The race for the Republican Presidential nominee in the USA is getting interesting. Last Tuesday the good people of Iowa voted for their favourite Republican, with no clear outcome. Willard “Mitt” Romney won the popular vote by eight over Rick “please don’t google my surname” Santorum, but the actual allocation of delegates is unknown since Iowa uses a complex caucus system that no normal person understands. The only certain consequence from the Iowa vote is that Michele Bachmann has dropped out, leaving six serious contenders.
While all of the remaining candidates have an interesting story to tell, it is the rise of Ron Paul and a growing libertarian voting block that has the biggest long-term consequences. When I wrote about Ron Paul for “the drum” a month ago he was still being largely ignored by the mainstream media (MSM) despite consistent good polling and fund-raising. That is slowly changing. Given that Paul came 3rd in Iowa (with 21% of the vote), is currently polling 2nd in the next voting state of New Hampshire (~20%), and is the only candidate other than Romney with money and campaign infrastructure around the country, some people have started paying attention.
In November next year, Barack Obama will go up against a Republican candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and defacto leader of planet earth. But before then, the Grand Old Party (GOP) of the Republicans will need to pick their candidate, which involves an eight month marathon of rolling mini-elections in 55 States and territories (including Guam and American Samoa) starting in Iowa on 3 January 2012.
And so when debate season rolled around, the field had been narrowed to a rag-tag bunch of about a dozen, with the most prominent being the millionaire Mormon ex-Governor of Massachusetts — Mitt Romney. From the start, Romney has consistently been 1st or 2nd in national polls among GOP voters with about 20-30% support, and he has been seen as the frontrunner due to his decent polling, wealthy friends, establishment support, and high media profile. The race has then been seen as a contest between Romney and “anti-Romney”, a mythical creature who has so far taken four human forms — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Newt Gingrich. Cain has since dropped out of the race.
There is a country in Europe with a federal income tax rate of 1.2% and free trade, recognition of same-sex unions and yet no anti-discrimination legislation, people can own handguns for self-defence, welfare is done at a local level, their leader believes the State should just concentrate on the rule of law and foreign affairs, citizens can veto any piece of legislation with a referendum, local autonomy is so extensive that a local community (about 3000 people) have the freedom to vote themselves independent at any time, there is no standing army, they refuse to join the EU, and have a GDP/person of $134,392. Welcome to the Principality of Liechtenstein — libertarian wonderland.
I’ve just finished Graham Hancock‘s 1989 classic “Lords of Poverty” and recommend it to anybody interested in the working of the international aid bureaucracy. Hancock is scathing in his assessment of international aid agencies such as the United Nations, bilateral aid agencies (eg US AID), development banks (eg World Bank), and the IMF, and concludes that they haven’t just made a few unfortunate mistakes but they are irredeemably broken and need to be abandoned.
I found a few of his examples to be overly harsh, but found his thesis to be generally persuasive. Instead of trying to review his themes, I think it best to provide some extended quotes, and then encourage you to read the rest…
“This is how the game works: public money levied in taxes from the poor of the rich countries is transferred in the form of ‘foreign aid’ to the rich in the poor countries; the rich in the poor countries then hand it back for safe-keeping to the rich in the rich countries. The real trick, throughout this cycle of expropriation, is to maintain the pretence that it is the poor in poor countries who are being helped all along. The winner is the player who manages to keep a straight face while building up a billion-dollar bank account”
The most surprising thing about the economic troubles around the world is that they are considered surprising. The economic story is actually quite simple — western governments around the world have been consistently spending more than they have, and just hoping that continued economic growth would save them. The very obvious problem with this approach is that when debt gets too high while you have an economic slowdown, then the government faces a budget crisis. Then you have Greece getting bailed out and America extending their government credit card from $14.3 to $17.7 trillion.
But that’s only the start. Bailing out the Greek government does not solve the underlying problem of excessive European debt. And going into more debt does not solve the underlying problem of excessive American debt. These problems are currently being delayed, but not solved.
America is more than a year away from their 2012 Presidential election, but things are already heating up. The “Grand Old Party” (GOP) of the Republicans are starting their process of picking their Presidential candidate to take on Obama, and as yet it is still a very open race. One interesting element of this nomination race is that there is growing strength among the non-establishment “outsider” candidates. It is still more likely that a “mainstream” candidate (Romney, Pawlenty, Huntsman, Perry) will win, but the “outsiders” (Bachmann, Paul, Cain, Palin) are all within striking distance.
So with only a little bit of poetic licence, I will run through the candidates in pairs… matching an “insider” and an “outsider” together for each category.
Frontrunners — Mitt Romney (establishment) v Michele Bachmann (outsider). Romney has been leading in all major polls since the start of the race, but many consider him to be a soft leader who is in front mostly on name-recognition. He was a contender in the 2008 nomination race before losing out to John McCain. Bachmann has been the outsider who has caught the most momentum in recent weeks, leading the polls in some states (all important Iowa) and second in others (New Hampshire). The problem with Romney is his history of supporting a health mandate and seemingly changing his opinions to suit the circumstances. Bachmann is considered more of a conviction and “tea party” politician, but lacks the experience and as a “mini-Palin” has occasionally suffered from “foot-in-mouth” disease. She’s free-market and socially conservative.
Just behind — Rick Perry (establishment) v Ron Paul (outsider). Rick Perry hasn’t entered the race yet, but if/when he does he will automatically be in the mix as he is already polling at or above 10%. In some ways he is a cross between Romney & Bachmann… with the experience and credibility of Romney but with some of the conservative convictions of Bachmann. He has previously voiced sympathy with the “independent Texas” movement, but some question whether America is ready for another Texan governor (following Dubya). On the other side is libertarian favourite Ron Paul who has consistently been coming in near the top of the polls (around 10%) and came in second in fund-raising so far. The principled doctor now has a more professional campaign, but he is still being over-looked by many in the media.
People do stupid things. I have done stupid things. And you, dear reader, have done stupid things. If we have no tolerance for mistakes, then we have no tolerance for humans. And if we use mistakes as a justification for hatred, then we will end up hate-filled and intolerant people, in a sad and hate-filled world.
Once upon a time, we were able to keep most of our stupidity restricted to a few unfortunate souls in our friend/family/work network, and those people were able to put our mistakes into context and often forgive us and move forward. But in the internet-age, mistakes can travel at the speed of light to millions of strangers. This is a new paradigm for making moral judgements, and sadly it seems the most common response has been to shower condemnation on people who make mistakes. Because these online mistakes are made by strangers (or worse, politicians), we feel free to be as cruel and hateful as we like. And so the “internet” seems to judge like a self-righteous prude that is without sin.
But we have all made mistakes. And the stupid people we see online are normal people just like us who are often deserving of forgiveness and a second chance.
The recent report by Four Corners about the live cattle trade to Indonesia has got people talking. The report showed that some Indonesian abattoirs are acting “inhumanely” towards the cattle, where some cows take over three minutes to die (instead of the industry standard 30 seconds) and other cows are beaten and abused. Many scenes from the report were gruesome to watch, and it has stirred a popular backlash against the live animal trade. In response, GetUp started a campaign against live animal exports, and the government has responded.
This debate is framed as being about “animal rights”. But it isn’t. If anybody was honestly determining the rights of animals, surely the first right would be the right not to be killed just so that people could eat their flesh. No honest person would say that “the right to not be punched in the face” comes before “the right to live”. If I told you that there was a guy called Brian… and that one person wanted to beat him up, and another person wanted to kill him and eat him, are you honestly going to say that you think the first guy is doing the greater crime?
What if I told you there was a cow called Brian? This is from the GetUp campaign:
Brian (a cow) did nothing to deserve being hit in the face, whipped, or kicked. Each time this occurred he called out in a way which was heart-wrenching. I swear I could hear him call out ‘why’
The twentieth century has been the century of the state. Not only did the world have to deal with two militant statist philosophies (fascism & socialism) but the “free” world also slowly drifted further and further towards a statist outcome. Our methods have been fairer and our behaviour more humane, but ultimately the western world seems to be tip-toeing towards a situation where the state has significant control over our lives. Jonah Goldberg has described this shift to benevolent big-government as “liberal fascism” which might be a bit harsh… but also might be a bit fair.
Strangely though, as the government grows, so do the calls on the left that we are becoming more “right wing” and/or too “free-market”. Somehow, this is taken seriously. The source of all this evil free-market right-wing ideology is the super-capitalist super-power — the USA. So I thought it might be worth having a look at the size of the American government over the last 80 years.
In 1930, the federal American government spend 3.4% of GDP and had a budget surplus of 0.8% of GDP. That sounds pretty good to me. While some libertarians would want to shrink the federal government even more, most would admit to being fairly happy with a federal government that made up less than 4% of the economy.
Heartland takes a position that has variously been described as “denialist”, “skeptical” or “realist”, but which I like to call “non-scared”. I say that because the conference includes science contrarians (Willie Soon, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Chris Monckton), but it also includes people who accept the mainstream story of a warming planet caused by greenhouse gases (and I cautiously include myself in that category) but who nonetheless don’t believe this represents an impending catastrophe, and it certainly doesn’t justify rushing into bad public policy.
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