Abu Hatem أبو حاتم

Fouad Ajami, an author which I do not agree with much to say the least, has a very good article in today’s Wall Street Journal about how the crowds and high popularity of Barack Obama show that something is sick with our society.  Ajami rightly claims that such messianism is characteristic of third world societies and corrupt oppressed backwards peoples.  To add to Ajami’s argument, I will invoke the great Edmund Burke.  Burke knew that the modern cliche refrain to “get out the vote,” and that all voting was good was absolutely meaningless rubbish.  Instead Burke said that a society that was overly interested in politics is a sick society, because it is one that finds government as the solution to all of its problems and which is not content with itself seeking radical change.  Burke knew that moderately low voting rates were good for society because society was thus less politicized.

Anyway, here is Ajami’s argument:

There is something odd — and dare I say novel — in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, “Crowds and Power” (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when “distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.” These crowds, in the tens of thousands, who have been turning out for the Democratic standard-bearer in St. Louis and Denver and Portland, are a measure of American distress…

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd — the street, we call it — in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness. When I came into my own, in the late 1950s and ’60s, those hopes were invested in the Egyptian Gamal Abdul Nasser. He faltered, and broke the hearts of generations of Arabs. But the faith in the Awaited One lives on, and it would forever circle the Arab world looking for the next redeemer.

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession — its imagination.

From Elias Canetti again: “But the crowd, as such, disintegrates. It has a presentiment of this and fears it. . . . Only the growth of the crowd prevents those who belong to it from creeping back under their private burdens.”

I think only the most closed minded won’t take wisdom wherever they find it.  Ajami is undoubtedly right about Arabs and their failed societies no matter how wrong he was on other issues (the Iraq war and Bush’s reelection for instance).  But Obama is not the cause of this American societal illness, but a sympton of the disease.  The cause is 8 years of Bush.

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Judge Andrew Napolitano rips both Barack Obama and John McCain in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.  A strict constitutionalist, and a free marketeer, he rips into both for supporting the bailout like a judge reading a guilty verdict:

Mr. Obama is hardly alone in his expansive view of legitimate government. During the past month, Sen. John McCain (who, like Sen. Obama, voted in favor of the $700 billion bank bailout) has been advocating that $300 billion be spent to pay the monthly mortgage payments of those in danger of foreclosure. The federal government is legally powerless to do that, as well…

There is no power in the Constitution for the federal government to enter the marketplace since, when it does, it will favor itself over its competition. The Contracts Clause (the states cannot interfere with private contracts, like mortgages), the Takings Clause (no government can take away property, like real estate or shares of stock, without paying a fair market value for it and putting it to a public use), and the Due Process Clause (no government can take away a right or obligation, like collecting or paying a debt, or enforcing a contract, without a fair trial) together mandate a free market, regulated only to keep it fair and competitive.

It is clear that the Framers wrote a Constitution as a result of which contracts would be enforced, risk would be real, choices would be free and have consequences, and private property would be sacrosanct.

The $700 billion bailout of large banks that Congress recently enacted runs afoul of virtually all these constitutional principles. It directly benefits a few, not everyone. We already know that the favored banks that received cash from taxpayers have used it to retire their own debt. It is private welfare. It violates the principle of equal protection: Why help Bank of America and not Lehman Brothers? It permits federal ownership of assets or debt that puts the government at odds with others in the free market. It permits the government to tilt the playing field to favor its patrons (like J.P. Morgan Chase, in which it has invested taxpayer dollars) and to disfavor those who compete with its patrons (like the perfectly lawful hedge funds which will not have the taxpayers relieve their debts).

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I may cause a stir on this point, but I thought I would put my two cents in after Obama wrote that the constitution was “fundamentally flawed” because it did not include income redistribution.  Of course, that is rubbish.  But anyway, there are a few things I think we did get wrong in our legal system and our constitution that I would go back and change.
Civil law makes much more sense for conservatives and libertarians to support than common law.  If you really think about it, civil law is much less court-based.  Common law, in every country it has been tried, has been rife with judicial activism and policymaking from the bench.  Jefferson didn’t even like the concept of judicial review itself, what would he think of today’s judicial activism?  Conservatives on the Court like Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito still use the court for judicial activism.  This is what libertarian constitutional law professor Cass Sunstein writes of frequently, and other advocates of judicial minimalism.  Rather than being “income redistribution” as Obama said - the fundamental flaw of the framers in writing the constitution was that they should have more clearly and explicitly defined the role of the Court and adopted a civil law system.  It is not very conservative to throw the baby out with the bathwater and change, but in this case I do think it was necessary to gradually adopt a foreign law system.  The other major problem with the constitution, is that the 14th Amendment should have been more explicitly written such that the Bill of Rights was incorporated to the states.  I know some will chide me saying that this gives more power to the federal government - but it doesn’t.  These rights are natural inalienable rights, and for some states to even have the possibility to ignore them is a major problem.  Of course the states should also be the fundamental enforcers of such rights.  It is a moot point anyway since (1) most of the Bill of Rights has been incorporated, and (2) every state Bill of Rights protects the natural inalienable rights codified in the federal constitution.

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As an antiwar foreign policy voter at heart, at first I thought John McCain was worse than Obama.  Even though Obama’s advisers have talked up bombing Iran, or that Obama wants Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or that Obama wants to expand the Afghanistan war, I thought that the man was simply much better than bellicose McCain.  Especially in regards to ending the Iraq war and diplomacy as a new approach, Obama remains to be much better.

But the past month has had me more and more disgusted with Obama.  First came his utterly disgusting rhetoric during the third debate with McCain wherein he affirmed a radically pro-abortion message that extended to even partial birth abortions.  Then came Joe the Plumber and Obama’s extreme Welfare Statism.  Then came the fact that the democrats are going to perhaps get a fillibuster-proof majority and hence be able to reverse the Reagan revolution.  Then came the fact that Obama wants to completely shift American the left - par a European socialist model such as Gordon Brown - as a reponse to this financial crisis.

But then came yesterday and Obama’s extremely radical views on the constitution.  Obama wants the constitution not to be a document protecting “negative liberties,” but instead a radical redistributionist document.

Obama is heading us into European socialism, no not Marxist-Lenninism, but instead the more tame European social democracy models of Labour in the UK, the SPD in Germany, or the Socialist Party of France.  An Obama presidency is a disasterous turn to the left.

Thus, I cannot say for sure that Obama will be better than McCain.  I can only say that in general - both will be equally bad.  The American Conservative had some good articles today encouraging people just to NOT VOTE.  I don’t know if I will take that advice personally, but the sheer sadness and depression both Obama and McCain induce on lovers of peace, order, and liberty is too much to bear.  Maybe the only solution is the hopless non-vote in federal elections.

Pat Buchanan today describes the disasters of an Obama administration one by one:

1. Swift amnesty for 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and a drive to make them citizens and register them, as in the Bill Clinton years. This will mean that Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona will soon move out of reach for GOP presidential candidates, as has California.
2. Border security will go on the backburner, and America will have a virtual open border with a Mexico of 110 million.
3. Taxes will be raised on the top 5 percent of wage-earners, who now carry 60 percent of the U.S. income tax burden, and tens of millions of checks will be sent out to the 40 percent of wage-earners who pay no federal income tax. Like the man said, redistribute the wealth, spread it around.
4. Social Security taxes will be raised on the most successful among us, and capital gains taxes will be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. The Bush tax cuts will be repealed, and death taxes reimposed.
5. Two or three more liberal activists of the Ruth Bader Ginsberg-John Paul Stevens stripe will be named to the Supreme Court. U.S. district and appellate courts will be stacked with “progressives.”
6. Special protections for homosexuals will be written into all civil rights laws, and gays and lesbians in the military will be invited to come out of the closet. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dead.
7. The homosexual marriages that state judges have forced California, Massachusetts and Connecticut to recognize, an Obama Congress or Obama court will require all 50 states to recognize.
8. A “Freedom of Choice Act” nullifying all state restrictions on abortions will be enacted. America will become the most pro-abortion nation on earth.
9. Affirmative action — hiring and promotions based on race, sex and sexual orientation until specified quotas are reached — will be rigorously enforced throughout the U.S. government and private sector.
10. Universal health insurance will be enacted, covering legal and illegal immigrants, providing another powerful magnet for the world to come to America, if necessary by breaching her borders.
11. A federal bailout of states and municipalities to keep state and local governments spending up could come in December or early next year.
12. The first trillion-dollar deficit will be run in the first year of an Obama presidency. It will be the first of many.

Welcome to Obamaland!

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I still think Sarah Palin had the potential to be the heroine of the American right.  McCain’s handlers schooled her in neoconservative interventionist foreign policy and made her out into a far-right attack dog.  She also obviously, as an Alaskan governor, had no experience in foreign policy, and her interview with Katie Couric brought about her downfall.But you know what, there is still much good in Sarah Palin.  Palin is a staunch social conservative but at the same time very libertarian.  In Alaska she fought against an ordinance which closed bars, even though the church she attended banned drinking.  She cut taxes, and she really was a reformer.  Who has the guts to run against the incumbent governor of their own party?  Her husband isn’t even a republican anyway.

I think the way they rolled Sarah Palin out was ridiculous.  She had no clue she was being picked until a day before, and had a week “crash course” in American national politics.  She obviously was not ready for this job, there is no question.  The McCain campaign banned her from talking to the media and basically destroyed any potential she had in her.  She was actually a pretty centrist governor in Alaska in many ways, and had a 80% approval rating.  The left painted her out to be from the radical right, and if Palin was allowed to talk to the media more and reach out to the center she would have been a more Obama-like “post-partisan” figure.  But there is just no question that now was not her time.  Maybe if she had known about running for a few months earlier.  Maybe if she had been governor longer.  There is no question she had national aspirations, but it was rolled out in the worst sort of way.  She also had to run with the worst republican in the Senate - Senator John McCain - the liberal big-spending tax-hiking bellicose warmonger.  That was certainly not a plus.

After this election, I hope Sarah Palin remains on the scene, because despite her role now as the chief McCain surrogate, when she gets to speak her mind she will be far more effective.  I hope she doesn’t turn out to be another Dan Quayle.  I would certainly not vote for Sarah Palin if she was on the ballot today due to her Lieberman-McCain foreign policy, but I would vote for the Sarah Palin of a few months ago for statewide office Most people hate Sarah Palin not because of her conservative views, or even her obvious ignorance on the Katie Couric interview, but because of their urbanite elitism.  I have lived my life in predominately rural areas, and even in my visits to the Middle East I visit predominately rural areas.

I have always been astounded at what Ibn Khaldun calls the strong differential between rural and urban life.There is an urbanite elitism in the United States, and almost every country, wherein the people of the cities see residents of rural areas as backwards, old fashioned, reactionaries.  Even though urbanites, if you ask me, live in the fast-paced nihilism of the tensions of existence (shout out to Blaise Pascal).In his great novel, Maria Chapdelaine, French writer Louis Hemon illustrates traditional French Canadian society in Quebec as compared to his homeland of France.  Hemon realizes that although traditional societies are superstitious, they also cling to religion, culture, family, community, and neighborly virtue.  Hemon, through the novel, bewails how far his homeland of France has fallen from the classical French ideal, and how the French Revolution and urbanization had basically destroyed all cultural roots of modern France.

Urbanites with their fad fashions, materialism, and fast-paced life style, miss out on a lot.  Just because one lives in a big city, or one has a lot of money, does not mean one is better than another.  Hence the chief vice of urbanite life is arrogance.  You find this in any city, whether Washington D.C. and New York or Damascus.  City dwellers look at the rural traditionalists as backwards.  And in many ways, rural traditionalists are more superstitious and ignorant than urbanites.  Yet beneath those prejudicial glances, traditional societies have so much that the postmodern “city mentality” is lacking.Of course, there is nothing wrong with cities or city dwellers.  But this is the main reason behind the vitriolic aversion to Sarah Palin.  Most people are not against Sarah Palin because of her disgusting foreign policy views, like me.  They hate her because she is like the average joe.  People get mad at Americans for wanting their presidents to be in touch with the heartland.  But if you think about it, what good is an elitist arrogant snob?

Sarah Palin reminds me of average people I run into every single day.  Average Joe’s all around the country - any country - which I have seen time and time again.  Average Joe’s whether in the United States or Syria may be slightly xenophobic and nativist.  They may be slightly arrogant, and they may often fall into the vices of racial discrimination.  I know this in both countries.  Yet average Joe’s have just as many flaws as city dwelling elitists who may not be nativist, xenophobic, or racist but who are often elitist, arrogant, greedy, and militantly prejudicial to ruralites.

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In last week’s Christian Science Monitor a great op-ed by economist Steven Horowitz refuting the socialist/Keynesian myth that the free market caused this crisis:

 To call the housing and credit crisis a failure of the free market or the product of unregulated greed is to overlook the myriad government regulations, policies, and political pronouncements that have both reduced the freedom of this market and led self-interested actors to produce disastrous consequences, often unintentionally. The two biggest players in the mortgage market are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Until they were nationalized recently, they were “government sponsored enterprises” (GSEs). That meant they enjoyed all the profit potential of a private business, but carried none of the risk. How would you run your business differently if you knew the government would bail you out or if Congress bullied you into adopting certain business strategies? Would you be acting greedily – or just rationally?

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Some doom and gloom from the great Arthur Laffer (of the Laffer Curve fame) in today’sWall Street Journal.  It describes how both Reagan and Clinton governed economically from the right and ushered in an era of growth, while Bush II governed economically from the left and hence created this entire crisis.  Laffer explains how the corporate socialist President Bush and his plan to nationalize the banks is bringing us to the end of prosperity.  As Ibn Khaldun said, the beginning of the end of civilization is when government transgresses upon property rights, which is the essence of socialism.Laffer writes:

 No one likes to see people lose their homes when housing prices fall and they can’t afford to pay their mortgages; nor does any one of us enjoy watching banks go belly-up for making subprime loans without enough equity. But the taxpayers had nothing to do with either side of the mortgage transaction. If the house’s value had appreciated, believe you me the overleveraged homeowner and the overly aggressive bank would never have shared their gain with taxpayers. Housing price declines and their consequences are signals to the market to stop building so many houses, pure and simple. But here’s the rub. Now enter the government and the prospects of a kinder and gentler economy. To alleviate the obvious hardships to both homeowners and banks, the government commits to buy mortgages and inject capital into banks, which on the face of it seems like a very nice thing to do. But unfortunately in this world there is no tooth fairy. And the government doesn’t create anything; it just redistributes. Whenever the government bails someone out of trouble, they always put someone into trouble, plus of course a toll for the troll. Every $100 billion in bailout requires at least $130 billion in taxes, where the $30 billion extra is the cost of getting government involved. 

If you don’t believe me, just watch how Congress and Barney Frank run the banks. If you thought they did a bad job running the post office, Amtrak, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the military, just wait till you see what they’ll do with Wall Street. Some 14 months ago, the projected deficit for the 2008 fiscal year was about 0.6% of GDP. With the $170 billion stimulus package last March, the add-ons to housing and agriculture bills, and the slowdown in tax receipts, the deficit for 2008 actually came in at 3.2% of GDP, with the 2009 deficit projected at 3.8% of GDP. And this is just the beginning.

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The great antiwar conservative Andrew Bacevich lays out his case that American empire is crumbling in today’s LA Times:

Bush’s response to 9/11 reflected this widespread sense of assurance and entitlement. The Bush doctrine of preventive war, the president’s impatient, with-us-or-against-us attitude, his disdain for international opinion and international law, his confidence that American military power, once unleashed, would quickly bring evildoers to justice or justice to evildoers — and above all his conviction that the people of the Islamic world thirsted for freedom American-style — all of these made explicit precepts that had been germinating during the post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. Bush was merely expressing in a crude vernacular — “Bring ‘em on!” — ideas and attitudes to which the majority of Americans already subscribed.

Today those ideas and attitudes have become the equivalent of an oversized SUV: They no longer sell. Not least among Bush’s errors in judgment has been his failure to appreciate just how ephemeral the Age of Triumphalism would prove to be.

Having discovered that being the new Rome entails burdens as well as privileges, Americans have opted out. Although Bush’s wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, Joe the Plumber’s interest in liberating the greater Middle East or courting a showdown even with a figure as vile as Kim Jong Il is close to zero. Americans are no longer in the mood to chase after distant evildoers. They care about jobs, affordable energy, decent healthcare and restoring their 401(k) accounts. Fix what’s broken abroad? No thanks; not until we’ve fixed what’s broken at home. This defines the new normalcy.

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CNN did a “fact check” the other day attempting to see if Obama was a “socialist,” as McCain claimed.  They actually did a good job.  CNN said the word “socialist” means government ownership of property, central planning of the economy, etc.  Hence, CNN said that if you would call Obama a socialist you could only do so if you believed McCain was one too, and that the U.S. government has already engaged in socialism.

Yes.  This is true.  And this is what many true free marketeers have been saying for years.  We are going the socialist path of such failed states as Sweeden, France, etc.  Call it “social democracy” or “socialism lite,” but the Soviet Union was not the only state that had a socialist economy.  The socialist party still controls the United Kingdom to this very day - the Labour party originated as a non-Marxist socialist party and to this day calls itself socialist and “unashamed” in its party platform.  Of course modern Third Way Labour or New Labour is much more free market than ever before.

When Britain experimented with socialism post-World War II they destroyed their economy.  This is because socialism is based in the ideals of force and power, instead of cooperation.  The best case against socialism is a moral one.  Any system which does not recognize the God-given rights of private property and the economic freedom such private property entails, is an immoral system disrespectful of human dignity.

With McCain and Obama both voting for the corporate bailout of huge banks and other corporations, they have shown their socialist gravitas. And to quote the great Ludwig von Mises, there is a huge difference from a society which recognizes the right to private property (the gaurdian of every other right), and those which recognize central planning:

Capitalism means free enterprise, sovereignty of the consumers in economic matters, and sovereignty of the voters in political matters. Socialism means full government control of every sphere of the individuals life and the unrestricted supremacy of the government in its capacity as central board of production management.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism: is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

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Says Yaron Brook:

Any belief Greenspan ever had in truly free markets was abandoned long ago. While Greenspan long ago wrote in favor of a truly free market in banking, including the gold standard that such markets always adopt, he then proceeded to work for two decades as leader and chief advocate of the Federal Reserve, which continually inflates the money supply and manipulates interest rates. Advocates of free banking understand that when the government inflates the currency, it artificially increases prices and causes booms in certain sectors of the economy, followed by inevitable busts. But not only did Greenspan lead the inflation behind the .com bubble and the real estate boom, he blamed the market for their treacherous collapses. Greenspan should have recognized that what he wrote in 1966 of the boom preceding the 1929 crash applied here: ‘The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market–triggering a fantastic speculative boom.’ Instead, he superficially blamed ‘infectious greed.’

Should it be any shock that Greenspan now blames the free market for today’s meltdown–rather than the Fed’s policies, which fueled an inflationary housing boom, which rewarded reckless lenders and borrowers from Wall Street to Main Street? Greenspan didn’t mention the word ‘inflation’ once in his testimony.  Whatever Greenspan’s economic philosophy is, it is not anything resembling a free market.

Of course true capitalists support free banking and hence a gold standard.

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