Yearly Archives: 2016

Why only Number 3?

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I am going to have to stop reading The AFR while trying to eat my lunch if they keep coming up with articles like this: PM Malcolm Turnbull comes in No. 3 on President Barack Obama’s best-friends list. I can see why they might have an affinity for each other. What gets me is why Obama’s high approval is not the kiss of death for Malcolm.

President Obama may be in Havana but Malcolm Turnbull can relax knowing he’s one of the top three world leaders on the president’s besties list.

The Atlantic magazine writes that the man in the White House “has intense relationships with many world leaders – and he has become, in his last years as president, a mentor to a handful of important new ones”.

The magazine put world leaders “on a continuum reflecting the state of their relations with Obama”, and Turnbull, who’s only been in the job six months, places quite well coming in third after Pope Francis and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

It is clear that Obama can spot a kindred spirit, another empty-headed narcissist lacking any ideas other than the cookie-cutter inanities of the left. Global warming – check. Open borders – check. Runaway public spending – check.

But the part about Obama’s comments on Malcolm that I found most noteworthy is that I only saw them mentioned once and then only in a small article on page 7 of The AFR. It can only mean that even for the ABC, an endorsement from Obama brings no political momentum whatsoever. This might help you understand why that could be:

Just outside the top 10 are more controversial choices, including Cuban dictator Raul Castro at No. 11, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who placed twelfth, and at No. 13, Nicaragua’s “tiresome Marxist ideologue” and president Daniel Ortega.

You really do have to ask why Obama’s views have not wrecked the Democrat brand? Anyway, Obama will be gone in a year. Yay!

UPDATE – THE MOST DEPRAVED POLITICAL LEADER EVER ELECTED IN THE WEST: That year cannot pass soon enough. This is from an article titled, For Obama, Muted Reaction to Brussels Attacks Is by Design, with the non-reaction having occurred while he was in Cuba visiting a country that has been a one-man dictatorship since 1959!

In the aftermath of a deadly terror attack that stirred Americans’ concerns about the potential for threats to the U.S., President Barack Obama pressed ahead with his tour of Latin America, including a planned family excursion in Patagonia.

Mr. Obama’s public appearance of nonchalance has drawn criticism from Republicans that he is detached from Americans’ fears and isn’t sufficiently countering violent extremism. But his approach partly reflects his belief that overreacting to a terrorist attack—however horrific—elevates extremist groups like Islamic State in a way that exaggerates their influence, his aides have said.

Also driving Mr. Obama is his view that the threat of terrorism in Americans’ daily lives often is overstated, and that the focus on it could become self-paralyzing and an excuse to adopt misguided policies. His aides often note that many more Americans are killed by gun violence than terrorist attacks, for instance.

Mr. Obama, asked about the Islamic State threat Wednesday at a news conference in Buenos Aires with Argentine President Mauricio Macri, urged Americans not to give terrorist groups the power “to strike fear in our societies.”

“Even as we are systematic and ruthless and focused in going after them, disrupting their networks, getting their leaders, rolling up their operations, it is very important for us to not respond with fear,” he said. “We send a message to those that might be inspired by them to say, you are not going to change our values of liberty, and openness, and the respect of all people.”

If you voted for Obama, or supported him either in 2008 or 2012, your right to comment on the 2016 election is hereby rescinded.

Henry Clay, economist

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Adapted from Henry Clay’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Jewkes and Jewkes: 2004) for an article I have written on Clay’s incomparable introductory text, Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader, which I have described as the best introductory text ever written. Only those sections related to his work as an economist have been included. The text while truncated is exactly as found. It is the Clay whom I well know from his text, and it is interesting to find that, given how similar we are, I may be properly categorised as a Gladstonian Liberal. Strangely, that very much makes me a conservative in modern times.

Clay, Sir Henry (1883–1954), economist, was born on 9 May 1883. He went as a scholar to University College, Oxford, [graduating] in 1902. Between 1909 and 1917 he lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association under the university extension scheme, an experience that led to the writing of Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader (1916; 2nd edn, 1942). The book had great success, especially in Great Britain and the United States, and, by reason of its clarity and real-world examples, broadened public interest in economic matters.

In 1922 Clay became the Stanley Jevons professor of political economy at Manchester. In 1927 Clay asked to exchange his chair for the new professorship of social economics. He perceived that applied economics could be strengthened by closer regular contacts between economists and business people.

Clay was not a foremost economic theorist. Indeed, he often expressed doubts about the value of much of the theorizing then in fashion. As he told Edwin Cannan, another leading economist who shared his structural diagnosis of Britain’s industrial problems, he always felt that as a Professor of Economics I was a fraud … My reading of English economics has been scrappy … I don’t know enough mathematics to follow our Cambridge friends, however suspicious I may be of their results; and I cannot suppress my interest in current political and social questions sufficiently to stick to any one part of the field of economics and so do some serious work on it.

In 1930 Clay resigned his chair to join the Bank of England. Clay’s shrewd advice and his knack of getting on with people, especially with Montagu Norman, led to his appointment in 1933 [at the very trough of the Great Depression] as economic adviser to the governor of the Bank of England. Clay and Norman shared the opinion that, necessary as was a proper budgetary and monetary framework, financial ingenuity by governments in the form of large-scale loan-financed public works did not offer a long-term solution to the problems of British industry. They believed that the solution lay more on the supply side, where widespread inefficiencies in the use of capital and labour resulted in high costs and low productivity, problems that were being addressed by the bank in its promotion of industrial rationalization.

Clay’s writings from his first and famous book in 1916 to the papers unfinished at his death show the main lines of his thinking unbroken. He was in many ways a Gladstonian Liberal, believing that private enterprise was the most efficient form of organizing production, that the liberty of the individual would be endangered by the continued growth of government, and that Britain should maintain its historic internationalism in its economic policies. His views diverged from the main stream of contemporary Liberal economic thought in at least two ways: in his doubts about the practical results of the Keynesian solution to unemployment or more especially of the views of some of Keynes’s disciples; secondly, concerning industrial monopoly. Clay was not prepared to agree that a competitive system would inevitably degenerate into monopoly unless safeguarded by the state: anti-monopoly legislation in his view was unnecessary, inexpedient, and inequitable.

Although in later years he became something of a man of affairs, he retained the habits and enthusiasms of the scholar; nor might he be mistaken for anything else. He could never resist a second-hand bookshelf and he collected a large library, which included many bargains.

Do you think that just maybe he’s on to something?

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This was published on January 27 in The New York Times: Donald Trump Finds New City to Insult: Brussels. It opens:

He incensed Paris and London by saying that some of their neighborhoods were so overrun with radicals that the police were too scared to enter.

He raised Scottish tempers by threatening to pull the plug on his investments there, including his luxury golf courses, if British politicians barred him from entering Britain.

Now Donald J. Trump has upset the already beleaguered people of Belgium, calling its capital, Brussels, “a hellhole.”

Asked by the Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo about the feasibility of his proposal to bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States, Mr. Trump argued that Belgium and France had been blighted by the failure of Muslims in these countries to integrate.

“There is something going on, Maria,” he said. “Go to Brussels. Go to Paris. Go to different places. There is something going on and it’s not good, where they want Shariah law, where they want this, where they want things that — you know, there has to be some assimilation. There is no assimilation. There is something bad going on.”

Warming to his theme, he added that Brussels was in a particularly dire state. “You go to Brussels — I was in Brussels a long time ago, 20 years ago, so beautiful, everything is so beautiful — it’s like living in a hellhole right now,” Mr. Trump continued.

Feel free to go to the link and continue from there.

[From SmallDeadAnimals]

What now?

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brussels terrorists

We all know the news:

EXPLOSIONS ROCK BRUSSELS AIRPORT, SUBWAY…
‘Allahu Akbar’…
RAIDS UNDERWAY ACROSS BELGIUM…
‘Shocking’ Unpreparedness…
INTERIOR MINISTER: ‘Never could have imagined something of this scale’…
Brussels Ran Ad Mocking Notion of Islamic Violence 2 Months Ago…
FLASHBACK: ISIS Says Paris ‘Start of Storm’…
MAG: Islamic State Overwhelming European Counterterrorism Forces…
Geert Wilders: ‘We Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet’…
Belgium beefs up security at nuke plants…
Aftermath footage shows terrified travelers cowering behind suitcases…
Europe vows to defend democracy on ‘black day’…
American missionaries, military family among wounded…
Attack narrowly missed two visiting U.S. Senators…
Attacks Fuel Debate Over Migrants in Fractured Europe…

The real questions are, what do they want and what do we do?

AND THE VIEWS OF DONALD TRUMP: From Piers Morgan and in The Daily Mail: When it comes to terror, isn’t it time we started listening seriously to Trump?

Trump told me countries must tighten their borders in light of these terror attacks, especially to anyone related to an ISIS fighter in Syria.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he wants law-abiding Muslims to root out the extremists in their midst, expressing his bafflement and anger that someone like Abdeslam was able to hide for so long in the very part of Brussels he had previously lived.

Is he so wrong?

He told me America must make it far harder for illegal immigrants to enter the U.S. and thinks European countries should follow suit.

Is he so wrong?

He told me he believes there are now areas of many major European cities which have become poisonous breeding grounds for radicalized Islamic terror.

Is he so wrong?

Or we could just stand still and do nothing.

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”

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It has been frightening to go through the usual blogs I consult to find unanimity – 100% unanimity – in their opposition to Donald Trump as President. I do find it upsetting, but I am used to it, having had the same experience with Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. The same again in opposing Obama in 2008 and 2012, where I don’t recall anyone I personally knew or regularly read going for McCain and Romney. I therefore went looking today at The Diplomad who has been pretty reliable up until now, but then again, so has everyone else, up until now. And this is his conclusion, found here:

For now, I’ll go with Donald Trump.

Pretty good, and a standout for me, making me feel I can trust him when things are less clear cut than now. He has more explanation for his view, always worth listening to in the past, and apparently still is:

I had been sitting uncomfortably on the fence re the GOP candidates. After listening to the Romney speech and the other “establishment” types, and hearing the anchor pundits, the pundit anchors, and all the other assorted wise ones, I have jumped off the fence. I have landed in Trump’s farm. He is not perfect, far from it. I might even change my mind, but for now I support Trump.

I don’t know if Trump will be terrible; I do know that what we have right now is horrible beyond words. I can’t bear the thought of a Hillary presidency. I know, I know. I have seen the advice about letting the Dems have the White House, and the GOP will hold the Congress, and thus freeze Hillary in place. Don’t buy it. We have seen what has happened over the past few years when the Dems did not have the Congress; we have seen the enormous damage that a progressive President can do even without Congressional approval. In addition, we have seen that the GOP members of the Washington Cartel refuse to fight Obama on what counts. So, I don’t want another Democratic White House.

That was on March 3rd and he has not recanted thus far. Most intriguing, almost all of the commenters have agreed with his decision, and one has even given me a real laugh:

I am reminded of W. Edwards Deeming’s famous quote: ‘It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.’

So the GOP establishment’s much anticipated comeback strategy is to drag from the political grave reserved for failed presidential nominees the man who could not get out, or win, sufficient votes in 2012, to stage a hit on Trump, who is winning, and in the process drawing out new GOP voters, all when the DNC’s turnout is collapsing.

Seriously, what could possibly go wrong? The stupidity is breathtaking.

Beyond insanity.

Donald Trump speaks on Israel

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I thought this might be worth seeing on its own rather than as an update to my previous post on TDS. Aside from this being a speech that puts the state of New York into play in November, it has clearly been worked on by others in his foreign policy team. It is both sophisticated and measured, but it is also from the heart. For a change, a conviction politician in the mould of Margaret Thatcher, but someone, also like her, who can get things done and is every inch a conservative. It’s less than half an hour long, and here you will discover a Donald Trump you have not seen before.

UPDATE: From The American Spectator, which begins with the now pro forma declaration of a preference for Cruz: Republicans: Who are You?. And this is the choice. First on the Republican side:

The people who attend Trump rallies and vote for him generally are conservative — fiscally and culturally. They hate big government, they are highly patriotic and wave flags, they hate taxes, affirmative action, gun control, government debt, climate change deals that destroy American jobs, ‎government waste, welfare, political correctness, trade deals they think give away the store, and illegal immigration. They are people who work for a living, are economically stressed out, and see what Obama has done to America economically and culturally and they don’t like it at all. You’d be surprised how many blacks, veterans, soccer moms, and legal immigrants you see at a Trump rally.

And then there is Hillary:

Now many in the party are making the absurd argument that even Hillary Clinton in the White House would be better than Trump.

Huh? This is the Hillary Clinton that wants to raise tax rates to 50 percent or more, is in favor of abortion on demand with no exceptions, wants trillions of dollars of new spending and debt, would shut down America’s oil and gas and coal production, will double down on Obamacare, and was the architect of the disastrous Obama foreign policy of leading from behind. Other than that, apparently, she’s conservative enough.

These independent think-for-themselves types who call themselves conservative but would vote for Hillary give me the impression they have never thought anything not first endorsed by the ABC.

Six years of depressed employment and counting

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On the twenty year lost decade in Japan, from my Dangerous Return of Keynesian Economics:

It ought to be the textbook case now for why all such forms of economic stimulus should be avoided at all costs. Because, say what you will about the causes of the Japanese downturn and the failure to recover, all major economies experienced the same deep recession at the start of the 1990s, but only the Japanese economy has never fully recovered its previous strength.

That is, only the Japanese tried a public sector stimulus to end their recession in the 1990s and their economy has never recovered. So we take you now to the United States: Half of U.S. May Endure ‘Lost Decade’ of Depressed Employment

Economic recovery has been unusually sluggish and uneven across regional U.S. job markets, with employment set to stay low for years to come in areas that endured the recession’s worst, according to new research.

At the current pace of improvement, employment rates across the U.S. won’t return to normal levels until the 2020s, “amounting to more than a relative ‘lost decade’ of depressed employment for…half of the country.”. . .

Based on the current trend, employment rates won’t converge to their normal levels until sometime in the 2020s. . . .

“We’re at six years of depressed employment and counting.”

Only about a dozen years to go to catch up with the Japanese, who by then may be in the 30th year of their lost decade.

Is Trump Derangement Syndrome at an end?

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Hope so. From Roger Simon:

I was heartened to read on Fox News today: “Donald Trump will reportedly meet Monday in Washington with nearly two dozen influential Republicans, with the apparent hope of improving relations with the GOP establishment.”

His supporters should not panic. I predict this is not the great sell-out. The meeting was arranged by Senator Jeff Sessions, the man said to have the greatest influence on Trump and not one known for selling out. This could be the beginning… even if a tentative one… of the end of Trump Derangement Syndrome and some kind of reconciliation.

I have to admit quite some dismay over the reaction to Trump. Style over substance seems to matter much too much for their and our good among the policy establishment. Therefore it is important that they consider this, also from Simon:

Will and others are suffering from such acute Trump Derangement Syndrome that they don’t allow themselves to acknowledge the obvious — most of Trump’s views, his current ones anyway, fall well within the conservative mainstream.

Add to that the certainty that no one else even has a ghost of a chance to beat Hillary, it really has been a shambles.

Transnational progressivism

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I picked up this article at Instapundit and when I went to the link it turned out to be an article from Quadrant, an article that is of the utmost importance in our world. The Quadrant title is Ideologies Have Consequences which explains nothing about what follows after since anyone can say that. But the article, written by John Fonte, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is far far more than that. What the article is about is what I have called progressive internationalism (discussed here, here, here and here), while he has used the phrase “transnational progressivism”. Both, however, come to the same thing. It is the desire to do away with the nation state and replace it with a world of itinerant and floating individuals, detached from any kind of historic homeland, a post-post-modernism of world citizenship in which everyone is alienated from their roots, disembodied from any traditional way of life or system of belief. It is an impossibility, since no one can live like that, but that is the aim. A community will re-establish itself, but it will be nothing like what we have previously known. And when it really comes down to it, only our Western civilisation is under threat, since nowhere else has modernity even begun to determine how things are done, never mind even post-modernity, which has been at the centre of our own cultural chaos for the past half century.

The article is long, and follows many rabbits down many burrows – in itself a problem – and never seems to define what is meant by transnational progressivism. This seems to be about as close as he gets, coming in two parts. First this:

Western Leftists promote (in varying degrees and where politically possible) what they call “global governance”, meaning the building of supranational institutions and policies that diminish the role of the nation-state, including the democratic nation-state. The ultimate goal of this grand ideological project is the creation of an increasingly integrated global order with laws and institutions that are superior to those of the nation-state.

That’s the “transnational” part. In relation to “progressivism”, there is this:

Progressives focus on promoting what they call “marginalised” groups, such as women, LGBT people, racial minorities, linguistic minorities, immigrants, particularly Muslims. For example, the Western Left calls for “gender parity” (imposed proportional representation) across the board in all institutions of civic life, by fiat if necessary (violating the tenets of a free society). They tout an adversarial multiculturalism or identity politics that problematises national patriotic cultures, traditional institutions (religion, family), the concepts of free speech, individual citizenship and equality under the law (because the marginalised groups are awarded special rights). . . . The general trajectory of today’s Western Left is away from class conflict and towards new antagonisms. These new (post-1960s) fault lines are based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration, language, religion, globalism and other issues that are even more divisive for national cohesion than traditional class struggle.

A world of endless grievances in which the centre will not hold. This is my version, which I called progressive internationalism in the article linked above:

The nation state has to go, or at least the nation states of the first world. No more Australia, at least no more than say an Italy within the EU. It is a kind of World Government idiocy. . . . Once we have been overwhelmed by migration, nothing of what we built will remain, other than some of those technologies we were able to develop. The rest will be utterly swept away in a sea of blended barbarism. The only part I have never understood – other than through envy and hatred (including self-hatred) – is why would anyone wish to see these changes taking place.

Not all cultures are the same, and what is undeniable and absolutely true is that not all national histories are the same. I don’t live in an economy, I live in a society that has its own past and traditions. It is where I call home. There is, however, an international elite doing all it can to undermine these nationalities of ours, who see economic advantage in wiping out our homelands, traditions, cultural values and histories. And they are going to do it, have no doubt about it, since it is almost impossible for most people to see what is going on, and it is even harder to get most people at the elite level either to see why it matters or think through what to do.

Read the article with these thoughts in mind and you will see what he is getting at. Also read the comments at Instapundit, which are depressing since few who read even there thought the article worth commenting on, and even then, only a small proportion of the handful who have commented seem to have any idea what the article is trying to say.

Fonte has written a book, Sovereignty or Submission?, which spells it out in more detail. There is little any of us can do about any of it, but at least you will be able to follow events with a deeper understanding of what is being done.