Give Me That Old Time Recession

Merle Hazard and the Hazardaires ask for that "Old Time Recession" (HT Mankiw), those happier times when at least we were left with a few good reasons to rejoice... Enjoy!

Why Most Western Intellectuals Supported Soviet Tyranny?

Anthony Daniels explains the puzzling phenomenon in this article from a special edition of the "The New Criterion" on the fall of the Berlin wall (HT Selva Brasilis). The sin of intellectuals, according to him, is that they frequently favor utopia in detriment of reality, and political idealism at the cost of human existence. In his words:

One of the most extraordinary episodes in the intellectual history of the twentieth century—if, indeed, something that lasted half a century or more can properly be called an episode—is the moral and sometimes material support given by much of the western intelligentsia to the Soviet tyranny, a tyranny that made all previous tyrannies seem relaxed, liberal, and almost amateurish by comparison. Men who found the slightest circumscription of their own freedom intolerable raised hosannas to the most systematic and concerted abrogation of personal liberty yet attempted; many were hose who strained at gnats to swallow a camel.

No doubt the explanation for this phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically complex. A commonly cited factor that supposedly contributed to it was ignorance of the real situation obtaining in the Soviet Union: intellectuals were therefore able to project on to the Soviet Union their utopian fantasies unconstrained by any appreciation of the sordid realities. This explanation, however, is entirely false. ...

The Soviet Union was valued by contemporary intellectuals not for the omelette, but for the broken eggs. They thought that if nothing great could be built without sacrifice, then so great a sacrifice must be building something great. The Soviets had the courage of their abstractions, which are often so much more important to intellectuals than living, breathing human beings.

A Great Day for Freedom

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour interprets "A Great Day for Freedom" live in Gdansk:

On the day the wall came down
They threw the locks onto the ground
And with glasses high we raised a cry for freedom had arrived

On the day the wall came down
The Ship of Fools had finally run aground
Promises lit up the night like paper doves in flight

Enjoy!

Where the Wall Is Yet to Fall

The world celebrates tomorrow the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Meanwhile, in the prison-island of Cuba, communist state oppression yet rules.

Blogger Yoani Sánchez uses the Internet to denounce the lack of freedom, inequities and economic chaos that are the trademarks of the political and economic systems of her country. As expected, she has to deal with the consequences of confronting the powerful Castro family's political machine on a daily basis. Yesterday, she was kidnapped by Cuban political police agents while participating in a march for peace. In her own words:

Near 23rd Street, just at the Avenida de los Presidentes roundabout, we saw a black car, made in China, pull up with three heavily built strangers. “Yoani, get in the car,” one told me while grabbing me forcefully by the wrist. The other two surrounded Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a friend who was accompanying us to the march against violence. The ironies of life, it was an evening filled with punches, shouts and obscenities on what should have
passed as a day of peace and harmony. The same “aggressors” called for a patrol car which took my other two companions, Orlando and I were condemned to the car with yellow plates, the terrifying world of lawlessness and the impunity of Armageddon. ...

I was listening to Orlando panting and the blows continued to rain down on us, I planned to open the door and throw myself out but there was no handle on the inside. We were at their mercy and hearing Orlando’s voice encouraged me. Later he told me it was the same for him hearing my choking words… they let him know, “Yoani is still alive.” We were left aching, lying in a street in Timba, a woman approached, “What has happened?”… “A kidnapping,” I managed to say. We cried in each others arms in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about Teo, for God’s sake how am I going to explain all these bruises. How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street. How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.

I managed to see, however, the degree of fright of our assailants, the fear of the new, of what they cannot destroy because they don’t understand, the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee should be very, very ashamed for not having given the prize this year to someone that actually did something to deserve it, someone that needed the protection and the money that come with it. Someone like Yoani.

A Monument to Government Insanity

Is what the House's Health Care Bill has become, according to the WSJ (HT Miron):

The 1,990-page health-care bill in the House is one of the weightiest pieces of legislation on Capitol Hill.

A single-sided copy of it printed by The Wall Street Journal weighed 19.6 pounds, and stood 8.25 inches tall.

If it passes, it would be among the longest pieces of House legislation ever, congressional historians say.

The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

In four days the world will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the most important events in human history: the fall of the Berlin wall, the symbol of the separation between the free world and one of the most disastrous political, social and economic experiments that ever took place on the face of this planet: the communist or socialist state.

We should never forget the dark heritage of communism. The wall wasn't built because East Germany was a magnet for the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," but much on the contrary, it was built to make sure that their tired and poor, the subjects of communism, couldn't escape from the nightmare of their government's ironfisted rule.

As explained by Paul Hollander, "the failure of the communist system was not merely economic and political; it was a moral failure as well." Or as put by Cato's Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar (HT Escolhas e Consequências' Hillbrecht):

Communists and socialists everywhere, including in India, were dismayed. They could not understand why East Germans blessed with income equality, free social welfare and full employment should flee to the highly unequal West, which bristled with unemployment and social perils. An answer came in a letter to a newspaper editor.

"My daughter's hamster (a pet white mouse) has food, water, shelter and even medical care, and a cage full of fun curly tubes. The hamster responds by constantly trying to chew his way to freedom. I think we all understand what freedom is, and it is not a gilded cage."

Surprisingly for many, our President decided to snub the celebrations of what was one of the most decisive political victories in the history of the United States. The Germans and other Europeans didn't take the affront lightly (HT Selva Brasilis). Their negative reaction should have been expected by anyone who knows on which side of the Atlantic Europe is located. On the other hand, I hope that this time Europeans will give the Presidential gaffe some thought and learn something new about American politics.

Taylor on Government Failure Versus Market Failure

In this blog I like to point out how frequent and prevalent is the phenomenon of government failure. Under a public choice perspective, the problem is that, in the public sector, there are strong incentives to use market failure as an excuse for the adoption of awkward or interested public policies, while government failure is rarely - if ever - recognized as a problem by politicians and government officers in power, since it would represent a recognition of their own deficiencies. Here's how Stanford economist John Taylor summarizes the problem:

Cliff Winston of the Brookings Institution carefully reviews three decades of empirical research on a wide range of microeconomic policy studies in his important book Government Failure versus Market Failure. He comes to the same basic conclusion; as he puts it "thirty years of empirical evidence... suggests that the welfare cost of government failure may be considerably greater than that of market failure."

It is interesting that he focuses on research done outside of government because, again as he puts it, "studies conducted by the government,...can be biased, inconsistent, and technically flawed." So perhaps it is not surprising that so few government agencies or officials are pointing to government failure as the main problem in the recent financial crisis.