Afghanistan is America's Suez Crisis

Twenty years after the United States invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban regime that was harbouring the architects of the 9/11 attacks, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is back with more territory and with the same murderous intent to subjugate its people.

What was the point of it all? President George W. Bush's stated intention was to destroy Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organisation that launched the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, which was based in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. But it took until Barack Obama's presidency ten years later before a US special operations team eventually killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda (whom it turned out was actually being harboured by America's supposed ally, Pakistan). But cutting off the head of Al-Qaeda meant that, like a modern day Medusa, it spawned a dozen other evil organisations in Iraq, Syria, Mali and other Islamic countries.

Today, with Kabul, the Afghan capital, and most of the rest of the country again in Taliban hands (they now hold more territory than in 2001), Western nations scrambling to evacuate their diplomats and citizens from a chaotic Kabul airport, and local allies abandoned to the dubious mercy of the country's new rulers, it is indeed hard to know what the point of it all was. It's not even as though we in the West have taught the Islamic extremists in the Taliban any lessons other than about our own perfidy. By all reports, the Taliban is already settling scores, carrying out executions and demanding child "brides" from conquered communities. Far from being chastened, the Taliban is reiterating their commitment to the fundamentalist Islamic goal of a global caliphate.

The Americans might have had some humility in setting out on their Afghanistan adventure if they had a sense of history, for that country has been the graveyard of empires including the British in the 19th Century and the Soviets in the 20th Century. But the Western experience of Afghanistan goes back much further than that - all the way to Alexander the Great, who married an Afghani princess, Roxanne, to help ensure the compliance of the region's rulers once he had conquered it. Perhaps Joe Biden should have followed Alexander's example and sought a second wife from among the daughters of the Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar. In Biden's case, a young second wife might have had the added benefit of staving off his obvious senescence, although I suspect it is too late for that.

Here in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern seems to have taken on board some of that American hubris and is lecturing the Taliban from afar to uphold Western standards of human rights because "the whole world will be watching." I'm sure the Taliban leaders are quaking in their boots. Meanwhile, Ardern has ordered New Zealand soldiers and a Royal New Zealand Airforce C-130 Hercules aircraft to mount a mission to Afghanistan to evacuate New Zealanders from the country. Quite how she intends this will happen when not even the Americans can evacuate their people in an orderly manner, is beyond me, but an appreciation for the reality on the ground has never been Ardern's strong point.

I don't believe the United States should have occupied Afghanistan for twenty years. There was a justification for American troops entering the country following the 9-11 attacks to track down Al-Qaeda, but that should have been a special forces mission, not a wholesale invasion of the entire country. It is not that I think the United States was morally wrong to invade - I believe, as Ayn Rand said, that although it is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations but it has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses. 

The problem here is that it was in no one's interests, least of all that of the United States, to spend twenty years trying to establish a liberal democracy in a place that has no cultural traditions on which to build such institutions. What is worse is that the United States ruled through a system of corrupt, cronyist, favours - as Jacob Siegel quotes on Bari Weiss's excellent Common Sense substack, "the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States". You can't establish a moral order by immoral means. But having occupied Afghanistan and destroyed its existing institutions, however illiberal they were, America's politicians and military leaders had a minimal obligation to leave the place no worse than they found it, and they can't even claim to have done that. President Joe Biden is responsible for the lives of the Afghans who helped the Americans during their twenty-year experiment in nation-building, many of whom will now be tortured, mutilated and killed for what the Taliban sees as their traitorous and blasphemous conduct.

The fallout of the fall of Afghanistan will last for years. America has shown that once again it lacks the national vigour, moral authority and self-belief to fulfil the objectives of its military interventions. Afghanistan is already being talked about as this generation's Vietnam. I think America's Suez Crisis might be a more accurate comparison, because it was that event that signalled the decline of Britain's imperial might more than any other. I feel sorry for the Afghans who must face the extreme theocratic and misanthropic whims of their new rulers, but I also feel a bit sorry for Americans, who must be bewildered at how the greatest military power in history has once again been made to look ineffectual and irrelevant.

The Mass Customisation of Politics

Business in the social media age is all about mass customisation. Industries such as telecommunications, banking and transportation have figured out that the key to success is to have economies of scale while allowing individuals to have products and services that are tailored to their needs. The commercial behemoths of old that insisted on one-size-fits-all have fallen by the wayside as new businesses exploit flexible manufacturing and service delivery models to accomodate individual consumers' needs.

Politics in the 21st Century is the same. Voters are increasingly unwilling to be boxed into traditional political definitions - left, right, socialist, nationalist. etc. Ironically, this is happening at a time when political labels such as 'extreme', 'Fascist' and 'Nazi' are being bandied about with increasing abandon and usually without justification. 

Many people, myself included, have a political philosophy that does not sit comfortably with most established party manifestos. We are a little bit left, a little bit right, and a whole lot completely outside the spectrum. This is not the same as being purely pragmatic - we have a philosophy that is well thought-out and articulated and are prepared to vote to maximise its realisation. We have little in common with the David Camerons and John Keys of this world who don't believe in anything much and who are willing to do whatever it takes to stitch together a coalition to keep them in power. We may vote for the lesser of evils but it doesn't mean we will accept the bland and uncommitted.

So how do we achieve mass customisation in politics when many countries seem to be locked into a traditional left-of-centre/right-of-centre, two-party paradigm? Partly it is achieved through breaking down the paradigm, and we have seen this with the rise of third parties in many Western countries. The other way it can be achieved is through localisation of politics.

Politics in many countries in recent decades has been characterised by greater centralisation. The European Community is the most obvious example and in the United States we have seen the growth of the federal government at the expense of the state or local government. The problem with this is that it means greater homogenisation and less opportunity for people like me, whose views don't fall into the traditional political buckets, to have our views represented. Localisation of political decisions means we can enjoy, at least at a local level, a more flexible set of policy setttings, and if we are not happy with the decisions of our local government, we can seek out somewhere more compatible with our political views.

It was the intention of America's founding fathers. particularly Jefferson and Hamilton, that the US Republic would be a place where different communities could experiment with different political and social settings, subject only to the universal rights enshrined in the Constitution. America today has become a highly centralised bureaucracy with the Federal Government interfering in every area of Americans lives from health care to what children eat in their school lunches. The complete dominance of US politics by the two major parties means that people who don't fall into the traditional Democrat and Republican camps have no real alternative, except that last year they chose a rebel Republican in Donald Trump to be president. Trump's support came from the disaffected middle and working classes, who rejected the big statism and identity politics of the Democrats and the social conservatism and crony capitalism of the Republicans, and is therefore understandable in terms of the mass customisation paradigm. Brexit was similarly a rejection of the traditional political choices.

Those who insist on seeing today's politics in terms of past dichotomies will continue to be surprised and bewildered by voters' choices. I think that the rejection of tradition political boundaries it is a very positive development but it needs to be accompanied by a decentralisation of political power if voters are to have genuine choices.

The Mandibles - a realistic view of the future

I am currently reading The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver. The author is best known for her book about a Columbine-style killer, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and for getting into trouble for her politically incorrect speech last year to a Brisbane writer's festival about 'cultural appropriation' (which I discussed here). I think she is one of the best writers on the planet today and her latest work has only confirmed my view.

The Mandibles is set in the future - between 2029 and 2047 - and tells the story of four generations of the eponymous family. You could describe it as a dystopian novel but unlike most other novels of that genre, the dire future it describes is only too realistic and inevitable given the current economic policies of Western governments. The United States has lost its position as the issuer of the world's reserve currency - the huge deficits, borrowing and currency production (i.e. 'quantitative easing') of successive governments have finally come home to roost and the U.S. defaults on its debts. A consortium of international governments - including a Russia still led by Vladimir Putin - replaces the Dollar as the currency of international exchange with a new commodity-backed unit called the 'bancor'.

The story doesn't focus on the 'macro' however, it describes the aftermath of these events through the eyes of a well-off American family whose lives are transformed when they lose everything they own. A populist Hispanic president, who seems cast in the image of Barack Obama, invokes emergency economic powers along the lines of those used by Franklin Roosevelt to seize privately owned gold - even wedding rings (which were exempted by Roosevelt) - and sends the Army to conduct door-to-door searches to collect it. The American future it portrays is the lives of Venezuelans todays - empty supermarket shelves, shortages of basic medicines, sky-high inflation and an increasingly oppressive government response to civil unrest.

There is no Big Brother in this story, no Fahrenheit 451-style burning of books (although books are largely obsolete in the digital culture) and no genetic-engineering of humans à la Brave New World. It is just American society today, projected twelve years into the future. That it is so realistic makes it all the more frightening. I hope at least a few of the members of the dysfunctional US Congress, which is once again debating raising the debt ceiling, reads it and considers the implications of their current spend-and-hope policies.

July 4th

The Declaration of Independence, sighed by the representatives of the 13 colonies in America on this day 241 years ago, was such a world-shattering statement of political reason and courage that it is worth dusting it off and re-examining it in the light of government in the so-called Free World today. The kernel of the declaration is contained the following words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

There are two important ideas contained in these words:

• That we have rights that are inherent to our nature as human beings, the most important being the rights to live, to be free, and to pursue our own interests
• That governments do not create our rights, but rather that we create governments and their only proper purpose is to protect our rights.

These ideas are at odds with the role and functions of governments as they exist in most countries today. Governments like to bestow all sorts of new rights on us - the rights to food and a roof over our heads, the rights to a job, education and healthcare, the rights not to be discriminated against or even to be offended, etc. But these rights aren't what the Founding Fathers meant when they talked about rights. For a start, if rights are granted by governments, they can be taken away - they aren't inherent to our nature. Secondly, they fail the 'equality' test that is contained in the first line above - the right to receive something, bestowed by the government, cannot be equally endowed because that which is given by a government must be taken from someone else. And finally, they are increasingly given as alternatives to real rights - they are baubles to distract us from the fact that governments are denying us our real rights.

The authors of the Declaration were smart enough to realise that real rights aren't a zero-sum game. I don't need you to die in order that I can live. I don't need you to be a slave in order that I can be free. And I don't need you to sacrifice your happiness in order that I can be happy. That is perhaps the greatest revelation of that great revolutionary document.

No, Hillary, you lost it all on your own

Hillary Clinton gave an interview at the Code Conference this week in which she blamed everyone under the sun for her election loss - the Russians, Wikileaks, Macedonian fake news sites, a British data mining company, the dumb American electorate - in other words, everyone but herself. Her interview was cringe-inducing. This woman has lost her grasp of reality and if nothing else, it proves why she should never have been president. Has she no self-awareness at all? 

I have argued in an earlier post that it was not in the interests of Russia to have Donald Trump elected president of the United States, but if they did try to influence the election, they didn't do a very good job of it. A Stanford University study has shown that fake news probably had no effect on voters intentions. Even Hillary Clinton herself admits in the interview that the emails of DNC Chairman John Podesta's that were dumped by Wikileaks were 'anodyne to boredom' (sic). 

Hillary lost because of herself. She was a stinker of a candidate - an inarticulate, boring, elitist politician who has always had a whiff of corruption around her. She had no credible policy positions, having changed her stripes so often - on free trade, gay rights, health care and foreign policy amongst others - that two-thirds of Americans said they didn't trust her during the election campaign. She had the full support of the legendary Democratic Party electoral machine and the endorsement of almost every major media outlet, political commentator and celebrity in the country.

Trump had almost no support from the mainstream media and commentariat, and he didn't even have the unequivocal support of his own party. He won because he was (in the words of Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson) 'pure message'. You mightn't have liked his message, but you have to admit he stuck to it - on immigration, trade, climate change, etc. He bypassed the mainstream media through his use of social media and his hugely-popular rallies all over the country, to communicate that message directly to the electorate, and enough of the electorate in enough states liked enough of what they heard to give him 57% of the electoral college, 60% of the states, and 80% of the counties. And he worked harder than Clinton, doing twice as many campaign events as Clinton.

No one likes a sore loser and Clinton is particularly pathetic with her 'I was robbed' whining. Her political career is over and it is time she stepped aside and let the Democratic Party refocus and rebuild, and to be the responsible opposition party that America needs in the Trump era.

Trump at 100 Days

Tomorrow is the 100-day mark in Donald Trump's presidency and like jouranlists and bloggers all over the world, I am taking the opportunity to provide my assessment on how I think he is doing.

The 45th president of the United States of America certainly set a cracking pace (as I wrote about here) but more recently he seems to be getting bogged down in the swamp he said he would drain. I have looked at a number of his campaign promises in various policy areas and graded them from A+ (completely achieved) to E (has done nothing) and then averaged them to get an overall grade.

Healthcare: He promised to repeal Obamacare, but rather than trying to repeal it he supported Paul Ryan's replacement American Care Act, which was withdrawn when it failed to gain enough support to pass in in the House. His professed approach now seems to be to wait for Obamacare to implode, which is a bit pathetic really. Therefore, he gets a D for this.

Immigration: Repeated knock-downs of Trump's executive orders by the federal courts has meant he has failed to implement his policies in this area, but that is not a bad thing in my view because his policies were ill-advised and poorly thought out. It also shows the American system of government with its separation of powers is working. But in terms of Trump's delivery, he gets a D for this.

Taxation: He has announced tax reforms including lowering rates for companies and individuals, and simplifying the Byzantine system of deductions - so he gets a B-, but maintaining or improving on that grade will depend on follow-through.

Draining the Swamp: He promised to reduce the size of government starting with a freeze on federal hiring, and to stop officials becoming lobbyists after they leave their government jobs. He has signed executive orders to give effect to these policies, so a good start and a B+ for effort.

Reduce Government Compliance: He promised to introduce a requirement for two federal regulations to be elminated for every one introduced. He has signed an executive order stating that two regulations have to be identified for elimination, so, again, a good start and a B+.

Trade: He said he would renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. He also said he would label China a 'currency manipulator'. He has fudged on the first, signed a memorandum to effect the second, and backed down on the third. These were all silly policies in my view but a B- for partial delivery.

Energy: He promised to lift restrictions on fracking and clean coal production, and build the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. He has issued executive orders on all of these, so he here he gets an A+.

Climate Alarmism: He said he would withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord and stop payments to UN climate change programmes. He hasn't done either yet, reportedly because Ivanka doesn't like these policies, so he gets an E for this.

These are not all the campaign promises he made but they are enough to give an overall grade for his commitment to delivery. The average is a C+, which is not brilliant but probably better than most presidents achieved after just 100 days in office.

So what grade would you give Donald Trump for his performance so far?

The chaos of US immigration and border control

Late last year I transited through San Francisco airport on my way home from Mexico. The Mexican border officials, like the New Zealand ones, are courteous and good-humoured, characteristics that are all the more remarkable in view of the problems that nation has with drug trafficking and its own illegal immigration from Central America. When we got to San Francisco the experience was entirely different, notable by the belligerence and downright petulance of the US border officials.

The behaviour of the young, female immigration officer who processed us was like something out of Monty Python, as she huffed and tutted and otherwise behaved as if we were most-wanted criminals trying to sneak into her country. My wife made the mistake of putting her passport on the counter about two inches from the spot indicated by this American version of a Maoist Red Guard, whereupon she picked up the offending document and slammed it down on the correct spot. More of this infantile behaviour followed but we kept our composure and responded with politeness, knowing that had we given her the slightest excuse we would have been detained and probably missed our connecting flight.

President Trump's ill-conceived restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim nations has just added to the awful experience of crossing the US border. The experience of a French holocaust historian, Henry Rousso, who was detained for more than ten hours and nearly deported because an immigration official did not know the law, is just another example of the chaos that reigns at the US borders. Some good may come out of this case as we can expect the French to retaliate - when the Americans started mistreating transit passengers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by holding them in cramped, non-air-conditioned rooms (something I personally experienced), the French singled out Americans for similar treatment at their borders - and the US soon changed their practices.

Unfortunately for many Americans, these antics aren't confined to the border. United States Customs and Border Protection operates checkpoints as much as 100 miles inland of the border, which is a bit of pain for the residents of towns such as Arivaca in Arizona, who are subject to CBP checks every time they drive to work or drop their children off at school. These officers habitually exceed their authority and are very fond of using tasers on innocent American citizens who question their unconstitutional actions.

The attitude of bureaucrats always reflects the political environment in which they operate. A belligerent government allows belligerent bureaucrats to thrive. Give those bureaucrats too much power and they inevitably abuse it. If their power over you is absolute, such as is the case of US border officials in deciding whether you may pass or be detained, they will abuse it absolutely. It doesn't seem to matter to them whether they follow the law or not and no one in authority appears to be ready to hold them to account. I have experienced similar abuses here in New Zealand with council officials who have almost unlimited powers under the awful Resource Management Act.

Update: While writing this I read a post on Not PC's blog on the very same subject.

Update 2: It appears Trump is about to modify his hardline stance on immigration with reports today that he is looking to implement a "broad immigration overhaul that would grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants who have not committed serious crimes." Perhaps the blowhard president is learning on the job and realising that the policies he campaigned on are neither practical nor in America's interests. If he really wants to 'make America great again' he would do well to start by reigning in his Red Guards at the border.

If the answer is Trump, what is the question?

So Donald J Trump is now the nominated candidate of the Republican Party for this year's US presidential election. I seem to be a lot less surprised by this outcome than many other New Zealanders, probably because I have spent more time in the United States in recent years and have regular contact with a lot more people living in America than the average New Zealander. I don't think you need to be very politically astute to understand why Trump has secured the Republican Party's nomination.

Firstly, there is the fact that America continues to languish in the economic doldrums it has been in since 2008. Despite endless pump-priming by the Federal Reserve, and talking up of the anaemic recovery by President Obama and his bureaucrats, many Americans cannot find work (the unemployment rate for men between the ages of 25 and 54 is 16%) and many are still 'underwater' in terms of wealth, having not regained the equity they lost in property and pension funds during the global financial crisis.

Secondly, there is disillusionment with the existing political institutions to deal with America's problems. Many Americans bought Obama's message of 'hope and change' but after eight years there has been no real change except for a much more expensive compulsory health insurance system, and no hope left. The Republicans are seen as equally hopeless, having been in control of both houses of Congress for the last two years with seemingly nothing to show for it.

Thirdly, there was the uninspiring line-up of alternative candidates in the presidential primaries. As National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg puts it, "the prospect of watching a Bush-Clinton race was so disgusting" that many people decided they would rather have a billionaire buffoon or a dyed-in-the-wool Socialist than either of the candidates from the two dynasties that account for three of the last four presidents.

Trump is a consummate populist, even more so than that other populist, Barack Obama. He doesn't have any discernible political philosophy - his position on any issue, whether it is immigration, trade or terrorism, is whatever will make him popular. Perhaps the only political label you could justifiably put on him is that he is a nationalist. He certainly does not have any credible solutions to America's problems. The Republican Party has decided he is the answer, but no one seems to know what is the question.

How will Trump perform as president? No one knows that either, but I expect that we are going to find out because (as I have written before) I believe he will beat Hillary Clinton to become the next President of the United States.

Independence Day celebrates individual rights

Today is Independence Day, the day on which Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies in America from Great Britain. One thing that is often forgotten is that the American Revolution was a rebellion of Englishmen against their government. They were a remarkable group those revolutionaries, risking their lives by committing treason against the Crown. They were intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson, polymaths like Benjamin Franklin and pragmatists like James Madison. Some, like John Adams, came reluctantly to the cause, while others like George Washington were enthusiastic revolutionaries. What they had in common was a belief that

individuals that are sovereign and that moral governments can only rule with the consent of the governed.

Those brave founders signed a declaration that enunciated a philosophy that was radical for the times. It wasn't completely original - other Englishmen like John Locke and Thomas Paine (who went to America to join the revolution) had already expressed similar sentiments - but it went against the the predominant philosophy that had endured since Aristotle and Socrates - that individuals are sacrificial lambs to the greater good. They turned this prevailing wisdom on its head and said that human beings have inherent rights including the right to pursue their own interests (described in the Declaration as 'the pursuit of happiness') and that these rights cannot be subordinated to anyone's view of the collective good.

The Declaration also stated that governments exist only to protect the rights of individuals. This is, in my view, perhaps the most under-appreciated principle contained in that powerful document. It means there cannot be conflict between the actions of a moral government and the rights of the individual. How can that be true, you ask? Surely part of the role of government is to arbitrate between the conflicting rights of its citizens?

The answer to this dilemma is that there is no conflict between the objectively-determined rights of individuals. Conflict arises because of subjective claims that are not genuine rights (such as 'the right to a job'). The rights that the Declaration refers to are by definition universal and they impose no obligation on anyone other than to respect the same rights in everyone else. There is no conflict between a government that regards its role as solely to protect rights by this definition and the rights of the individual because they are one and the same thing*. This suggests that many, if not most, of the actions of the United States Government today are immoral and inconsistent with the Declaration (and the US is certainly not unique in this regard).

There are many who claim that the Declaration and the US Constitution are anachronistic. I think, on the contrary, both documents were incredibly farsighted. It is not these documents that are the problem today but successive governments abrogation of them.

* I have expanded on this subject before here.

If God is a Republican, then it is time for Him to intervene

There has been a lot of speculation about what happens if Donald Trump wins a plurality, but not a majority, of the nominating delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio in July. If that happens there will be a contested convention that is likely to go to multiple voting rounds. Delegates from many states are only bound to vote according to the primary outcome in the first ballot and after that all bets are off.

Some claim that the party could nominate someone who hasn't even contested the primaries, like House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, while others think John Kasich, who has won only one state in the primary race, could be the compromise candidate. Current rules prevent anyone who has not won at least eight states from contesting the nomination at the convention (rules that were brought in to prevent libertarian candidate Ron Paul from contesting the nomination in 2012) but the rules could be changed by a party committee immediately prior to the convention. The most likely outcome, as Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review, is that delegates will switch from Trump to second-placed Ted Cruz. It might take several ballots but in this way Cruz could end up with the nomination.

Ted Cruz wouldn't be a bad candidate in my opinion. He is liberal on economic and civil liberties issues, non-interventionist on foreign policy and a sceptic on climate change. He believes in trade liberalisation, a low flat tax, and balanced budgets. On the other hand, he is conservative on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. So he's about half-right, but that makes him better than most Republican candidates by half.

The thing most against Cruz in winning the nomination is that the Republican Party establishment hates him even more than Trump. This is because Cruz has been willing to defy the Republican leadership to vote against his party in the Senate, even going so far as to call Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar in a debate last year. But while it may stick in the craw of the Republican establishment to support Cruz, they may fall into line if he is the only alternative to Trump.

The outcome of a Cruz switcheroo is anyone's guess. Trump himself has talked about possible riots if he is unfairly denied the nomination. At the very least it is likely to cause infighting in the Republican Party that would damage its candidate's chances in the November election.

There is still a small chance that Cruz could get enough votes in the remaining primaries to overtake Trump as he is less than 200 delegates behind and there are more than 850 delegates still to be decided, but Trump is ahead in the polls in the remaining big states of New York and California, so that outcome seems pretty unlikely.

However, miracles do happen and if God is a Republican (as so many of the GOP's supporters seem to believe), then it is time for Him to intervene.

All immigrants need is life, liberty and the opportunity to pursue happiness

In recent days we have seen a lot of hand-wringing, particularly from the Western liberal-left media, about the influx of refugees into Europe from Syria. On the one hand they say we must "do something", on the other it is clear they don't like the idea of letting such people into their own countries. In fact, modern so-called liberals tend not to be liberal at all when it comes to immigration. This is not surprising because immigration poses a dilemma for Western democratic socialism.

Marx's ideal of international socialist solidarity has morphed in Western countries into a highly nationalistic socialism that is all about preserving the privilege and exclusivity of the domestic welfare state. Western socialists pretend to be concerned with the victims of repression in countries like Syria but actually they see such people as a threat to their increasingly fragile world. They realise that each immigrant is a challenge to the carefully constructed power balance in Western societies between the increasing unproductive majority of the population and the productive minority who support them. Unproductive immigrants add to the burden on a base of taxpayers already staggering under the weight of welfare demands, and productive immigrants merely serve to show how unnecessary and counterproductive much of the modern welfare state really is.

The reason I am truly liberal on immigration is because I am a humanist. Socialists try to paint themselves as humanists, but a true humanist is someone who values human potential. A true humanist sees immigrants for their opportunity to add to our society as producers, not as victims who only ever consume limited resources.

A guest post by Alex Nowraseth from the Cato Institute on Not PC's blog proposes building a wall around the welfare system to exclude immigrants. Personally, I think this is morally indefensible. Are immigrants merely slaves to the indolent native-born? The only moral solution is to reduce, or better abolish, the welfare state so that the productive of society, whether immigrants or native-born, are unshackled to pursue their own interests.

The Statue of Liberty was inscribed with the famous words from Emma Lazarus' poem "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" and America lived up to this exhortation by absorbing more than 30 million immigrants between 1850 and 1920. It was only a comparatively free and capitalist society like the United States was during that period that could afford to absorb so many from those huddled masses. Americans understood back then that immigrants bring with them in their minds and bodies the opportunities they create. They don't need to be given anything other than life, liberty and the opportunity to pursue their own happiness.

FIFA, Silk Road and American "Justice"

This week in the news we have seen two criminal cases that are not entirely unrelated - the sentencing of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and the arrest of FIFA officials in Switzerland.

Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. What did he do that the US justice system determined was so irredeemable, you might ask? Did he commit mass murder? No, he ran a website that was used by people all over the world for the buying and selling of recreational narcotics. Ulbricht appears to have been motivated not so much by financial gain (although there is nothing wrong with that) as philosophy. He was a libertarian and believes, as I do, that governments have no business interfering in the voluntary interactions of rational, adult human beings. As this article on libertarian website Reason.com explains, Ulbricht believes people should have the right to choose whether or not they take recreational drugs and governments should not initiate violence against those who do so (or those like him who enable them to do so).

The United States Government has devoted a large part of its resources over the last few decades to pursuing and imprisoning people who consume and trade in recreational narcotics. As a result America has the highest level of imprisonment of any Western nation (with 4.4% of the world's population, the US has 22% of the world's prisoners - and more than half of all federal prisoners are incarcerated for drug offences). The very high imprisonment rate is due to three factors. Firstly the American justice system is overwhelmingly weighted in favour of prosecutors with federal prosecutors having a 93% conviction rate [2012 figures], which is matched only in countries that tend not to have much respect for the rule of law such as China. Secondly, the prosecutorial system in the United States is based on a fundamentally corrupt practice that is outlawed in many other countries - that of plea bargaining. This practice encourages prosecutors to lay manifestly excessive charges against defendants so that they will be forced to plead guilty to lesser charges, even when those lesser charges are themselves tenuous. Thirdly, the US has manifestly excessive sentences, especially for drug offences - for a first offence conviction for trafficking in just one gram of LSD the federal mandatory sentence is 5 - 40 years in prison [source: DEA website].

In Ross Ulbricht's case the inherent excess and corruption of the US justice system is made even worse by what Forbes magazine describes as "staggering corruption in the Silk Road investigation." The article reveals that two of the investigators in the case have been charged with embezzlement and theft and that "a state's witness took the fall for an agent's theft, thus becoming a target for murder-for-hire" (for which it was implied that Ross Ulbricht was responsible even though he was not tried for this). Evidence of this incredible corruption was suppressed by the prosecution until immediately prior to the trial and the judge denied all attempts by the defence to introduce it during the trial. Read the article linked above for yourself and I'm sure you will be as gobsmacked as me as to how someone can be sentenced to life in prison on the back of such impropriety by the US authorities.

With all this in mind, what should we make of the arrest of FIFA officials in Switizerland on extradiction warrants from the US Government? I think there is no doubt that FIFA is a very corrupt organisation and has been for many decades. The officials concerned, and long-term FIFA president Sepp Blatter as well, should held accountable for their corrupt practices. But I think Russian president Vladimir Putin (who is something of an expert on corruption himself) has it right when he says the arrests were “another blatant attempt by the United States to extend its jurisdiction to other states.” The sight of US Justice Department officials posing for photos as they left FIFA's regional association offices in Miami with boxes of papers had more than an hint of sham about it, and newly-appointed US Attorney-General Loretta Lynch's press conference did not add to the credibility of the case (and doesn't she know it isn't called "soccer" in the rest of the world?).

I have written before about the imperialistic ambitions of the United States to extend its legal bailiwick to the whole world. This wouldn't be so bad if the United States lived up to the intent of its founding document as a nation of people with "unalienable Rights...[including] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", whose government derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed." But America is no longer that, if it ever was. The US has deviated so far from its founders' original intent of a limited republic, where the government serves at the pleasure of its people rather than the other way around, that it is hypocritical in the extreme for it to try and impose its legislative morality on the rest of the world.

Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying America is irredeemably corrupt or has lost all respect for the rule of law, and I'd still far sooner be tried in an American court than a Chinese one - but a state that locks up a man for the rest of his life for the offence of running a website is a cruel and capricious one. And the world doesn't need a cruel and capricious imperial policeman.

It Can't Possibly Come Down to a Bush-Clinton Fight, Can It?

The dance of the seven veils has begun. No, I'm not talking about Salome's performance for Herod Antipas, I'm referring to the drawn-out unveiling of candidacies for next year's US presidential elections. On the red side, we have confirmed candidacy announcements from Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio; and euphemistic 'exploratory committee' announcements from Jeb Bush and neophyte former doctor Ben Carson. Jeb Bush is the frontrunner in the early polls. On the blue side, we have...well, Hillary Clinton. If you're anything like me, and take an interest in US politics, you're probably already groaning, "No, no, no, it can't possibly be coming down to a Bush-Clinton fight, can it? Hasn't this country of more than 300 million people got two decent presidential candidates who don't belong to one or other of these two families?"

I think it is unseemly in a democracy to be ruled by political dynasties. It's unseemly because it demonstrates democracy is not working. It is the sort of thing that happens in countries that are democratic in name only, countries like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The frequency with which dynasties have arisen, even in democracies are that are worthy of the name, can only be down to two factors - either the name recognition is, in itself, sufficient reason to attract voters to the candidate, or there is some form of favouritism or nepotism built into the political system. If it just comes down to name recognition, that suggests the voters are too shallow to consider real political issues. If it is favouritism, that means the voters don't really get a choice between the best candidates. Either way, it indicates democracy is not working.

Now, it may surprise you to learn I'm not a doctrinaire democrat. I believe, like Winston Churchill, that democracy is the least bad system for selecting our political leaders, and like Thomas Jefferson, I believe democracy only works effectively when it is tightly constrained. The unconstrained will of the majority is nothing but mob rule and the tendency towards this must be tempered with strong constitutional checks and balanced with strong protection for individual rights. One of the important constitutional checks in most Western nations is regular, fair and openly contested elections. The growth of political dynasties suggests that the 'fair' and 'open' criteria are not being met.

The United States desperately needs fresh political blood. That great nation is, I believe, on a path towards mediocrity. It is the most heavily indebted nation in absolute terms and has the biggest government expenditure deficit. Even in relative terms it is one of the most heavily indebted nations in the world. Unlike similarly indebted countries like Greece, the United States gets away with it because its dollar is the world's reserve currency, which means the value of its currency is inflated by demand for it as a unit of exchange. This suppresses the effect of all that debt on other economic indicators like interest rates and inflation and that means the US Government can continue to fund those deficits by borrowing and printing (electronically) more and more money to pay its debts. But sooner or later reality will catch up with America and that comparison with Greece will start to look a whole lot more real. At that point, or hopefully before it gets to that stage, Americans should hope they have better political leaders than the current crop.

And I really don't think they will be wanting a president named Bush or Clinton.

Michelle Obama's Pathetic Hashtag Photo Won't Help Kidnap Victims

My teenaged daughter has been invited to attend a protest march against the kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militant group Boko Haram. The name Boko Haram means 'non-Muslim teaching is evil' and the group believes that Islam forbids the education of women entirely, which is why it targets girls in Nigerian state schools as kidnap victims (although the group's willingness to sell the girls into slavery suggests a more mercenary motive).

The protest will take place at Parliament Buildings in Wellington and has been organised by fellow pupils at her inner city girls school. To her credit, my daughter has decided not to join the protest, not because she doesn't care about the fate of the kidnapped girls - on the contrary, she is very upset by the matter - but because she realises the futility of protesting in New Zealand about the actions of terrorists half the world away. What these protestors want to achieve is unclear, unlike the aims of the kidnappers.

But as futile as the actions of these protestors are, they don't compare to the pathetic frivolousness of Michelle Obama's hashtag photo opportunity shown below. The US president's wife insults the victims of this horrible religious violence precisely because she is one of the few people in the world who has the ability to influence the outcome of this event.

There are only a handful of countries capable of rendering assistance to the kidnap victims. The United States, obviously, is one of these, but don't hold your breath waiting for President Obama to act. The President has shown himself to be a moral weakling where foreign policy is concerned. In Benghazi, he wasn't willing even to go to the aid of his own consular officials when the embassy there was attacked by an Al Qaeda militia on September 11, 2012. His so-called 'red-line' on the use of chemical weapons in Syria has counted for nothing, and his bluster on Ukraine is rightly treated as irrelevant by Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.

The first United States president to take his country to war against an external enemy was Thomas Jefferson, and the enemy in that case was Islamic pirates on the Barbary Coast who were kidnapping and enslaving American sailors. There is much that Jefferson would not admire today about the republic he helped establish but I think the thing he would least admire is the current president's lack of moral courage on matters of foreign policy. President Obama should be guided by the example of America's third president and take the fight to these Islamic extremists, wherever they are hiding, and his wife should drop the social media frivolity and urge her husband to grow a backbone.

Taking up the cudgels again in 2014 in defence of individual rights

I have had a very relaxing start to the year, partaking of some great weather, wonderful sights, delicious food and fine wines in some of New Zealand's most beautiful holiday spots. The relaxation was undoubtedly enhanced by confining my holiday reading to some excellent books (Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and Bill Bryson's One Summer stand out) and consuming as little of the execrable mainstream media as possible. But it is time to return to the challenges that will face us in 2014.

In New Zealand, the Government led by John Key seems to be determined to pursue a political agenda that is as secretive, and frankly as corrupt, as ever. Key and his coalition of right-of-centre hypocrites and and racial determinists will continue to expand the power of the state and debase the rights of some New Zealanders in order to retain power.

Late in 2013 it the Key Government introduced a bill to enable the nefarious US FATCA regime, which I have blogged on before. FATCA treats any New Zealander with the misfortune of being born in the United States, or even born here to American parents, as "United States taxpayers that are resident in New Zealand." The Government acknowledges that the proposed law explicitly overrides the Privacy Act, Human Rights Act and New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. To what purpose does it treat some New Zealanders as non-citizens? It is to enforce a US taxation regime that is one-sided, unique in the world and inconsistent with OECD model taxation agreements. This analysis on the New Zealand legislation from the Isaac Brock Society sets out the issues in more detail.

Another nefarious piece of legislation the Key Government introduced in late 2013 is the Treaty of Waitangi settlement bill that gives redress to the Ngati Toa tribe for alleged wrongs committed against the tribe by the Crown in the early 19th Century. These Maori grievance settlements have become more and more outrageous over time, establishing two classes of citizenship in New Zealand - a privileged Maori tribal citizenship and lesser rights for the rest of us - but this one really takes the cake. Ngati Toa was the tribe of chief Te Rauparaha who committed what can only be described as genocide against other Maori tribes in his violent rampage through the North Island and top of the South Island in the 1820s and 1830s. British forces intervened against Te Rauparaha and his nephew Te Rangihaeata in the late 1830s and 1840s, stopping their horrific attacks against other Maori tribes and European settlers. Giving compensation to Ngati Toa today for the actions of British forces is like giving compensation to Bosnian Serbs for what happened at Srebrenica in the 1990s. Former Maori Treaty claim researcher John Robinson provides background and opinion on this claim in this article.

In the United States the Obamacare legislation is being shown up for the disaster some people always knew it would be, with even former supporters shocked to discover the huge cost increases that it is imposing and President Obama being exposed as having lied through his teeth when he said Americans would be able to keep their existing healthcare plan. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy said the legislation would "change the relationship between the government and the individual in a profound way." He meant that socialised medicine makes citizens dependent on the state in a way that Americans have traditionally not been, and he is being proved right.

On the positive side in America, President Obama has said he will rein back the extent of spying on citizens and foreign leaders that were exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Many commentators have said the president's pledge does not go far enough and have expressed scepticism about whether there will be any meaningful change. Obama has pursued more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than all other presidents combined, so people are right to be cynical about his intentions.

So as much as I enjoyed my holiday and have been slow to take up the cudgels again in defence of freedom, I am mindful of Thomas Jefferson's (or Edmund Burke's similar) saying, "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."

As Shakespeare said, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more..."

Lincoln was truly heroic

Several years ago, during a visit to Washington, DC, I took the time to visit the Lincoln Memorial and, while looking around the magnificent monument with its enormous seated statue of the great man, I did something that few other visitors to the monument do - I took the elevator down to the basement and visited the small museum that is housed there. At first glance the museum is not very impressive - just a few of Lincoln's personal items and papers in several small rooms - but I found myself engrossed in its contents. Amongst the papers was a letter Lincoln had written to a colleague while he was a young lawyer in Illinois. The topic of the letter was slavery. Lincoln had returned from a trip to the South and expressed his disgust at what he had seen - human beings being treated as chattels and subject to the most inhuman indignities. He vowed in that letter that he would enter politics with the express purpose of abolishing the dreadful stain that he saw slavery to be on the principles by which the founding fathers established the United States of America.

Today in America is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's greatest speech - the simple 272 word paean to the ideals that are in the words of the Declaration of Independence - that men are born equal and that government should be accountable to the people, not the other way around.  Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg on November 19th, 1863, was intended to be nothing more than an afterword to the lengthy oration by retired senator, Edward Everett, but in a little over two minutes the President said far more than Everett had said in two hours.

Abraham Lincoln is portrayed by some historians as pragmatic and even unprincipled - deferring political and military confrontation over slavery until he was forced to act.  But those historians obviously have not read that letter that I saw at the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln devoted his life to what he knew was right and he stood by his principles to the end of his life.

I see no counterpart amongst politicians today.

Americans Choose Greater Depression

It has been interesting watching and listening to the commentary on the US budget stand-off, which has been resolved, at least for another few months. Democrats and Republicans have blamed each other, naturally enough, and the overwhelmingly left-wing mainstream media have blamed the Republicans, also naturally enough. But an interesting fact arose during the debate, which the media did not play up because it shows perhaps where the weight of blame really lies.  The US Senate has not passed a budget resolution since 2009.  Every budget appropriation bill since then has been what is called a "continuing resolution," in effect an emergency measure to keep the government running for a short period, as indeed is the case with the latest funding bill (which only funds the government until January 2014).  

The real blame for the lack of a proper budget does not lie with Congress, however.  The reason there has not been a proper budget bill since 2009 is that President Obama's Office of Management and Budget has not proposed one.  The United States follows the procedures of its Westminister origins in the executive branch putting up a budget, which the legislative branch votes on. So you can't blame the Republican-controlled House of Representatives or the Democrat-controlled Senate for failing to pass a budget, because there hasn't been one to vote on for the last four years.  The blame lies fairly and squarely with President Obama.  This article, from the (liberal, pro-Obama) Washington Post, tells why.

Irrespective of the blame, there is a lack of political will to address what is actually an expenditure crisis.  The US Government spends around a third more every year than its takes in revenue and without expenditure cuts, massive tax increases, or a significant surge in economic growth, this will continue to grow.  The federal debt stood at a little over $10 trillion when President Obama took office and he has now increased it by two-thirds to over $17 trillion.  It will almost certainly have doubled by the time he leaves office in 2017. Democrats say George W Bush was just as bad but this is not true - the debt rose 38% under Bush (and 34% under Clinton).  

How is the US federal debt funded?  For the most part, new debt is funded by issuing Treasury Bonds. Who buys the Treasuries?  Well, last year 70% of them were bought by the Federal Reserve. And where does the Federal Reserve gets its funds from?  It creates the money out of thin air through entries in its accounting systems. This is the modern-day equivalent of rolling the printing presses to create more money. We all know what happens when you do that - there are plenty of examples such as Germany in the 1920s and Zimbabwe in recent years.

So why is the US not suffering from hyperinflation? The answer is twofold.  Firstly, actual inflation is not as low as the US Government claims it to be.  If we use the same methodology to calculate inflation as in 1980, current US inflation would be nearly 10% rather than the official rate of 1.5%. Secondly, prices are being held down by a combination of consumer behaviour, which is to pay off debt rather than increase spending, plus artificially low interest rates (ordinarily the latter would discourage the former).  Interest rates are being held down by precisely the situation discussed above - the Federal Reserve buying Treasury Bonds at the low interest rates.  The reason the Federal Reserve is buying most of the T-bonds is that no one else will take them at such low rates.  Chinese investors, for example, who were the main purchasers of T-Bonds up until a couple of years ago, are no longer interested in buying them at the current coupon rate of 1.9% because they believe the risk premium is a lot higher than that.  To get some idea of how the market views the risk of US government bonds, one only has to look at the longer term yields, which are up to 4%.

The US Government can get away with this 'borrowing from Peter to pay Paul' scenario just as long as the US Dollar continues to be regarded as the world's primary exchange currency.  In other words, it can continue to 'print' Dollars to lend to itself because other countries still regard the Dollar as sound. But under this scenario the US Dollar must start to fall, as indeed it is has been doing for the last few years against more stable currencies such as the New Zealand Dollar.  Many commentators believe there will come a tipping point at which confidence in the US Dollar will be eroded sufficiently to see it plummet, and when that happens US inflation will rise and US interest rates will soar.  Of course, that will mean the US deficit will increase even further as the interest on Federal debt rises and the whole vicious circle will send the US economy back into significant decline, a scenario that some commentators are calling the 'Greater Depression'.

The US is unlikely to grow its way out of its current economic situation through more of the same policies. Government borrowing to drive consumer spending has not worked. The alternative is encourage greater capital investment to grow production, jobs and incomes, and the way to do this is to lower taxes, reduce disincentives to investment such as government regulations, and to significantly decrease government spending to balance the Federal budget. Unfortunately, we have a socialist in the White House, who would rather see his country suffer further economic decline rather than free up the economy.  A proper budget that showed the true state of the government's finances, would be a good start.

The Narrowing Gap Between the Forbidden and the Compulsory

I was recently talking with a friend of mine about the inexorable encroachment of the power of the state into every area of our lives and he made a very insightful comment. There have always been things that are forbidden by the government - traditional crimes against person and property such as murder and theft; and there have always been things that are compulsory as well - taking care of your own children, for example. For most of the last few hundred years, in Western nations at least, the gap between these two areas of state proscription has been large and the State did not consider it to be its business to interfere in areas as broad as where and how you work, whether you save for your retirement, whether you make provision for personal medical care, how you are educated, what you eat and drink, and what you sell to your neighbour. We regarded countries that did try to interfere in all these areas of its citizens lives to be feudal and dictatorial.

The West, led by Britain and the United States of America, valued individual liberty and rights as important foundations of their ways of life. Of course, individual liberty and rights were not absolutes and there were significant exceptions to the rule, such as slavery in the United States before Emancipation, but the general principle was that the state left people alone unless there was good reason not to.  It is this principle that has been abandoned in much of the western world today where governments consider it not only their right but their responsibility to interfere in every area of every citizen's life. The gap my friend talked about is now almost non-existent. Sure, there are a few areas of increased personal freedom such as around the removal of state sanctions against homosexual relations, but the generally the trend has been far in the other direction.

Today we face new challenges to the narrowing gap that remains. Governments across the Western world are trying to ensure we do not say or do anything that is contrary to the narrow view of acceptable behaviour as defined by the small, often unelected, elite in the executive branches of our governments.  These people claim the right (often disregarding legal and constitutional restraints on their power) to watch our every move, listen to everything we say and read everything we write. As always, they claim this is for our own good, to protect us against poorly defined threats and enemies. They often claim these powers are temporary but of course they never give them up.

In the past the mainstream media would have carried the flame of the protests against this encroachment of the state but now most in the media are apologists for it. There are a few who are prepared to stand up and act against this existential threat to free, democratic society from within. Edward Snowden is one of the few. He has exposed illegal an unconstitutional activity by the US Government against its own citizens. Americans should stand up for Edward Snowden before it is too late.