RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/a-crime-against-humanity/

Last week at the New Criterion, conservative scholar James Piereson posed an interesting question, arguing the affirmative: is socialism a hate crime?

As is his custom, Piereson makes a solid case. His isn’t a complex argument — Piereson simply totals up the corpses thanks to the world’s chief practitioners of socialist governance in the 20thcentury, and concludes that anything which leads to the deaths of more than 110 million souls has to be a hate crime by the definition afforded us by the modern gatekeepers of the term.

After all, the evidence for its malignant effects is obvious to anyone with sufficient curiosity to look at the historical record. The socialist movement has been responsible for the murder, imprisonment, and torture of many millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of innocent people during its heyday in the twentieth century. That history of murder and tyranny continues on a smaller scale today in the handful of countries living under the misfortune of socialism — for example, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and (more recently) Venezuela.

How do socialists escape the indictment that, in view of the historical record, they are purveyors of tyranny and mass murder? Many deny that Stalin, Mao, and the others were true socialists and, indeed, that socialism has never really been tried — a manifest absurdity. Senator Sanders and others claim that they are for something called “democratic socialism,” a popular and peaceful version of the doctrine, but that’s what Lenin, Mao, and Castro said until they seized power and immediately began to sing a different tune. Democracy and diversity are what they say when out of power; tyranny and authoritarianism are what they practice once in power. That is the tried-and-true technique of all socialist movements.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-takes-a-second-look-at-conscription-1535311309

Conscription is back. After the Cold War, most European countries suspended mandatory military service, but now they’re rediscovering the institution that added muscle to the armed forces and some measure of social cohesion. The practice is often more a burden than an aid to the military. But with natural disasters and other emergencies increasing, what we really need is citizen resilience training.

“I can promise you one thing: We’ll have to discuss the issue of military service and national service very intensively again,” Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, secretary-general of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, said in a video message released earlier this month. That sentence unleashed this summer’s biggest debate in Germany.

The government suspended conscription seven years ago. In its final years, only about one-third of young Germans performed military service, about one-third chose civilian national service, and the remaining third were not called up or signed up as professional soldiers—Germany’s post-Cold War armed forces simply didn’t need that many soldiers. But with the armed forces—the Bundeswehr—now struggling to recruit professional soldiers, Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s suggestion is not surprising. Sweden has reinstated selective conscription to beef up its active-duty forces, as has Lithuania. Norway has expanded the selective draft to women, while French President Emmanuel Macron is planning a new form of mandatory national service that includes a civilian and a military segment.

These initiatives are laudable, but only the best-executed conscription models generate substantial military value. “People fill the conscription concept with all kinds of problems they want to solve: integration, unruly youths, teaching young people rules,” noted Annika Nordgren Christensen, a Swedish former member of Parliament who wrote the report that led to the selective draft, told me. “But what really matters is its military value.” Ms. Kramp-Karrenbauer’s proposal is essentially an updated, co-ed return to Germany’s previous model; young men and women would be required to serve in the Bundeswehr or in a civil-society organization such as a fire brigade or an assisted-living facility. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rouhani-suffers-fresh-blow-after-irans-parliament-ousts-economy-minister-1535296186?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=8&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Iran’s parliament ousted the country’s economy minister Sunday, stepping up an overhaul of President Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet amid deep domestic opposition to his response to harsh new U.S. sanctions.

Mr. Rouhani, a relative moderate in Iran’s system, had surrounded himself with a cabinet of technocrats, vowing to fight corruption, promote transparency and open Iran’s economy to the West with the 2015 nuclear deal.

But after the economy faltered and the Iran deal came under threat from the Trump administration last year, hard-line opponents have seized on Iran’s growing rich-poor divide and plummeting currency to gut Mr. Rouhani’s economic team and undercut that strategy.

Slightly more than the required majority of 260 parliamentarians present on Sunday voted to fire the economy minister, Masoud Karbasian, state television reported. Parliamentarians criticized him for allegedly failing to address the currency crisis or tame high inflation, and for his unfitness to fight an economic war with the U.S. since Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in May and began imposing new sanctions.

The move against Mr. Karbasian, who held his position for little more than a year, followed the parliament’s impeachment early this month of Mr. Rouhani’s labor minister on grounds that he failed to properly address unemployment, which the International Monetary Fund forecasts at around 12% this year.

Mr. Rouhani also removed and replaced the central bank governor, Valiollah Seif, last month after Iran’s currency fell to new lows against the dollar. It now takes around 105,000 Iranian rials to buy a dollar, compared with about 43,000 in January.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-tyranny-of-bad-ideas-1535311573

Ideas run the world. Good ones create freedom and wealth; bad ones, oppression and poverty. You are not what you eat, but what you think.

Politicians in particular fall under the sway of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. . . . It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

The story of Venezuela makes this point with singular clarity. In 1914 the discovery of oil brought the country vast revenues and produced a relatively free economy. By 1950 Venezuela enjoyed the fourth-highest per capita income in the world, behind only the U.S., Switzerland and New Zealand. As late as 1980, it boasted the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 20th century. In 2001 Venezuela still ranked as Latin America’s wealthiest country.

Venezuela’s troubles, however, had begun long before. Starting around 1958, government interference in the economy, including price and exchange controls, higher taxes, and restrictions on property rights, led to decades of stagnation, with per capita real income declining 0.13% from 1960-97. Still, it remained a normal, functioning country.

Today the country with the world’s largest oil reserves suffers from a severely contracting economy, runaway inflation, despotism, mass emigration, criminality, disease, hunger and starvation, with circumstances deteriorating daily. Venezuela’s economy contracted by 16% in 2016, 14% last year and a predicted 15% in 2018. Inflation was at 112% in 2015 and 2,800% at the end of last year. Economist Steve Hanke finds an annualized rate of around 65,000% for 2018, making Venezuela’s one of the most severe hyperinflations ever. Food shortages led to an average weight loss among Venezuelans of 18 pounds in 2016 and 24 pounds in 2017.

What caused this crisis? Foreign invasion, civil war, natural disaster, substitutes for oil, or agricultural plagues? No, bad ideas, pure and simple. CONTINUE AT SITE