"In Egypt, public borrowing rose to 89 percent of the country’s GDP (US$183.7 billion in June last year), much of which was spent on food exports as the economy was forced to shift from agriculture and manufacturing to tourism and services."That's Soumaya Ghannoushi from the notoriously anti-capitalist "School of Oriental and African Studies" in London. Look: if the Egyptian economy was "forced to shift" from agriculture to tourism, then how could the Egyptian government have spent 89% of GDP on agricultural exports?
Bonus shots:
(1) What was imposed on the populations of those countries was made possible by the dictatorships lording it over them, not the people at the World Bank - and I say that as someone with no sympathy for that institution.
(2) What's been happening in North Africa and the Middle East isn't an "Arab" revolt, and to identify it by a racial designation just goes to show the despicable superficiality so typical of the diseased wing of the Left.
Meanwhile here's Hitchens on the ridiculously UN-limited Western intervention in Libya:
"The immediate task now is to assimilate those lessons, shorten the time in which the knowledge gained can be applied, call the evil by its right name, and face Qaddafi with a stark choice between his own death and his appearance in the dock. It is morally unthinkable that he should emerge from this episode with even a rag of authority to call his own, and it is morally feeble not to say so out loud."Agreed. I have a post in the works on how a libertarian intervention could have been done, but it'll have to wait for another day...
One thing you'll never hear these guys say is property rights. I love it, the sheer idiocy and statist thinking. In Egypt in cities 85%+ of land is untitled and it is 95%+ in the countryside. Aswan Dam traded the yearly floods that fertilized the land for less chance of monster floods and electricity.
ReplyDeleteJust normal stuff, the Latin Americans went through it during the 70's and 80's. There'll be a lot of blood, ruined lives and blame for everyone else except themselves. America will be considered the root cause and eventually it will hit an equilibrium.
The part I love is how little play is being put on the Libyan situation. It's just shocking how it's just nonchalantly being thrown under the rug. The terrorist who was released because of a terminal cancer who just happened to have a full recovery, Qaddafi's assistance in stemming the tide of African immigrants, German malfeasance, Who the rebels are and what they support and do. Just weird to see lefties who screamed bloody murder about Iraq go all silent on Libya.
To think this all started from an unemployed fruit seller in Tunisia who self-immolated after his wares were taken by the police and they beat him up.
"Just weird to see lefties who screamed bloody murder about Iraq go all silent on Libya."
ReplyDeleteNot at all weird - in looking at the Left, you have to remember to distinguish its different constituents from one another. There are the old-school, soft-core Marxists like Hitchens who can, I think, be boxed into more of a properly liberal, limited government position domestically whilst retaining a hawkish stance on foreign policy (from my brief arguments with him I suspect J.Michael Cole may fall into this category). Then you have the more hard-core, but unorthodox Marxists (people like Chomsky) who can agree to many aspects of a libertarian critique of the State, but who nevertheless would like to abolish private property over the means of production - these people seem to be reflexively against foreign military intervention (I have an essay to write about them). Then you have the DW (Diseased Wing) of the Left: these people fall into two groups; the first are the thorough-going unlimited government, technocratic types (since Jeremy Bentham onwards) who are reflexively pragmatist in their ethics (Turton falls into this group, along with much of the "scientific community" and environmental movement - people like George Moonbat); the second is the postmodern, anti-capitalist cultural and ethical relativists who reflexively side against the West in any conflict - these people are just scum (the likes of Ghannoushi are in here).
Then finally, there is the philosophically-orthodox, but strategically and tactically modern Marxist-Leninist wing who are very sophisticated. These people see foreign policy as either a distraction, or a tool of domestic politics.
Of course, it's not unusual to find overlaps among these different groups, but if you know which one you're looking at, then their movements become more predictable. For instance, if a Tsai administration is elected next year, and does indeed find itself having to "expropriate" farmland to build renewables, then Turton will go right along with it on the qualification that the due legal process is adhered to, whereas someone like J.M. Cole might complain of having "serious misgivings" but would probably be persuaded to not make too much of a fuss. From across the Left, only the unorthodox Marxists might oppose a move like that.
I understand what you're saying. I know it is true, but for the love of God, I can't fathom how one could live with such cognitive dissonance.
ReplyDeleteHuh? Sorry - got to give you a 404 on that - come again?
ReplyDelete