McChrystal Doesn’t Get It—Does Obama?

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation. The Soviets tried and failed. They deployed 110,000 troops, operating on less restrictive lines of communication and logistical supply than the United States. They built an Afghan army of some 45,000 troops. They operated without the constraints of American rules of engagement. They slaughtered around a million Afghans. And they lost, for the simple reason that the people of Afghanistan did not want them, or their Afghan proxies. . . .

Obama may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but if he allows himself to be bullied into supporting McChrystal’s foray into Afghanistan, he will reveal himself as the worst kind of warmonger. True, he didn’t invent the Afghan quagmire. That honor resides with George W. Bush, who also is to blame for the American fiasco in Iraq. But history will be surprisingly gentle toward America’s 43rd president. Bush will share the blame for his calamitous military decisions with the mistaken policies of previous administrations, a compliant Congress, headstrong advisers, servile intelligence agencies and, of course, the shock of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Bush will be seen more as a useful idiot than a ruthless ideologue. Obama, with his obvious intelligence, soaring rhetorical skills and Nobel credentials, does not readily fit such a characterization. If he decides to reinforce failure in Afghanistan by dispatching tens of thousands more American troops to that disaster, America’s 44th president will cement himself as a grand fraud, a hawk hiding in dove feathers. Given his potential for doing good, one clearly would not want such a scenario to play out.

The president’s lack of military experience screams out when he calls America’s involvement in Afghanistan a “good war.” He would have been better off trying to make the case for a justifiable war, or even a necessary war, but to label a process that brings about the death and injury of thousands as “good” makes me wonder about Obama’s fitness to be commander in chief. His seeming inexperience on national security affairs and foreign policy leave him vulnerable to domestic political pressures that emanate from these arenas. The president does possess the vision to see a world in which America stands side by side with other nations as an equal, operating with a shared notion of due process and respect for the rule of law, but that doesn’t square with any decision to deploy more troops to Afghanistan. Expanding the war in Afghanistan will lend credence to the central worry about Obama: that, at the end of the day, this man of vision might in fact be little more than an Illinois politician who is willing to barter away American life, treasure and good will for political gain on the domestic front. And, in doing so, it will undermine his noble vision of an America “resetting” its relationship with the world following eight years of unilateralist militarism. . . .

Afghanistan has, over the centuries, earned its reputation as the graveyard of empires. Just ask the Greeks, Mongols, British and Russians. If Barack Obama ultimately agrees to dispatch more American troops to Afghanistan, he will ensure not only that America will add its name to the list of those who have failed in their effort to conquer the unconquerable, but also that his name will join the ranks of those leaders throughout history who succumbed to the temptations of hubris when given the choice between war and peace. The Nobel committee will have failed in its gambit to motivate America’s 44th president to embrace the mantle of peacemaker, and the American people will be left to sort through the detritus of war brought on by yet another failed president.

-- from "McChrystal Doesn’t Get It—Does Obama?" by Scott Ritter

Healthcare: too important to be left to the market?

Consider health care, which is the topic du jour and the foremost example of something that is "too important to be left to the market." First, health care is defined and revealed by the market process, and second, we can't know how much is "enough" without prices, profits, and losses. As always, claims like this are exercises in robust political economy: even if we grant the ethical assumption that health care occupies a different moral category than other goods and services, it isn't clear that a government monopoly will do better than a free market.

-- from "Common Objections to Capitalism" by Art Carden

Let's take their profits and use them to fund free healthcare for all!

For fun, let’s imagine confiscating all the profits of all the famously greedy health-insurance companies. That would pay for four days of health care for all Americans. Let’s add in the profits of the 10 biggest rapacious U.S. drug companies. Another 7 days. Indeed, confiscating all the profits of all American companies, in every industry, wouldn’t cover even five months of our health-care expenses.

-- from "How American Health Care Killed My Father" by David Goldhill

Intentions and results

Among the earliest lessons that I teach my freshman economics students are (1) intentions are not results, and (2) to oppose a government program is not necessarily to object to the intentions stated by that program’s advocates.

-- from "Intentions and Results" by Don Boudreaux

A correction is supposed to correct mistakes

David Einhorn, one of the few people to make money in the crash of sub-prime debt:

“The financial reform on the table is analogous to our response to airline terrorism by frisking grandma and taking away everyone’s shampoo. It gives the appearance of ‘doing something’ and adds to our bureaucracy without really making anything safer.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that even bankruptcy can be a good thing. “Household Debt Can Hasten Recovery…when it goes unpaid,” says a headline.

The whole idea of a correction is to wash out mistakes. If people can pay their debts down, the mistakes are corrected. The system is strengthened. If they can’t, the process of correction can happen faster. Bad debts are written off quickly. Then, a real recovery can begin. Either way, the system comes back in better shape.

Too bad the feds are getting in the way!

A decent correction should carry off those who made the biggest mistakes – in the present case, the firms on Wall Street that wagered billions on a bigger and bigger bubble. But instead of letting them go broke, the feds rewarded them.

Wall Street profits are a ‘gift’ from the state, says George Soros.

But wait, what kind of gift is this? If you give $100 to your neighbor, that’s a gift. But what if you tax your neighbor on the left $100 in order to give the money to your neighbor on the right? That’s a gift too…but of a special kind. You’re ‘redistributing the wealth,’ you might say.

And what if you do a quantitative easing? You know, you print up a $100 bill and give it to your neighbor? That’s a gift too.

Yeah, thanks a lot.

Meanwhile, the recession is said to have come to an end in the US. GDP growth is positive, say the papers. But if this is a recovery, let’s hope it comes to an end soon.

Existing house prices continued to fall in September.

Unemployment continued to worsen. “Signs of recovery don’t extend to jobs,” says the WSJ.

-- from "Economic Correction Disease" by Bill Bonner

The Fruits of Intervention

We ran Saddam out of Kuwait and put U.S. troops into Saudi Arabia. And we got Osama bin Laden's 9-11. We responded by taking down the Taliban and taking over Afghanistan. And we got an eight-year war with no victory and no end in sight. Now Pakistan is burning. We took down Saddam and got a seven-year war and an ungrateful Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Turks, who shared a border with Saddam, have done no fighting. Iran has watched as we destroyed its two greatest enemies, the Taliban and Saddam. China, which has a border with both Pakistan and Afghanistan, has sat back. India, which has a border with Pakistan and fought three wars with that country, has stayed aloof.

The United States, on the other side of the world, plunged in. And now we face an elongated military presence in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan and potential disaster in Pakistan, and are being pushed from behind into a war with Iran.

"America rejects the false comfort of isolationism," said George W. Bush in his 2006 State of the Union. And we did reject that false comfort. And now we can enjoy the fruits of interventionism.

-- from "The Fruits of Intervention" by Patrick J. Buchanan

Climate change suicide

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

-- from "The real climate change catastrophe" by Christopher Booker

Climate change groupthink run amok

Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly exaggerated computer predictions combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.

-- MIT's Richard Lindzen, as quote by Christopher Booker in "The real climate change catastrophe "

The real climate change catastrophe

More and more eminent scientists have been coming out of the woodwork to suggest that the IPCC, with its computer models, had got it all wrong. It isn’t CO₂ that has been driving the climate, the changes are natural, driven by the activity of the sun and changes in the currents of the world’s oceans.

The ice caps haven’t been melting as the alarmists and the models predicted they should. The Antarctic, containing nearly 90 per cent of all the ice in the world, has actually been cooling over the past 30 years, not warming. The polar bears are not drowning – there are four times more of them now than there were 40 years ago. In recent decades, the number of hurricanes and droughts have gone markedly down, not up.

As the world has already been through two of its coldest winters for decades, with all the signs that we may now be entering a third, the scientific case for CO₂ threatening the world with warming has been crumbling away on an astonishing scale.

Yet it is at just this point that the world’s politicians, led by Britain, the EU and now President Obama, are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world – measures so destructive that even if only half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the dark ages.

-- from "The real climate change catastrophe" by Christopher Booker

Healthcare reform and other fairy tales

Like an uninquisitive child, most people seem willing to believe politicians when they promise to subsidize and compel the use of medical “insurance” while reducing prices without controlling choices. And while they’re at it, they’ll cut the budget deficit and boost economic growth. One shouldn’t have to be an economist to smell a scam.

-- from "The Goal Is Freedom: The Welfare State Corrupts Absolutely / What's wrong with healthcare reform" by Sheldon Richman

If the science is settled, why so many climate models?

It has been often said that the "science is settled" on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false.

The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements.

Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.

We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled, the model (singular) would have predicted it.

-- from "Physicist Howard Hayden's one-letter disproof of global warming claims" by Stephan Kinsella

Howard Zinn on Obama

Everyone wants to support Obama, [Howard Zinn] continued, or at least everyone in his circle. Everyone wants to love Obama. But let's face it: "His presidency doesn't measure up. I have to say that. But why? How? How come?"

Militarism, he answered. Obama has kept the troops in Iraq. He's sent more troops to Afghanistan. "He's continued a military foreign policy."

Not to be a know-it-all, Zinn said ("though I do know it all," he joked), but those who expected great change from this president were fooling themselves. Look at history, he urged, invoking his mantra; Democrats are as aggressive as Republicans.

"They're all in this for war," he said. "That's what we call bipartisanship." Those surprised or disappointed are those who "exaggerated expectations, romanticized him, idealized him. Obama is a Democratic Party politician. I know that sounds demeaning. It is."

-- from "The Return of Howard Zinn, and Company / A packed house hears a left-wing critique of Obama" by Seth Rolbein

How does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?

Syndicated columnist Gene Lyons asks the question "Why are we still in Afghanistan?"

"One of the enduring oddities of the American foreign policy debate," he writes, "is that asking the most obvious questions is all but forbidden. For example, how does Afghanistan pose a threat to the United States?"

It doesn’t.

The 9/11 attacks were an aberration. So many people in our internal security and law enforcement structure were asleep at the wheel that it’s downright criminal. An attack like 9/11 shouldn’t occur again. Nobody in our Homeland Security apparatus wants to be the schmo who let it happen on his watch. "Fighting them over there" has nothing to do with national security. They don’t have an air force or a navy that can get us over here.

As Lyons says, "Terrorists can’t defeat the United States; they can only cause American politicians to self-destruct in fear of taking blame for future atrocities."

That, unfortunately, is precisely why Obama is going along with this cockamamie escalation. Imagine how Dick Cheney and the rest of the war banshees would wail if Obama stiff armed Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s escalation demand and somebody snuck through the Homeland Defense screen and blew up a school or a stadium or something. Ouch!

Military pundit Ralph Peters is on the right side of the Afghanistan issue. "Even if everything went perfectly in Afghanistan — which it won’t — the results would be virtually meaningless: Our mortal enemies (above all, al-Qaeda) have dug in elsewhere, from Pakistan to Somalia," he wrote recently in the New York Post. "Our soldiers are dying for a fad, not for a strategy. Our vaunted counterinsurgency doctrine is the military equivalent of hula hoops, pet rocks and Beanie Babies: an oddity that caught the Zeitgeist." Indeed, counterinsurgency (COIN) is the "it" strategy now, the Army’s reason for being. There won’t be any big tank battles in the Fulda gap. COIN is the only kind of war left; without it, there is no Long War.

Of course, if we don’t need the Long War, we don’t need to do COIN in Afghanistan.

And we don’t need the Long War. But it looks like we’re going to get it.

-- from "Alas Afghanistan" by Jeff Huber

Another scientific revolution?

I see many parallels between the struggle for acceptance of a heliocentric solar system and the acceptance of a free-market, stateless society. The cast of characters has changed somewhat: Galileo’s Papal State is today’s democratic state; Catholic doctrine has been replaced by statist, democratic doctrine; the geocentric view is now the leviathan central government; the religious intelligentsia have been replaced by high level bureaucrats; and the illiterates can now read but they are ignorant of economics.

The scientific intellectuals, who furthered Copernicus’ work, are today the anti-intellectual intellectuals(5), striving to spread the notion of liberty. They continue to work and expose the evils of majority rule, often at the expense of advancement in their careers, subjecting themselves to ostracism, ridicule and sometimes, even being jailed for refusing to obey the laws of the state.

Galileo’s premise was accepted as truth because the predictions that it made were ultimately visible. As his followers perfected the technology required to observe the phenomena he had described, they became evident and accessible to more and more people. It was then impossible for the (Papal) State to deny the reality.

This is what I see happening with the freedom movement. Our technology is the Internet and the Mises Institute, the centre for development of free-market theory. The predictions that were made by Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt and so many others are coming true and we, the ignorant masses of today, are finally being enlightened.

-- from "Copernican Shift, then and now" by Catherine LeBoeuf-Schouten

Rationally ignorant healthcare "reform"

The Senate Finance Committee has filed its current version of healthcare reform. . . .

It is 1,502 pages long and it is in legislative language. If passed, it will affect our lives in important ways. Let me suggest that you all read it carefully and then let your senators know what you think.

Of course you won’t do that and neither will I. We are rationally ignorant and we shall remain that way.

Will the senators, not on the committee, read it? I doubt it. They will be too busy giving their opinions on selected portions. However, special interests will know about the particular provisions that affect them. As to the senators on the committee, staffers will give summaries. How much they understand or care about provisions that affect the general interests in contrast to the interests that elect them is unknown.

The welfare state makes a mockery of the rule of law and of representative democracy.

--from "Planning And Democracy: Redux" by Mario Rizzo

Economic Correction Disease

Another national emergency! Terrorism…the banking crisis…now Swine Flu.

Why it is an emergency, we don’t know. Our sister, living in Virginia tells us that several of her grandchildren have come down with the Swine Flu. It doesn’t seem to bother them anymore than any other flu.

But every emergency is an opportunity. The feds don’t want to waste it. Instead, they swing into operation with a rescue plan. It will end up costing billions…hundreds of billions…or maybe even trillions. We don’t know what they’ve got in mind. But we know what will come of it. It will end up extending the power and influence of the government. So far, the feds are the only real winners from any of these crises. Federal outlays, as a percentage of GDP have shot up from less than 20% of GDP in 2000 to more than 26% in 2009.

Will it do any good? Public health is not central banking. And it’s not economic planning. Force everyone to wear a surgical mask and maybe lives would be spared. Or, maybe not. Without the immunity of occasional bouts of flu, who knows? Maybe people would be more susceptible to the next disease. The American Indians were almost wiped out…because they had no immunity to European diseases. . . .

David Einhorn, one of the few people to make money in the crash of sub-prime debt:

“The financial reform on the table is analogous to our response to airline terrorism by frisking grandma and taking away everyone’s shampoo. It gives the appearance of ‘doing something’ and adds to our bureaucracy without really making anything safer.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that even bankruptcy can be a good thing. “Household Debt Can Hasten Recovery…when it goes unpaid,” says a headline.

The whole idea of a correction is to wash out mistakes. If people can pay their debts down, the mistakes are corrected. The system is strengthened. If they can’t, the process of correction can happen faster. Bad debts are written off quickly. Then, a real recovery can begin. Either way, the system comes back in better shape.

Too bad the feds are getting in the way!

A decent correction should carry off those who made the biggest mistakes – in the present case, the firms on Wall Street that wagered billions on a bigger and bigger bubble. But instead of letting them go broke, the feds rewarded them.

Wall Street profits are a ‘gift’ from the state, says George Soros.

But wait, what kind of gift is this? If you give $100 to your neighbor, that’s a gift. But what if you tax your neighbor on the left $100 in order to give the money to your neighbor on the right? That’s a gift too…but of a special kind. You’re ‘redistributing the wealth,’ you might say.

And what if you do a quantitative easing? You know, you print up a $100 bill and give it to your neighbor? That’s a gift too.

Yeah, thanks a lot.

Meanwhile, the recession is said to have come to an end in the US. GDP growth is positive, say the papers. But if this is a recovery, let’s hope it comes to an end soon.

Existing house prices continued to fall in September.

Unemployment continued to worsen. “Signs of recovery don’t extend to jobs,” says the WSJ.

-- from "Economic Correction Disease" by Bill Bonner

Democracy’s Most Critical Defect

[I]f I were to send a private Predator drone to Pakistan to fire explosive missiles into villages, killing women, children, and other innocent persons, I would be seen as a monstrous mass murderer, and demands would be made that I be apprehended and “brought to justice” or killed. Yet when President Obama causes deaths in this way, no such demands are made. How did Barack Obama come by the right to kill innocent people? By democratic election to the presidency of the United States, of course. Most people actually believe, and act on the belief, that mere election to a political office can endow a person with standing to disregard the moral requirements applicable to people in general. And not only the elected official, but all those officials beneath him in the chain of command ― nobody demands that the technician who sits comfortably in the United States and directs the exact operation of the lethal drone be brought to justice; he, as the saying goes, is “only following orders.”

-- from "Democracy’s Most Critical Defect" by Robert Higgs

The Democrats in Congress have the power to end war

“Every thinking person wants to take a stand against hate crimes, but isn’t war the most offensive of hate crimes?” asked Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who did not vote for the bill, when I spoke to him by phone. “To have people have to make a choice, or contemplate the hierarchy of hate crimes, is cynical. I don’t vote to fund wars. If you are opposed to war, you don’t vote to authorize or appropriate money. Congress, historically and constitutionally, has the power to fund or defund a war. The more Congress participates in authorizing spending for war, the more likely it is that we will be there for a long, long time. This reflects an even larger question. All the attention is paid to what President Obama is going to do right now with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is the Democratic Congress could have ended the war when it took control just after 2006. We were given control of the Congress by the American people in November 2006 specifically to end the war. It did not happen. The funding continues. And while the attention is on the president, Congress clearly has the authority at any time to stop the funding. And yet it doesn’t. Worse yet, it finds other ways to garner votes for bills that authorize funding for war. The spending juggernaut moves forward, a companion to the inconscient force of war itself.”

-- Dennis Kucinich, as quoted by Chris Hedges in "War Is a Hate Crime"

Society cannot be planned from the top down

Mises died a year before what is usually considered the Austrian revival, which is often dated from 1974 when Hayek received the Nobel Prize, a prize that was entirely unexpected and which had to be shared with a socialist and which shocked a profession that had no interest in the ideas of either Mises or Hayek, whom they considered to be dinosaurs.

It is interesting to read Hayek's acceptance speech, which the Mises Institute published this year. It is a tribute to a profession to which he wanted closer ties. But it was not a loving presentation of the glories of academia. In fact, it was the opposite. He said that the most dangerous person on earth is an arrogant intellectual who lacks the humility necessary to see that society needs no masters and cannot be planned from the top down. An intellectual lacking humility can become a tyrant, and an accomplice in the destruction of civilization itself.

It was an amazing speech for a Nobel Prize winner to give, an implicit condemnation of a century of intellectual and social trends, and a real tribute to Mises, who had stuck by his principles and never given into the academic trends of his time.

-- from "Economics and Moral Courage" by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

It's time to pusue a foreign policy of noninterventionism

It’s high time we adopted the isolationist policy recommended by our founding fathers. I’m not talking about withdrawing from the world as an economic and diplomatic superpower. I’m suggesting that we just say no to strewing our military strength far and wide every time we have a temper tantrum. The past eight years have shown that our military might doesn’t accomplish our national objectives. Let the crazy world take care of itself.

-- from "Make the World Go Away" by Jeff Huber

A kinder, gentler city on the hill

The neocons would have us believe that we can be a force for good in the world by blowing it up bits at a time. Can a belief get any sillier? (If she floats, she’s a witch.)

The oceans and our size provide us with ample security protection, just as they did in the day of Washington and Jefferson and Franklin. No one can invade and occupy us. Nobody would ever be crazy enough to pop a nuclear missile off in our direction, or in the direction of any of our friends (do we have any of those left?)

No one is interested in competing with us militarily, not even Russia or China. Let’s start coming home and fixing our own problems, and take the world off our shoulders. It will get along fine without us bombing it on a regular basis.

It’s time to become that kinder, gentler nation and that shining city on the hill that Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush exhorted us to be.

-- from "Make the World Go Away" by Jeff Huber