Socialist economics don’t work. The welfare states of Europe are falling into ruin one after another. Greece, Ireland, Portugal have become beggar-nations.

Now Spain.

Soeren Kern writes at PajamasMedia:

Throngs of Spanish youth have gathered in more than 150 cities across Spain to protest skyrocketing unemployment, cutbacks to social welfare benefits, and rampant corruption among Spain’s political elite. …

The Spanish protesters have been inspired [perhaps] by the pro-democracy movements in the Arab world, and are using social media networks to coordinate the demonstrations. …

The largest protests have been in Madrid … Protests are under way in other major Spanish cities, including Barcelona, Bilbao, Granada, Palma de Mallorca, Santiago de Compostela, Seville, Valencia, Vigo, and Zaragoza. The protestors have vowed to remain mobilized at least through the May 22 elections …

Up until now, anti-government protests in Spain have been relatively few and far between, partly because of the strong ties that labor unions have with the ruling Socialists. But Spain’s nascent youth democracy movement is a spontaneous grassroots groundswell that is not left versus right but rather young versus old. The youth movement is highly inclusive and its members — who represent all of Spain’s socio-economic classes — have expressed disgust with both the governing Socialists and the main opposition conservative Popular Party. …

Corruption in Spain is endemic and politicians from both major parties have been implicated in scandals in all of Spain’s 48 provinces. …

Spain’s ailing economy too is a symptom of much broader problem, including the inability of the social welfare economic model to create jobs, as well as a highly paternalistic labor market that benefits an older generation seeking to preserve the status quo. Although Spain’s economic crisis has affected workers in all age groups, youth unemployment is more than double the overall jobless rate of 21.2 percent, the highest in the industrialized world. Around half of Spain’s youth are unemployed and the other half that is working often does so under highly exploitative employment conditions. …

Opinion polls forecast devastating losses for the Socialists. … Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced on April 2 that he would not stand for a third term in general elections scheduled for March 2012. …

But all major parties in Europe now are socialist, no matter what they call themselves, and an Opposition coming into power is unlikely to make any difference.

Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the conservative Popular Party, stands to make huge gains in the elections … But after eight years in the opposition and after many months on the campaign trail, he has yet to say how he plans to reverse Spain’s economic fortunes if he finally becomes prime minister …

And Richard Fernandez reports and comments, also at PajamasMedia:

When Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took power seven years ago, he and his Socialist Workers Party set out to perfect the welfare state in Spain. The goal was to equal— or even surpass — lavish social protections that have long been the rule in Spain’s Western European neighbors.

True to his Socialist principles and riding an economic boom, Zapatero raised the minimum wage and extended health insurance to cover everything from sniffles to sex-changes. He made scholarships available for all. Young adults got rent subsidies called “emancipation” money. Mothers got $3,500 for the birth of a child, toddlers attended free nurseries and the elderly won stipends to finance nursing care. … [But his] main concern in his second term has become hacking away at government spending to preserve Spain’s credit rating. The icon of socialism just concluded a pact with labor unions and business leaders to freeze pensions, push back the retirement age from 65 to 67, trim union bargaining rights, cut civil servants’ pay by 5 percent — including his own — and suspend the childbirth bonus. The alternative, he warned, was bankruptcy. …

Now Zapatero is facing a revolt from his angry left, from the millions of socialist believers and youth — many of whom are unemployed — who were promised something for nothing and now feel betrayed.

They insist on getting “something for nothing”. They want “free “ health care, fat pensions from an early retirement age, rent subsidies, childbirth bonuses, scholarships for all – and full employment. But where will the money come from? To whom can any Spanish government turn? To Germany? Germans feel they’ve given more than enough to failed Eurostates (that shoud never have been allowed to join the Eurozone in the first place). To the International Monetary Fund (an agency that redistributes wealth on a global scale)?

Greece had hopes of getting a hand-out from the IMF. Its erstwhile head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was sympathetic to its importuning. But he is being held under house arrest in New York, charged with sexual assault, and has lost his powerful position, so the Greek government may hold out its trembling hands for alms in vain.

But even had their champion been at liberty to promote a second bailout, there was no guarantee that Greece would not default eventually and descend into social unrest. …

In Athens, home to almost half of Greece’s 11 million-strong population, the signs of austerity – and poverty – are everywhere: in the homeless and hungry who forage through municipal rubbish bins late at night; in the cash-strapped pensioners who pick up rejects at the street markets that sell fruit and vegetables; in the shops now boarded and closed and in the thousands of ordinary Greeks who can no longer afford to take family outings or regularly eat meat.

There were economists who could have told the European politicians that their socialist policies would bankrupt them. Could have and did. But government after government would not heed the warnings. Now they are learning the hard way, to their shock and distress, that what has been proved unworkable in theory doesn’t work in practice.

Is there any point in hoping that the American Left is taking note?

Zapatero’s problems are a preview of the fate which awaits a left-wing politician who promises to lower the level of the oceans and winds up raising the price of gas.

The Second Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution, occurred because its inventors, entrepreneurs, venture-capitalists, its innovators and risk-takers and visionaries of all sorts were free. They had freedom of action, could use their time and resources as they chose. What they produced has benefited uncountable millions of other people. Their country, their world, and all generations to come, the whole human race, are the beneficiaries of their ideas and labors. They have enriched us all. If ever men have deserved to grow rich themselves, they have.

No government, no social program, no redistribution of wealth, no central planning, no high-tax-high-spend economic system, can do for the general good what they have done for it. They have created wealth. Governments diminish it. And redistributing governments, run by “social justice” liberals, destroy it.

Why can’t the very men who used freedom so well understand this? Why are so many of them helping to destroy that essential freedom of which they took splendid advantage, so that in future others cannot do what they did?

In an article at Front Page on business leaders toadying to Obama, Benjamin Shapiro considers the strange phenomenon of their self-destructive behavior:

On April 5, President Obama kicked off his newly-minted presidential campaign by announcing that he would be conducting a “Facebook town hall” event streaming live via the website and via the White House website on April 20. Just to ensure that the Facebook audience recognizes that this isn’t merely another media appearance but an endorsement of Obama by the Facebook executives, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg quizzed Obama before an audience of over 1,000 Facebook employees and other internet mavens.

The recorded result will be chopped up and distributed via Facebook and the White House website over the coming months. “We’re honored that President Obama will be visiting headquarters later this month and will be using the Facebook platform to communicate with an international audience,” Andrew Noyes, Facebook spokesman, gushed.

Obama isn’t the first politician to use Facebook as a fundraising platform. But he is the first politician to be granted the privileged insider status of visiting HQ to do so. Facebook has been one of Obama’s most important supporters over the past several years. And Facebook is hardly the only Silicon Valley organization backing Obama. Apple and Google have also become vocal supporters of the administration. Steve Jobs dined with Zuckerberg and Obama in February to discuss job creation; Google CEO Eric Schmidt was one of Obama’s earliest backers for the presidency; Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s founders, became Obama’s internet czar in 2007. In fact, prior to the election of 2008, Schmidt toured the United States with Obama’s soon-to-be FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski to stump for Obama’s net neutrality policies.

On the surface, this makes little sense. Obama’s policies have targeted businesses with remorseless cruelty, setting them up as villains in the class conflict Obama wishes to precipitate. Facebook, Apple, and Google are three of the most successful businesses of the 21st century. Yet all three seem to be mobilizing in favor of the Obama Administration.

That’s because all three must dance for their political master.

Because the federal government is so large and so powerful, and because President Obama is obviously willing and able to use government weight to press forward his agenda, major businesses in the United States must look to appease him. Obama has no problem wielding the heavy club of regulation to hurt his political enemies, or to help his political friends. Major businesses like Facebook, Google, and Apple have all felt the sour stings and warm embraces of big government. And all of them prefer the warm embraces.

President Obama has already promoted Facebook and Google openly: in his State of the Union address, for example, Obama stated, “We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook.” Obama’s net neutrality policy, which may or may not be backed by Google, would lock Google into place as the leading search engine on the internet – other search engines would not be able to pay internet service providers (ISPs) to make their websites run faster. Obama has promoted Apple publicly too, particularly [Steve] Jobs.

By the same token, Obama has also targeted each and every one of these businesses, making it clear that they had better get in line. Obama’s Justice Department has cracked down on Google Books, covertly threatening antitrust lawsuits. The DOJ has also pledged to shut down Google’s acquisition of ITA, a flight data and software company. Michelle Obama has said that Facebook is no place for children, and President Obama has stated that iPads and iPods threaten the republic, making “information … a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment … it is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.”

Facebook’s, Google’s, and Apple’s flirtations with President Obama are just the latest example of how American businesses die. To be sure, Facebook, Google and Apple are a long way from death. But once they begin dancing to the tune of the government flute, it is only a matter of time before they become obsolete.

The growth of government – and the threat of government involvement in industry – has eventually crippled virtually every major industry in America over the past century and a half.  Businesses are started by entrepreneurs; when they grow successful, government intervenes to take its pound of flesh; entrepreneurs respond by parlaying with government, hamstringing their own businesses in an attempt to [appease] government wrath. Those businesses gradually become decrepit, dependent on the whims of the capricious Washington D.C. deities.  Overseas competitors begin to compete, and the now-slow-moving businesses require government subsidies to survive. This is how businesses turn from American assets into American sinkholes. …

James J. Hill, the man who built the Great Northern Railroad, derided government aid, explaining, “The government should not furnish capital to these companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the public treasury.”  … Hill started off as a grocery clerk, then worked in a variety of industries before pooling his cash with several partners to enter the world of the railroads.  His business model was a paradigm of pure capitalism.  Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting converted the railroad industry into a shell of its former self, and converted its “robber baron” leaders into public villains. Now today, President Obama tells us that we must publicly fund rail systems so as to compete with the Chinese.

In the oil industry, the Rockefellers of the early 20^th century gave way to the heavily regulated firms of today – and not coincidentally, the foreign oil dependence that now shapes our foreign and domestic politics.

In the automobile industry, Henry Ford entrepreneurialism gave way to government-supported unionization, subsidization, and finally, bankruptcy.

When President Obama praises the fact that we are “the nation that puts cars in driveways and computers in offices,” he neglects to mention that we are also the government that kills the car industry and ships the computer industry overseas; when he lionizes us as “the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers,” he ignores the fact that Edison has given way to government-sponsored GE, a company whose stock fluctuates with each presidential press conference; when he effervesces over Google and Facebook, he blithely overlooks the fact that his own intervention will help make those companies archaic before their time.

This is what liberalism does to industry.  It kills it.

How is it possible for such brilliant achievers to be played for chumps so easily?

The cartoon Mr Magoo never gets personally hurt, though he leaves wreckage behind him. The Magoos of business and industry cannot count on being so lucky. Obama wants to turn America into a socialist state. Socialism is the wrecker of freedom. Socialism is bad not only for the economy as a whole and so for all business and industry, but for every individual –

Except its ruling elite. So, you men of the great start-ups, of great ideas and great ability, maybe for you personally the way of Chris Hughes is the way to go: join the administration and help to wreck America.

And watch the admiration and gratitude of your country and the world, which you have now, change to anger, contempt, and unforgiving blame.

Socialism has failed in America as it has failed everywhere it has been tried, and always must. It’s a bad idea.

Now the harm the socialists have done must be undone.

We agree for the most part with these comments from an article at RedState on Paul Ryan’s budget.

This budget proposal, which would cut $5.8 trillion from the CBO baseline over the next decade, is a mature and well balanced plan emanating from a city full of fatuous demagoguery. …

It is a laudable first step that has come to fruition through the assiduous work of Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues on the Budget Committee. It is a fresh breath of moderation and seriousness amidst the extremism that is so endemic in Washington among the Democrats. Here is a cursory breakdown of some of the major provisions of the Ryan plan, categorized by the excellent, the good, and the need for improvement.

The Excellent

Medicaid: The budget proposes a transformational change to Medicaid by converting it to a block grant program which would give states more flexibility in how to spend their Medicaid dollars. There would also be an overall cap placed on the block grants. This would encourage states to innovate and formulate the best ideas for reducing dependency, instead of exacerbating it through an open ended entitlement program. The plan would trim the cost of Medicaid by $771 billion from the CBO baseline over the next decade.

Corporate Welfare/Ethanol/Farm Subsidies: Ryan’s proposal repeals the odious ethanol subsidies lock, stock and barrel. It also reforms farm subsidies by trimming farm/corporate welfare from its current level of $25 billion. This is especially prescient given the record high food prices that have been spurred in part by these market-distorting subsidies. To address the record high energy prices, the proposal calls for an end to tax cuts for the rich – no more green subsidies!

Obamacare: It defunds Obamacare lock, stock and barrel. While much of the budget is driven by choices between several evils in order to reform existing Democrat entitlement programs, this proposal prevents ObamaCare from becoming another Medicare/Medicaid disaster.

Taxes: The proposal reduces the highest corporate and personal income tax rates to 25%.

Earmarks: The ban on earmarks is made permanent.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae: The budget plan cancels these economic destructive government entities and calls for their privatization. …

The Good

Medicare: Ryan proposes a premium-support program to replace the current market-distorting, bankrupting, and open-ended subsidization of all health care for seniors. Under such a plan, the government would pay the premiums of Medicare enrollees’ so they can purchase an insurance plan of their choice in the free market. As with the Medicaid proposal, this plan would mandate an overall spending cap on the amount of the premium payments.

While this plan is a prudential first step to infusing the free market into an otherwise socialized sector of the economy, the changes will not take effect for another 10 years. Also, a more conservative approach would have called for the issuance of vouchers, thereby directly empowering the individual, as opposed to perpetuating the role of government through their payments to insurance companies. …

Welfare Reform: Ryan proposes converting the Food Stamp program into a block grant to states that would be indexed to inflation and tailor made to each state’s own unique circumstances. He also wants to apply the 1996 welfare reform accountability mechanisms to other housing assistance programs. There are currently a staggering 44 million Americans on food stamps and the program is projected to cost $700 billion over the next 10 years. Ryan’s reforms offer a very good first step. On the other hand, there are still over 70 other welfare programs that cost another trillion dollars, but are untouched in this proposal. …

Need for Improvement

Social Security: The most glaring omission of Ryan’s budget plan is a fix to Social Security. It is understandable why Ryan would shy away from touching the most sacrosanct program in the federal arsenal, especially as he is bravely striking out at virtually all of the other major programs. However it must be reformed.

Abolished, we would say. We are deskchair politicians, and as such do not have to be strictly realistic. We know that politics is “the art of the possible”. We know that it is not possible to legislate too far ahead of public opinion. But as we are not legislators, only opinion pedlars, we airily declare that we would like to see absolutely no government interference in the market. There shouldn’t be the least whiff of a stub of socialism left in the ash-tray of American history, but Social Security goes smouldering on, a huge reeking stogie.

Many good conservatives are so concerned about solvency that they are calling for a raise in the retirement age and means-testing of benefits. While those proposals might succeed in making SS more solvent, they are an anathema to the ideals of free market capitalism and individual liberty. It is inconceivable that a hard working 30 year-old should be forced to work until 70 (maybe longer) and then awarded his retirement at the whims of a means-tested regime, all the while having no property rights over his retirement security.

The objective of entitlement reform is not to make a Democrat-run program solvent. Our objective vis-à-vis entitlement reform should be focused on returning the wealth to the American worker and taxpayer by promoting more liberty and prosperity. It is fair to propose much needed innovative changes such as benefit cuts and retirement age adjustments for those who optionally enroll in such a program. However, there can be no discussion of raising the retirement age without offering young workers private accounts or an option to opt out.

Taxes: Repeal Death Tax- One of the more egregious components of the grand tax deal last year was the reinstating of the immoral Death Tax at 35%. The Death Tax needs to be abolished. Period.

Non-defense discretionary spending: The proposal only cuts $1.7 trillion from domestic discretionary programs over 10 years. That adds up to roughly $170 billion in discretionary spending cuts per year. This is accomplished by bringing non-security discretionary spending back below 2008 levels and then freezing it for five years. Spending levels for most agencies should be reduced to 2006 levels. Furthermore, Republicans should take a closer look at Rand Paul’s proposal to cut up to $500 billion a year by eliminating such impotent departments as HUD [Housing and Urban Development], Education, and Energy. His plan would also seriously reduce the funding, size, and scope of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, HHS [Health and Human Services], Interior, and Labor.

Keep in mind that when we fund these agencies, we are not merely losing the billions or tens of billions of dollars in wasted expenditures. These superfluous agencies use that funding to impose onerous market-distorting regulations and mandates on job creation, income growth, energy productivity, and consumer purchasing power. Such a cost to our economy is incalculable.

Debt and Deficit: Due in part to the previous point, the proposal would take too long to balance the budget. For FY 2012, the government would spend $3.529 trillion and collect $2.533 trillion, still resulting in a gargantuan deficit of $995 billion. It would take another 26 years to fully balance the budget.

Conclusion

The Democrats have worked indefatigably for a century to destroy the fabric of our free market, liberty seeking society. We will not restore our republic overnight. … Paul Ryan’s proposal provides us with the building blocks from which to bring about the restoration of our constitutional government.

Will it, or something close to it, be passed?

Not easily. Socialism is an addiction, very hard to cure.

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”.

Remember what a difference electricity makes to the lives of country-dwellers in that vast book Atlas Shrugged?

Here the case for having it in never-failing abundance is made briefly but well by Professor Ross McKitrick writing against the nonsensical fad of “Earth Hour”.

From the Vancouver Sun:

I abhor EarthHour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferationof inexpensive and reliable electricity. Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity. People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

The Greens would if they could. To them the human race is a disease of the planet, which can only be saved (for what?) if it is cured of us.

Professor McKitrick goes on:

I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.

Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks. I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Tradeoffs? What tradeoffs?

In addition to everything else that runs on electricity, there’s the glorious internet. It has so transformed our lives that we think there should be a new calendar marking the difference – Before the Internet Age, BIA,  and the Internet Age, IA. If we date the start of the Internet Age from 1973 of Our Common Era, when the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started something called “the Inter netting project”, we are now in IA year 38.

Let’s have extravagant supplies of energy from coal (clean or filthy), gas, oil, and nuclear reactors.

And hope that the last Greens to leave their senses will be kept from switching off the lights.

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

Okay, we have to concede that Obama cannot – either deliberately or through negligence – cause earthquakes and tsunamis. For all our scathing contempt of him, our seething animosity towards him, we cannot blame him for the destruction and loss of life those natural disasters have caused in Japan.

But for all other major calamities presently afflicting the world and America in particular, we do hold him responsible.

Obama is chiefly to blame for the continuing economic crisis in America. Incompetent though he is, this could be his singular success, the one goal he aimed at and achieved. America, in his eyes, was too prosperous. He took measures to make the country he led poorer and weaker. He extended government control over the economy, increased government spending, and so put people out of work. Food and energy prices are soaring. He intentionally raised the cost of energy. Higher energy costs mean higher food prices. He puts the hungrier country deeper into debt. Inflation looms. And lo! – it’s done: America is no longer the most prosperous, the freest, the mightiest country on earth. “God damn America!” Pastor Jeremiah Wright prayed. His parishioner Barack Obama heard him, and, having had power put in his hands by a misled electorate, acts to grant that iniquitous prayer.

And he is largely to blame for the growing danger of chaos and war in North Africa and the Middle East, which will affect the whole world, as oil supplies are endangered, and Iran seizes the opportunity created for it by violent upheavals and slaughter to arm its proxies, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria …

This is from Investor’s Business Daily  …

With all eyes on upheaval in the Middle East and Japan’s triple catastrophe, Iran is quietly working under the radar to wreak havoc. It’s moving fast to ship illegal weapons for use against us and our allies.

The Israeli navy on Tuesday intercepted a ship loaded with Iranian weapons 125 miles off its coast. The Liberian-flagged, German-owned Victoria, which debarked from Turkey full of what it claimed were lentils and cotton, made a pit stop at the Syrian port of Latakia and then sailed for Egypt.

In reality, the ship was hauling 2,500 mortar shells, six C-704 anti-ship missiles, two radar systems, two launchers, two hydraulic mounting cranes and 67,000 bullets.

Its Syrian stop just happened to be at the same port an Iranian ship visited when it crossed the Suez Canal last Jan. 22, and no, the Victoria was not bound for Egypt.

“The weaponry originated in Iran, which is trying to arm the Gaza strip,” said Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

As disturbing as it is, it seems to be just one element of an accelerating Iranian plan to arm terrorists in areas where it thinks it can get away with it. …

Israel in fact has been encircled from all sides by Iranian arms in the past three days. Coming up from the south, Egyptian security forces on Sunday captured another load of rocket-propelled grenades, mortar rounds, rifles and explosive in five trucks coming from Sudan on their way to terrorists in Gaza.

Around the same time, Turkey forced an illicit Iranian plane flying over its territory to land. It was carrying, analysts believe, weapons bound for Syria.

And it seems a creepy coincidence that five members of an Israeli settler family in the West Bank were murdered over the weekend by Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorists who named their subgroup after a Hezbollah terrorist with links to Iran.

Iran in fact is stepping up arms shipments all over, blithely ignoring the United Nations embargo.

Three weeks ago, Senegal sent Iran’s ambassador packing after separatist rebels in the south fought pitched battles with Iranian weapons against Senegalese troops, killing three of them. …

Gambia has had it with Iran, too.

Last November, it gave Iran’s diplomats 48 hours to leave, without giving a reason. But it was believed to involve a huge shipment of illegal Iranian rocket launchers and grenades discovered in a Nigerian port on a ship that claimed to be hauling building materials.

Nigeria reported the illegal shipment to the United Nations Security Council — to no effect. Gambia booted the Iranians.

Meanwhile, illegal Iranian arms continue to flow to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and there’s cause to worry that they’ll end up in the hands of Mexican and Central American drug traffickers via Nicaragua.

It all signals that nuclear weapons are not the only danger from Iran — the country is spreading weapons of war in earnest, especially now that it sees its chance.

The world should be alert to the unquestionably violent aims of this evil regime. Its weapons shipments signal a will to make war. But who will stop them?

Not America. It could stop the Iranian regime from becoming a nuclear-armed power, but its president doesn’t want it to.

It is the recognition by dictators, rogue states, terrorists, and the Islamic “community of believers” – the ummah – that America under Obama’s presidency has resigned from its super-power status, has opted to be weak, a passive nation among nations, unjudging of others, no threat to any tyrant, wanting pathetically to be friendly with the bloodiest regimes, that has moved them to act as they do now. By his silence and inactivity he has given them permission.

This article by Ernest S. Christian and Gary A. Robbins, whose bitterness and anger we applaud, also comes from IBD:

Other nations no longer look to America’s mysterious president for leadership. …

President Obama … has not done one single thing to make America better off. His presidential scorecard is all negatives, a mixture of strikeouts, bunts, pop flies and game-losing errors so dumb and off-base they must be deliberate. Why else would he spend us into bankruptcy and lower our flag of freedom?

Obama’s foreign policy is a moral and intellectual outrage. People in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in that region seek liberty and need help. But from Obama they get flabby babble that means nothing or is too little, too late and grudging. He is condemning whole populations to further enslavement — and pushing millions of people into the arms of bin Laden, thereby pointing a gun right back at America’s head. …

Obama is as a matter of principle reluctant to interfere with the evil plans of despots — not even the mullahs in Iran who threaten nuclear holocaust — but he does not hesitate to impose harmful, downright bizarre “solutions” on innocent Americans.

He spent trillions of dollars to create a mountain of debt and a few temporary make-work jobs — but, guess what? The debt must be repaid with tax increases that will destroy millions of real private-sector jobs for years to come. Smart move, Barack! …

Obama talks airily about creating “green jobs,” but what he’s really doing is outlawing carbon fuels and destroying all the high-paying jobs in America’s manufacturing sector.

Through the combination of stultifying regulations, Obama-created high energy prices (gas may soon hit $5) and the sheer in terrorem effect of his continued presence in the White House, the president is “resetting” America’s economy to operate at a low GDP growth rate that for the foreseeable future is insufficient to provide jobs for our growing population.

Unless Republicans quickly succeed in cutting back federal spending and downsizing government — despite Obama’s opposition — and unless they repeal ObamaCare, Americans face a bleak future of massive tax increases, lower living standards, government-run and rationed health care — and a gradual loss of personal freedom. …

Obama traduces the truth daily and has already done more damage to the U.S. than Nixon, Carter and Clinton combined — and the worst may be yet to come. The man is a public menace who should be kept under political quarantine.

Better still, impeached and removed from office. Beyond that – is there a punishment that would fit what he has done?

To which countries does the US, even when enduring economic hardship, give aid?

These are some of the recipients:

Russia, still inimical enough to the US to make disarmament treaties seem necessary.

China, to which the US is vastly in debt.

Zimbabwe, under the bloody rule of a mass-murderer.

Somalia, a savage anarchy.

Cuba, a communist prison.

Venezuela, in league with America’s most threatening enemy, Iran.

North Korea, a communist and would-be nuclear-armed hell.

Libya, where Colonel Gaddafi is still dictator.

The amounts are not important. To give any amount to any of them is indefensible. But the figures can be found here, along with more infuriating information about who gets foreign aid.

Dark dark dark. Are we all going into the dark?

An unnecessary shortage of energy is being imposed on the industrially developed world.

Paul Driessen writes at Townhall:

As Britain suffered through its coldest December in a century, families were forced to choose between keeping homes warm and feeding their children nourishing meals – thanks to climate policies that have forced extensive reliance on wind power and deliberately driven energy prices skyward.

Barely two months later, the UK’s power grid CEO informed the country that its days of reliable electricity are numbered. Families, schools, offices, shops, hospitals and factories will just have to “get used to” consuming electricity “when it’s available,” not necessarily when they want it or need it. A new “smart grid” will be used to allocate decreasing electricity supplies, on a rolling basis or according to bureaucratic determinations as to which consumers most need available power – mostly from wind turbines that provided a pitiful 0.04% of Britain’s electricity during its coldest days last December.

Meanwhile, the EU’s Energy Commissioner warned that German electricity prices are already at “the upper edge” of what society can accept and businesses can tolerate. Taxes, levies and regulations imposed in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming are forcing companies to relocate to other countries and causing “a gradual process of de-industrialization” across Germany. …

Welcome to the Third World, Europeans, where costly electricity is available only from time to time, at unexpected hours, depending on bureaucratic whims and how much power wind turbines and other “environment-friendly” generators can muster.

Is the USA next in line? …

America depends on abundant, reliable, affordable energy – 85% of it hydrocarbons. Coal generates half of all US electricity, and up to 90% in its manufacturing heartland – versus 1% from wind and solar. …

Unlocking America’s still abundant hydrocarbon resources and unleashing our innovative, hard-driving free enterprise system would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in leasing, royalty and tax revenues for federal, state and local governments. It would put millions back to work … help stanch the flow of red ink … keep tens of billions of crude oil spending and investment in America … and create enormous new wealth …

American technology powered by capitalism continues to invent ever better ways of providing energy and making all our lives easier and more productive:

Just consider the incredible revolution that the genius of American capitalists has presented the world: hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” to tap previously inaccessible oil and gas deposits. This technology has turned “depletion” and “sustainability” claims upside down. It has already doubled US natural gas reserves and given North America over a century of recoverable gas, at current consumption rates.

It is also unlocking oil wealth in the vast Bakken shale formation of Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. Oil production there has already soared from 3,000 barrels a day five years ago to over 225,000 today. The US Energy Information Administration says it could reach 350,000 barrels a day by 2035; industry sources say it could top a million barrels by 2020. Related oilfield employment has soared from 5,000 to over 18,000 in the same five-year period, and could eventually reach 100,000 jobs. At $100 a barrel, even 350,000 barrels a day could mean $1.6 billion in annual royalties, from Bakken oil alone. …

It is a technologically possible and economically affordable solution that [could generate] bountiful jobs and revenues – as opposed to pixie dust solutions that require perpetual subsidies and address speculative problems. Offshore and ANWR drilling could do likewise.

But the Obama administration is enforcing its impoverishing energy policy:

Unfortunately, the White House, Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and too many in Congress, courts and state legislatures are determined to restrict and obstruct this hydrocarbon revolution. They want to … force America to convert to expensive, subsidized, unreliable, land-intensive wind, solar and ethanol power – and tell people how much energy they can have, and when.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is using groundless claims about possible groundwater contamination to delay fracking operations. Because Congress rejected cap-tax-and-trade, she has rewritten the Clean Air Act to label plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide a “pollutant” and restrict CO2 emissions from power plants, refineries and other facilities. …

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has shut down leasing and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, put tens of thousands out of work, ignored court orders to end his moratorium, and issued decrees that make millions of additional onshore and offshore acres off limits to drilling. He has blocked exploration in ANWR because [ie. on the pretext that – JB] its oil riches won’t make us energy independent (as though even massive wind, solar, ethanol and electric car programs would do so).

President Obama wants oil, gas, coal and electricity prices to “skyrocket,” to make “green” energy appear more attractive. Energy Secretary Steven Chu wants to “boost the price of gasoline to levels in Europe” – over $8 per gallon! …

Why?