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The News from Kisbacs

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Slower still than Slovakia . . .


I just read a Cato dispatch by Marian Tupy stating that the nation of Slovakia (of former Checko- fame) has voted to privatize a good third of its retirement social security system. (Tupy, whom I've had the opportunity to meet, was born in Slovakia.)

Two things about this:

First, Slovakia is a nation with a strong tradition of state support for citizens in their retirement, ideas about economic liberty are far less advanced there than in the U.S., and by any measure, the transition costs of such a change will be much higher there than in Western countries. Still, they've conjured up the political will to pull off such an important measure.

Second, their plan to privatize is both more aggressive than President Bush's (he only wanted to privatize 1/3 of 1/2 of the U.S.'s social security system and failed to push even this through a Republican-controlled Congress) and more intelligent. Under Bush's plan, none of the privatization effort would ever have gone to reducing the eventual costs of the transition. Under the Slovakian version, fully a third would be. To wit:

Social security contributions in Slovakia amount to 28.75% of gross wages. Workers can now put 9% into their personal retirement accounts and 9% goes to the old system. The balance covers other types of insurance or administrative costs.


. . . Read this entire article

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Three more Irans?


The New York Times gets my vote for capturing the understatement of the week. To wit:

On Saturday, President Pervez Musharraf told Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns that the Jan. 13 strike "must not be repeated."

I admit to having at first not grasped the gravity of our (the United States') rocket attack on a Pakistani building last week. In case you haven't either, let me put it in the starkest terms: we purposefully carried out an attack on one of our allies' soil without their say-so and killed (at last count) 13 of their civilians, including women and children.

If you still can't fathom why this was a terrible mistake, read my post below. I think fellow blogger Vache Folle says it better than I can.

In the 1950's-1970's, in Iran, the U.S. and Britain helped support a dictator who so kept a lid on his people's democratic urges for so long that the country eventually exploded into horrific revolution.

In Saudi Arabia, we are supporting an oligarchy that has kept the lid on its people's democratic urges for so long that they are turning to Wahabbiite clerics for answers. Many predict the monarchy's days are numbered.

In Pakistan, . . . not only are we supporting a dictator, but we are bombing his people. Say what you will of our intentions, this is the way the U.S.'s activities are percieved in that country. (Free registration required for foregoing link.)

Assuming we pull out of Iraq before that nation's government has full control (i.e., anytime in the next 90 years), we may be setting the stage for it to go all fundy on us as well, thus making conditions ripe for three more fundamentalist revolutions in the Middle East on par with that in Iran.

Only in Bin Ladin's wildest dreams. And he's hardly had to lift a finger since 9/11.


. . . Read this entire article

Friday, January 20, 2006

What's good for the goose. . .


The Vache Folle said the following in a recent post about our missile strike on terrorists in Pakistan. I thought it was worth quoting.

Let’s say the government of Pakistan suspects that some bad guys, suspected terrorists, are holed up in a motel in Tampa. Let’s say that the government of Pakistan blows up the motel and kills some of the bad guys along with some of the rest of the motel’s guests who are not suspected of anything by anyone. That would be OK, right? We are allies, after all, and collateral damage just can’t be helped if you want to get those terrorists. Is there a flaw in my moral reasoning?
Thanks Vache Folle. You are a mad cow, a mad, anarchist cow, and I'm totally groovin' on that.

(And in case you're stumped by his rhetorical final question, the answer is no - there is no flaw in his reasoning. Not, that is, if you think the U.S.'s strike into Pakistani territory was justified.)


. . . Read this entire article

Workers of the world, . . . disjoint!


China has been racked by waves of peasant revolts over the last two years. The ostensible reason is "anger over land confiscations in which, farmers allege, village or county officials took money from business developers in return for favorable deals."

Beijing has responded with a concerted effort to crack down on corruption in China. The Washington Post Online offers this explanation of the situation:

As China moves from socialism toward a market economy, local party officials have adopted economic growth as their main goal, creating a de facto alliance with private businessmen. In the shared race for profits, opportunities for corruption have become numerous.

I actually don't think the Washington Post is wrong here. Except to call the situation a "shared race for profits." When a bureaucrat profits, it's by definition exploitative. When a businessman profits, it's because somebody bought his product.

* * *

All this brings out mixed feelings for me. Of course, corruption is also one of the principle things that Eastern Europeans complain about as their governments transitioned from socialist to free-market economies. Is this corruption unavoidable? Is it simply true that every time the state handles privatization and is moving from a situation of total to one of limited power that bureaucrats will consume huge amounts of the surplus on their own ends?

The sickest thing about situations of retreating government power (e.g. privatizations) is that the government runs them. And yet the resultant bumbling, corruption, and inefficiencies often breed as much resentment of capitalism as the government-run system did of the government.

Witness the World Socialist Web Site's claims that the peasant revolts are a result of "Beijing’s free market policies," which are "opening up deep social fissures and provoking social unrest."


. . . Read this entire article

Saturday, January 14, 2006

British Patriotism

The difference between patriotism in the U.S. and abroad?

Here are some observations by de Toqueville that - amazingly - still hold true today. In my opinion, at least. I being admittedly no great observer of all things Anglia.

If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “there is not its equal in the world.” If I applaud the freedom that its inhabitants enjoy, he answers: “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark on the purity of morals that distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has witnessed the corruption that prevails in other nations, would be astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.

Such is not the case with the English. An Englishman calmly enjoys the real or imaginary advantages which, in his opinion, his country possesses. If he grants nothing to other nations, neither does he solicit anything for his own. The censure of foreigners does not affect him, and their praise hardly flatters him; his position with regard to the rest of the world is one of disdainful and ignorant reserve: his pride requires no sustenance; it nourishes itself. It is remarkable that two nations so recently sprung from the same stock should be so opposite to each other in their manner of feeling and conversing.

Many thanks to Crooked Timber for pointing this out.


. . . Read this entire article

Friday, January 13, 2006

A Stan of Their Own

My former Cato higher-up and living genius, Tom Palmer, is lecturing on liberty in Kurdistan, one of the many 'Stans you can't find on most maps. (But I found a map of its possible dimensions here.)

He's having Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Bastiat's The Law and What is Not Seen translated into Kurdish.

I think the Bastiat stuff is great (especially What is Not Seen, which sums up liberal economics as well as anyone else has in 200 years), but The Road to Serfdom, I find a little too dense to serve as a good political tract. Or even an intro- text to classical liberalism.

In any event, our hearts go out to Palmer for his important work.


. . . Read this entire article

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Atlantic gets chillier

Hooray! They're shooting Frenchmen into space! Oh. . . no I got that wrong? Frenchmen are launching things into space?


Rats.


The blog / website of the French liberal (libertarian) group Liberté Chérie notes continued development of the EU program Galileo , a network of satellites launched from France to "enhance" the capabilities of the United States' GPS location technology.

Don't be fooled, though: the "enhancements" are far from the latest example of trans-Atlantic amity and cooperation.

In terms of costs v. benefits, L.C. posits, the project is devoid of merit. GPS resolution would be improved only slightly - from the current 3 meters to close to 1 meter after the establishment of the French satellite network. What, asks the blogger Stéphanie, could then justify the expenditure of some 3 billion euros (apparently by some combination of France and the EU) in order to achieve such paltry results?

Her answer: France is shooting up rockets because the sky is falling on its alliance with the U.S.

GPS technology was made possible by the US military, and the world is still at our military's mercy for its use. If necessary, our generals could encrypt signals from GPS satellites in such a way as to make them accessible only to our forces.

France's "enhancement" of GPS, observes Stéphanie, is a (in her mind unnecessary) effort to have a failsafe in place in case the United States and France should ever part ways, a prospect that, if the Galileo program is any indicator, France seems to be taking more seriously.


. . . Read this entire article

Monday, January 09, 2006

Insta-nation . . . just add to water



Why reform a nation when you can build one?

We're centuries away from feudalism, but sovereignty over human beings is still tied to ownership of land. (Even if "ownership" is hardly the correct term for the control that a modern state exercises over an area of territory.)

This has led a number of visionary (read: imaginative) libertarians to propose something radical: build land where there was none and declare it free. Among their ranks, Patri Friedman of . . . well, the Friedmans.

The "land" that sea-steaders dream of resembles a system of interlocking oil platforms over open ocean. They propose to build a whole lot of it. And then live there.

How much will one o' them thar seastead units run yuh? Costs are conservatively placed at $400-450,000 per platform. So Friedman must really want him som freedom.

(I, of course, dare not call him a dreamer, as I consistently vote Libertarian for Congress and President. The chances of my wishes ever being fulfilled make Walden-on-an-oil-derrick seem totally attainable.)


. . . Read this entire article

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Vanishing Voices

Why do the corpses of languages smell so sweet?

My wife is a linguist. Among the more popular projects in her academic circles is the effort to catalogue and preserve dead or dying languages. Of which, it would seem, there are thousands.

In books like Nettle and Romanaine's Vanishing Voices, linguists alternately bemoan the death of languages and call for (surprise) government efforts to keep them afloat.

If you know me at all, you can probably see by now where I'm going with this. Though I'll admit to feeling the same sort of nostalgia that many linguists do (especially with languages like Istro-Romanian, spoken by about 500 Croatians I've got to pay a visit one day), I see no case for using government resources to keep a language alive.

After all, most folks are in favor of standardization of things like credit cards, systems of weights and measures, computer software, interchangeable automobile parts and the like. There are even efforts underway by many of the same linguists to create a standard language that everyone can speak (as though English weren't the proper one all along.)

So why is spontaneous standardization of language something that governments need to fight? (See this Catallarchy post by Patri Friedman (yes - relation) loosley on point.)

And let's not get things confused: a language's death does not mean the death of its people. Or even their culture (witness Ireland.) Or that people's written history. Or even the liturgical tradition in that language (witness Latin, Sanskrit and - until recently - Old Church Slavonic).

The speakers of Romanian on the Istrian penninsula have every right to be sad that their dialect will someday die (as it almost certainly will.) But tax others so that it will not? I'd draw the line before that.

* * *

I'll add this post script: monolithic, standardized government education may be largely to blame for the disappearance of small language communities. I'm sure that Russia (a very ethnically diverse country) provides a great example of this.

If we (or - say - Russians) were to be taxed in order to support programs to keep dying languages afloat, what better an example could we ask for of government breaking our legs, then handing us a crutch and demanding "see, where would you be but for that great crutch I just gave you!?"


. . . Read this entire article

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Real Aid to Africa

This is me resisting the urge to start this post with a joke about how many Somalians you can fit into X vanishingly small space.

Ahem . . .

I am not sold on the idea that aid to places like Sub Saharan Africa is as royally un-good as some libertarians claim. Still, I'm sympathetic to arguments such as those made by two of my former bosses, Chris Preble and Marian Tupy, in Reason Online this summer. They note:

The aid is ineffective because of the appalling way in which Africa is governed. In recent decades, of each dollar given to Africa in aid, 80 cents were stolen by corrupt leaders and transferred back into Western bank accounts. In total, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo estimated, "corrupt African leaders have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the [four] decades since independence." All that is left when these regimes eventually collapse is a massive public debt.

But this argument falls apart just as soon as we find un-corrupt African leaders. Or at least ones relatively so.

Preble and Tupy go on to argue that reducing trade barriers is a far more profitable way for the US to confer far greater aid to the developing world. I'll agree with them here too.

I do, however, think that there's much to be said for limited, wisely spent wealth transfers from rich Westerners to poorer people in the world. If the notion of welfare in the U.S. has any merit at all, where our "poor" almost all possess indoor plumbing and television sets, how much greater a thing is it to elevate someone from $1 to $5 per day in the third world? (And they're certainly more deserving than welfare payments to cattle, notes Sir Bob Geldorf - thanks to Marginal Revolution for the link.)

The New Zealand Herald recently took note of a success story in the former Soviet satellite of Mozambique. There, debt relief from the West was coupled with free market reform, and the result has been a decade of stunning growth (though I'd argue more from the free market reform than the debt relief.)

On an even more precision-guided note, I was recently introduced to Kiva.org, where one can make a contribtion (actually, an "investment") online, which turns into funds to loan venture capital to business people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

More free-market reform, reduced trade barries, and stuff like this and I don't know . . . I might have to think of jokes to replace the ones about Ethiopians and strong breezes.


. . . Read this entire article

Thursday, January 05, 2006

This just in from Kisbács

Our idea here is to assemble a team of bloggers to report on / discuss liberal issues abroad (and particularly in the developing world.) And by "liberal," I mean their definition of liberal: having to do with liberty.

So off we go.


. . . Read this entire article

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

The City of Kisbács



Kisbács is a bustling Transylvanian metropolis that substantially dwarfs its neighbor, Cluj-Napoca, in size, population, and economy. . .

Okay, not really. It's actually an insignificant, Romano-Hungarian hamlet just outside of Cluj and has a population of somewhere around 1,000.

It's located roughly under the little brown "X" on the map at the top of this page.

And it is the inspiration for the title of this blog. Why? Well, in addition to the fact that Andor hails from there, it is representative of so much of the world: utterly invisible to most Western eyes and absolutely brimming with potential. But hopeless to ever see its potential bear fruit because of stifling, ludicrous governance.

It's the symbol for a blog about liberty in the rest of the world. Liberty . . . for them too.

(As though we even had it here.)


. . . Read this entire article