Mid-Week Miscellany

New Zealand, China, Peru, and the United States . . .

Some recent interesting material on blogs and the web includes:

1. Two Wrongs Do Not Make a Right

Madeleine at MandM arguing that the Foreshore and Seabed imbroglio is shaping up to be a case of two wrongs. She makes a case for the essential priority being given to due legal process rights and suspects that the current Government is about to commit an equally big injustice as did the bankrupt Labour administration.

She writes:

Basically the government is going to settle a case out of court; on our behalf when it is not clear that the government are guilty and not that long ago they denied a case existed on the part of Ngati Apa. Historical Maori land ownership claims are very difficult to prove. There were no deeds or titles issued and records consist of tribal stories, songs, carvings and so on. In addition, the land in question has to have been in continual use by the tribe making the claim from at least 1840 through to the present day (unless unjustly dispossessed). Not only is it very possible Ngati Apa may not have suceeded, there would not be a huge risk of floodgates because each tribe would need to be able to establish this long chain of use and ownership.

The government seems to be happy to have the land of its citizens taken without due process as long as it furthers their political popularity. The former government was willing to suspend due process of one group of citizens and unilaterally declare that the land in question belonged to a second group of citizens. The current government is willing to unilaterally declare that the land in question belongs to the first group of citizens and not the second group and again is not going to allow a court to hear the evidence.

The whole post is worth reading.

2. The Chinese Economic "Miracle" Looks Suspect

John Lee, in an article published in Policy Magazine, entitled Is China Really an ‘East Asian success story’? compares the development paths of Korea and Taiwan to China. In the cases of Korea and Taiwan, economic development took place under the direction and at the instigation of centralist and authoritarian regimes. However, the influence, relative size, and controls of the respective governments reduced over time.

China, however, has done the opposite. The control and power of the government has increased under the Chinese economic development path. He writes:

The explosion in the number of officials is further indication of the rise of the Chinese ‘corporate state.’ In the 1980s, China had fewer than 20 million officials on the payroll. In the early 1990s, the number grew to more than 20 million, and by 2004 there were more than 46 million. This equates to around one official for every 28 people.(16) This is backed up in a further report that indicated the doubling of officials during the 1990s. In the 1980s, a small township had around 10 to 20 officials and a large one had around 20 to 30 officials. By 2004, an average township had more than 100 officials.(17)

Another case in point is that more than 30 of the largest 35 listed companies on the Shanghai Stock Exchange are majority owned by the state and state-controlled entities. Between 1990 and 2003, less than 7% of the initial public offerings on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges were from private-sector companies.(18) The Chinese state owns about 50% of all the shares of listed companies.(19) When state-controlled entities are included in the calculation, it is likely to be around 70–80% of all listed shares. In terms of assets, employment, national output, and control of the most important sectors, the state’s role in the Chinese economy is far more profound, extensive, and entrenched than at any time in East Asian countries such as Taiwan and South Korea.

The political motivations behind these developments are clear. The Tiananmen protests brought the Party to its knees. Authoritarian regimes become irrelevant at their peril. To preserve its relevance, the Party has gone to extensive lengths to retake control of the major levers of economic power. This control is at the heart of an economic structure that entrenches, for the moment, the role and status of Party officials and members in the Chinese economy and society.

We would expect that one of the consequences would be an enormous waste of resources and capital. Lee argues that this is exactly what is happening in China.

To put the situation in perspective, China’s overall use of capital is twice as inefficient as India’s when measured in terms of capital inputs used to produce additional output. In fact, World Bank findings indicated that about one-third of recent investments made generated zero or negative returns.(23) Given the regime’s need to continually stimulate the economy for political ends, it is no wonder loans keep on increasing at an incredible pace despite economic rationality demanding that it should not. This might further the end of maintaining loyalty to the ruling Party and entrenching its power, but it is at enormous cost to the country.

His conclusion: China will continue to be influential by virtue of its size alone. But it will not become the economic powerhouse that most expect. It will rather end up like Brazil--a country and economy that is distorted, inefficient, wasteful--and, therefore, vulnerable and weak.

3. Zero Tolerance for Prison Rape

Eli Lehrer argues in National Review Online that the US must strive for the elimination of prison rape. He writes:

Anyone who looks at the problem can’t react with anything other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over 60,000 prisoners — the great bulk of them male — fall victim to sexual abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are “punks” who are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on end. . . .

But the nation’s prison-rape problems can’t go away overnight for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly. Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in prison has lead to a widespread attitude that’s frankly inhumane. It is one thing to say that prison shouldn’t be fun and quite another to say that detainees “deserve” rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked websites, and late-night comedians.

Government runs the prisons and, in the end, government policy will have to play the dominant role in eliminating prison rape. But, to facilitate that, society also has to change and acknowledge that, even though most people in prison have done awful things, they’re still human beings and still have rights.

Amen!

4. Those Climate Change Killjoys

Anyone who has done even a modicum of research into the global warming debate knows that the earth has successively warmed and cooled over long periods of time well before our current generation. This indisputable fact is an embarrassment to the global warming alarmists because it calls in to question the human causation of current global warming--that is, society's release of carbon into the atmosphere.

One earlier warm period occurred in the medieval period, and it was a time of great bounty and prosperity--at least for the Incas of Peru. An archaeological investigation in Peru has been written up on the web.

Apparently, the Incas flourished under the globally warmer conditions.

The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire. A team of English and U.S. scientists has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that "the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries."

The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.

"This period of increased temperatures," the scientists say, "allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.

"They re-created the landscape and produced the huge surpluses of maize, potatoes, quinua and other crops that freed a rapidly growing population to build roads, scores of palaces like Machu Picchu and in particular the development of a large standing army."