Hugo Chavez: What's the Point?

The real problem with oil is not that it is despoiling the earth through global warming. It
is that it ruins nations. Like Venezuela. The great problem nations of the world are often
oil-rich.

In an oil-rich nation, the people become a cost. But in a resource-poor nation, the
people are a resource.

That certainly goes for Venezuela. The oil revenues of Venezuela are a piggy-bank to
pay for the ambitions of the leader of Venezuela. Right now, the leader is
Hugo Chavez, a Castro-type
lefty whose ambition is to bestride Latin America like a colossus. His foreign policy
is to
oppose whatever the US proposes.

Right now, the US proposes a Free Trade Area of the Americas, a continent-wide
market in which all can participate. But
Chavez
went to the recent pan-American summit determined

to "bury" the trade plan, arguing that it would "enslave" Latin
American workers. He called the plan for a Free Trade Area of the Americas an
"annexation plan" that would destroy local industries and give
the US political and economic domination over the region.

OK, pal. Go ahead. From the US point of view, the free-trade plan is really
little more than charity. Our major trading partners are Canada, Mexico, Europe and East Asia.
If South America doesn’t want free trade, it really doesn’t make much difference to the
US.

Of course, according to generally accepted economics, a free-trade pact will
make a big difference to the workers and the emerging economies of Latin America, bringing
the benefit of “global best practice” into their economies. But if they don’t want
it, or Chavez can persuade them that they don’t want it, why bother?

The lesson of history seems to be that nations that don’t allow a free competive
economy just stagnate and wither. As Venezuela will stagnate once the current oil-price
bubble pops.

Wake Me When It's Over

We live, most of us, most of the time, in a dream. So says
John Derbyshire
as he thinks about the aftermath of the riots in France. Even as the
dream of the welfare state is turning into a nightmare there are people running
around with tee-shirts exhorting us to MAKE POVERTY HISTORY

by dint of "fair trade, debt relief, fighting corruption and directing
additional resources for basic needs — education, health, clean water, food, and care
for orphans." Good grief! How come nobody ever thought of this before? Billions of poor
people out there, and all we have to do is direct some additional resources! It’s so
simple! Yet for decades
we’ve been doing nothing! Shame, shame, shame on us!

In the British Guardian the edit page invokes the Kerner Commission
as though we had learned nothing from the generation since the 1960s. No doubt
the Kerner generation correctly diagnosed
the illness—“frustrated hopes and powerlessness.” But then they proposed a foolish
remedy of more government spending and payments for not working that took a generation
to unravel.

Derbyshire directs his readers to the BBC website where the children of the welfare
state propose their solution to the French crisis. To them

the solution to the rioting in France is plain. Respect! Give them jobs!
Set up some post-colonial studies programs!
Work together! Socialism! Love! End poverty!

The children of the welfare state have been well taught. The educated elite has
taught them to believe that their welfare state, their “social model,” is the way of goodness and truth.
But the
truth is that the welfare state is a cruel and oppressive system. It is not
a social model but a feudal model that privileges
the educated elite and reduces the rest of society to powerless
adolescence, coopted and anesthetized with pensions and welfare, but deprived in
independence and responsibility.
It will take a generation to unlearn that, and in the meanwhile many people will suffer.

Young Men Want to Fight for the Tribe

Young men like to fight. That is a truth that has been obscured over the
last generation as advocates of “peace” have monopolized the public square. But whatever
they say, young men like to fight. Even left-wing young men like to fight. They call
it “activism.”

So it can’t be surprising that young men are signing up to fight in the War on Terror.
The surprise is that anyone would expect otherwise. Here we have a generation of boys
that have been tranquilized on Ritalin but that have spent every waking hour engaged
in violent warlike video games. Here we have a generation of boys that, given a choice
on TV, watch sports and
the History Channel rather than the relationship fare of the sitcom. And we are
surprised that they choose to join the armed forces?

W. Thomas Smith Jr.
gives us the details. Recruitment goals in the regular armed forces are generally
being met although the reserves are not doing so well.

"There is a sort of vendetta because of 9/11," says Staff Sgt. Jose Guerreiro, a senior drill instructor at Parris Island.
"Some recruits have even had family members killed in Iraq. We tell them
chances are they’ll be going," the sergeant said. "We explain to them that not
everybody’s going to be kicking down doors up
front, but they know combat is likely for all Marines."

This is as old as the hills. The way that young men serve their tribe or
nation is by stepping up to offer themselves as the ultimate sacrifice. That has always
been the way, for studies show that until recently only about half the young men in any
generation got to project their genes into the next generation.

A lot of people think that the age of war and violence is over. That we have
entered a new era in which the lion will lie down with the lamb. Chances are they are wrong.
Humans are animals, and animals live by killing. Some animals only kill vegetables, but
all animals are in the business of killing to stay alive and to feed their young.

Democratic Politicians and the Angry Left

Conservatives are waking up this week to the possibility that our Democratic friends
may indeed be nailing their colors to the mast of “Bush Lied!” and that they are
prepared to face the American people on the proposition that the current administration
tricked the American people into an illegal and immoral war on Iraq. This
would represent a political polarization worse than the Vietnam War.

Yet it comes at a moment when it must be clear to anyone not hiding in a bunker
that there really is a war going on between radical Islam and the west. There are bombs
in Britain, riots in the Paris suburbs, bombs in Bali, murders of Christian schoolgirls
in Indonesia, genocide in Darfur and, last but not least, the insurgency in Iraq.
The military historian Victor Davis Hanson wonders how Democrats could be
so blind. The columnist
Jonah Goldberg complains that the partisan Democrats just don’t care.

The frisson of worry and of exasperation issues, of course, from the realization that
we are coming up for a fight. With the Democrats turning sharply away from the war and
anything to do with it, for whatever reason, the next two elections culminating in the
presidential election of 2008 are shaping up as divisive as the elections of 2000 and
2004.

It is clear that the national Democratic elected politicians are throwing in their
lot with the Angry Left base symbolized by the left-wing web sites MoveOn.org and
dailyknos.com. This is confusing to Republicans, because for us they represent the left-wing
equivalent of making the John Birch Society the center of the Republican Party. Republicans,
led by William F. Buckley, Jr., read the radical right out of the conservative movement in
the formative stage of the movement, and cannot understand why the Democrats would embrace
their extremists.

In fact, of course, there really are a lot of Angry Lefties. The system
encourages them and condones their extremism. The “no enemies on the
left” tradition in liberal circles and the radicalization of education in the
universitymeans that extreme
left-wing ideas do not get filtered out of the national political discourse.

Recent demographic studies such as
The Politics of Polarization argue that it is folly for the Democrats
to adopt the politics of division because the Republican conservative base
is bigger than the Democratic liberal base.

But you never know.

The Failure of the Social Model

Decades ago a much-loved European pleasure was to shake the head in
knowing exasperation about American race riots. Those Americans just didn’t have a clue.

But now the tables are turned. There is nothing more delicious than for an American
to sit back and enjoy the social problems of Old Europe. And this week we have
a ringside seat at the race riots in Paris. Or are they religious riots? We
can chuckle as French government leaders issue
firm statements
about the rule of law
and preserving peace. And as rivals for the French presidency snipe at each other.

One of the key responsibilities of any government is to control the volatile spirits
of young single males. As Lee Harris has written, the civilized world is in a
neverending battle with the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” The gang of ruthless men
has always found a ready source of recruits among young single men. Legitimate government
needs to get to the young men first before the ruthless men—the revolutionaries, the criminal
gangs, the religious warriors—do.

In the modern welfare state, as
Theodore Dalrymple writes, we have built an almost perfect system for
delivering angry young men to the gang leaders. The brilliance of our progressive thinkers
and policymakers in bringing this about is almost breathtaking.

First of all, they have made it possible for single women to raise children without
having to marry their fathers. This is helpful in raising a generation of gangbangers.
Then they have set up a rigid labor market that vitiates the traditional employment at will
contract. There are minimum wage laws; there are licensing requirements; there are
penalties for firing employees; there are generous unemployment benefits. All of these
worthy measures discourage employers from hiring combustible young men and they discourage
combustible young men with limited skills from seeking employment.
And then there is the whole left-wing discourse of social justice, discrimination, and
multiculturalism that condones and encourages alienation in the lower orders.

So what do these young men do? They do what comes naturally. They join a gang, and
hang out looking surly. From time to time they have a rumble.
In the case of young Muslim men from South Asia, the rumble takes the form of suicide
bombing.

A highly secularized Muslim population whose men nevertheless wish
to maintain their dominance over women and need a justification for doing so;
the hurtful experience of disdain or rejection from the surrounding society;
the bitter disappointment of a frustrated materialism and a seemingly perpetual
inferior status in the economic hierarchy; the extreme insufficiency and
unattractiveness of modern popular culture that is without value; the readiness to
hand of an ideological and religious solution that is
flattering to self-esteem and allegedly all-sufficient;

What is left for the disaffected youth but the holy sacrifice of suicide bombing?

UN Discovers Property Rights for the Poor

Here’s a man bites dog story. The United Nations is setting up a commission on the
property rights of the poor and the hurdles and obstacles the poor face as they try to
make a living.

It’s surprising because, for more than a century, the global bien-pensant elites have
brushed aside the question of property rights. They have experienced that the way
for the poor to advance was by clientage to the political power of the educated elite.
Vote for us, the educated elite told the poor, and we will have our experts look after you.

But now, according to
Alejandro Chafuen,
the UN is taking a look at the narrative developed by Peruvian businessman Hernando De Soto.
And guess what. The new “High Level Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor” will be
led by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright—and Hernando De Soto himself.

Founder and director of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, Peru, and author of the landmark 1986 book on property rights, "The Other Path," Mr. De Soto has demonstrated to policy makers worldwide that an organized "legal property system" is the single
most important factor -- the "hidden architecture" or "missing link," he calls it --
that will determine whether individual entrepreneurs and national economies have even
a chance of achieving success.

In capitalist economies, Mr. De Soto notes, business transactions are made
possible by widely accepted rules governing legally defined property. Such concepts
often don’t exist in the developing world, where existing legal systems (or the lack
thereof) may not recognize the assets and transactions of some 70 percent of the
population.

And if that doesn’t persuade you there is the testimony of William L. Lewis in
The Power of Productivity in which he shows that the biggest problem faced by anyone,
rich or poor, is the lack of a flat and fair playing field for economic competition. Usually,
Third World countries are hobbled by vast structures that favor producers over consumers and
distort the economy with a miasma of subsidies.

Of course, all the UN is proposing to do for now is to talk. But still, progress is progress.

A Great Opportunity

It was the fall of 1987 when Senator Edward Kennedy opened a new era in American politics.
In fact, it is perhaps his signature contribution to American politics. An hour after President Reagan
nominated Appeals Court Judge Robert Bork to a seat on the United States Supreme Court, Kennedy spoke
these words on the floor of the United States Senate:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into
back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police
could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,
children could not be taught about evolution

It was the beginning of the Bork era, in which Democrats arrogated to themselves
the right to attack with ruthless character assassination any candidate for the federal bench who did not hew
to the liberal line on abortion and the other various “rights” that had been
legislated from the federal bench in the era of judicial activism that began in the 1950s
with the Warren court.

Ever since, Republicans have walked in fear of being Borked, and Republicans have suffered
again and again from vicious campaigns of character assassination from Democratic activists.
For Republicans never seemed to be able to avoid getting spattered with mud when Democrats
jumped into the gutter.

Central to the Democrats’ power to administer these public floggings was their
willing accomplices in the media. Most journalists were liberal and they wanted
to preserve the great liberal rights decisions that the Supreme Court had made in the
previous generation.

Now they are trying it again. Senator Schumer of New York has stepped into the shoes
of Senator Kennedy with a speech made this time moments before President Bush announced
the nomination of Samuel Alito for a seat on the Supreme Court, implying that Alito was
a racist:

A preliminary review of his record raises real questions about
Judge Alito’s judicial philosophy and his commitment to civil rights, workers’
rights, women’s rights, the rights of average Americans which the courts have always
looked out for.

Now, it’s sad that the president felt he had to pick a nominee likely to
divide America instead of choosing a nominee in the mold of Sandra Day O’Connor
who would unify us.

America needs unity now. America needs reaching out to one another more than ever.
But the president seems to want to hunker down in his bunker and is more concerned
about smoothing the ruffled feathers of the extreme wing of his party than about
governing all of America and changing history for the better.

For conservatives and Republicans, the issue cannot be clearer. After twenty years cowering from
the monstrous calumnies of liberal senators and liberal activist groups, the Bork era
must be brought to a close. Conservatives and Republicans should not live in
fear of Borking and character assassination.

This time, once for all, the Democratic
tactic of character assassination and obstruction must not stand. It must fail, and
be seen to fail in a national convulsion of disgust with the politics of
“the eternal gang of ruthless men.”

Fortunately Republicans now have the tools to do the job: our own publicity machine
that can meet or beat the organs of the Democratic Party and their willing accomplices
in the mainstream media.

Bring. It. On.