The Twilight Years, Part V

We're Eugenicists and We're Here to Help

The fear for the future that gripped Britain in the two decades after World War One rested not just on economic misdiagnoses. There was also a prevailing concern over miscegenation and genetic deformation. So argues Richard Overy in his book, The Twilight Years.

Professional and leading historians were telling the public that societies inevitably decline and that Britain had reached its high point and now decline was certain. Things would go from bad to worse from this point, the public were told and they believed it. Economists agreed, arguing that capitalism was so internally contradictory that it would grow to incompetence and collapse. Moreover, it was fundamentally immoral. No civilisation could be sustained upon such unethical and immoral foundations. But things might be assuaged if the worst excesses and contradictions could be offset by bureaucratic planning. The Soviet Union was held up as the way forward.

But a further problem was “sickness” in the racial body of the nation. Consider Julian Huxley's diagnosis of the threat, written in 1930:

What are we going to do? Every defective man, woman and child is a burden. Every defective is an extra body for the nation to feed and clothe, but produces little or nothing in return. Every defective needs care, and immobilises a certain quantum of energy and goodwill which could otherwise be put to constructive ends. Every defective is an emotional burden—a sorrow to someone, and in himself, a creature doomed, when unassisted, to live an incomplete and sub-human existence. Not only that, but if their numbers continue to increase, the burden . . . will gradually drag us down. Cited in Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), p.93.

The "sickness" with which society was afflicted consisted of sub-standard people having too many (defective) children, which were a burden upon society, bringing about its inevitable collapse. This “world-view” of course was Malthusian: population will always run ahead of food supply, until war, death, disease or famine kills off sufficient people to bring things into equilibrium. This was the diagnosis. The solution: control the reproduction of defectives through “birth control”.

One of the earliest advocates in Britain of birth control was Marie Stopes. Overy takes up the narrative:

In May 1921 Marie Stopes organized a public meeting on constructive birth control at the Queen's Hall in London . . . . She had been advised that she might find the hall almost empty, but on the night, according to a sceptical eye-witness, there was no “trickle of ill-dressed fanatics” but a packed crowd of “quite normal-looking people”. After a lengthy organ recital, Marie Stopes, resplendent in a shining white dress, took the stage to berate the audience about the perils and expense of allowing “wastrels” to breed. The record of the meeting indicates applause at every opportunity. The only people who should become parents, she insisted, were those who could “add individuals of value to the race”. In her final remarks of the evening she told the audience that if race selection were successful they would look at their grandchildren and “think almost that the gods had descended to walk upon the earth”. . . . (Overy p. 96)

The notion of the improvement of the race was the foundation upon which the birth-control movement was built.

In our day, this kind of rhetoric grates horribly--at least to many. But in the Inter-War years in Britain it did not. Why the difference? Firstly, the greater superiority of the Englishman was a commonly held view at the time. Britain was an imperial race, therefore superior: it could maintain its Empire only by maintaining its racial purity. Breeding superior progeny was seen as a key essential to maintain the glory of the Empire: without it, Britain would inevitably decline.

The problem was famously encapsulated by David Lloyd George, the first post-war prime minister, when he warned an audience that it was not possible to run an A1 empire with a C3 population. These alphabetic categories were used by the army to label the physical qualities of recruits. . . . Sir James Barr, onetime president of the British Medical Association, testily observed that “while the virility of the nation was carrying on he war, the derelicts were carrying on the race. Overy, p. 97-8

Secondly, the increasingly popular social Darwinism of the age naturally led to an assessment of the human race which would break society up into categories of superiors and inferiors, not by virtue of bearing authority to rule or to be obeyed, but by virtue of genetics. It was an easy step, once you had accepted the Darwinistic world-view, as almost all intellectuals and public protagonists had, to be able to suggest with the utmost sweet reasonableness that across the human race was a spectrum of inferior through to superior genetic models. The survival of the race depended upon breeding out the inferiors, and increasing the fecundity of those with superior genetic makeup. Stopes openly argued (without recrimination or reaction) that “race suicide” would result from “excessive breeding of inferior stock”.

Such sentiments are a blasphemous anathema to modern pagans. Why? Largely, we suspect, because of the loathing with which the eugenics movement in Nazi Germany is now held (at least officially). Ideas do have consequences: the consequences as evident in Nazi Germany are too terrible and horrible now to contemplate. It is now politely ignored and put under the carpet that eugenics was every bit as alive and fashionable in Britain as it was in pre-War Germany. It has, in the post-World War II West, forced eugenics into operating beneath the radar screen. Eugenics is still widely practised in the West, but not necessarily as a government programme or promotion. It has been reframed into a "personal choice". Tests are now routinely done on unborn children to ascertain whether they have disease or defection. When tests prove positive parents are invited/encouraged to kill the unborn child.

Throughout the twentieth century, eugenics was practised in the United States as well, as traced by Edwin Black in, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003; Thunder's Mouth Press, 2004). As Michael Gerson points out in The Washington Post, Black recounts

efforts by distinguished scientists, academics, industrialists, health officials and jurists through much of the 20th century to “direct human evolution” by waging war against people with developmental and physical disabilities.

Black points out that early last century, the American Breeders Association -- supported by generous grants from Andrew Carnegie -- created a committee to study “the best practical means for cutting off the defective germ-plasm of the American population.” The panel included doctors, economists and attorneys from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Chicago.

Black continues: “During a number of subsequent conferences, they carefully debated the ‘problem of cutting off the supply of defectives,’ and systemically plotted a bold campaign of ‘purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes.’ Ten groups were eventually identified as ‘socially unfit’ and targeted for ‘elimination.’” Among those groups, according to Black, were the “feebleminded,” epileptics, the “insane,” the “deformed” and the “deaf.”

Eugenic sterilizations did not end in the United States until the 1970s, endorsed by a decision of the Supreme Court. Citizens with Down syndrome and other genetic challenges are increasingly rare in America, because of prenatal testing and abortion. And as such genetic perfection is pursued, those who lack it are subjected to increased prejudice.

Accordingly, Social Darwinism has been “reworked” and "re-morphed" in the modern generation. Now it is fashionable, once again, to believe that there are superiors and inferiors in the human race. But those of superior genetic stock are those who have reached a stage of enlightenment where they paternalistically and condescendingly believe in equal human rights for all; the invitation to all lesser un-enlightened mortals is to develop and evolve to higher states of being, which are essentially ideological and cerebral. Abortion is framed as a "woman's right to choose" or a "woman's right over her own body": the propaganda frames abortion as an act of a truly enlightened superior being. The invitation to inferior humans is to persuade them that they need not, in fact, remain inferior, but that they too can become truly enlightened. Naturalistic Darwinism morphed into social Darwinism, which has once again morphed into ideological Darwinism. But throughout the Darwinistic world-view, inconsistency and hypocrisy notwithstanding, remains firmly predominant.

But we digress. Returning to Britain in the Inter-War years, the idea of inferior breeding and poor genetic structures fitting seamlessly and neatly into the pessimism of the age in Britain in the twenties and thirties. The warning of a potential biological crisis was credible, given the general pessimism. Moreover, it buttressed the prevailing prejudices by appearing to give them a rational, scientific foundation. As soon as appeals to "science" could be made, the credibility and believability of the pessimistic outlook went up by several degrees. And it went both ways: the prevailing pessimistic outlook in turn made the claims of the eugenics movement appear well reasoned and well founded. For example, in the 1930's Leonard Darwin, fourth son of Charles, warned that

without biological correction Western civilization was destined to suffer the same slow decay that had been the lot 'of every great civilization.' . . . the problem lay in the inherited quality of the race, which, Darwin argued, had a natural tendency to decline as long as the 'less efficient strata' reproduced faster than the biologically inefficient. (Overy, p. 101)

Eugenics was the new advance in biological science which would prevent the inevitable decline occurring.

Eugenics became widely popular in academic and intellectual circles in the Inter-War period. The inevitable tendency was for “science” to overstate the influence of Nature (as contrasted with Nurture) so that it became seriously entertained that almost all social problems could be put down to defective Nature: alcoholism, syphilis, feeble-mindedness, crime, prostitution, delinquency were all understood to be due to an inherited predisposition and reflective of sub-standard genetics. (About the only vestige of this view which has survived to linger on in the modern world is the idea that homosexuality is a predisposed genetic condition. But, of course, this has also been parsed through the filters of ideological Darwinism, so that homosexuality, although a genetic defect, has been declared to be a human right.)

As eugenicists debated appropriate policies which would apply their science to the betterment and purification of the race, the inevitable question became where to draw the line. Unsurprisingly, it was suggested that about half the population was below average! But within this deficient half, there was believed to be a smaller sub-set which, if allowed to continue unchecked, threatened the entire race with genetic degeneration. And, it was observed repeatedly, the least genetically worthy were always breeding faster, having larger and larger families than, well, superior folk.

In the 1930's, eugenicists left no doubt about what needed to be done to preserve the race.

The language routinely used to describe biological intervention was uncompromising--'elimination' of the unfit, 'festering sores' to be cut out, a 'diseased constitution' to be medically repaired. . . . Cleansing the race left few options that did not involve severe levels of medical or social intervention. [It reduced to] two possibilities. The first was the 'lethal chamber', the second sterilization.” (Overy p. 115)

The lethal chamber was rejected as lacking sufficient public support. But compulsory sterilization was another matter.

There were few, if any, eugenicists who did not accept that sterilization, whether compulsory or voluntary, was the one remaining panacea capable to addressing the seriousness of their case for racial decline, and they worked throughout the inter-war years to persuade the government to set in place firm procedures for a national programme of sterilization targeted as the biologically and socially undesirable. (Overy p.117)

Now, it is important to remember that this was not some fringe maniacal group; eugenicists were mainstream, leading figures, intellectuals, and opinion leaders.

The ranks of self-confessed eugenists were swollen in the 1920's with a panoply of distinguished public figures in every field: the economist J.M. Keynes, who helped set up the Cambridge Eugenics Society before 1914 and remained a life-long supporter; the sexologist Havelock Ellis, who wrote pioneering books on sex before 1914; the zoologist Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin's chief disciple Thomas Huxley and an early science celebrity; the psychologist Cyril Burt, pioneer of intelligence testing of schoolchildren and, as a result, a convinced hereditarian; the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose Man and Superman played on eugenics themes; William Inge, Dean of St Paul's, almost certainly the best-known churchman of his generation, who wanted and ideal British population of only 20 million, all with 'certificates of bodily and mental fitness'; and so on. Eugenic concern in the inter-war years was no longer the province of people the public might have regarded as enthusiastic cranks. (Overy, p. 106)

So, civilization was declining. Eugenicists argued it was substantially due to inferior, defective classes breeding far too promiscuously. The bad were multiplying; the superior were being overrun. Society would inevitably decline. Their analysis had the imprimatur of "science", and therefore it was seen as objective, credible, certain, and infallible. And, as we have seen recently, never get between a scientist and the limelight—unless one's life insurance is up to date. Overy's concluding paragraphs are reminiscent of our own recent experiences, this time to do with climate:

A great many biologists wanted to believe that they could explain crisis in convincing ways, and their science seemed self-evidently appropriate to the morbid contemplation of decay and regeneration. Biological explanations had about them the unmistakable stamp of progress, rooted as they were in programmes of scientific research and statistical assessment that were demonstrably at the cutting edge of their subjects. Identifying crisis and cure gave scientists a sense of social purpose and a high public profile even if it meant presenting complex and uncertain elements of their science in vulgar form in order to be understood”--and we may add, in order to make elements of the science appear more definite and certain. (Overy, p. 134)

We have seen how academic experts framed beliefs and expectations of impending long term decline in Great Britain during the Inter-War years. Their consensus view was taken up and reflected back in the media and in most sections of society during that period. We have argued that this polarity of unbridled optimism, followed by deep and abiding pessimism is an inevitable pathology of the religion of secular humanism becoming ascendant in a culture.

Initially the notion that man is the centre of the universe and lord of all he surveys proves wonderfully liberating and uplifting. However, man is far too puny to sustain the weight of deity. Soon his failures and phobias and imperfections intrude to the dashing of hopes and the defenestration of optimism. A deep gloom settles over the culture. The bi-polar mood swings are manifest most clearly within the Academy which had early championed the secular idolatry of rationalistic humanism.

This bi-polar pattern of extreme optimism, followed by much longer periods of apocalyptic alarmism and general despair continues unabated in our day. So has the eugenics movement. It has now morphed into strident promotion and militant practise of abortion to preserve the superiority of "enlightened" people--that is, those who have evolved to the point where they understand that an individual's rights and personal convenience trump anyone sufficiently powerless to defend or protect or assert or speak up for themselves. Death to them. Thus, the fittest survive. We have to do this to save ourselves, to become authentic, higher, self-actualised beings.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

Not in the Name of Fiscal Common Sense
Liturgy and Worship - Confession for the Nations
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, February 13, 2010

Our Father and God, You have established Your Church as a royal priesthood in this world, and so we intercede for the nations of men now, confessing on their behalf so that the grace of Your forgiveness will soon be extended to them all.

Father and God, we confess that we have become a debtor nation, and yet Your word has told us not rack up the kind of uncharitable debts that we have done. Father, the trillions of unpayable debt that we have incurred is a set of impossible obligations that will land on our children and grandchildren. On behalf of a stiff-necked nation, we confess our greed and self-absorption, and we ask You to grant a spirit of deep repentance. Father, we do not ask for deliverance in the name of fiscal common sense, but rather in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We know, Father, that if we in the Church regard iniquity in our own midst, or in our own hearts, this prayer will be ineffectual. Father, we confess that the Church has not spoken prophetically on this issue, and we confess that we have not done so because we have been complicit in the sin. Help us to see the sinful nature of our debt slavery, and we pray that You would rise up and deliver us, despite the fact that we have not deserved any deliverance at all—quite the reverse. Forgive us our sins, we pray.

And Father, we confess our particular sins to You now—Selah . . . We do this in the strong name of Jesus, and amen.

You have confessed honestly, and without reserve or evasion. You are trusting in Jesus, and only in Jesus. On that basis, I declare your sins are forgiven through Christ.

Congregation: Thanks be to God!

Global Warming Downdraft

Time for Last Rites

The main stream media is now carrying articles critical of global warming larceny and malpractice. It is not universal, but there are now far more critical analyses and even-handed articles than there were several months ago.

Much is being made of the admissions of Phil Jones, of Climategate infamy, the academic who ran the Climatic Research Unit at Hadley for the University of East Anglia, and a core member of the global warming academic cabal. Here is one synopsis of an interview with Professor Jones conducted by the BBC and which has been noticed all around the world.

Asked by the BBC what it means when scientists say "the debate on climate change is over," the keeper of the flame sounded chastened. "I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this," Jones said. "This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the . . . past as well."

Jones discussed the highly contentious "medieval warming period." If global temperatures were warmer than today back in 800-1300 AD -- about 1,000 years before Henry Ford's assembly lines began spitting out cars -- it suggests that natural factors have a large hand in climate change, a concession that climate alarmists are loath to make.

Jones said we don't know if the warming in this period was global in extent since paleoclimatic records are sketchy. If it was, and if temperatures were higher than now, "then obviously the late 20th century warmth would not be unprecedented."

Jones also noted that there's been no statistically significant warming since 1995, although the cooling since 2002 hasn't been statistically significant, either.

All of this is like a cardinal of the Catholic Church saying the evidence for apostolic succession is still open to debate.

OK, so we guess those "the science is settled" mantras have become a bit more muted now. And no evidence of warming since 1995--despite all that carbon dioxide being emitted in ever greater amounts over the past 15 years.

The credibility of the IPCC is now in tatters. Only the wilfully stubborn, the ignorant, or those with vested interests want to maintain its credibility. As a editorial in the the Wall Street Journal argued:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the "settled science" of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Since the climategate email story broke in November, the standard defense is that while the scandal may have revealed some all-too-human behavior by a handful of leading climatologists, it made no difference to the underlying science. We think the science is still disputable. But there's no doubt that climategate has spurred at least some reporters to scrutinize the IPCC's headline-grabbing claims in a way they had rarely done previously.

Take the rain forest claim. In its 2007 report, the IPCC wrote that "up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state."

But as Jonathan Leake of London's Sunday Times reported last month, those claims were based on a report from the World Wildlife Fund, which in turn had fundamentally misrepresented a study in the journal Nature. The Nature study, Mr. Leake writes, "did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning."

The IPCC has relied on World Wildlife Fund studies regarding the "transformation of natural coastal areas," the "destruction of more mangroves," "glacial lake outbursts causing mudflows and avalanches," changes in the ecosystem of the "Mesoamerican reef," and so on. The Wildlife Fund is a green lobby that believes in global warming, and its "research" reflects its advocacy, not the scientific method.

The IPCC has also cited a study by British climatologist Nigel Arnell claiming that global warming could deplete water resources for as many as 4.5 billion people by the year 2085. But as our Anne Jolis reported in our European edition, the IPCC neglected to include Mr. Arnell's corollary finding, which is that global warming could also increase water resources for as many as six billion people.

The IPCC report made aggressive claims that "extreme weather-related events" had led to "rapidly rising costs." Never mind that the link between global warming and storms like Hurricane Katrina remains tenuous at best. More astonishing (or, maybe, not so astonishing) is that the IPCC again based its assertion on a single study that was not peer-reviewed. In fact, nobody can reliably establish a quantifiable connection between global warming and increased disaster-related costs. In Holland, there's even a minor uproar over the report's claim that 55% of the country is below sea level. It's 26%.

It seems that every day throws up another scandal, now that a new critical eye is being cast over the IPCC's formulations and prognostications. The latest is the misrepresentations over alleged African crop failures as a consequence of global warming. And in this case, once again, the malodorous fingers of the Chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri are all over it.

Ever more question marks have been raised in recent weeks over the reputations of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri. But the latest example to emerge is arguably the most bizarre and scandalous of all. It centres on a very specific scare story which was included in the IPCC's 2007 report, although it was completely at odds with the scientific evidence – including that produced by the British expert in charge of the relevant section of the report. Even more tellingly, however, this particular claim has repeatedly been championed by Dr Pachauri himself.

Only last week Dr Pachauri was specifically denying that the appearance of this claim in two IPCC reports, including one of which he was the editor, was an error. Yet it has now come to light that the IPCC, ignoring the evidence of its own experts, deliberately published the claim for propaganda purposes.

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for "carbon credits". As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, "agricultural production will more than double by 2020". Yet it was Agoumi's claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC's Working Group II report in 2007. . . .

However, the story then got worse when Dr Pachauri himself came to edit and co-author the IPCC's Synthesis Report (for which the IPCC paid his Delhi-based Teri institute, out of the £400,000 allocated for its production). Not only did Pachauri's version again give prominence to Agoumi's 50 per cent figure, but he himself has repeated the claim on numerous occasions since, in articles, interviews and speeches –such as the one he gave to a climate summit in Potsdam last September, where he boasted he was speaking "in the voice of the world's scientific community".

Only last week, in an interview available on YouTube, Dr Pachauri was asked about errors in the IPCC's 2007 report and his own Synthesis Report, with specific reference to the loss of North African crops. His reply was that – aside from the prediction that the IPCC has now had to disown, that Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035 – the reports contained "no errors". Passages such as those on African crops were "not errors and we are absolutely certain that what we have said over that can be substantiated".

In the wake of all the other recent scandals, "Africa-gate" may be the most damaging of all, because of the involvement of Dr Pachauri himself. Not only is the reputation of the IPCC in tatters, but that of its chairman appears irreperably damaged. Yet the world's politicians cannot afford to see him resign because, if he goes, the whole sham edifice they have sworn by would come tumbling down.

As Rich Lowry reports at least one climate scientist formerly active in the IPCC sees a very disturbing pattern emerging:

These aren't random errors. As former head of the IPCC, the British scientist Robert Watson notes, "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact."

Former global warming trumpeter scientists are being forced to take a far more muted line, where their positions are much more nuanced and qualified.

In The Boston Globe, MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel marshals a new argument for fighting warming: "We do not have the luxury of waiting for scientific certainty, which will never come."

Ok, try this argument for size: "We will never have scientific certainty that man-caused global warming is a fact. But we ask you to support higher taxes, economic damage, and a lower standard of living because it might be true."

If this is the most forceful argument that can now be mounted, politically, a tombstone will have more life than global warming. It will now die the death of a thousand qualifications, which should have been the case all along.

Doug Wilson's Letter From America

The Earl of Greenback Trillions
Obama Nation Building

Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, February 12, 2010
First posted in Blog and Magblog

Time will tell if the Tea Party movement -- and other forms of less directed anger -- will rise to an actual peasants-with-pitchforks moment. I can only say what Tolkien once said in another context entirely -- one hopes.

In order for the peasants to actually make it over the castle walls, in pursuit of their patriotic desire to see if the Earl of Greenback Trillions will float in the moat, they have to be especially wary of . . . Republicans. I have seen more than one republicoid talking on the television, rubbing his hands gleefully, as though the Tea Party and the Republicans were natural allies. They are not at all. If this is an angry confrontation, and it is, the goal of which is to take away the hooch, it doesn't really matter if the Republicans are what we call the functional drunks and the Democrats are the face-down-in-the-gutter kind. In either case, the Johnny Walker Black is going down the sink, and in each instance the relevant drunk will try to get in the way, depending on whose bottle we are currently holding over the drain.

With this in mind, one of the best things that could happen would be for John McCain to lose to his primary challenger. Since the elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, the Democrats have been rattled and badly frightened. But we will not be well underway until the Republican establishment is terrified as well.

Advocacy Research

Snake Oil, Hypochondriac "Science"

Over the past week or so we have seen "experts" advocating a complete ban on tobacco in New Zealand within ten years. As an interim measure, they are calling for the inevitable increase in taxes on tobacco, and much more radical, a ban on smoking in public places such as beaches and pretty much anywhere outdoors where other human beings are present or might be present some time in the future. These "experts" are actually "taxpayer funded health officials" aka bureaucrats. These health bureaucrats are very experienced and skilled at getting the government to swing in behind their causes.

They are politically savvy. They have tapped successfully into the "care for children" cause. They are now tapping into the "Maori problem" rubric, since plenty of Maori smoke. They know that if the smoking issue can be framed as one which disadvantages and hurts Maori, it will leapfrog in public traction.

The call from the Auckland Regional Public Health Service for a range of tough measures comes in its submission to the Maori affairs select committee's forthcoming inquiry into the tobacco industry and the effects of tobacco use on Maori.

Hopes are high among public health campaigners that the inquiry will re-frame debate on tobacco and make it easier for the Government to adopt radical measures to make New Zealand smokefree within 10 years.

The Auckland service wants the law banning indoor smoking at workplaces extended to playgrounds, outdoor eating areas, beaches, the area outside buildings, cars when a child aged less than 16 is present, public transport stops and pedestrian malls.

Pity the poor worker who has now been banned from work when it comes to smoking. Now he or she will be banned from smoking outside as well, if these erstwhile human controllers have their way.

These measures would greatly reduce smoking opportunities for workers and bar patrons, who have been forced outside or onto the street by the smokefree environments law.

The regional public health service is funded by the Auckland, Waitemata and Counties Manukau district health boards and the Health Ministry. The Waitemata DHB has already endorsed its approach.

Like all bureaucrats they believe in redemption through laws and rules and regulations. The Prime Minister hastily dismissed them as taking one nanny-state-step-too-far. But one of the reasons these folk are so effective is that they think long term. No doubt they are well aware that they are unlikely to make much progress under the current administration (apart from the tax increases, since the government is rapaciously going after every dollar it can expropriate with a modicum of political acceptance). But, they will be figuring that when Labour finally comes back into government, their banning of tobacco will be up front and centre. The inconceivable will become the inevitable.

Local authorities are already on the kick.

The call to ban smoking in many public places comes as an increasing number of local authorities are putting up signs asking people not to smoke in areas used by children, such as playgrounds, sports fields and beaches.

Auckland University banned outdoor smoking at its campuses from last month, adding to the statutory indoor ban.

Behind all this lies junk science. We are learning that there are few things more dangerous than advocacy science--which is where "science" becomes handmaiden to political causes. In fact whenever this has happened it has become downright dangerous. In the past eighty years advocacy "science" in the West has, well, advocated eugenics, compulsory sterilisation, forced population control, substituting food for bio-fuel production, and the compulsory expropriation of private property to combat "global warming". The damage inflicted by advocacy "science" has been considerable, indirectly causing untold human suffering, degradation, and death. All, we note, with the intent of "saving" humanity.

Rob Lyons details the junk science that lies behind the anti-tobacco crusade.

Advocacy research: what a filthy habit
New research suggesting ‘third-hand smoke’ is a major health hazard was spurred by policy, not hard science.
Rob Lyons

First we were told - quite reasonably - that smoking was bad for us. It increases the risk of a variety of diseases, particularly lung cancer and respiratory illnesses, as well as making heart disease and stroke more likely. No one who smokes regularly can be unaware that there is a fair chance that their habit will shorten their life, even if the immediate prospect of a stimulating drag is more enticing than a few extra years of old age. We’ve all got to die of something, at some point; it’s up to us to make a calculation about whether that nicotine hit is worth it.

Advocacy science could not stop at providing hard evidence of the health damage and dangers of smoking. Because governments now assert control over our bodies through public health systems, it was inevitable that the issue would spill over into laws, rules, and regulations over tobacco use. If the rapacious government was going to pay for treating tobacco related diseases, then would move to control its use.

But these things are relentless. Soon the advocacy moved on to second-hand smoke.

More controversial was the suggestion that breathing other people’s smoke might be dangerous, too. Okay, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if those nights of old spent steeped in a nicotine-tinged fug in the Dog and Duck didn’t exactly do one’s lungs the world of good. The smell certainly lingered on your clothes. Even then, anyone who remembers boozers in the past, or the top-deck of the bus on a winter’s evening, will know that the modern, well-ventilated, pre-smoking ban pub was a much less smoky environment. By rather dubiously extrapolating from some small personal risks, based on smoking studies that probably bear little relevance to twenty-first century Western workplaces, official estimates concluded that about 1,000 people per year die from ‘secondhand’ smoke in the UK. In July 2007, a ban on smoking in public places came into force in England. The tobacco lovers were turfed out on to the street.

Junk science just tore out another artery from the body politic.

But now we are moving from "secondhand" smoke to "thirdhand" smoke. The "thirdhand" iteration by junk science is critical to getting tobacco banned altogether.

Old tobacco smoke does more than simply make a room smell stale - it can leave cancer-causing toxins behind, Reuters reported today.

Researchers in the US found cancer-causing agents called tobacco-specific nitrosamines stick to a variety of surfaces, where they can get into dust or be picked up on the fingers.

Children and infants are the most likely to pick them up, the team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California reported.

"These findings raise concerns about exposures to the tobacco smoke residue that has been recently dubbed `third-hand smoke'," the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As Lyons writes, we are now moving from the stupid to the unbelievably stupid--except he puts it more colourfully:

Now, claim researchers, you don’t even need to breathe smoke in, you simply need to be in contact with smokers or touch surfaces that have been in contact with their smoke to be at risk. If the dodgy research that produced the smoking ban was bullshit, the claims made for third-hand smoking are in a whole new category: ‘beyond bullshit’.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California found that carcinogens from cigarettes linger in the environment on clothing, floors and walls long after smoke has dispersed. Worse, their shock-horror discovery was that some of these substances can then go on to react with these surfaces to produce more carcinogens. Mohamad Sleiman, the lead researcher, told Scientific American: ‘Our findings indicate that third-hand smoke represents an unappreciated health hazard.’

This is why smoking is being banned in public places by local councils in New Zealand where children might be remotely present, let alone parks with playgrounds where they are usually present in abundance.

This is not cold, hard-headed investigation; this is ‘advocacy research’. Those involved have decided that tobacco smoke is not just a threat to smokers but to everyone, particularly children. Unsurprisingly, their work then confirms this prejudice. Winickoff is asked in that Scientific American article why the label ‘third-hand smoke’ was chosen. ‘This study points to the need for every smoker to try to quit. That’s the only way to completely protect their children… Really, I think that what this says is that we need to have sympathy for smokers and help them quit smoking… [And also] that the introduction of this concept will lead to more smoke-free spaces in… public.’

So, now children are exposed to deadly agents if they crawl on a carpet or sit on a swing proximate to where a cigarette has been smoked. Really. Yes, really! Yeah, right. Science has become a nonsense--as it always does when it moves from research to advocacy.

The mere presence of carcinogens does not mean that we will suffer from cancer. In fact, we are bombarded with carcinogens every day. Our food is packed with them, particularly naturally occurring substances that plants produce to ward off pests. If the microscopic quantities of carcinogens in our carpets and on our clothes left by tobacco smoke are going to be treated as a potential health threat, that makes every cup of coffee a caffeinated, cancer-causing cocktail, too.

If the chemicals in cigarette smoke were really so deadly as Winickoff and Glantz imply, it would be simply inconceivable that people could live - as many do for 50 years or more - while smoking a packet of cigarettes or more every day. It usually takes decades of effort directly polluting the body with tobacco smoke before someone becomes seriously ill because of it. The idea that a whiff of smoke in the air, or a thin coat of smoky tar on the walls, can put us in mortal danger is just laughable. Or, at least, it would be if the health authorities weren’t so keen to pounce upon each new study as a justification for ever-greater restrictions on lighting up.

All advocacy "science" posits a bogey-man, a monster hiding in the cupboard about to spring out and devour. It dovetails nicely with the prevailing pessimistic world-view which sees demons everywhere, threatening to overpower and destroy us all. But junk science it is--and junk science it will remain. As Lyons puts it, junk science is nothing more nor less than institutional hypochondria. When junk science teams up with nannying bureaucrats we really do have a demon from the ancient world.

Anti-smoking is hypochondria-by-proxy, an obsessive compulsive disorder whose sufferers demand that the normal pastimes of others leave them under attack. Contrary to what Winickoff says, it is anti-smoking campaigners and our health guardians who need help - to quit their disgusting, illiberal, interfering, busybody habit once and for all.

North Korea: Expect the Worst

Dwarves in Caverns

Christopher Hitchens has recently written a piece arguing that North Korea is much worse than most people think. It was published in Slate magazine and consisted of a review of a book recently published entitled, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, by B.R.Myers--which Hitchens calls "electrifying".

The thesis is that North Korea has to be regarded as "pathologically right"--which resembles far more National Socialism than communism, references to which have been dropped by the North Korean government long ago.

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

The implication is that the regime is not uttering "posturing" or "framing" statements of crass hyperbole when it speaks of making war: it means exactly what it says.

These conclusions of his, in a finely argued and brilliantly written book, carry the worrisome implication that the propaganda of the regime may actually mean exactly what it says, which in turn would mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with it are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that.

Hitchens concludes with these graphic observations:

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.

But this is what proves Myers right. Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Full and Final Settlement

Let each one do just as he has purposed in his heart; not grudgingly or under compulsion; for God loves a cheerful giver.
II Corinthians 9:7

In New Zealand we have a Treaty Grievance "industry". Its fundamental animus is the unlawful historical expropriation by the Crown of Maori land and assets usually as an outcome of the Maori wars. Its more recent and increasingly pervasive animus is a revisionist recasting of the Treaty of Waitangi, where it is claimed that Maori are co-partners with the government in ruling the nation.

This “Treaty partner” concept has been used to argue for Maori ownership in some proportional sense of all economic activity, resources, assets, and wealth in New Zealand. In general the governing apparatus in this country has accepted the revisionist recasting and has proceeded to agree to dolling out large amounts to Maori to reflect their rightful status as “Treaty partners”.

To some it is considered a thing most passing strange that the government and the country would accept so readily and easily the idea that any government of the day would dole out millions upon millions of taxpayer expropriations to a newly discovered category of beneficiary—that is, to so-called Treaty partners. But it is not strange at all.
Expropriation and redistribution is what almost all people in the country believe is the central role and competence of government—so settling Treaty grievances is business as usual, as is the ever expanding claims and newly discovered rights of Maori. It's simply the way the country works now, as it has done for the past eighty years.

From time to time the Crown and Maori will talk about “full and final settlements”. The idea is that the Crown will have settled once-and-for-all an historical grievance, so that no further claims can be made. Both parties would apparently agree—but a few years later, the Oliver Twist syndrome appears, and those who had once agreed that they had received “full and final settlement” are back, begging for—sorry, demanding—more.

An absolute classic of the syndrome was the “special deal” given to Maori business interests when the government was crafting its ludicrous Emissions Trading Scheme. Now under this nonsense, all economic activity and enterprise is to be taxed for producing carbon dioxide—that wonderful, life giving, green producing gas. But under the legislation Maori business interests are to receive special treatment, exemptions, and supports because when the respective tribes signed “full and final” settlements they had no idea that one day the businesses and wealth established as a result of settlement of grievances would be subject to a carbon dioxide tax. So, Oliver's bowl was whipped out, and more settlements were made.

Of course the country will just shrug and move on. Everybody knows that that's just what governments do. Expropriation and redistribution. Good on the Maori for being clever enough to push themselves to the front of the line.

But this reality remains: anyone who continually has to make atonement and provide restitution for wrongs is enslaved. Consequently, the nation is progressively becoming enslaved atoning and making restitution, atoning and making restitution, and so on. It is precisely for this reason that Christians are free—well, more accurately, they are bonded slaves to Him who has made them free indeed. Compared to our former state, His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

Our Gospel is that Christ has provided full and final settlement for all our sin. He has made atonement, and He has sat down at the right hand of God the Father. It is complete, full, final, and perfect. We are free. We no longer need to make repeated sacrifices or atonements for our daily sins. This is a wonderful release, since the longer we walk with the Christ in the light of His law, the more we realise the depths and pervasiveness of our sinfulness and its former robbery of God. If the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed. How liberating for us is that cry from the Cross—it is finished! It is over. It is done. Full and final settlement for all the sin of all My people.

The implications are all consuming and extensive. They touch every part of our lives and daily existence. Amongst many other things, because of His full and final settlement we Christians are unmoved by the pseudo-guilt which the modern world would foist upon citizens and subjects. The mantra of needing to “pay up” and “settle” no longer has a hold over us. The pseudo-guilt of Oliver's bowl, offering us a way of atoning for past and present wrongs no longer has any impact or hold over our souls. Consequently, we are freed to give generously and cheerfully to those genuinely in need, rather than to those who have made begging a career and lifestyle choice.

Giving in a vain attempt to make atonement, or giving to make things right is compulsion, which is to be enslaved. For there is no end to it. Giving out of joy at being set free is a celebration of His full and final settlement for all our sin. Is it surprising, then, that the Scriptures declare that God loves and rejoices with the cheerful giver?

Letter From America

Eat What Is Set Before You
Food
By Peter J. Leithart
First published in Credenda Agenda, Thursday, 11 February 2010

Food is hugely important in the Bible. Adam’s first sin was a violation of a food law, Israel worshiped at a table, the altar, we have a meal at the center of our worship and life, and we’re looking ahead to the marriage supper of the lamb. What to eat or not eat was an important issue in the Old Testament. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 describe and list animals, birds, and fish that could and could not be eaten. Food rules became especially important during and after the Maccabean Revolt, when some Jews were martyred for refusing to eat unclean food.

By the time of the first century A.D., many Jews were consumed (!) with the issue of food, so much so that Jacob Neusner has called Pharisaism primarily a table fellowship movement. Eating unclean foods defiled; eating with unwashed hands defiled; eating untithed food defiled; eating with Gentiles, and even eating with less-than-pure Jews defiled. Pharisees wanted to avoid defilement, and that meant paying a lot of attention to food.

It’s not surprising that Jesus’ meal habits and teaching on food, and especially the freedom of the apostles in eating with Gentiles, caused a ruckus in the first century. Jesus was not challenging some marginal issue when, as Mark says, he said that defilement comes from the heart not through the mouth, and when he declared all foods clean (Mark 7:1-23). Peter was acting like a typical Jew when he first objected to the Lord’s command to “kill and eat” (Acts 10-11), and was, unfortunately, still acting as a Jew when he refused to sit down with Gentiles (Galatians 2).

Over against the Pharisaical obsession with purity of food and table fellowship, Paul insisted that foods do not commend us to God or distance us from Him (1 Corinthians 8:8), and in Christ believers are as free from rules of food and drink as they are from rules concerning new moons and Sabbaths (Colossians 2:16). The Old Covenant, Hebrews tells us, gave regulations concerning food and drink, regulations for the flesh until the time of reformation that Jesus brings (Hebrews 9:10).

This doesn’t mean that food becomes less important in the New Covenant. We still are under “food laws,” but the shape and telos of those food laws have been transformed. We are required to eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood if we want to have life (John 6). Our table companions still matter, and they matter a lot. But instead of Pharisaical exclusion, Jesus commands a generous expansion of hospitality. We are to invite the impure and outcasts to our tables, strangers (Matthew 25:38) and those who cannot pay us back with reciprocal hospitality (Luke 7:9-15).

Does it matter what we eat? Paul addresses that question too. In 1 Corinthians, he addresses the question of meat sacrificed to idols. Priests in ancient pagan temples, like the priests in the temple in Jerusalem, slaughtered animals and burned portions on altars in sacrifice. Some of the meat, however, was left over and offered for sale in the meat market. In a city like Corinth, in fact, most of the available meat had come from animals that had been offered to idols, and in the Corinthians church there were some former idolaters who were hesitant to eat this meat. Accustomed to worshiping idols, they worried that eating meat from a sacrifice would defile them. And Paul agrees: If one eats thinking he will be defiled, his conscience actually is defiled (1 Corinthians 8:7).

Paul knows better, and so do many of the Corinthians. He knows that there is only one God, and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 8:5-6). He knows that idols are nothing (v. 4). Because of this knowledge, his conscience is strong. One commentator says that for Paul conscience is a kind of scanner that sets off a warning bell or blinking lights when a person comes close to doing something he considers immoral. Someone with a lot of knowledge has a “strong” conscience; he knows that there are no idols, and that all things come from God, and so his scope of action is quite wide. Few things set off the warning bell, because “all things are lawful” (1 Corinthians 10:23). Other Christians – who are fully brothers and children of God for whom Christ died (1 Corinthians 8:6, 11) – do not have this knowledge. They fear that idols might exist, and so their freedom to act is more limited. Bells and whistles go off every time they pass a shrine or a meat market.

Knowledge varies, but knowledge is not what matters here. Paul begins 1 Corinthians 8 by contrasting love and knowledge. He knows that the two are not absolutely opposed, but they are opposed when it comes to food. In this area, and in many others no doubt, Paul says that knowledge is radically subordinated to love. A person with much knowledge, and a strong conscience, ought not act on that knowledge. Rather, he should follow Paul’s apostolic example and act out of concern for his brother. If eating meat encourages a less knowledgeable brother to violate his conscience, then Paul will refuse to eat meat. He’d rather use his freedom in Christ to become a vegetarian than to harm a brother for whom Christ died, and so “sin against Christ” Himself (1 Corinthians 8:11-12).

A few chapters later, Paul returns to this question. While he exhorts the Corinthians not to participate in idolatrous worship, he says that eating meat from the meat market is lawful. “Eat anything that is sold in the meat market without asking questions for conscience’ sake” (10:25), he says, and adds that even when Christians eat at the home of an unbeliever they should “eat anything that is set before you without asking questions for conscience’ sake” (10:27). Again, however, the rule of love molds the expression of this freedom. If eating sacrificial meat is offensive to a brother, Paul says, don’t eat, for the sake of his conscience (10:28-29). In short, “let no one seek his own good, but that of his neighbor” (10:24).

There are many other important questions concerning food, but the New Testament lays out a clear set of basics. We are to share our food with the hungry (Isaiah 58; Matthew 25). We are to manifest Christ’s own hospitality at our tables. What we eat does not make us either impure or holy (1 Corinthians 8:8). We are to eat what is set before us, giving thanks to God, the one who is the Lord of the earth and all it contains. Whatever else we think about and do with food, whatever other habits we cultivate and whatever decisions we make, all have to be consistent with and extensions of these apostolic directives.

Coming to a Backyard Near You

Greece is an Early Warning Sign

The past three weeks have seen national strikes in Greece. The problem is pretty simple. For years Greece as a country has been living way beyond its means, with the government spending what it did not have, effectively putting off the day of reckoning by accessing EU grants and subsidies and by running ever larger fiscal deficits.

Now the subsidies have dried up and Greece has been told by the EU to get its fiscal house in order. Government spending has to be cut; taxes have to rise. Upshot: thousands of state employees take to the streets in protest. The adjustment will be painful. EU rules require that fiscal deficits are no more than 3 percent of GDP. Greece's fiscal deficit is running at 13%.

If Greece stays in the EU, it has not choice but to go through the mother of all fiscal crunches. The political pressure might be too much. Since the EU nations (primarily Germany) have ruled out paying for Greece's folly, the only alternative would be for Greece to leave the EU, could well cause the common currency to unravel completely.

What we see playing out in Greece, however, is a trailer for the horror flick that will eventually make its way around the entire Western world. Niall Ferguson, writing in the Financial Times, explains why.

A Greek crisis is coming to America
Niall Ferguson




It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.

There is of course a distinctive feature to the eurozone crisis. Because of the way the European Monetary Union was designed, there is in fact no mechanism for a bail-out of the Greek government by the European Union, other member states or the European Central Bank (articles 123 and 125 of the Lisbon treaty). . . . There is not even a mechanism for Greece to leave the eurozone.

That leaves just three possibilities: one of the most excruciating fiscal squeezes in modern European history – reducing the deficit from 13 per cent to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within just three years; outright default on all or part of the Greek government’s debt; or . . . some kind of bail-out led by Berlin. Because none of these options is very appealing, and because any decision about Greece will have implications for Portugal, Spain and possibly others, it may take much horse-trading before one can be reached.

Yet the idiosyncrasies of the eurozone should not distract us from the general nature of the fiscal crisis that is now afflicting most western economies. Call it the fractal geometry of debt: the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes.

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never. . . .

Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted – as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.

But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. . . .

The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue – from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.

Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

The writer is a contributing editor of the FT and author of ‘The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World‘

We in New Zealand will not escape. The government here too is trying to spend its way out of our trouble. The cost will come soon enough. We expect that interest rates will rise sharply in the next twelve months. This will have very little to do with the Reserve Bank (which will continue to find plenty of reasons not to tighten monetary policy). It will have everything to do with interest rates rising around the world as the reckless deficit spending splurge by Western governments (including our own) needs to be paid for by savings.

The intense competition for investment savings to fund Western government debts can be expected to pull interest rates upward, everywhere. New Zealand government, corporate, and household sectors will likely find the cost of their debt rising until it hurts. Then things could get interesting.

Irony Indeed

God Moves in a Mysterious Way, His Wonders to Perform

Forty years ago some Westerners were involved in trying to smuggle Bibles into China. Christians going there on business or other reasons would sometimes take a few extra Bibles in their luggage and try to make contact with Chinese Christians, leaving the Bibles with them.

Such activity now seems bizarre. Really? You mean people actually did that? Well, yes they did. But times change. How they change.

In May, 2008 a new publishing facility was opened in Nanjing. It is run by Amity Printing Company and it prints Bibles. Only Bibles. It is the largest printing and publishing company of Bibles in the world. It has made Nanjing the Bible printing capital of the world.

Amity has the capacity to produce 12 million Bibles a year, or 23 every minute. The vast majority of these Bibles go to Christians and Christian churches in mainland China.

According to an article in Time in December 2007, published shortly before the new Amity facility opened, the Bible is now China's new bestseller.

About 80% of the Bibles Amity produces are for domestic use, with the remainder going to Christians in Africa, Central Europe and other Asian nations. A poll early this year by East China Normal University in Shanghai of 4,500 Chinese found that 31.4% considered themselves religious, a proportion that suggests 300 million Chinese believers; of the religious respondents, Christians represented 12%, or 40 million nationwide. Demand has grown to the point that the foundation plans to open a new, 515,000-square-foot (48,000 sq. m.) printing plant next year, which will allow Amity to turn out more than a million books a month. It's thought to be one of the largest Bible production facilities in the world.

To all intents and purposes, the Bible is now freely available in China; most copies and editions are being published by an officially sanctioned organization: Amity.

Under Chinese law, the Bibles Amity prints can be distributed only through officially sanctioned churches. But in recent years it has become easier for house churches to procure Bibles, often buying them through registered churches. Some Bibles are even appearing in bookstores, despite lacking the registration numbers required of any printed work. Jean-Paul Wiest, an expert on Chinese Catholicism who teaches at the Beijing Center, says his students have no problems getting religious materials. "Bibles are very widely available," he says.

As the ancient prophet said, they shall come to Zion from the ends of the earth.

The Twilight Years, Part IV

A Nutty Idea Still Believed

In this series of posts we are blogging on Richard Overy's new book, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), in which he documents the pervasive pessimistic outlook that gripped Britain for over twenty years. People everywhere in the twenties and thirties believed that Western civilization was going to come to an end, and Britain, the beacon of light for civilization itself, was going to disappear, Atlantis-like, sunk in the ceaseless repetitive tides of history.

What were the signs of the coming collapse of civilization? Clearly, the pointless and senseless World War was one sign. Civilization was crumbing from within as the West went to war with itself. But another sign that the end was nigh was the prophesied death and expected collapse of the capitalist system. The recitation of the last rites over capitalism came most frequently and stridently from the intellectual socialists of the day: particularly Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw.
Underlying the conviction that capitalism was about to collapse lay the particular eschatology of Karl Marx which argued that the internal and inherent contradictions within any capitalist system would ultimately lead to its destruction.

Marx's jeremiad was grounded in his nutty view of the labour theory of value. The idea was that the value (and therefore the correct or just price) of any particular good was the cost of the labour to produce it in the first place. But capitalists wanted to make a profit over and above the actual costs of production, which to Marx was theft. Profit was exploitation in Marx's economic lexicon—specifically the exploitation of labour. By charging more for a good than it cost to produce, labour was kept in a state of impoverishment. They could never afford to buy goods and services produced under the capitalist system: they could not afford them because they were priced above what they earned. Moreover, the more machines (that is, capital) employed, and the less labour, the poorer workers became, while the richer became richer. In the end, the workers would rise up and violently destroy capitalism and the civilization upon which it had been built.

Jay Richards “runs the numbers” on Marx's nutty labour theory of value:

Of course, labor often adds value to a produce, as long as that labor creates what someone wants. But you can't define economic value in terms of labor. Someone can dig a ditch in a field until his hands are bloody and raw, and then fill it back in again, without making anything that anyone wants. In that case there is a lot of labor, but no economic value . . . .

This may have been Marx's biggest blunder. I say this because Marx's prophecy that capitalism would destroy itself hinged on his labor theory of value. According to Marx, when a factory owner hires a worker to build a chair and then sells the chair for more than it cost to produce, the owner has taken more than the good is actually worth. He's taken its “surplus value”. Such profit is basically theft, since, on Marx's terms, the chair is worth exactly what it cost to produce it. So the factory owner has gotten more than it's really worth. This is why Marx speaks of capitalists “exploiting” workers, even if the workers have chosen to work for the salary they are given.

Without his definition of value, however, Marx's argument collapses. The workers have received what they agreed to. The factory owner has wisely combined their labor with his resources. He then markets and sells the chairs for more than they cost to produce but not more than others will freely pay. He's rewarded with profit for his entrepreneurial effort. There's no injustice here, no exploitation, no contradiction that will inevitably lead to class warfare and revolution.” Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem, (New York: Harper/Collins Publishers, 2009), pp. 66,67

All predictions and rife expectations of the collapse of the economic order in the UK during the Inter-War years were grounded to one extent or another upon Marx's labour theory of value.

The labour theory of value is still subscribed to widely in our modern world. One common manifestation is the ideological resistance to government privatising or selling off state owned businesses or services. Out trots the labour theory of value. The introduction of the profit motivation of the capitalist into something like managing prisons, or schools, or utilities will result in exploitation, not only of staff, but also of consumers of those services. They would need to pay an exploitative price we are told. And, if the consumers were actually willing to pay the price, it only serves to “prove” that labour is being exploited and underpaid. The workers should have been paid more in the first place. Strip profit out, and businesses can be run far more efficiently, and staff get much higher rewards. And consumers get told what they are to buy, when, how, and for what price. The long term result: everyone is "employed", but there is nothing attractive or useful to buy. Meanwhile, the bread-lines lengthen by the day. The "black market" flourishes. And so it came to pass in the Soviet Union, the great experimental workshop of Marxist economics.

But, according to Marx's labour theory of value, capitalism is morally bankrupt, is inherently diseased, and will collapse and die—just like any other organism that has a cancer eating away at its vitals. This notion that capitalism was decaying from within became widely accepted in Britain in the Inter-War years. Capitalism was grounded in exploitation, theft, and selfishness—and as such it would drive the world into anarchy and barbarism because, in the end, the exploited working classes would not tolerate it. These ideas gained much wider credence as a result of the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed, giving them an apparent empirical weight.

What solution did the economists offer? There were some who argued for the introduction of a communist economic system as quickly as possible. The majority of economists, however, argued for a mixed economy, where the worst excesses of capitalism could be curbed and controlled by central planning and by targeted State intervention.

The most popular solution suggested for the crisis which was capable of uniting individuals across the political divide, was planning. The belief that a planned economy was the necessary successor to the free market was widespread across Europe, from Stalin's Soviet Union to Mussolini's Italy. For the British left, planning was something which would make the tradition from capitalism to socialism possible and secure a measure of social justice without the need for a violent revolutionary politics. In her reflection on the diseases of the capitalist system broadcast by the BBC in 1932 Beatrice Webb pointed out that 'planlessness' was in her view 'the most intractable disease' suffered by contemporary capitalism, but also the one illness that capitalism could do nothing to cure.” (Overy, p.76,77. Emphasis, ours.)

Her solution was to turn to the public service (that is, government bureaucracies, to “plan the life of the community”. The idea was that capitalists could not do the planning: the conflict of interest was impossible to overcome. But “public servants” would be disinterested, and therefore, be able to plan for the greater good of the whole public.

Belief in the efficacy of planning came to be shared by both progressives and classical-liberals. In the case of the latter, whilst being fundamentally sympathetic to market forces and economic individualism, they argued that the worst excesses of capitalism and its inner contradictions could be assuaged by rational planning.

The mixed-economy model is the one which emerged post-World War Two. In part, the planned and state directed war-economy set Britain up for moving in this direction. We need to be clear, however, that this “solution” was promulgated out of deep and widely held beliefs that the economic model of minimal state interference was fatally flawed and immoral. Neither belief was correct. The mixed-economy model exists as the solution to a falsely diagnosed problem.

The alleged internal contradictions of an economy built upon universal private ownership of both capital and labour were fabrications. The crisis was a fiction. In classical economic systems based upon the rectitude and sovereignty of property rights, the Great Depression was a normal, expected correction. Government interference and overriding of sovereign property rights only served to make it many times worse.

The “solutions” which were finally adopted to a non-existent problem, and which are with us to this day, have wreaked a terrible cost, which is rising progressively as the decades pass. The parallels in our day of the reaction to the credit crisis of 2007-8 are eerie. In this most recent case, the “crisis” was amplified way and above a normal market correction by the distortions and excesses spawned by decades of government largesse, or planning. Once again, there have been many prophecies and pronouncements of the end of free-market economics. But the reality is that free-market, sovereign property economics died a long long time ago. But, as before, the proffered solution is more centralisation of government power to plan, tax, regulate, direct, and control how people deploy their own sovereign capital and labour. As always in such cases the cure is many, many times worse than the purported disease.

When pagan societies become fearful, dreading the future, believing that the end is nigh they are usually not disappointed. But the damage comes not from their fears but from their misdirected and ill conceived diagnoses and solutions. In effect, things do become much worse, but not for the reasons they expected. They become worse because their so-called solutions carry extremely damaging unintended consequences.

The consequences of the mixed planned-economy under which we now labour are ubiquitous and relentless: they have pushed us into a miasma of increasingly despotic smothering nannying government. They have also sufficiently undermined and therefore distorted the price setting power of the free consumer so that when inevitable corrections occur, they become so bad and so severe that entire collapse is a serious possibility--as the recent global credit crisis demonstrates.

It is deeply ironic that the “solution” to a non-existent, incorrectly diagnosed problem in the thirties led to the mixed-economy model throughout the West, which is really creeping state ownership and direction of an increasingly centrally planned economy. In the long run, this makes economic decrepitude, if not outright collapse inevitable.

When gilded idols are finally broken, maybe people will be “foolish” enough to return to the God of their fathers and to the sovereign rights of property ownership, which He commands.

Not a Pretty Sight

The Solipsism of Objectivism's Patron Saint

Ayn Rand was an idolater. She ostensibly worshipped the cold steel of Aristotelian logic. Actually, she worshipped herself, as the living avatar of logic and truth. As happens with all idol worship, she become like the god she adored. In Rand's case, it was not a pretty sight.

In the latest edition of The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels reviews Anne C Heller's biography of Rand, entitled Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Rand, we are told is now coming back into vogue. We provide a shortened version of the review.

Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do.

Rand believed all people to be possessed of equal rights, but she found relations of equality with others insupportable. Though she could be charming, it was not something she could keep up for long. She was deeply ungrateful to those who had helped her and many of her friendships ended in acrimony. . . .

A passionate hater of religion, Rand founded a cult around her own person, complete with rituals of excommunication; a passionate believer in rationality and logic, she was incapable of seeing the contradictions in her own work. She was a rationalist who was not entirely rational; she could not distinguish between rationalism and rationality. Of narrow aesthetic sympathies, she laid down the law in matters of artistic judgment like a panjandrum; a believer in honesty, she was adept at self-deception and special pleading. I have rarely read a biography of a writer I should have cared so little to meet. . . .

She did, on occasion, put things very well. She was often shrewd, seeing the dangers of statism very clearly, when few others did. Rand’s statement that racism is the lowest and most primitive form of collectivism is a striking apothegm. Likewise, she was among the first to appreciate that the notion of collective rights (a mirror image of racial discrimination) would “disintegrate a country into an institutionalized civil war of pressure groups, each fighting for legislative favors and special privileges at the expense of one another.” This could hardly be expressed better . . . .

Unfortunately, Rand’s vices as a writer are never very far from her virtues. Not only does the above passage suggest that people are to be judged mainly by reference to their brain power, a very narrow and inhumane criterion, but she continues: “A genius is a genius … and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race.” This grates because one knows that she not only divides the world into creators and parasites with no intermediate category, but also because she never expresses any sympathy or understanding for the weak or ill, always referring to them with disdain at best and eugenicist hatred at worst. A moron is to be blamed for his own lack of intelligence. . . .

Rand’s hardness of heart was not only confined to the page. There is a chilling account in the biography of how she treated her long-suffering husband, Frank O’Connor, when he suffered from dementia:

She nagged at him continually, to onlookers’ distress. “Don’t humor him,” she [said]. “Make him try to remember.” She insisted that his mental lapses were “psycho-epistemological,” and she gave him long, grueling lessons in how to think and remember. She assigned him papers on aspects of his mental functioning, which he was entirely unable to write.

This downright cruelty (as well as downright stupidity) derived from her overvaluation of supposed intellectual consistency in the conduct of daily life. She believed that it was more important to adhere to a principle than to behave well. Among her many bad ideas was the compatibility of all human desiderata, and that any conflict of a man’s interests was merely the consequence of his not having thought through his situation sufficiently, and applied a fundamental and indubitable principle correctly and consistently. For Rand, there was no ambiguity in the world: if it is true that man has free will and is responsible for his conduct, it cannot also be that there is a condition such as dementia that robs a man of his capacity for choice. Hence her husband’s lapses were wilful and deliberate, to be corrected by Randian brainwashing. This is authentically horrible.

Rand’s crude dichotomizing is evident throughout her work. Her rejection of compassion is Nietzschean in tone, seeing in pity merely an attempt by the weak and ill-favored to overcome the power and influence of the strong and healthy. But this is an elementary error. From the correct psychological insight that the allegedly compassionate sometimes use the existence of the weak and needy as a tool for their own social ascent and attainment of power—whole political parties, in almost every country, are founded upon this principle—it does not in the least follow that there are no people in need of assistance or that compassion for them is ipso facto bogus and a cover for the will to power. From the insight that government assistance to the unfortunate increases the number of the unfortunate, often imprisoning them in their misfortune, it does not follow in the least that it is right for human beings to be utterly callous and indifferent to the fate of the unfortunate. Human sympathy is, as Adam Smith himself pointed out, implanted by nature in the human breast, but Ayn Rand, to a greater extent even than Pharaoh, hardened her heart and expunged sympathy from it utterly. . . .

Humanity, according to Rand, is divided into heroes, creators, and geniuses on the one hand, and weaklings, parasites, and the feeble-minded on the other. Needless to say, the latter outnumber the former by a very wide margin, but only the former are truly human in the full sense of the word. . . .

In some respects, Rand is almost Soviet. Her habit of remaking the past in accordance with her wishes or needs of the present is most striking. The original edition of Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to Nathaniel Branden, a young man whom Rand deemed to be in apostolic intellectual succession to her until he displayed his irrational tendencies by refusing to continue a sexual liaison with her (a refusal she considered irrational despite their very considerable age difference). The dedication was removed from subsequent editions in the way that Trotsky and others were removed from Soviet photographs once they had fallen from favor. Perhaps the most significant sentence in Ms. Heller’s biography is this from the preface: “Because I am not an advocate for Rand’s ideas, I was denied access to the Ayn Rand Papers at the Ayn Rand Institute …” . . . .

Like any Stalinist despot, Ayn Rand considered herself to be totally unprecedented and quite without parallel. Like Kim Il-Sung and Howard Roark, she sprang into the world with her philosophical genius fully formed, not needing any support from any other thinker, despite the fact that (in fact) no element of her thought was entirely original. . . .

In her expository writings, Rand’s style resembles that of Stalin. It is more catechism than argument, and bores into you in the manner of a drill. She has a habit of quoting herself as independent verification of what she says; reading her is like being cornered at a party by a man, intelligent but dull, who is determined to prove to you that right is on his side in the property dispute upon which he is now engaged and will omit no detail.

Her unequivocal admiration bordering on worship of industrialization and the size of human construction as a mark of progress is profoundly Stalinist. Where Stalinist iconography would plant a giant chimney belching black smoke, Randian iconography would plant a skyscraper. (At the end of The Fountainhead, Roark receives a commission to build the tallest skyscraper in New York, its height being the guarantor of its moral grandeur. According to this scale of values, the Burj Dubai would be man’s crowning achievement so far.) Industrialists are to Rand what Stakhanovites were to Stalin: Both saw nature as an enemy, something to be beaten into submission. One doesn’t have to be an adherent of the Gaia hypothesis to know where this hatred of nature led. . . .

Rand’s fanaticism is Russian; philosophically, she resembles Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, but without his more attractive qualities. Nathaniel Branden was still Rand’s sexual partner and intellectual eunuch when he wrote, with her complete nihil obstat, the following:

"There is no greater self-delusion than to imagine that one can render unto reason that which is reason’s and unto faith that which is faith’s. Faith cannot be circumscribed or delimited; to surrender one’s consciousness by an inch is to surrender one’s consciousness in total. Either reason is absolute to a mind or it is not—and if it is not, there is no place to draw the line, no barrier faith cannot cross, no part of one’s life faith cannot invade: one remains rational until and unless one’s feelings decree otherwise."

One doesn’t know whether to remark more on the arrogance, self-delusion, or sheer ignorance of this. According to the passage above, the man who was probably the greatest scientist of all time, Sir Isaac Newton, was not rational. Ayn Rand was the only rational being in history. Of course, she was so intolerable that her sister, visiting her in the United States after decades of separation, couldn’t wait to return to the Soviet Union. After reading Ms. Heller’s book, I sympathise with her sister. Rand was the Chernyshevsky of individualism.

No Way Out

Greed and Covetousness Spawn a Giant Kleptocracy

We were driving home yesterday listening to the brouhaha on Larry Williams over John Key's roadmap speech on tax changes and other things. It appears that the speech satisfied no-one, and virtually every sectional interest was buzzing like a nest of angry wasps. Now this on its own is a possible indicator of it being a "steady as she goes", middle of the road, minor inconvenience rather than a substantial reform. One suspects that Roger Douglas was right when he called it an exercise in rearranging the deck chair on the Titanic.

But, in any event, it provoked us to ruminate once again on the trap in which we now find ourselves. An effective trap design has critters entering through a funnel that progressively narrows down to a much smaller mouth. Once fully in the trap, the animal or fish cannot squeeze itself back out. As we look back on the past one hundred years of Western democratic government its course has been to squeeze itself into an ever narrowing funnel, that has now become an inescapable trap.

In an excellent article recently published in City Journal entitled, The Grasping Hand Peter Sloterdijk argues that pillage of productive citizens has become the essence of Western democratic nations. And like the progressively narrowing funnel, it gets harder and harder to sustain. But, like the trapped animals, very little can be done to escape the trap. There is no politically sustainable way to back out.

The modern democratic state that emerged in the nineteenth century throughout Europe was either classically liberal or anarchistic. Both, Sloterdijk contends, looked to a minimal, withering state.

But the political history of the twentieth century, and not just in its totalitarian extremes, proved unkind to both classical liberalism and anarchism. The modern democratic state gradually transformed into the debtor state, within the space of a century metastasizing into a colossal monster—one that breathes and spits out money.

These words have been written as rising national debt levels and fiscal deficits are reaching unprecedented levels throughout the West.

This metamorphosis has resulted, above all, from a prodigious enlargement of the tax base—most notably, with the introduction of the progressive income tax. This tax is the functional equivalent of socialist expropriation. It offers the remarkable advantage of being annually renewable—at least, in the case of those it has not bled dry the previous year. (To appreciate the current tolerance of well-off citizens, recall that when the very first income tax was levied in England, at the rate of 5 percent, Queen Victoria worried that it might have exceeded acceptable limits. Since that day, we have become accustomed to the fact that a handful of productive citizens provide more than half of national income-tax revenues.)

When this levy is combined with a long list of other fees and taxes, which target consumers most of all, this is the surprising result: each year, modern states claim half the economic proceeds of their productive classes and pass them on to tax collectors, and yet these productive classes do not attempt to remedy their situation with the most obvious reaction: an antitax civil rebellion. This submissiveness is a political tour de force that would have made a king’s finance minister swoon.

If the colonists revolted in the American colonies over tax, why don't the now grossly overtaxed productive citizens revolt in Western democracies? After all, the fiscal imposition upon the modern productive citizen is far, far greater than what the American colonists were asked to pay. The reason lies in the justification for modern taxation--which is a claim that the modern taxation rort is actually just. In the case of the American colonies, taxes went to King George. The poor(er) being taxed to sustain the very rich. Clearly unjust. In modern democracies, taxes go (ostensibly) to the "poor". Clearly just--or so the productive classes are told. The argument fallaciously appeals to guilt and pity, but is effective nonetheless. The appeal to guilt rests on an argument which asserts that the productive classes are making money at the expense of the poor. The poor remain poor because the productive classes are exploiting them and making money of them and thereby keeping them poor. The appeal to pity powerfully resonates in people predisposed toward compassion. For these reasons, modern democrats willingly accept the no-way-out trap in which Western democracies find themselves.

With these considerations in mind, we can see that the question that many European observers are asking during the current economic crisis—“Does capitalism have a future?”—is the wrong one. In fact, we do not live in a capitalist system but under a form of semi-socialism that Europeans tactfully refer to as a “social market economy.” The grasping hand of government releases its takings mainly for the ostensible public interest, funding Sisyphean tasks in the name of “social justice.”

Government in modern Western democracies has evolved into a giant kleptocracy. The State steals from (the productive) few to bestow upon (non-producing) others. The numbers of beneficiaries are now larger than those actually producing the wealth. Politically, it has become virtually impossible to reverse this. Whilst politicians can get elected on a platform of tax reduction no politician will now be electable if he or she runs on a platform of "benefit" reduction. Some politicians have attempted to do this by stealth--running on something else, but then attempting to reduce benefits when in office. They have kept their powder dry on the hustings, but once elected, have attempted to do the unthinkable. In all almost all cases it has been political suicide. Rule number one for survival in government is "never, ever reduce a benefit".

Can this situtation continue? No, clearly not. Sloterdijk suggests that massive social unrest could well lie ahead.

In an earlier day, the rich lived at the expense of the poor, directly and unequivocally; in a modern economy, unproductive citizens increasingly live at the expense of productive ones—though in an equivocal way, since they are told, and believe, that they are disadvantaged and deserve more still. Today, in fact, a good half of the population of every modern nation is made up of people with little or no income, who are exempt from taxes and live, to a large extent, off the other half of the population, which pays taxes. If such a situation were to be radicalized, it could give rise to massive social conflict. The eminently plausible free-market thesis of exploitation by the unproductive would then have prevailed over the much less promising socialist thesis of the exploitation of labor by capital. This reversal would imply the coming of a post-democratic age.

It is impossible to back out of the trap. The Left believes (when pressed) that dependants will voluntarily take themselves off welfare lists and entitlements, preferring in the long run to work and join the productive classes. Such naivety is breathtaking, rather than charming. How many more centuries of contrary empirical evidence does the Left need?

Voluntary rejecting of welfarism will be manifest in places only where people come to have a deep conviction that theft and covetousness is immoral and wicked, in the first place. Secondly, a society will not voluntarily reject welfarism until believes that the present redistributive taxation system is nothing other than institutionalised covetousness and theft and, therefore, intrinsically unjust, regardless of the "legality" of the edifice. A majority of citizens in the West believing thus will not emerge without another Great Awakening. Lacking that, the situation can only get progressively worse.

At present, the main danger to the future of the system involves the growing indebtedness of states intoxicated by Keynesianism. Discreetly and ineluctably, we are heading toward a situation in which debtors will once again dispossess their creditors—as has so often happened in the history of taxation, from the era of the pharaohs to the monetary reforms of the twentieth century. What is new is the gargantuan scale of public debt. Mortgaging, insolvency, monetary reform, or inflation—no matter, the next great expropriations are under way. Today, the state’s grasping hand even reaches into the pockets of generations unborn. We have already written the title of the next chapter of our history: “The pillage of the future by the present.”