangement as that is analogous to your local store owner giving you cash on condition that you spend some of it buying his merchandise.

But let’s return to our assertion that aid often has the effect of making poor countries poorer. Here’s a quotation from an article by Matthew Rees in the Wall Street Journal [first quoted in our post, How to spread poverty, April 4, 2009]:

Dambisa Moyo, a native of Zambia and a former World Bank consultant, believes that it is time to stop proceeding as if foreign aid does the good that it is supposed to do. …  Aid, she writes, is “no longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.” … Ms. Moyo spells out how attempts to help Africa actually hurt it. The aid money pouring into Africa, she says, underwrites brutal and corrupt regimes; it stifles investment; and it leads to higher rates of poverty – all of which, in turn, creates a demand for yet more aid. Africa, Ms. Moyo notes, seems hopelessly trapped in this spiral, and she wants to see it break free. Over the past 30 years, she says, the most aid-dependent countries in Africa have experienced economic contraction averaging 0.2% a year.

In the light of that dismal fact, foreign aid is plainly a bad idea and it should be stopped.

What would happen if it were?

It’s more than likely that the redistribution saints would wax very wrathful indeed. It would soon become plain that their motive was never so much – or at all? – the betterment of life for the hungry masses in poor countries. They, or many of them, have a higher goal in mind: global redistribution of what they call “resources” – meaning the wealth created in and by the capitalist First World.

Matthew Rees explains in his Wall Street Journal article:

The report blends the socialist and Islamic economic perspectives as an alternative to our present capitalistic system.  It has four basic themes.  Western-style free market capitalism is the villain. Redistributive justice is mandatory. New global governance authorities are required. Global taxes are also needed.

The only institution that the UN experts believe has broad enough political legitimacy to serve as the global decision making forum and eliminate the abuses of free market capitalism is, unsurprisingly, the body that gave them the platform to air their views on a global stage in the first place – the United Nations.

Since the United States is usually asked by the UN to put up at least 20% of whatever money it is raising, that would mean U.S. taxpayers would be expected to fork over $200 billion extra over the next two years.

Would we at least be able to impose some reasonable conditions on the massive grants and loans for development and other support (or “conditionalities” as the Commission of Experts calls them)?  The UN experts say absolutely not!

After all, it would be politically incorrect to expect each recipient of our taxpayers’ money to actually have to demonstrate that the money won’t end up in a corrupt dictator’s Swiss bank account because, according to the UN experts’ circular reasoning, such “conditionalities” would “disadvantage developing countries relative to the developed, and undermine incentives for developing countries to seek support funding…

Our sovereignty as a self-governing people to regulate our own economy must give way to global government for the sake of “the broad interest of the international community”.

The bid failed. But the saints never give up. They had another go by claiming that the planet could only be saved from man-made global warming by world government, which would oversee the redistribution of the developed world’s “resources”.

That would be the killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. There would soon be no more “resources” to redistribute. No one would be rich (except themselves), but there’d be that equality of misery everywhere on earth which, to the socialist conscience, is the non plus ultra of moral good.

We must not let it happen. Our verdict is that if foreign aid were stopped, everyone would benefit, the nations that give and the nations that receive. So what we need now – to save not only ourselves who are thriving on capitalism, but the rest of the world too – are tightfisted governments. America must elect a miser-government, the stingiest ever, refusing so much as a crumb in aid to another country. Then the wretched of the earth can imitate our ways, and prosper.

Jillian Becker   March 21, 2011

President Obama’s father was a communist. His mother was involved with the New Left. The chief mentor of his youth was the communist writer Frank Marshall Davis. At the University of Columbia he sought out Marxist professors. He trained to be a “community organizer” according to the precepts of the communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky. He brought Maoists into the White House to advise and assist him. He advocates communist egalitarianism (“spread the wealth around”). He is not only the first black president of the United States, he is also its first communist president. (However, like any idea that enters his head between parties and games and hangs about there, his communism is a mere miasma; and as he has no leadership ability it will not have much effect, beyond such expensive mistakes as his attempt at a government takeover of the nation’s health care. Getting the country into deep debt was perhaps less the result of a leftist economic policy than of his being unable to formulate any policies at all.)

Returning to the theme of our post, The once and future Republican Party, March 3, 2011 – that the Republican Party has been the friend of blacks and the Democratic Party their enemy – we quote some passages from an article by John Rossomando at Townhall:

Leading black conservatives lay blame for black America’s rampant poverty and other ills squarely at the feet of the socialist orientation of black leaders such as Al Sharpton.

They say the black intelligentsia’s rhetoric has created a defeatist and demoralizing climate that has robbed millions of black Americans of hope and has sentenced them to an impoverished existence.

“One of the tenets of the socialist ideology is to create a welfare state, and that’s exactly what has happened in the black community,” says Florida Rep. Allen West, the only Republican member of the Congressional Black Caucus. “I like to say we have sort of a reverse plantation going on here where you have people like Sharpton and [Jesse] Jackson trying to make themselves into overseers.”

Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, says Marxists have worked hard to exploit blacks for the past century and divide them from the rest of society.

Socialism has been deeply ingrained in the black community since the NAACP’s founding in 1909 according to the Socialist Party USA.

And NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois later developed an admiration for Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin and even continued to apologize for him even after many other black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison had repudiated their support for the dictator. DuBois even received the 1959 “Lenin Peace Prize” and formally joined the Communist Party USA two years later in 1961. …

Not even legendary civil rights leader [and Republican] Martin Luther King Jr. escaped being infected by the socialist virus, as evidenced by speeches he gave toward the end of his life. …

“The biggest tragedy in all of this is that the blacks did not know the poison of socialism and communism,” Innis says. “And they were led to believe it was the only alternative for fighting Jim Crow and pushing back against segregation.” …

The black elites’ Marxist dialectic has pit white versus black and rich versus poor …

“It has really hurt the black community because the real uplift in this country is through individual initiative, activity and entrepreneurship,” says Bishop E.W. Jackson Sr., a prominent conservative black minister and Tea Partier. …

Read it all here.

The fever of revolution has spread from North Africa to the communist Far East. There are stirrings of revolt in North Korea and Vietnam. And it seems possible that the Chinese people may actually achieve a change of regime.

Ryan Mauro provides information about these movements which is otherwise hard to find. He attributes the new-found courage of populations under communist tyrannies to the example of the revolutionary movements in the Arab states.

The government of North Korea is frightened:

Trouble began for the regime on February 14 after it failed to deliver promised goods in the days leading up to Kim Jong-Il’s birthday. Dozens of people in North Pyongan Province demanded electricity and food. On February 18 in Sinuiju, the security forces had a confrontation with traders at the market, resulting in an assault on one trader to the point where he was unconscious. The family members of the victim protested and were quickly joined by other traders, resulting in the deployment of more soldiers and police. A source to one newspaper reported that “hundreds” were involved in the clashes. The true number is unknown but the clashes are an unprecedented and important development in the Hermit Kingdom.

South Korea has also begun trying to incite unrest by sending tens of thousands of helium balloons delivering messages, medicine, food, clothing and radios up to 200 kilometers into North Korea. The messages inform the readers of the revolutions in the Middle East and boldly say, “a dictatorial regime is bound to collapse.” The regime is threatening to attack the areas from which the balloons are launched and has said it will destroy loudspeakers near the border if they broadcast anti-government messages into the country.

The government of Vietnam tries to silence a defiant leader:

A top democratic opposition leader named Nguyen Dan Que was arrested in late February after calling on the Vietnamese people to follow in the footsteps of the Tunisians and Egyptians. He spoke of accomplishing a “clean sweep of Communist dictatorship and build[ing] a new, free, democratic, humane and progressive Vietnam.” He was shortly thereafter released but 60,000 files from his computer were taken. The government says they will question him further as their investigation into opposition activities continues. Que is allowed to go home at night but must return to a police station during the day.

The “domino effect” of the Jasmine Revolution has “even reached China”, where security forces in large numbers have been deployed to forestall protests in Beijing, Shanghai, and eleven other cities.

Over 100 democratic activists were arrested or placed under house arrest. Greater Internetcensorship began with more websites being blocked and users were even prevented from searching the word “jasmine” on Twitter and other social networking websites.

Despite these precautions, ways of bringing protestors out on Sundays were found:

A crowd of hundreds still formed in Beijing and Shanghai and activists are spreading the word about protesting every Sunday by having “peaceful strolls” with no signs or chanting so that the police have little reason to arrest them. University campuses have been surrounded by security forces when the government has learned of the demonstrations and journalists are not being permitted to visit the protest sites. Those who do say they are harassed. Major streets and commercial centers are the scene of police dogs, security agents dressed as civilians, paramilitary personnel and special forces. The ruling party is now discussing further Internet censorship and at least 20 have been charged for their role in organizing the protests.

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, is quoted as predicting the near approach of “the last days of the People’s Republic”. He believes that “a single action could cause a chain of events resulting in huge changes in the government.”

“When the Chinese lose their fear—and that moment is coming soon—we will see the strength of the discontent in society,” he said.

No oppressive government can be confident in times like these. The world is focused on the rapidly changing events in the Middle East but there is a freedom movement just as important in Asia, even if few are paying attention to it.