Ron Paul: Lessons from Paris

Former US congressman and libertarian Ron Paul explains that the latest terror events in Paris partly represented a blowback from foreign policies.

From the Ron Paul Institute  (bold mine)

After the tragic shooting at a provocative magazine in Paris last week, I pointed out that given the foreign policy positions of France we must consider blowback as a factor. Those who do not understand blowback made the ridiculous claim that I was excusing the attack or even blaming the victims. Not at all, as I abhor the initiation of force. The police blaming victims when they search for the motive of a criminal.

The mainstream media immediately decided that the shooting was an attack on free speech. Many in the US preferred this version of “they hate us because we are free,” which is the claim that President Bush made after 9/11. They expressed solidarity with the French and vowed to fight for free speech. But have these people not noticed that the First Amendment is routinely violated by the US government? President Obama has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined to silence and imprison whistleblowers. Where are the protests? Where are protesters demanding the release of John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA use of waterboarding and other torture? The whistleblower went to prison while the torturers will not be prosecuted. No protests.

If Islamic extremism is on the rise, the US and French governments are at least partly to blame. The two Paris shooters had reportedly spent the summer in Syria fighting with the rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Assad. They were also said to have recruited young French Muslims to go to Syria and fight Assad. But France and the United States have spent nearly four years training and equipping foreign fighters to infiltrate Syria and overthrow Assad! In other words, when it comes to Syria, the two Paris killers were on “our” side. They may have even used French or US weapons while fighting in Syria.

Beginning with Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US and its allies have deliberately radicalized Muslim fighters in the hopes they would strictly fight those they are told to fight. We learned on 9/11 that sometimes they come back to fight us. The French learned the same thing last week. Will they make better decisions knowing the blowback from such risky foreign policy? It is unlikely because they refuse to consider blowback. They prefer to believe the fantasy that they attack us because they hate our freedoms, or that they cannot stand our free speech.

Perhaps one way to make us all more safe is for the US and its allies to stop supporting these extremists.

Another lesson from the attack is that the surveillance state that has arisen since 9/11 is very good at following, listening to, and harassing the rest of us but is not very good at stopping terrorists. We have learned that the two suspected attackers had long been under the watch of US and French intelligence services. They had reportedly been placed on the US no-fly list and at least one of them had actually been convicted in 2008 of trying to travel to Iraq to fight against the US occupation. According to CNN, the two suspects traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaeda. So they were individuals known to have direct terrorist associations. How many red flags is it necessary to set off before action is taken? How long did US and French intelligence know about them and do nothing, and why?

Foreign policy actions have consequences. The aggressive foreign policies of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have radicalized thousands and have made us less safe. Blowback is real whether some want to recognize it or not. There are no guarantees of security, but only a policy of non-intervention can reduce the risk of another attack.

Deglobalization: Chinese State owned firms to sever ties with US consulting firms

Geopolitical strains have begun to spillover into the economic realm.

The Chinese government orders her state owned companies to cut ties with US consulting firms

From Reuters:

China has told its state-owned enterprises to sever links with American consulting firms just days after the United States charged five Chinese military officers with hacking U.S. companies, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

China's action, which targets companies like McKinsey & Company and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), stems from fears the firms are providing trade secrets to the U.S. government, the FT reported, citing unnamed sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

These are seeds of protectionism. If there will be more tit-for-tat responses, protectionist policies will spread and swell to cover many economic areas. This implies deglobalization or a potential significant slowdown of global trade and finance or capital flows. Importantly, protectionism increases the risk of a military showdown. 

Very bullish no?

Along with the French, Chinese Police to Patrol Paris

From the Guardian

Paris police are to draft in reinforcements from China to help patrol the French capital during the summer tourist boom.

The foreign officers will be deployed to key landmarks to prevent Chinese visitors – around 1 million of whom come to France every year – being targeted by pickpockets and muggers.

A plan originating from the French Interior Ministry proposed that Chinese police officers would patrol with their French counterparts in Paris tourist spots. A ministry spokesperson refused to give details or numbers, but said their role would be preventative, and that they would operate as part of a global operation to protect tourists across the city.

Police say Chinese tourists often carry large amounts of cash, making them a target for attacks. Tourists from China are estimated to spend an average of €1,300 during their holidays, much of it on designer goods.

The move follows a rise in assaults by thieves on tourists from China. In March last year a group of 23 Chinese visitors were robbed in a restaurant shortly after arriving in Paris. The group was on a 12-day tour of Europe but stopped for dinner at Le Bourget in one of Paris's northern suburbs, where they were robbed of €7,500 cash, plane tickets and passports. The group leader was injured in the attack…

In central Paris, officers struggle to deal with organised gangs of thieves and pickpockets, many of them children, from the Balkans and eastern Europe, who harass tourists with fake "petitions" or demands for charity donations.

Some thoughts

Given how the Philippine government has been eager to embrace US bases, will the Philippine government do a copycat and ask US police to patrol the streets of Manila for the "protection of American tourists"?

Chinese cash rich tourists as targets by domestic thieves and Chinese police presence in Paris exude a crucial shift in the balance of economic and geopolitical power

The above also demonstrates the incompetence of centralized political institutions that are supposed to protect people within their defined political boundaries.

The French socialist government’s drafting of external police force exhibits such patent government failure.

If the French government “struggle to deal with organised gangs of thieves and pickpockets”, how will the Chinese police help solve such problems when the latter seems hardly familiar with the French geography, the political, legal and or cultural system?  

Yet the Chinese police seem to have a handful of domestic criminal issues to deal with.

The Chinese police may “help victims to make a police complaint” but farther than these they are unlikely to succeed, unless the French are convinced of a Jet Li solution.

Private Police anyone? 

 

Showbiz Politics: The Myth of US-Philippine Defense Pact Promoting Regional Peace

As I said yesterday, showbiz has practically consumed most of social affairs in the Philippines.

More evidence of showbiz in the context of the bilateral military agreement between the heads of state of the US and the Philippines. 

From the Philippine Inquirer:

“The Philippines-U.S. Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) takes our security cooperation to a higher level of engagement, reaffirms our countries’ commitment to mutual defense and security, and promotes regional peace and stability,” Aquino said during their joint press conference.

Hours after the EDCA was signed, Aquino said the two countries’ defense alliance, even before the agreement, served as a “cornerstone of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region for more than 60 years.”

The populist model for attaining "peace and stability" can be summarized as: the “bullied” should get a “big backer” to ward off the “bully”.

This may work perhaps if the object of contention has been about the bullied. But what if it isn’t? What if the target has been instead the “backer”, where the “bullied’ is really just a pawn in their rivalry?

[As a side note, the reason why the "bully" behaves this way maybe due to the actions of the "backer" or the "rivalry". That's one aspect offered to us by US political insider K. Philippa Malmgren, who observed that "access to the shipping lanes in and out of China has become an increasingly high-priority issue. After all, that's how 90 percent of critical food and energy supplies arrive in China and also how most things leave China. Yet all China sees is the ever-increasing presence of the U.S. Navy encircling them and rendering sea access less certain. Let's not forget that 10 percent of the world's fish supply comes from "near seas". (bold mine)]

History shares us some lessons here

Philippine participation in World War II according to the Wikipedia.org (bold mine)

The Commonwealth of the Philippines was invaded by the Empire of Japan in December 1941 shortly after Japan's declaration of war upon the United States of America, which controlled the Philippines at the time and possessed important military bases there.

Let us put on the military tactician’s thinking hat on. Let’s say the opposite side has decided to go to war with the “backer”.  Which would the military planners of the aggressing nation attack first? Nations allied to the enemy with bases or without bases? Well, world War 2 has provided the answer; The Philippines was bombed a day after Pearl Harbor in December 8, 1941

I rightly predicted that the Philippine political trend has been headed towards this direction in early 2012. Sell nationalism to get popular approval to justify the defense agreement.  But then I wrote about the treaty, the recently concluded agreement is reportedly a “pact”—between the two executive offices—without congressional approval.

Yet despite the ”pact”, the peace and stability model—the “bullied” should get a “big backer” to ward off the “bully”—unfortunately seem to have fallen through.

From today’s headlines at the Inquirer. (bold mine)

Obama gave no categorical commitment whether the 62-year-old Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) between the two countries—the backbone of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (Edca) signed by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin and US Ambassador Philip Goldberg—would apply in case the Philippines’ territorial dispute with China escalates into an armed confrontation.

Steering clear of the question, Obama instead pointed to Beijing’s “interest” in abiding by international law, saying “larger countries have a greater responsibility” to do so.

“Our goal is not to counter China; our goal is not to contain China,” he said in a joint press conference with President Aquino in Malacañang, reflecting a delicate balancing act throughout his weeklong trip that earlier took him to Japan, South Korea and Malaysia.

So the “pact” turns out to be a noncommittal military agreement which reveals of the extent of its lopsidedness in favor of the US. The US President Obama seem to have stiffed the Philippine administration and their mainstream supporters when he said that the US had no "specific position on the disputes between nations". Ouch. The Philippine government and the mainstream seem to have heavily been expecting a "big backer" role the US should have supposedly assumed.

Why the noncommittal stance? Most possibly because the US cannot commit to fight each, and engage in, every conflict of her allies. The US has already had her hands full in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Mali, Somalia, Yemen and etc. The Washington Blog estimates 74 different wars which the US has been engaged in. Ukraine may now be in the pipeline. 

You see, to expect the US to make a full commitment and yet deliver her promises with overstretched resources and personnel…well, that’s entertainment! Aside from the dozens of wars, the US has hundreds of bases around the world (estimates vary: Ron Paul 900, Charlmes Johnson 737) if not more than a thousand (Aljazeera, Global Research). The US budget for military spending in 2014 has been estimated at US$ 630 billion

And the non-committal stance by the US essentially debunks the one of the many impossible things believed by domestic populist politics, particularly Nationalism (and Nationalism based spending) is BEYOND the scope of economics and economic reasoning.  The lesson here is Economics drives politics.

The US President may have also been aware that an explicit support could have raised the risks of moral hazard, where the Philippine goverment may become more adversarial in her relationship with China.

With the base pact, I expect that the political trend, as I wrote in 2012, will now revolve around...

In reality, military bases have mostly been used as a staging point for political interventions in local affairs and for justifying the maintenance and or growth of the defense budget for the US federal government.

Promoting regional peace? Hardly. Maybe more of amplifying risks of geopolitical instability. 

And this “pact” looks more like a validation of the 2 time war medal the late Major General Smedley Butler’s claim that “war is a racket”

Quote of the Day: The Evil of Chávez is Dwarfed by that of the Governments of the "Free World”

Hugo Chávez may have been oppressive, but at least he wasn't a lapdog for Washington like so many other heads of state. The world would be a much more free and decentralized place with more anti-imperialist "rogue" nations. And it is important to put his depredations in perspective. Bush, Obama, Blair, Hollande, etc., have caused more death and suffering in the world than Chávez ever did. And this should be no surprise.It is often the less authoritarian states that afflict more humans more seriously, even if those afflicted the worst happen to be foreigners.  That is because the most "free" countries are also often the most imperialistic. This is what Hans-Hermann Hoppe calls the "paradox of imperialism."  States that allow more domestic freedom have more wealth to tap to fund more conquests and interventions.

Considering the chaos, terror, and wanton murderous destruction perpetrated on a daily basis by the West upon its recipients of "liberation," the evil of Chávez is dwarfed by that of the governments of the "free world."

This is from Mises.org editor Daniel J. Sanchez as quoted by Lew Rockwell at the Lew Rockwell Blog.

By the way, Hugo Chávez has reportedly amassed a personal fortune worth about US$ 2 billion as of 2010. The Criminal Justice International Associates said that “the Chávez administration have subtracted around $100 billion out of the nearly $1 trillion in oil income made by PDVSA since 1999.”

Some social justice from the Socialist of the 21st century eh?

Scarborough Shoal Dispute: The Politics of Nationalism

The Inquirer.net reports

As the dispute between China and the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal entered its 18th day Friday, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile called on the nation to rally behind President Aquino in asserting the country’s sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea)…

At the hearing, Enrile explained that the dispute over territorial waters in the West Philippine Sea was not political.

“This is a national issue that requires the support of the entire nation, and we support the President on this,” Enrile said. There should be no deviation. “There should be unanimity of all Filipinos in supporting Malacañang regardless of political persuasion and affiliation on this particular issue,” he said.

“We must show the People’s Republic of China that in this particular issue, the Filipino nation is one in supporting the leadership of the Republic of the Philippines in asserting the sovereign rights of this republic and the Filipino people over the Scarborough Shoal and the Reed Bank, and all the areas the Republic of the Philippines occupy in the South China Sea,” said Enrile.

Say what? Asking for popular approval is NOT about politics?

The definition of politics according to dictionary.com

exercising or seeking power in the governmental or public affairs of a state, municipality, etc.: a political machine; apolitical boss.

of, pertaining to, or involving the state or its government: apolitical offense.

So seeking power in public affairs and or the involvement of the state IS political. And we have a national politician stirring up dangerous nationalist fervor with sloganeering based on untruths.

As George Orwell once wrote,

Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

As I earlier pointed out, the Scarborough Shoal territorial dispute has NOT been about oil or resources and which has mostly likely been about political DIVERSION amidst internal political divisions in China and or the PROMOTION of arms sales for the military industrial complex. Further it is not in the interest of China to provoke military conflagrations when she has been promoting her currency as the region's foreign currency reserve.

And the seeming insouciance of financial markets over the brinkmanship politics, expressed through the price mechanism, has limned on the perceived risk environment where political sensationalism has departed from people voting with their money. The Phisix closed the week at record highs while the local currency the Philippine Peso closed the week up at 42.37 and seems to be approaching the February highs.

In other words, what politicians sees as urgency that requires “unanimity of all Filipinos” which is being touted by mainstream media, seems to depart from the actions of the marketplace, where the latter sees the risks of a shooting war to be negligible.

Of course, politicians know that in case of a real military skirmish, they or their families will not be at the battlefront (they will most likely be ensconced abroad), thus their audacity to call for implied aggressive populist nationalism that might justify an armed confrontation.

Furthermore, considering that both Spratlys and Scarborough Shoals have largely been uninhabited or has no population, the main benefits over the disputed “resource rich” islands will likely accrue to the cronies and the interests of political authorities than that of the nation. Yet the masses are being conjured to fight for their interests via calls for pretentious nationalism.

The history of war, said Michael Rivero, is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains.

Finally, the real target of these war mongers are our civil liberties and economic freedom.

As French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote,

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.

Thus, the call for nationalism over territorial disputes is like putting the proverbial lipstick on the political pig.

Unintended Consequences from the Libyan Intervention

Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute enumerates the unintended consequences of the foreign policy of military interventions in Libya in 2011

Writes Mr. Friedman (bold emphasis added)

Advocates of both interventions underestimate coercion’s contribution to political order. Autocratic rule in these countries is partially a consequence of state weakness—the absence of strong liberal norms, government institutions, and nationalism. By helping to remove the levers of coercion in places like Libya and Syria, we risk producing anarchy—continual civil war or long-lived violent disorder. Either outcome would likely worsen suffering through widespread murder, a collapse of sanitation and health services, and stunted economic growth conducive to well-being. And the most promising paths to new of forms of unity and order in these states are illiberal: religious rule, war, or new autocrats. The humanitarian and liberal cases for these interventions are unconvincing.

Aside from Qaddafi’s fall, U.S. leaders gave three primary rationales for military intervention Libya (I repeatedly criticized them last spring). One was to show other dictators that the international community would not tolerate the violent suppression of dissenters. That reverse domino theory has obviously failed. If Qaddafi’s fate taught neighboring leaders like Bashar al-Assad anything, it is to brutally nip opposition movements in the bud before they coalesce, attract foreign arms and air support, and kill you, or, if you’re lucky, ship you off to the Hague.

The second rationale was the establishment of liberal democracy. But Libya, like Syria, lacks the traditional building blocks of liberal democracy. And history suggests that foreign military intervention impedes democratization. Whether or not it manages to hold elections, Libya seems unlikely to become a truly liberal state any time soon. As with Syria, any path to that outcome is likely to be long and bloody.

Meanwhile, Libya’s revolution has destabilized Mali. Qaddafi’s fall pushed hundreds of Tuareg tribesmen that fought on his side back to their native Mali, where they promptly reignited an old insurgency. Malian military officers, citing their government’s insufficient vigor against the rebels, mounted a coup, overthrowing democracy that had lasted over twenty years. Thus far, the military intervention in Libya has reduced the number of democracies by one.

The most widely cited rationale for helping Libya’s rebels was to save civilians from the regime. Along with many commentators, President Obama and his aides insisted that Qaddafi promised to slaughter civilians in towns that his forces were poised to retake last March. Thus, intervention saved hundreds of thousands of lives. A minor problem with this claim is that Qaddafi’s speeches actually threatened rebel fighters, not civilians, and he explicitly exempted those rebels that put down arms. More importantly, if Qaddafi intended to massacre civilians, his forces had ample opportunity to do it. They did commit war crimes, using force indiscriminately and executing and torturing prisoners. But the sort of wholesale slaughter that the Obama administration warned of did not occur—maybe because the regime’s forces lacked the organization needed for systematic slaughter.

The limited nature of the regime’s brutality does not itself invalidate humanitarian concerns. It might be worthwhile to stop even a historically mild suppression of rebellion if the cost of doing so is low enough. The trouble with the humanitarian argument for intervention in Libya is instead that the intervention and the chaos it produced may ultimately cause more suffering than the atrocities it prevented. Libya’s rebel leaders have thus far failed to resurrect central authority. Hundreds of militias police cities and occasionally battle. There are many credible reports that militias have unlawfully detained thousands of regime supporters, executed others, driven mistrusted communities from their homes, and engaged in widespread torture.

The looting of Libya’s weapons stockpiles is also likely to contribute to Libya’s misery, in part by arming the militias that obstruct central authority. The weapons depots reportedly included thousands of man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), some of which may still work. It is worth noting that the widely-reported claim that Libya lost 20,000 MANPADS appears exaggerated. That figure comes from Senate testimony last spring by the head of Africa Command, who did not substantiate it (my two requests to Africa’s Command PR people for information on this claim were ignored). A State Department official recently gave the same figure before essentially admitting that we have no idea what the right figure is.

As always, the politics of interventionism has been veneered with noble “humanitarian” intentions which not only fails to meet their goals but eventually backfires.

In reality, "noble intentions" has always been used as cover to promote the interests of parties who operate 'behind the curtains' through the state.

Global Weapons Exports and the Spratlys Dispute

I previously asked if the Spratlys dispute has partly been about promoting weapons exports for the benefit of the military industrial complex and domestic politicians.

The Economist gives us some clues (bold emphasis mine)

GLOBAL transfers of large conventional weapons such as tanks and planes were 24% higher in 2007-2011 than in 2002-2006, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Deliveries to South-East Asia rose particularly steeply, jumping by 185% as tensions mounted over territorial claims in the South China Sea. Three-quarters of all exports in the past five years were made by five countries, as can be seen in the chart below. A notable recent development is China's ability to manufacture its own weapons. Consequently it now ranks as the sixth-biggest exporter, and having been the second-largest importer in 2002-06, it was only the fourth-largest in 2007-11. India remains the biggest importer of arms, buying 10% of the world's total. Perhaps surprisingly there was little change in the volume of arms sent to Arab Spring countries in the past year, though exports to Syria in 2007-2011 (supplied overwhelmingly by Russia) increased by nearly 600% on figures for 2002-06.

We never really know if governments, through their respective foreign policies, have been working in complicity to promote undeclared political agenda.

How War Policies will Hurt the US

The economics of war will eventually weigh on the US.

The following is an excerpt from a must read article by investing guru Doug Casey (bold emphasis mine)

An AK-47 costs less than $500 most places in the world; the bullets cost about 20 cents apiece, and the teenager to employ them costs nothing at all. In fact, teenagers in the Muslim world are in such oversupply that they can be said to have a negative cost.

A US soldier, by contrast, is immensely expensive. Even though most of them come from lower socio-economic levels, a substantial investment has been made in taking them even through Grade 12. Then comes the cost of recruiting, training, equipping, paying, insuring, housing and transporting them in the military. I’m not sure the cost of a US soldier in the field has ever been accurately computed, but it has to be well over a million dollars for a simple grunt and much more for a specialist. That’s not counting the lifetime of pension benefits and medical care for the maimed. And with battlefield medical as good as it now is, the ratio of seriously wounded to dead is much higher than ever before. You may sympathize with the US soldier, but he’s definitely on the wrong side of the equation.

An M-1 tank costs about $5 million a copy. It, or any other vehicle, can be destroyed by an IED fabricated from fertilizer or unexploded ordnance. Even if it’s not destroyed, or not even severely damaged, the brains of its occupants are likely to be scrambled by the blast wave. This is, incidentally, something that is underappreciated. A blast wave bounces a brain around in a skull like an egg inside a tin can. Considering that IEDs are both devastating and extremely hard to detect, it’s no wonder they’re so popular.

Have you ever wondered why there’s no reporting on the numbers of tanks, APCs, Humvees, helicopters and other (immensely expensive) hardware being destroyed in the current US wars? It’s classified, because the numbers would be so embarrassing. Unlike in Vietnam, there’s no longer any body count of the enemy because that would be politically incorrect. But it doesn’t matter how large it is; every dead jihadi is a dragon’s tooth that will grow back as ten replacements. That’s why there’s really no way to win a guerrilla war before you go bankrupt – no way short of genocide or at least serious mass murder.

A $1,000 RPG will easily destroy a million-dollar armored personnel carrier and its occupants. A $10,000 shoulder-launched missile can take out a $10 million helicopter or a $40 million F-16. It may be practically impossible to shoot down a $1 billion B-2 bomber, but that’s academic; they were built to fight a nuclear war against the USSR. They’re useless except to deliver atomic weapons, but the new enemy lives in refugee camps and scattered within teeming cities. The B-2’s codename should be changed from Spirit to Albatross, because it’s not only totally uneconomic, it’s almost totally useless.

So the economics of guerrillas attacking an invading superpower are excellent. In response, the economics of a superpower attacking guerrillas or terrorists are disastrous. In its current wars, the US winds up using cruise missiles, at around $1.5 million each, to blow up wedding parties. The direct expense is bad enough; the vastly greater indirect expense is the creation of a clan of new enemies. The best result is for the missile to just pulverize some sand. Even if it hits a few mujahidin, that’s placing an implied value of several hundred thousand dollars apiece on their heads.

In other words, whether we’re looking at offense or defense, the economics of destruction are tilted not just 10 to1, not just 100 to 1, but probably closer to 1,000 to 1 in the favor of insurgents.

Perhaps you’re thinking further advances in technology will tilt the equation back toward the US. But as I explained above, the effect of each innovation will be just the opposite after only a short period of technological monopoly. People have a lot of misplaced confidence in the so-called "defense" establishment to come up with marvelous devices to confound groups designated as the enemy. Of course advances will be made, at least for as long as the US government has scores of billions to spend on R&D annually – which it soon may not, for financial reasons. But even if it diverts funds from its myriad other projects, the procurement process is stultifyingly bureaucratic, slow and costly. It’s not at all entrepreneurial, which it still was to a degree even during WWII, when the P-51, the best fighter of the war, was taken from concept to production in nine months and turned out for $50,000 a copy.

The US will even lose the war for new weapons as time goes on, simply because the Defense Department bureaucracy is so counterproductive. It’s like the company Dilbert works for in the cartoon pitted against millions of independent entrepreneurs in the Open Source world. Dilbert’s company moves like a dinosaur, while the Open Source world watches, imitates, innovates and improves at warp speed.

Today a ponderous state supposedly represents our side (I italicize that because, although I truly dislike many of the people it’s fighting against, I consider it to be an even greater danger). At best, it resembles a dim, tired old Tyrannosaurus up against hundreds of smart young Velociraptors intent on eating it. The outcome is obvious: a bunch of the attackers will get killed, but the T-Rex is dead meat.

Remember that there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history before them, the vast majority from non-OECD countries. The ones who are any good don’t want to work in a constrained, bureaucratic environment with no financial upside. Entirely apart from that, if the minions of the perversely named Defense Department come up with a real super-weapon, in today’s world it’s easy to replicate and improve on, and for a fraction of the original cost. That’s why there are scores of thousands of apps developed for most any electronic device that hits the market today – in addition to the device itself being "knocked off" illegally by small factories that could be anywhere.

Terrorism icon Osama bin Laden’s goal was reportedly to bankrupt the US. And the US has been fighting a 20th century modeled war, when times (or warfare’s evolving dynamics) has been dramatically changing.

In line with the way incumbent political institutions have been structured, the US political establishment has been failing to keep with the new realities (or with the emergent forces of decentralization). And at worst, they seem to be falling right into bin Laden’s ‘war of attrition’ trap.

Yet you can profit from terror (or political folly) as Doug Casey points out, read the rest here

Heritage Foundation Urges Military Action on Iran

The Heritage Foundation has an incredible philosophical dichotomy, where on the one hand they propose free trade, and on the other hand, they propose imperialist policies to defend against terrorism

From Mike Brownfield (bold highlights mine)

The Obama Administration, to date, has pursued the Obama Doctrine–a foreign policy that calls for the United States to engage with its enemies instead of confronting the threat of state-sponsored terrorism head on. It’s an attitude and a posture that has been pervasive in President Obama’s rhetoric–abjuring American exceptionalism, passing on the opportunity to speak loudly to promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East, failing to condemn Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless regime, offering weak support to Israel and failing to condemn those who threaten the country’s very existence, and presenting a face of international accommodation and ambivalence. Obama’s strategy invites aggression and leaves the American people less secure as a result.

The Administration must finally change direction. Heritage’s James Carafano writes that it should take strong measures to respond to Iran’s actions, including conducting a proportional military response against suitable, feasible, and acceptable targets (in many ways the situation is similar to military operations conducted against al Qaeda in Pakistan). It should impose and enforce the strongest sanctions, target public diplomacy to expose the regime’s human rights abuses, reduce Iran’s meddling in Iraq, and rescind and rewrite its counterterrorism strategy.

The fact is that war and free trade are simply incompatible. Not only does war appropriate resources required for productive economic activities, which likewise has been tied to inflationary policies, war encourages growth of government or statist ‘ratchet effect’ policies in the broader spectrum of the economy in the US and elsewhere. This would be inimical and contradictory to economic freedom and free trade.

Yet militant foreign policy responses would likely trigger retaliatory impulses among those affected by these policies, whose feedback mechanism encourages more ‘terrorism’ instead of quelling it.

Besides to militarily provoke other nations could mean that the law of unintended consequences will apply. It would be hubris to believe that applying violence on some entities labeled as ‘terrorist’ won’t prompt for any nasty feedback.

Encouraging people to trade instead of coercive imposition of Western brand of democracy would serve as better approach for peaceful settlements.

As the Murray N. Rothbard wrote (italics and strike through mine)

America was born in a revolution against Western imperialism, born as a haven of freedom against the tyrannies and despotism, the wars and intrigues of the old world. Yet we have allowed ourselves to sacrifice the American ideals of peace and freedom and anti-colonialism on the altar of a crusade to kill communists terrorist throughout the world; we have surrendered our libertarian birthright into the hands of those who yearn to restore the Golden Age of the Holy Inquisition. It is about time that we wake up and rise up to restore our heritage.

I am no American, but I believe that America’s libertarian legacy can set the right model for the world.

Obama’s Foreign Policy: Judge, Jury and Executioner

Paul Craig Roberts on the assassination of Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan

But what Awlaki did or might have done is beside the point. The US Constitution requires that even the worst murderer cannot be punished until he is convicted in a court of law. When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged in federal court Obama’s assertion that he had the power to order assassinations of American citizens, the Obama Justice (sic) Department argued that Obama’s decision to have Americans murdered was an executive power beyond the reach of the judiciary.

In a decision that sealed America’s fate, federal district court judge John Bates ignored the Constitution’s requirement that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law and dismissed the case, saying that it was up to Congress to decide. Obama acted before an appeal could be heard, thus using Judge Bates’ acquiescence to establish the power and advance the transformation of the president into a Caesar that began under George W. Bush.

Read the rest here

Any foreigners, for whatever reason which mostly will signify as political opposition, can be labeled a ‘terrorist’, and thus, subject to unilateral summary execution.

War on Terror: More Terrorism Deaths Since 9-11

Since 9/11, the US government led war on terror has brought upon more fatalities and not less. This in spite of all the legal and bureaucratic inconveniences imposed on travel, finance and etc.

From the Economist, (bold emphasis mine)

THE attacks of September 11th 2001 killed 2,996 people. Despite the subsequent declaration of a war on terror, over the past ten years thousands more have been killed by terrorists of all hues. The chart below tracks the number of terrorist-related fatalities worldwide. The data is from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which defines terrorism as “the use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal”.

This is just another brazen example of government failure

Congressman and US Presidential aspirant Ron Paul is right, we should stop terrorism through empathy and free trade. (bold highlights mine)

Sadly, one thing that has entirely escaped modern American foreign policy is empathy. Without much humility or regard for human life, our foreign policy has been reduced to alternately bribing and bombing other nations, all with the stated goal of "promoting democracy." But if a country democratically elects a leader who is not sufficiently pro-American, our government will refuse to recognize them, will impose sanctions on them, and will possibly even support covert efforts to remove them. Democracy is obviously not what we are interested in. It is more likely that our government is interested in imposing its will on other governments. This policy of endless intervention in the affairs of others is very damaging to American liberty and security.

If we were really interested in democracy, peace, prosperity, and safety, we would pursue more free trade with other countries. Free and abundant trade is much more conducive to peace because it is generally bad business to kill your customers. When one’s livelihood is on the line, and the business agreements are mutually beneficial, it is in everyone’s best interests to maintain cooperative and friendly relations and not kill each other. But instead, to force other countries to bend to our will, we impose trade barriers and sanctions. If our government really wanted to promote freedom, Americans would be free to travel and trade with whoever they wished. And if we would simply look at our own policies around the world through the eyes of others, we would understand how these actions make us more targeted and therefore less safe from terrorism. The only answer is get back to free trade with all and entangling alliances with none. It is our bombs and sanctions and condescending aid packages that isolate us.

China to Assist in the Bailout of Greece

I have been saying that today’s globalization has not been limited to trade, investment and labor but also to the conduct of policies.

Recent concerns over Greece debt and entitlement Crisis has prompted China to renew her pledge of support to latest the bailout scheme still being finalized by the Eurozone as of this writing.

This report from the Reuters, [bold emphasis mine]

China's "vital" interests are at stake if Europe cannot resolve its debt crisis, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Friday as it voiced concern about the economic problems of its biggest trading partner.

At a media briefing ahead of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Europe next week, Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying made plain that China had tried to help Europe overcome its troubles by buying more European debt and encouraging bilateral trade.

"Whether the European economy can recover and whether some European economies can overcome their hardships and escape crisis, is vitally important for us," Fu said.

"China has consistently been quite concerned with the state of the European economy," she said.

Wen is due to visit Hungary, Britain and Germany late next week, just months after he visited France, Portugal and Spain and offered to help Europe overcome its debt woes.

Well China’s earlier purchases had already been substantial.

From another Reuters article [bold emphasis added]

The Asian powerhouse has been steadfast in its support for the Eurozone since the onset of the crisis. It purchased a significant amount of EUR440bn EFSF rescue facility that started auctioning bonds earlier this year. Although it is difficult to clarify how large its European debt holdings actually are since this data isn’t published by China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, it is thought to include Greek, Portuguese and Spanish bonds.

Some observations

This adds to the pile of evidence of the tightly entwined and coordinated actions of the central bank-government-banking system global cartel.

Remember, it isn’t Greece who is being bailed out but bondholders which comprise mostly foreign banks. The global political claque appears to be closing ranks.

One positive aspect is that trade fosters such collaborative action, even if trade could have possibly been just as a guise or a subordinated priority.

This should also serve as a foreign policy guide in dealing with China especially applied to the local Spratlys dispute. Elsewhere in the world, China’s foreign policy appears tilted towards cooperation than belligerency.

Finally, the money China will utilize, from her mounting over $3 trillion forex reserves, in assisting Europe would likely come at the expense of supporting US bonds. This should put more pressure on the US Federal Reserve to redeploy QE but perhaps in another name and or another form.

China has reportedly marginally increased her bond purchases from the US last April, but statistical inflation continues to ramp up (despite 4 policy rate increases). China’s bubble cycle appears to be in the maturing stage as her property sector continues to sizzle despite her government’s actions.

Should The Philippines Wage War With China Over The Executions Of The Drug Mules?

“It is just that the Philippines is less powerful than China in warfare” remarked a neighbor in the allusion that the Philippines is powerless to impose her will over its larger and far powerful Asian contemporary following yesterday’s execution of the 3 drug mules.

Stunned by this comment I retorted, “Do you honestly believe that the Philippines should go to war with China for them?”

Such unwarranted emotional interpretation of events appears to be the offshoot of the quality of reasoning peddled by mainstream media which the vulnerable public could have misinterpreted.

From the Inquirer.net

Three Filipinos convicted of drug smuggling were executed in China Wednesday, triggering condemnation in the Catholic Philippines and despair for family members who shared their final moments...

The executions came after repeated pleas by the Philippine government for their sentences to be commuted were turned down, and ended vigils in the country where supporters of the trio had prayed for a miracle.

There are many issues encompassing this case which makes it complex.

One it is the issue of drug trafficking.

Two it is the issue of death penalty.

The populist sentiment seems mostly aligned with the position taken by the influential Catholic church which hasn’t been about the legitimacy of DOMESTIC death penalty laws but death penalty as a moral principle.

From the same article,

Amnesty International as well as the influential Roman Catholic church swiftly condemned the executions.

"We strongly condemn the executions of the three Filipinos," Agence France-Presse quoted Amnesty's Philippine representative Aurora Parong.

"The Philippines should have taken a stronger action, and it is now its moral duty to lead a campaign against death penalty in Asia."

Amnesty International says China is the world's biggest executioner, with thousands of convicts killed every year. The Philippines has abolished the death penalty.

I wholeheartedly agree that death penalty should be abolished. But this is largely a non-sequitur. As you can see from the above article, the Philippines had been suggested to take “stronger action”? But how?

The populist perspective fundamentally ignores the fact that this issue is PRIMARILY about China’s DOMESTIC policies and NOT of ours.

It is the issue of FOREIGN POLITICAL relations.

If the US hasn’t been able to successfully compel China to alter her exchange rate policies (to resolve so called global imbalances) or on other contentious geopolitical issues as the UN environment saving program called the Kyoto Protocol, how the heck can we expect that the Philippines implement “stronger action” on China to save the felons-turned-victims?

As an aside, I don’t have the full knowledge of the circumstances behind this case for me to pass any judgments. I can only deduce from what I read or hear. So I am neutral on this.

So aside from geopolitical relations, the other very important issue is the FALSE impression that the Philippine political leadership can do something at all. This is an example of the religion of politics-the errant belief that government CAN and HAS to do SOMETHING.

Where the local political leadership can hardly control or manage domestic political issues, like the Congressional impeachment of the Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez or for many other matters, how can we expect the Philippine government to WANGLE her interests over China? Wage war as my neighbor implied?

The fact is that territorial borders IMPOSE a limit on the sphere of political power influence of the Philippine government.

This also means that the political priorities of the Chinese government will determine the fate of the Filipino drug mules and NOT the Philippine government (as had been the case).

The most we can do is to perhaps appeal—which is what the government did! But this serves no more than as photo OP and as advertisement mileage for politicians.

But in the realization that the Chinese government has been the largest practitioner of the death penalty, mostly applied to their own citizens, Filipinos shouldn’t expect much even from the government’s appeal.

As the Economist reported (bold emphasis added)

CHINA executes more of its own citizens than any other country, and more than all others in the world combined. “Thousands” of Chinese were executed in 2009 according to Amnesty International's annual study, which states that an exact number is impossible to determine because information on the death penalty is regarded as a state secret. But this gruesome record may yet change. The National People's Congress is reported to be reducing the number of offences that are punishable by execution. Among the crimes that currently carry the death penalty are bribing an official and stealing historical relics

Fatalities from China’s death penalty have even been far larger than the composite deaths of the whole world!!!

I’d like to add that there are reportedly some 125 cases of Filipinos scheduled to be executed elsewhere in the world where 85 are allegedly drug related cases, so why pick on China?

I am not a defender of the incumbent administration. But the essential point over this controversy is that the mainstream and the gullible public don’t seem to realize that this is a foreign policy issue, subject to the whims of China’s political leadership regarding the implementation of local rules on our supposedly erring immigrants or OFWs. This is also the issue of China's political and legal system.

This isn’t an issue of nationalist schism.

Importantly, this unfortunate event exposes on the grand delusion that the government CAN do something WHEN they can’t.

Filipinos abroad should realize that they are subject to political risk environment of their host countries that are vastly different than here, and must learn to safeguard their interest than rely on the government.

All the drivel from politicians about more spending to augment legal services for OFWs represent as mere ‘feel-good-vote-buying’ postures. Remember we don’t share the same legal process, institutions or framework with China, thus any assumption for more legal spending would likely only translate to waste.

Finally, when I asked the above question to the media indoctrinated youth, he simply turned around and walked away.

UPDATE: (I forgot to include this)

What happens if the Philippine government does successfully negotiate the mitigation of the sentences of the accused? Would this not serve as moral hazard that could encourage more drug related trades?

It is bad enough for us to expect our government to patently interfere with many aspects of our lives. But it is even worst to believe that our government has to intervene into the lives of people who lives beyond our borders.

The Politics Behind The UN’s No Fly Zone On Libya

The Economist has a dainty interactive graph which spells out on the diversified political incentives (interests) by nations that has participated in enforcing the UN’s No Fly zone

FRANCE and Britain led the diplomatic push for military action against Libya. The Arab League's vote, on March 12th, to call on the United Nations to enforce a no-fly zone was crucial in securing international legitimacy. The Americans were initially hesitant but were eventually won around. So much is familiar to observers of the unfolding Libya story.

Press on the country and the explanation appears.

In my view, the biggest incentive is this…

Graph also from the Economist

Outside the Arab League, perhaps the strongest incentive to intervene in Libya’s internal strife has been about oil geopolitics.

The other possible reason could be due to the earlier faux pas in foreign policy by some of the major participants.

The Daily Show Explains US Foreign Policy On Libya

Hilarious but politically poignant stuff from Jon Stewart (HT Bob Murphy)

The Daily Show - Odyssey Dawn - Unconstitutional War
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Fearing A Slap On The Face, UN Sanctions A No-Fly Zone

Faced with the prospects of a victorious comeback by Libya’s 42 year dictatorship under Muammar Gaddafi, the UN approves a No-Fly zone over Libya.

The Marketwatch reports,

The United Nations Security Council voted 10 to 0 supporting the use of "all necessary measures" including the use of a no-fly zone to protect civilians and rebel forces in Libya from forces loyal to Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Russia and China, which held veto powers, abstained from the vote, along with three other council members. The passing of the measure is expected to lead to U.N.-backed military strikes in Libya within hours, according to media reports.

UN’s action represents a response to a potential slap on the face if Gaddafi forces wins.

Writes Lew Rockwell's Eric Margolis,

In a huge embarrassment for President Barack Obama, who has been demanding Gadaffi resign, the gutsy new US national intelligence director, Gen. James Clapper, told Congress that Gadaffi’s forces were winning. Fortunately, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates put the brakes, at least for now, on Republican hawks and the-only-good-Arab-is-a-dead-Arab neocons who were urging the US impose a no-fly zone over Libya.

There will also be many red faces in Europe. Libya is a major oil supplier. If Gadaffi survives and reconsolidates his rule, Europe will have to continue buying oil from him. Germany’s Angela Merkel and her pal Sarko will look very foolish.

That means the leaders of France, Germany, and Britain, who have been calling for the overthrow of Gadaffi, may have to make nice to him again, and even, horror of horrors, go to Tripoli and be filmed holding hands with the smirking Libyan dictator, decked out in one of his Marx Brothers military outfits. Revenge, Libyan-style, will be oh so sweet.

To save face means to intervene militarily which is what the No-fly zone is all about. Libya’s civil war will now evolve into an international war.

So the UN’s foreign policy appears designed to boost the self esteem needs of political authorities by getting their soldier’s hands bloodied and also by shifting away of resources from productive activities. In short, the self interest of politicians matter more than the public.

Also, reputational needs of political heads translates to benefits for the military industrial complex. So if it isn’t the banking elites, it is the military industrial elites that mostly benefits from government interventionism. Of course the banking elite is also tied to the military industrial complex indirectly since the banking elites has been the chief financers of government expenditures.

Will The US Fall For Osama Bin Laden’s Trap?

From Eric Margolis at the Lew Rockwell.com, (bold emphasis mine)

Bin Laden’s primary goal is overthrowing US-backed autocratic regimes across the Muslim world. Attacking western targets that supported them was only secondary.

Col. Gadaffi was not totally wrong when he blamed al-Qaida for Libya’s uprising. Bin Laden was not pulling the strings of Libya’s rebellion, but al-Qaida’s revolutionary philosophy and anti-western jihad certainly inspired many young people from Morocco to Bangladesh.

That’s Washington’s big problem. Invading Libya will intensify the fires burning in the Arab world and create yet another anti-western jihad.

This is exactly Osama bin Laden’s strategy: draw the bull in the china shop – US into many small wars in the Muslim world – and so bleed it dry. So far, the US has been cooperating with Osama’s master plan.

When The Rubber Meets The Road: Political Controversies Hound The Aquino Administration

``The most important benefit of population size and growth is the increase it brings to the stock of useful knowledge. Minds matter economically as much as, or more than, hands or mouths.”- Julian Simon, More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment

Our projections are not only getting validated in the financial markets but also in the political front.

Many have come to fallaciously believe that the election of a new leadership would prompt for an overhaul in the management of the Philippine government. Now grinding reality has gradually been unmasking the mirage of “change”.

The Aquino administration is being rocked by several controversies. One is the hostage drama which has turned out to be a foreign policy relations disaster and has put into question the competence of the fledging administration.

Next is the allegation that the people close to the Aquino administration have been on the take[1], where the immaculacy of graft and corruption free image is evidently being chaffed.

As we have earlier argued[2], regulations that ignore the fundamental law of economics will only backfire.

Prohibition laws only foster and nurture violence, corruption and criminality and would not eliminate demand for the outlawed products or services, whether it is about drugs, abortion, prostitution or gambling.

Prohibition only worsens the situation by bringing these activities underground which undermines social institutions.

Apparently hardly anyone seems to have learned from history or from recent experience (President Estrada’s downfall was due to jueteng).

This is the fundamental pitfall of converting political “moral” issues into legal statutes without discerning on the responses of the individual.

Population Bill Controversy: Looking At The Wrong Picture

Another controversy hounding the Aquino administration is the religious uproar over the population control bill being sponsored by the administration.

This has placed incumbent leadership in direct confrontation with the largest religious cum political lobby group—the Catholic Church, which has even threatened President Aquino with excommunication[3]. The Church reportedly backtracked[4] on this.

While I agree that people should be given a free choice on what to do with their lives, the population control issue is fundamentally a deflection of the genuine pathology surrounding the Philippine political economy—the lack of capital and the dependency culture.

Figure 1: Google Public Data[5]: Population versus Wealth Creation

It’s basically false to impute population growth as the cause of poverty.

As figure 1 from the World Bank (Google Public Data) shows, world population growth (upper window) has more than doubled from 3 billion in 1960 to 6.7 billion in 2008. Yet global GDP per capita leapt from $445 to $9045 or some 19 times!

One would note that the gist of the improvement of global GDP per capita occurred when China opened her “to get rich is glorious[6]” doors to international trade in 1980 and when India likewise joined the global community which gave rise to globalization.

Globalization, which anchored China’s economic reforms, led to a massive decline in poverty rates “from 64% at the beginning of reform to 16% in 2004”[7].

The same holds true for India whose poverty rate declined sharply: According to the criterion used by the Planning Commission of India 27.5% of the population was living below the poverty line in 2004–2005, down from 51.3% in 1977–1978, and 36% in 1993-1994[8].

So in contrast to popular wisdom, two of the most populous nations saw a massive improvement in wealth creation as trade diffused into their economies.

In other words, contra neo-Malthusians, population growth is a positively associated with wealth creation because having more people enhances the division of labor and specialization as well as the broadening of the diversity of knowledge which increases the chances of innovative ideas. Thus, the essence to economic growth is the coordination of these attributes, channelled through voluntary exchange, which would allow more products and services or economic goods to be offered for exchange.

Here is Jean Baptiste Say’s* rejoinder to Thomas Malthus[9] who believed that population growth would adversely affect the distribution of resources (bold emphasis mine)

When men are once provided with the means of producing, they appropriate their productions to their wants, for the production itself is an exchange in which the productive means are supplied, and in which the article we most want is demanded in return. To create a thing, the want of which does not exist, is to create a thing without value: this would not be production. Now from the moment it has a value, the producer can find means to exchange it for those articles he wants.

As we earlier pointed out it is the lack of capital and the culture of dependency that hampers economic development which policymakers erroneously pinpoint to population growth. And the starting point of the lack of capital is the inadequate protection of property rights.

As Murray N. Rothbard explains[10],

The Third World suffers from a lack of economic development due to its lack of rights of private property, its government-imposed production controls, and its acceptance of government foreign aid that squeezes out private investment. The result is too little productive savings, investment, entrepreneurship, and market opportunity. What they desperately need is not more UN controls, whether of population or of anything else, but for international and domestic government to let them alone. Population will adjust on its own. But, of course, economic freedom is the one thing that neither the UN nor any other bureaucratic outfit will bring them.

In other words, persistent government intervention serves as a major hurdle to promoting productive activities of trade and free exchange and significantly hampers the development of “the political and institutional conditions required for a smooth and by and large uninterrupted progress of the process of larger-scale saving, capital accumulation, and investment.[11]”

And by culture of dependency, we refer to the welfare state, whereby population growth is impliedly encouraged by institutional policies such as public education.

The fundamental premise is if people are not held liable for their actions, or when the cost of committing errors are low, then the incentive to repeat such mistakes are high. For instance, since the cost of public education is borne by the taxpayers, the underprivileged will exercise little restraint on sexual reproduction knowing that education is “free”.

So while it would seem “compassionate” on the surface to finance the education of the poor, what is not seen is the cost of redistribution or the transfer of resources away from productive activities to non-productive activities. Such transfers not only reduce productivity or lower the standards of living but likewise encourage irresponsible behaviour. In short, or irresponsible actions are rewarded while productive actions are punished. Thus, the negative aspects of population growth as portrayed by media.

One should add that more government control over our lives chafes at our freedom.

Of course the chief beneficiaries of these have NOT been the recipients of redistribution but the administrators of the government. For they not only financially benefit from such transfers, they benefit by the inequality of distribution of power or that they exercise undue control over our lives.

And it is why despite the high penetration levels of education in the Philippines, we end up exporting labor as a consequence of a cauldron of interventionist policies, the symptoms of which are: mass production of low quality of education (industrial age mentality), the glaring mismatch of required skills for the available jobs relative to the output (graduates) of public education [e.g. Business Process Outsourcing], skyrocketing cost of private education[12], the heavily politicized education sector, high levels of unemployment, combined with the lack of property rights, underdeveloped and politicized markets and social institutions, the lack of savings and investments, and etc...

Political Talking Points: Do As I Say, But Not As I Do

Finally, the battle between the religious cum political lobby group (the Catholic Church) and the population bill proponents reveal the nature of Philippine politics—the struggle to promote their versions of statist doctrines reinforced by economic and political (religion) biases.

Like loose cannons, many shout out nonsensical “moral” arguments or politically correct sounding talking points which they either don’t understand or don’t practise at all. The essence of their opinions has been founded on blind faith[13] rather than reality.

For instance, the Catholic Church as a political lobby group hardly seem to practice on what they preach.

They have been allegedly staunch pro-environment (anti-mining) advocates by rhetoric, but actions appear to speak louder than words (see figure 2)

Figure 2: Philippine Stock Exchange: Catholic Church: Do As I Say Not What I Do?

Philex Mining, one of the top mining companies in the Philippines, in its disclosure of the top 100 shareholders of June 2010[14], reveals that some entities of the Catholic Church have significant shareholdings in the company, which ironically practices what they allege as engaging in a morally wrong act of environmental degradation.

I would wonder if their self-contradictory stance is about defeating competition more than ‘well meaning’ pronouncements.

Bottom line: I’d advise you to be very careful about heeding the specious arguments of sanctimonious statists.

*in my newsletter mailing list, I erroneously placed John Stuart Mill for Jean Baptiste Say

---

[1] Inquirer.net Aquino won’t ax Puno yet, September 24, 2010,

GMAnews.tv Bishop links moves to oust Robredo to jueteng, September 12, 2010

[2] See Plus Ca Change: President Aquino's Policy On Jueteng, May 24, 2010

[3]Inquirer.net Aquino faces threat of excommunication, October 1, 2010

[4]Inquirer.net CBCP: No threat vs Aquino, October 2, 2010

[5] Google Public Data Explorer, World Bank: Population and GDP per capita

[6] Wikipedia.org, Deng Xiao Peng Quote commonly attributed to Deng Xia Peng but has NOT been sourced

[7] Wikipedia.org, Poverty In China

[8] Wikipedia.org, Poverty In India

[9] Say Jean Baptiste Second letter to Malthus 1821 (The Pamphleteer)

[10] Rothbard, Murray N. Population Control Chapter 41, Making Economic Sense

[11] Mises, Ludwig von Period of Production, Waiting Time, and Period of Provision, Chapter 18 Section 4, Human Action

[12] See Is There A Brewing Bubble In The Philippine Education System? August 11, 2010

[13] See Blind Faith Analysis, October 1, 2010

[14] Philippine Stock Exchange, Philex Mining Corporation Top 100 Stockholders As Of 06/30/2010