This remarkable Statute created the modern copyright system, recognising for the first time that authors should be the primary beneficiary of the monopoly rights granted by a copyright. The other important thing the Statute of Queen Anne did was to make copyright a limited monopoly right. Prior to 1710, booksellers could and did hand down royal grants of copyright to their sons. Old Tom’s Almanac, for example, made several generations of English booksellers a very good living. In 1710 monopoly copyrights were, for the first time, limited to a fixed period (28 years in the original statute), after which a work passed into the Public Domain.

I’m certain Bruce Epstein wasn’t advocating a return to the pre-1710 state of things but encouraging booksellers to return to the old practice may not be such a good idea, at least from the creator’s point-of-view.

For what it’s worth, I think the British Lords of 1710 got it right and we’d do well to remember their reasons for acting as they did.

First, they didn’t consider copyright some inalienable civil or human right. Copyright is a government-granted monopoly right designed to encourage people to produce creative works. The Law Lords saw these works as being in the public good. They believed offering a form of monopoly protection to creators would ensure more and better works would appear. (They believed rightly as it turned out: post the Statute of Queen Anne saw one of the great flowerings of literature in Britain.)

Second, they strictly limited the life of this monopoly right. Since the right was granted primarily because it was seen that more and better creative works would be a public benefit, it followed that eventually the public should have access to that benefit directly. The original 28 year life of a granted copyright has been extended several times (most recently in the US by the so-called Sonny Bono law which extends copyright out 75 years after the copyright owner’s death) but it is still a limited right.

It worries me that people have begun to use language reminiscent of the civil rights movement when describing copyrights. It mostly comes from people high up in organisations like the RIAA and various Hollywood studios but I’ve seen similar language used on the StudioB list and other writing-related lists.

Copyright isn’t on a par with the right to life, liberty, fraternity and equality before the law. It’s a privilege extended to us by our fellow citizens because they recognise the value they get out of our efforts. Let’s not forget writers (and all artists) are in the service industry. If we start telling people they should feel privileged that we deign to offer our masterpieces for their purchase and edification they will — quite rightly — tell us all to f#$& off and die.

success in the Doha round of international trade talks would give the world more every year than what Buffett can give once after a lifetime of being the world’s most successful investor.

Mark Malloch Brown, the UN’s deputy secretary-general, said on June 6th that: “there is currently a perception among many otherwise quite moderate countries that anything the US supports must have a secret agenda...and therefore, put crudely, should be opposed without any real discussion of whether [it makes] sense or not.”

Although we’ve never met, I’m tempted to call you "Barb," the name you were given in your weeks as a Wal-Mart employee. I myself have never worked at Wal-Mart, and I can only remember shopping there once. In fact, I instinctively recoil at the big-box shopping centers spreading their uniformity across the American landscape. But I try hard not to let my personal and somewhat elitist shopping inclinations get in the way of an appraisal of Wal-Mart’s positive role in America’s economy and society.

Are you as surprised as I am by how quickly Wal-Mart’s critics move past the issue of low prices? You will hear comments like, "Yes, Wal-Mart may have somewhat low prices, but let’s talk about its impact on workers, the environment, trade with China, etc." But given just how important these low prices are to the hundreds of millions of Americans that shop there, I hope I can beg your indulgence to linger on them for a few moments.

A range of studies has found that Wal-Mart’s prices are 8 percent to 39 percent below the prices of its competitors. The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn’t mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that’s a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors. Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did. Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web. You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages. A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

The notion that video games reflect a new, inordinate societal preoccupation with violent entertainment is a myth. In his new book Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, Harold Schechter meticulously documents the prevalence of violent fare throughout the history of art and entertainment. Schechter notes that even “the supposedly halcyon days of the 1950s” were replete with violent fare, much of it aimed at children. “[T]he fact is that—contrary to popular belief—there was a shockingly high level of sadistic violence and gore in some of the most popular commercial entertainments of the 1950s.”47 Mickey Spillane’s best-selling “Mike Hammer” novels were a prime example.48 “Even the most vehement critics of contemporary popular culture would be hard-pressed to find anything in today’s mainstream mass entertainment as alarming as the gore-drenched, gun-worshipping fantasies that Spillane and his publisher dished out for the delectation of millions of ordinary American readers in the supposedly halcyon days of the 1950s,” argues Schechter.49 He also recounts the extraordinary gore of “pulp” comics during that decade, which were often replete with macabre, masochistic scenes. Schechter also notes the top-rated television program of 1954, Disney’s Davy Crockett series, “contained a staggering amount of graphic violence,” including scalpings, stabbings, “brainings,” hatchet and tomahawk blows, and so on. The series finale takes place at the Alamo and contained, in Schechter’s opinion, a “level of carnage [that] remains unsurpassed in the history of televised children’s entertainment.”50 (Incidentally, the show aired Wednesday nights at 7:30 to target the elementary school crowd.) Perhaps it is the case then, as Judge Posner suggested in the Kendrick case, that nothing much has really changed throughout the history art and entertainment. Many people—including many children—clearly have a desire to see depictions of violence. They might even imagine themselves to be role-playing or living out fantasies in the imaginary worlds created by authors, television and radio programmers and entertainers, and even video game developers. One need only read the works of Shakespeare to realize that this instinct is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. How many knives have been plunged into how many backs during the countless renditions of Shakespeare’s most revered works on stages over the past five centuries? And some of his plays—King Lear, Macbeth, and Titus Andronicus, in particular—contain scenes of extreme violence, murder and even mutilation. Yet, the works of Shakespeare are probably available in almost every library and school in America.

I realize that this will be viewed as apostasy in some circles, but I must confess I remain very dubious of the increasingly frequent calls to close the base at Guantanamo.

Regularize the procedures there? Of course. Apply the laws of armed conflict, including Common Article 3 of Geneva? Yes. Implement and apply a much more tailored and specific definition of "enemy combatant"? Absolutely. Increase transparency? You bet.

But close GTMO? And do . . . what, exactly, with the detainees? Indeed, wouldn’t it be better if all suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees -- e.g., those at Bagram, and at "black sites" -- were transferred to GTMO, where there is more legal process and greater judicial oversight (at least as a practical matter)?

Guantanamo now is, by far, the most comfortable and legally accountable detention facility maintained by the United States for foreign prisoners. Conditions there were crude in 2002, but since then one state-of-the art detention facility, modeled on a prison in Indiana, has been built, and a second is under construction. Guantanamo’s detainees have recreation facilities and good medical care; their continued detention is reviewed once a year by military boards, and prisoners are assigned advocates to help argue their cases. Pending a decision by the Supreme Court, they are also able to appeal their detentions to U.S. federal courts, and many have U.S. civilian lawyers. In contrast, some 500 detainees held by the United States at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan live in far harsher conditions and have fewer rights. They do not have their own advocates, and none has been able to appeal to U.S. courts. No American lawyers are available to broadcast any complaints they have about poor treatment; in fact, alarmingly little is known about what goes on inside the prison’s walls. And Bagram’s inmates are better off than the prisoners -- believed to number in the dozens -- held in secret CIA facilities. They have effectively disappeared, like the victims of a Third World dictatorship; they have never been registered with the International Red Cross, provided with a legal review of their cases or allowed to communicate with the outside world. From leaks to the media, we know that some have been tortured with techniques such as "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. So the United States’ treatment of its foreign detainees would improve enormously if all the prisoners it holds were transferred to Guantanamo.

Smokers are the new lepers. One already sees them huddled in doorways. Soon the health bill now before the UK parliament will ban smoking in all workplaces in England, including pubs, restaurants and private clubs. But the government revealed ... that the ban might eventually apply to doorways and entrances of offices and public buildings, as well as to bus shelters and sports stadiums. Smokers are to be driven out into the wilderness...

As a life-long non-smoker, I wonder what is driving these assaults. Is it an attempt to improve public health, as campaigners suggest? Or do smokers serve a need every society seems to have - for a group of pariahs that all right-thinking people can condemn? I strongly suspect the latter. ...

The discovery of passive smoking has, for this reason, given the anti-tobacco lobby its success. It has overwhelmed the protests of libertarians. Riding a tide of moral indignation, the government has enacted a draconian law banning smoking even in private clubs. Now it plans to extend that ban outdoors.

So how many lives might this extension "save" (or, more precisely, prolong)? Indeed, how many lives might the ban itself save?

According to a survey published in 2003 by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, ... passive smoking increases the risk of death from lung cancer by 25 per cent. This sounds dramatic. But these studies probably contain biased or inaccurate samples: some smokers may, for example, be classified as non-smokers. Moreover, the risk for non-smokers of death from lung cancer is itself only 10 per 100,000. So the increase generated by passive smoking comes to just 2.5 per 100,000.

If every non-smoker were exposed to sufficient quantities of second-hand smoke this would amount to a maximum of 1,000 deaths a year in England, ... less than 0.2 per cent of all deaths in the country. In practice, however, the ...deaths from lung cancer caused by passive smoking ... must be very much smaller than this. Many people already live in an overwhelmingly tobacco-free environment. ...

Moreover, the government’s ban does not even go near to eliminating passive smoking. As for the proposed extension to open spaces, it can add nothing. The notion that people would be exposed to dangerous quantities of passive smoke in open bus shelters or the doorways of buildings seems ludicrous. It also seems next to impossible to police fairly: where do doorways stop and who decides?

These difficulties do not, as it happens, apply to the places where the most damaging forms of passive smoking occur, in homes. That is where vulnerable children are likely to be most exposed... If the UK government were engaged in a serious health endeavour, as opposed to gesture politics, it would outlaw smoking in the home. This would be perfectly feasible... Children could be encouraged to "shop" their parents. Random visits could be arranged. ...

There is a precedent, although not a happy one: Montgomery County, in Maryland, US, did ban smoking in the home a few years ago, but then retracted the ban under global ridicule. Yet why the ridicule should have won out is far from obvious. All those people who think that the risks from passive smoking justify comprehensive legislation on public places must see the still stronger case for protecting children at home. Indeed, I wonder why the UK government does not ban the noxious weed altogether... That would be in accord with policy on a range of prohibited drugs.

Note: I am opposed to any such policy. I am merely pointing out the absurdities of current plans. Harm to others is a necessary justification for government interference. But it is not sufficient. Intervention should also be both effective and carry costs proportionate to the likely gains...

The report argues against the view that high levels of support are necessary to ensure the quality of the environment and prosperity in rural areas. Most support goes to those who have the largest farms while government aid often “leaks” out those who are not the intended beneficiaries such as suppliers or people who own, but do not farm, land, it says. Policies to improve the environment are often ineffectual because they mainly offset pressures on natural resources from subsidies that stimulate production. Rural development is more effectively fostered by measures such as investment in infrastructure, education and social services.

De VRT krijgt de toelating om een digitaal themakanaal voor cultuur te ontwikkelen en dat in samenwerking met de privé-sector. Dit is nieuw. Hiermee wordt afgestapt van de concurrentielogica tussen de publieke en private zenders die het Vlaamse medialandschap al een tijdje typeert en zelfs bijna gijzelt. Er wordt gekozen voor een samenwerkingslogica tussen de publieke en de private sector. Wij geloven veel meer in een model van ’co-competition’ dan in een concurrentiemodel.

In zowat alle domeinen spreken we vandaag van mogelijkheden in PPS. Blijkbaar was dat in het mediabeleid nog taboe, maar wij zien niet in waarom. We merken nu een eerste belangrijke doorbraak voor een innovatie. Ik geef u een voorbeeld. Ik denk aan het Vlaamse bedrijf uit Lint, Euro 1080, dat bekend maakte in het najaar te zullen starten met een digitale cultuurzender HD3 of ’High Definition 3’. Het past in de bedrijfsstrategie van die Vlaamse speler om maar liefst 12 cultuurzenders te ontwikkelen in de periode 2006-2008 voor verschillende Europese regio’s en taalgebieden.

Het bedrijf werkt vandaag samen met verschillende publieke omroepen in het buitenland. Wat in het buitenland kan met Vlaamse knowhow en creativiteit, waarom zou dat niet in Vlaanderen kunnen? Vlaanderen is een kleine cultuurgemeenschap. Zowel de privé- als de publieke middelen zijn beperkt. Er ligt een businessplan van Euro 1080 voor, dat de ontwikkeling van een digitale cultuurzender mogelijk maakt. Er ligt ook een businessplan van de VRT voor een digitaal cultuurkanaal voor. Waarom niet proberen om beide plannen te integreren? Dan wordt een winwinsituatie mogelijk. Lukt het niet, dan is dat zo. Maar lukt het wel, dan zetten we met deze krijtlijnen een nieuwe stap in ons mediabeleid. Onze fractie doet een oproep aan de VRT en aan de ministers van Media en Cultuur, om zo’n vorm van samenwerking onbevooroordeeld te onderzoeken en alle kansen te geven. Als dat lukt, dan zal Vlaanderen nog dit jaar een cultureel themakanaal hebben.

De dotatie voor de VRT voor 2006 bedraagt 260 miljoen euro, buiten de middelen voor e-VRT. In euro is dat een indrukwekkend bedrag, maar uitgedrukt in oude Belgische frank klinkt het misschien nog indrukwekkender: meer dan 10,5 miljard frank. Dat is de vertrekbasis. Dankzij de krijtlijnen stijgt de dotatie aan de VRT in de volgende vijf jaar met maar liefst 90 miljoen euro. Daarbij mag de VRT dan nog de middelen tellen uit de valorisatie van haar patrimonium. Na drie jaar volgt een evaluatie van de opdracht van de openbare omroep.

Sinds 1999 draagt onze partij op Vlaams niveau regeringsverantwoordelijkheid. We willen dan ook eens kijken van waar we komen. In 1999 bedroeg de dotatie aan de VRT 198 miljoen euro, omgerekend 8 miljard frank. Nu is dat, deze keer inclusief de middelen voor e-VRT, 11,2 miljard frank. Er was dus een stijging in die periode met maar liefst 40 percent. Niemand kan dan ook de politieke wereld verwijten de VRT slechts aalmoezen te gunnen.

Mijnheer de minister, wat we niet kunnen ontkennen, is dat het verwachtingspatroon inzake de financiële middelen aan de Reyerslaan wel veel hoger lager dan wat de regering op tafel kon leggen. De VRT vroeg in zijn goede visienota voor de vijf jaar samen maar liefst 600 miljoen euro extra.

Het past hierbij eens te kijken naar de algemene begrotingsverhoudingen. De totale beleidsruimte waarover de Vlaamse Regering in deze beleidsperiode beschikt, bedraagt 2,5 miljard euro. Als de VRT daarvan 600 miljoen euro vraagt, dan vragen hij omgerekend 24 percent - bijna een vierde - van de totale beleidsruimte. Minister Vandenbroucke, we hebben het even omgerekend voor uw beleidsruimte. We weten dat u voor heel de regeerperiode beschikt over 400 miljoen euro. Daarmee moet de Vlaamse Regering alle noden opvangen die te maken hebben met het onderwijs. De VRT vraagt alleen al voor zijn groeipad 200 miljoen euro meer.

Ik denk dat iedereen begrijpt dat dit niet realistisch was.

People from around the world are drawn to America for its promise of freedom and opportunity. That promise has been fulfilled for the tens of millions of immigrants who came here in the twentieth century.

Throughout our history as an immigrant nation, those who were already here have worried about the impact of newcomers. Yet, over time, immigrants have become part of a richer America, richer both economically and culturally. The current debate over immigration is a healthy part of a democratic society, but as economists and other social scientists we are concerned that some of the fundamental economics of immigration are too often obscured by misguided commentary.

Overall, immigration has been a net gain for American citizens, though a modest one in proportion to the size of our 13 trillion-dollar economy.

Immigrants do not take American jobs. The American economy can create as many jobs as there are workers willing to work so long as labor markets remain free, flexible and open to all workers on an equal basis.

In recent decades, immigration of low-skilled workers may have lowered the wages of domestic low-skilled workers, but the effect is likely to have been small, with estimates of wage reductions for high-school dropouts ranging from eight percent to as little as zero percent.

While a small percentage of native-born Americans may be harmed by immigration, vastly more Americans benefit from the contributions that immigrants make to our economy, including lower consumer prices. As with trade in goods and services, the gains from immigration outweigh the losses. The effect of all immigration on low-skilled workers is very likely positive as many immigrants bring skills, capital and entrepreneurship to the American economy.

Legitimate concerns about the impact of immigration on the poorest Americans should not be addressed by penalizing even poorer immigrants. Instead, we should promote policies, such as improving our education system, that enable Americans to be more productive with high-wage skills.

We must not forget that the gains to immigrants coming to the United States are immense. Immigration is the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The American dream is a reality for many immigrants who not only increase their own living standards but who also send billions of dollars of their money back to their families in their home countries—a form of truly effective foreign aid.

America is a generous and open country and these qualities make America a beacon to the world. We should not let exaggerated fears dim that beacon.

After years of delays, AYN RAND’s famous novel ATLAS SHRUGGED is being made into a feature film starring BRAD PITT and ANGELINA JOLIE, according to media reports in the US. Lionsgate Films has bought the rights to the film version of the 1957 novel, considered in many polls to be one of the most influential books in history. According to Hollywood trade paper Variety, the MR AND MRS SMITH co-stars, who are both fans of the Russian novelist, would play the lead roles of DAGNY TAGGART and JOHN GAULT (actually it’s John Galt). The story revolves around the economic collapse of the US sometime in the future and espouses Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. RAY producers HOWARD and KAREN BALDWIN will adapt the 1,100 page novel into a feature film. CLINT EASTWOOD, ROBERT REDFORD and FAYE DUNAWAY have previously been attached to the project over the years.

(T)he era of big government has not ended; indeed, the nation state is doing just fine. The Leviathan State is proving popular in the midst of rising concerns about globalization, immigration, and terrorism.

And as governments worldwide gear up for another century of bigness, they naturally want help with their message. What are world leaders, and would-be world leaders supposed to do -- share their thoughts with bloggers? Will presidents and prime ministers really want to do deal with pajama-clad part-timers? Please. Big Government presupposes Big Media. And if the media get small and dispersed, through the workings of market forces, then states will build the media back up, through the workings of non-market forces. Of course, the government-sponsored approach has a huge additional benefit: If governments pay the piper, then governments call the tune.

Exhibit A is the British Broadcasting Corporation, which already boasts 279 million viewers worldwide. It’s planning a major expansion. Specifically, the BBC is pushing into the crucial US market, starting on July 3, aiming to establish a 24/7 cable news presence to compete with CNN, Fox (where I am a contributor), and MSNBC. And the British government will be a big winner; our First Amendment makes no distinction between kinds of media ownership, public or private, national or international. Some might note, of course, that the "Beeb" has been at odds with Tony Blair, mostly over Iraq. And while that’s true enough, the network and the prime minister have mostly settled their differences -- and in any case, the BBC will long outlast Blair or anyone else.

Indeed, the BBC promises to be edgy: A billboard in Times Square shows photographs of immigrants and gives the viewer the choice: "citizens" or "criminals." Other ads will show American soldiers in Iraq, giving the choices of "occupier" or "liberator." For those Americans who assert that the US media are too conservative, the BBC should be welcome, indeed. So don’t be surprised if the BBC does well in the American market.

And if the BBC doesn’t find an audience right away, well, it has the deep pockets that allow for patience: a state-provided budget of some £3.8 billion a year. The Beeb may be bureaucratic, but with that much money -- plus a healthy dollop of political ambition -- it’s hard to see it failing over the long run.

In fact, the BBC already has its own local media rivals running scared, as everyone confronts the reality of convergence, when everything is digital and the distinction between TV, radio, and the Net has collapsed. Just as private companies complain when state-supported firms "dump" their product into the market, so The Telegraph has complained about the predatory tactics of this SOMSM. "The BBC is tough to compete with, and we don’t have the subsidies that they have," lamented Edward Roussel, online editorial director to The Wall Street Journal on May 26. Even The Guardian, which is ideologically in tune with the BBC, has expressed alarm about Beeb-gemony.

Developing nations have to pay extra money to borrow because lenders think that there is a better-than-average chance that they will not pay the money back. Developing economies are more prone to sudden shocks than rich world ones; their tax collecting systems are primitive; their governments tend to have a less-than-sterling committment to international fiscal rectitude; and they are often prone to coups by people who start off their new reign by repudiating all former debts. Moreover, their central bankers tend to be political cronies who will inflate the currency whenever it is politically convenient for those in power, which is why such countries are often required to borrow in a more stable currency, to remove the temptation for heads of state to inflate their way out of inconvenient debts.

Investors are pretty confident that the United States is not going to suddenly shed 25% of its GDP because of a boll weevil infestation, or get a president who nationalises all the farmland, expels half the skilled workers in the country and kills the rest, and runs the Treasury’s printing presses day and night as a way to temporarily cover up the ensuing problems. They are reasonably sure that our economy will grow at a steady, if unspectacular pace, and that we will be able to meet their debts (as they should be; both our national debt and our fiscal imbalances are relatively modest by international standards, and look especially good if you compare our long term fiscal position--where the primary driver of imbalances is social security and Medicare--to those of Europe and Japan.) Thus, they lend to us in dollars, and they lend to us at very attractive rates.

One of the reasons that the panickers neglect to mention that all these foreigners are lending us dollars is that in their judgement, the United States is the most likely economy in the world to deliver an attractive combination of growth and low risk.

That is not to say that our fiscal imbalances are not a problem: they are. Getting our fiscal house in order, on both the government and the household level, is not going to be pleasant. But it is ludicrous to talk as if we were the next Argentina.

Between 3 and 3.5 million immigrants, including those already living in their new country on a temporary basis, became official long-term residents in OECD countries in 2004, according to International Migration Outlook, the latest edition of the OECD’s annual report on migration movements and policies.

Immigration rose sharply to the United States (+34%), Italy (+28%) and the United Kingdom (24%) during 2004, the latest year for which comparative figures are available. By contrast, immigration dropped sharply in Finland (-25%), Germany (-15%) and New Zealand (-14%). Over the same period, the number of asylum seekers arriving in OECD countries declined by more than 20%, continuing a trend that has seen a 35% drop since 2000.

The number of temporary, seasonal, and contract workers has been increasing over the past ten years as OECD countries continue to recruit temporary foreign workers. In the countries and categories for which detailed data are available, temporary entries for employment increased by approximately 7% in 2004, reaching 1.5 million. The increase in the number foreign students is also significant, particularly in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, France and Germany.

Following the enlargement of the European Union to 25 states in May 2004, only three EU member countries - the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden - opened their labour markets to nationals of the new accession countries. Since then, the UK and Ireland have received a significant number of immigrants from these countries, Sweden to a lesser extent. From May 2004 to the end of December 2005, 345 000 workers from the new member states were registered in the United Kingdom. In Ireland, from May 2004 to May 2005, 83 000 nationals of the new EU member states were registered, equal to 4% of the Irish labour force.

Many countries have adopted measures to attract highly skilled immigrants and foreign students by introducing or improving selection policies. Security and the fight against irregular migration, however, remain key elements of policies to control migration flows. In parallel, new measures were adopted to develop or improve the integration of newcomers. These include obligatory language courses (Denmark and the Netherlands), assistance to find jobs, increased ethnic diversity within enterprises (almost all OECD countries), and the fight against discrimination (France) and for equal opportunities (Belgium, Finland, Sweden, among others).

Sweden’s unemployment rate is 15 per cent, three times the figure being used by the government, according to new research from McKinsey Global Institute, the think tank. The consultancy’s calculations indicate unemployment is set to rise further, with between 100,000 and 200,000 jobs outsourced to cheaper countries over the next 10 years if no corrective action is taken. The numbers cast a pall over Sweden’s international reputation as a thriving welfare state with low unemployment and will help focus attention on jobs ahead of September’s national elections. McKinsey reached its conclusions by including those who want to work and those who could do so, meaning people on government programmes as well as those on prolonged sick leave. In its first assessment of the country’s economy since 1995, it said: "Sweden’s economy has reached a critical juncture. If nothing is done, the problems will become much more serious." It praised Sweden for achieving average GDP growth of 2.7 per cent a year since 1995, which it attibuted to deregulation and improvements in private sector productivity. But it said the country could not rely on future improvements in private-sector productivity, as the catch-up effect that had driven these developments would decline over time. The ageing population would put the public sector under "intolerable pressure" unless productivity improved, it added. "If nothing else changes, the resulting increase in welfare costs would become too large to finance through the current tax system in only 10 to 20 years," McKinsey said. It forecast municipal income tax rates would have to rise from about 30 per cent to about 50 per cent, arguing that these rises would not be accepted by the public as welfare and health services would decline. Last, it said that the real unemployment rate of 15 per cent could increase as the production of goods and services moved to lower-cost countries - such as the Baltic states, Poland and Russia. "Sweden needs to move quickly to introduce reforms that would create favourable conditions for sustained productivity growth in the private sector, better performance in the public sector and the creation of jobs in the private services sector," it said. It expressed confidence the country would be able to respond to these challenges, praising its productive industries, macroeconomic stability and good relations between politicians, companies and unions. But McKinsey said that Sweden had a lot of lost ground to regain. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Sweden had dropped from fifth position in its welfare ranking to 112th in 2004.

Few Economist indicators are as often cited as our Big Mac index, which uses hamburger prices as an index of currency parity. In the same spirit, we wondered how the globe looks when viewed through the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle. It turns out that fizzy mass-market stuff—ie capitalism—is good for you. Oddly, a list of the top 12 Coke consumers shows no discernible pattern—unless you see what Iceland has in common with Aruba. Probe a little deeper, however, and patterns emerge. For one, there is a loose but clear positive relationship between Coke consumption and wealth—perhaps not surprisingly. Even clearer is the relationship between cola and an index developed by the United Nations to show general quality of life (as measured by wealth, education, health and literacy). Coke consumption takes off at the upper end of the development scale. Finally, democracy goes better with Coke. Consumption rises with political freedom, as measured by Freedom House’s seven-point scale. Have a cola, North Korea.

“When I go there every six months I can’t believe how things are changing — infrastructure, roads, water and electricity supplies.” And it isn’t all in services or IT. The Indian enterprise Bharat Forge will soon become the largest forging company in the world, operating in Scandinavia, Germany and China. Ms Dalal says that Indians who used to emigrate and stay abroad are now coming back to build something in their home towns. It is the Return of the Patels. The confidence is there, evidenced in the property ads, the profusion of new cars, the near-ubiquity of mobile phones. The Indian middle class is rising, and consuming as it rises.

Het succes van "Fawlty Towers" kan ik toch niet overtreffen", zegt de 66-jarige Cleese. Cleese wil zijn expertise inzake comedy wel overbrengen aan de jonge generatie. Hij zal een boek publiceren over de geschiedenis van het genre, en wil ook lezingen geven waarin hij jong talent de knepen van het vak leert. Cleese vindt het niveau van de hedendaagse sitcoms, vooral de Amerikaanse, bedroevend. "Alleen Ricky Gervais en Eddie Izzard zorgen voor tegengewicht".

Net neutrality means simply that all like Internet content must be treated alike and move at the same speed over the network. The owners of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate. This is the simple but brilliant "end-to-end" design of the Internet that has made it such a powerful force for economic and social good: All of the intelligence and control is held by producers and users, not the networks that connect them.

The current legislation, backed by companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, would allow the firms to create different tiers of online service. They would be able to sell access to the express lane to deep-pocketed corporations and relegate everyone else to the digital equivalent of a winding dirt road. Worse still, these gatekeepers would determine who gets premium treatment and who doesn’t.

Their idea is to stand between the content provider and the consumer, demanding a toll to guarantee quality delivery. It’s what Timothy Wu, an Internet policy expert at Columbia University, calls "the Tony Soprano business model": By extorting protection money from every Web site -- from the smallest blogger to Google -- network owners would earn huge profits. Meanwhile, they could slow or even block the Web sites and services of their competitors or those who refuse to pay up. They’d like Congress to "trust them" to behave.

Without net neutrality, the Internet would start to look like cable TV. A handful of massive companies would control access and distribution of content, deciding what you get to see and how much it costs. Major industries such as health care, finance, retailing and gambling would face huge tariffs for fast, secure Internet use -- all subject to discriminatory and exclusive dealmaking with telephone and cable giants.

We would lose the opportunity to vastly expand access and distribution of independent news and community information through broadband television. More than 60 percent of Web content is created by regular people, not corporations. How will this innovation and production thrive if creators must seek permission from a cartel of network owners?

There are well known externalities associated with the Internet. One positive externality is that the more users there are, the more beneficial it is to be plugged in, and the more profitable it is to write software it is for Net applications. But increasingly, as content like movies, real-time games, and other data-heavy services like remote disease monitoring are made available, some data imposes negative externalities-- traffic congestion, if you will-- that adversely affect the ability of others to use the Net reliably.

Until recently, traffic congestion on the Net was not a problem. There was so much excess capacity in the fiber optic cables and other parts of the complex telecommunications network that additional data heavy traffic delivered from one site did not threaten the reliability of traffic delivered from other sites and routed through the Net. But that blissful world is gone now. The existing networks are rapidly running out of excess capacity. We need new cyber-highways if the brave new world of movies, fast Google searches, and telemedicine-- to take a few examples-- is to become at all viable.

The question, then is: who should pay for these much higher speed networks? Asking all users to pay the same amount, regardless of how much they data they download, hardly seems fair. It would be like asking double wide trailer trucks to pay the same taxes for using our real world highways as you and I who drive our much smaller cars. In fact, state governments tend not to do this: they require trucks to pay taxes based on weight per axle that you and I with our cars (or SUVs) don’t pay.

Why should telecoms companies that want to build the next-generation cyber-highways be treated any differently? Shouldn’t they at least be allowed to charge data heavy sites more than others so that the many of us who don’t download lots of data don’t get socked?

It’s that simple, but the implications are profound. If, instead, telecoms companies are required by law to charge everyone the same amount for the next upgrade, there is a real risk that the charge will be so high that only a few data heavy sites will be able to pay. But because they, in effect, will have been subsidized, there will not be enough revenue collected to pay for the new networks. And they won’t get built. And the brave new world of telemedicine and wondrous economic and personal benefits it could bring-- let alone the benefits of all other kinds of uses for higher speed broadband networks-- will be stillborn.

We all want our broadband and the benefits it can bring. Let’s hope our policy-makers in Washington can resist the siren song of "net neutrality" and keep government out of Internet regulation so that the future that beckons becomes a reality.

Mr. Lomborg sent a polite response via the email address designated by the Independent for letters to the editor, detailing the errors in Mr. Hari’s column. Nothing, not even an acknowledgment of receipt, was received in return. On Thursday, he specifically addressed the same response to "reader’s editor" Guy Keleny. (In addition, I had previously informed Mr. Keleny of the inaccuracies in Mr. Hari’s column.) Once again, not even the courtesy of an acknowledgment of receipt was forthcoming.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and American commander Gen. George Casey said a reliable tip on Zarqawi’s location came in and allowed the U.S. to call in the bombers. The attack occurred last night at about 6 p.m., BBC says, and he may have been betrayed by someone in his inner circle. Zarqawi’s body was identified by facial recognition, Casey said.

If true, and this should be a very big conditional, this is a big, big success for the Iraqis and the Americans. Zarqawi wasn’t the sole force behind the insurgency, but he was the driving personality behind the jihad aspect of the Sunni fighting, which has much larger influence within the Iraqi insurgency than the size of its roster would suggest. It was his connections that brought in a lot of money from the Gulf, and with that cash and influence was able to bleed off some of the Ba’athists and Iraqi Islamists to his part of the insurgency.

Also, again assuming this is true, this indicates that bringing the Sunnis into the government seems to has worked. One of the gambles of bringing the Sunnis in was to see if they could start ramping down the violence through tips, turn-ins and general cooperation. That has always been the central question: Do the Sunnis in government have control over their factions in the insurgency? I’ve argued here that they don’t, but if today’s news is true, I may very well need to admit I was wrong on that. Gut feeling is that I was.

Casey said they got information on the safehouse where Zarqawi was hiding from local tips, so that indicates the Sunnis have started cooperating with Maliki’s government, which means this government may hold up after all. But it is important to realize that this will not end the insurgency. It has numerous factions, not all who are loyal to Zarqawi (obviously, since someone tipped the Americans off.) And it won’t end the sectarian violence, because Shi’ite death squads are still operating out of the Interior ministry and other police forces and many Sunni insurgents are not foreign jihadis. They have their own fight with the mainly Shi’ite Maliki government, which they see as a tool of Iran. Remember how happy everyone was after Saddam was captured? And remember how it just kept getting worse and worse?

But it is also significant that Maliki says he will announce his new Defense, National Security and Interior minister later today. (He declined to give their names at the press conference on Zarqawai, saying that would wait until the parliamentary meeting in the afternoon.) This indicates to me that the Defense and Interior slots have been being held open as a carrot for Sunnis to start bringing their fighters to heel. Now that the Sunnis have delivered a big prize in Zarqawi’s alleged corpse, it’s time to reward them with a big post. Will they get both Interior and Defense? No. In fact, Reuters is already reporting that Interior will go to Shi’ite Jawaad al-Bolani, formerly of the Fadhilla Party, and Defense will go to Sunni Gen. Abdel Qader Jassim.

Al-Bolani is an interesting choice, because he is reportedly a former Army colonel under Saddam and has been affiliated with numerous factions in Shi’a politics, including Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and Sheikh Karim Al-Mohammadawi, the “Prince of the Marshes,” a local Shi’ite boss in the south opposed to Iran, Chalabi and sometimes — but unreliably — allied with Moqtada al-Sadr. Mohammadawi is reliably in favor of Mohammadawi. Jassim, a Sunni, is currently the commander of the Iraqi ground forces and has worked closely with the Americans. He also was the general who advised Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait in 1991, further endearing him to Washington.

Both choices seem likely to be approved, or at least not opposed, by the Sunnis, as neither is closely tied to Iran. (The former Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, was connected with the Badr Organization neé Corps, which is still closely connected with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.)

De leider van Al Qaeda in Irak, de Jordaniër Abou Moussab Al Zarqawi (39), is omgebracht. Dat heeft de Iraakse staatstelevisie gemeld en het bericht is bevestigd door de Iraakse premier Nouri Al Maliki. Hij was de meest gezochte terrorist in het Midden-Oosten. De Iraakse eerste minister Nouri Al Maliki heeft via de Iraakse televisie bekendgemaakt dat de Jordaanse terrorist Al Zarqawi dood is. Al Zarqawi werd woensdagavond gedood in een huis bij Baquba, een bolwerk van opstandelingen, 50 kilometer ten noorden van Bagdad. Daar zat Zarqawi ondergedoken, samen met zeven van zijn medestanders. Ze zijn allemaal omgekomen in de aanval. Zarqawi is geïdentificeerd op basis van zijn vingerafdrukken en ook zijn gezicht was herkenbaar. Vanmiddag is er een persconferentie waarop de militaire details van de aanval op Al Zarqawi bekendgemaakt worden.

Every day and night, hundreds of Air Force generals and Navy admirals must thank their lucky stars for China. Without the specter of a rising Chinese military, there would be no rationale for such a large fleet of American nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, or for a new generation of stealth combat fighters—no rationale for about a quarter of the Pentagon’s budget. In Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Quadrennial Defense Review, released this past February, the looming Chinese threat is the explicit justification for all the big-ticket weapons systems that have nothing to do with fighting terrorists or insurgents.

But is the threat real? In each of the last four years, Congress has required the Defense Department to issue a report titled Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. The latest edition, issued this week, starts out ominously, but as you read through its 50 double-columned pages, you gradually realize that claims of emerging Chinese superpower are way overblown.

The state is a monopoly. Monopolies, unlike competitive enterprises, don’t care about annoying their "customers" - because they’ve got nowhere to go. So, neither workers nor managers in the state sector have much incentive to avoid strikes. Bosses have less incentive to improve workers’ morale, and workers have less incentive to co-operate with management. This just corroborates two of my priors. The state is a dysfunctional organization. And the old left were just stupid to believe state ownership would solve the problem of class conflict.

There are at least three different ways in which the creator of intellectual property can get paid: Legal control over access, technological control over access, uncontrolled access with tie-ins. Copyright law is an example of the first, the Lexis legal database of the second, advertising revenue from radio programs and web pages the third.

Intellectual property in digital form is easy to copy. In a networked world, it is also easy to distribute. It is therefore likely that copyright enforcement will become increasingly difficult. Tie-ins are a good solution for some forms of intellectual property but not for all. That leaves technological protection, ways of selling access to intellectual property without letting the purchaser reproduce it.

There is an important limit to such protection: It only works for forms of I.P. that are not entirely revealed in one use. However strong the encryption on the digital file containing your song, a customer can still tape record it when he plays it—or record the signals his computer is sending to its speaker, thus eliminating the sonic middleman. However well encrypted your novel, I can still, if I really want to, photograph my screen as I read it and run the pictures through OCR software.

There are other forms of I.P. that are not fully revealed in one use. What I get from Lexis or Westlaw is not a download of their database but the answer to a query. I can make a copy for a colleague but it is unlikely to be of much use to him, since he wants answers to different questions than I do. A computer program can be similarly protected, by running it on a webbed server and selling not copies but access.

A movie is fully revealed in one use. But one can imagine movie substitutes that are not. When I first thought of the idea, I was imagining a movie that could be viewed from many different angles, at the user’s option. Listen to the bad guys plotting—at the cost of missing whatever else is going on at the same time. Watch the same film again tomorrow, seeing different things. A sufficiently rich version could be both an interesting new art form and a protectable form of intellectual property.

While discussing the idea this weekend with sf author Jerry Pournelle—we were both on a panel at Baycon—it occurred to me that such an artform already existed. Indeed, I am already a customer. World of Warcraft and similar massively multiplayer online games are movie substitutes. Unlike a movie, the game is not fully revealed on one play. You can "film" today’s quest—but if you want to do another quest tomorrow you will have to pay Blizzard for the privilege.

As increasing bandwidth makes it more and more difficult to protect movies by either legal or technological means, I expect that we will see more and more of a shift away from conventional movies towards substitutes that, like games, are different each time you play them.

There is, however, a countervailing effect. As it becomes easier and easier to replace actors with computer generated images, the cost of making movies, even quite elaborate movies, will fall. For the net result, stay tuned—for the next decade or so.

UMTS-masten leveren geen gevaar op voor de volksgezondheid. Dat blijkt dinsdag uit een onderzoek van een Zwitsers instituut in opdracht van staatssecretaris van Milieubeheer Pieter van Geel (CDA). In 2003 meldde onderzoeksinstituut TNO dat enkele omwonenden van UMTS-antennes last hadden van tintelingen, duizeligheid en concentratiestoornissen. Deze effecten deden zich niet voor bij gsm-antennes. Volgens het dinsdag gepresenteerde Zwitserse onderzoek worden de gezondheidseffecten niet veroorzaakt door de masten. TNO heeft dinsdag aangegeven te willen onderzoeken hoe de klachten van omwonenden van masten dan wel te verklaren zijn.

KPN gaf in 2000 miljarden euro’s uit aan het verwerven van UMTS-licenties, maar liep bij de plaatsing van de masten op veel plaatsen tegen bezwaren van omwonenden aan. In december vorig jaar kondigden veertig gemeenten aan dat ze geen vergunningen voor de masten wilden geven voordat het onderzoek was afgerond. Van Geel vindt dat er nu geen beletselen meer zijn nieuwe masten te plaatsen.

Jesús Marzo Fernandez, een oud-functionaris van de Cubaanse regering, zegt waardering te hebben voor het onderzoekswerk van Forbes. ‘Ik twijfel niet over het fortuin van Castro maar bij de omvang kun je wel vraagtekens zetten. Ik wil objectief zijn. Het is een beetje veel, 900 miljoen dollar is veel geld.’ Fernandez was secretaris van de Deviezencommissie van de Ministerraad in Cuba in de periode rond 1990. Hij zegt dat we het patrimonium van Fidel Castro niet moeten beschouwen als een privéspaarpot waarvoor hij een villa aan de Franse Rivièra zou kopen.. ‘Het gaat om een fortuin dat ten allen tijde ter beschikking staat van Fidel en wat hij als politiek wapen gebruikt.’ Fernandez noemt ook staatsbedrijven als Gaviota, het nikkelbedrijf Sherriton en de onderneming die onder leiding van Eusebio Leal de wijk Oud Havana renoveert. Fernandez: ’Er kan dan ook geen onderscheid meer gemaakt worden tussen staatseigendom, privé-kapitaal en zwart geld.’

Een ander voorbeeld is het bedrijf Copextel voor microfoons, schotelantennes en andere technologie; dit bedrijf werd geleid door Ramiro Valdez, oud-minister van Binnenlandse Zaken en nu nog lid van het Cubaans Politburo.

Oud-medewerker van de Cubaanse geheime dienst, Manuel de Beunza die verantwoordelijk was voor transacties van het Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken wijst op het bestaan in Engeland van de Bank Havin die volledig door de Cubaanse leider wordt gecontroleerd. Er zouden op de hele wereld nog zo’n 270 bedrijven functioneren. Beunza heeft zelf bij gelegenheid ooit 2 miljoen dollar aan contanten aan Fidel gegeven via zijn trouwe adjudant Chomy Miyar Barruecos.

Zulk contant geld wordt vrij willekeurig uitgegeven bijvoorbeeld om Rambo-messen te kopen. Die kwamen op de markt toen de gelijknamige film draaide en er werden er 1500 voor de Speciale Troepen van het Cubaanse leger aangeschaft. Castro betaalde er ook een suikerriet centrale voor ter waarde van $45 miljoen dollar en die vervolgens geschonken werd aan de sandinisten in Nicaragua. Beunza vertelt ook nog dat er destijds bijvoorbeeld 50 winterjassen van dierenhuiden in Canada van dergelijk geld werden aangekocht. Die waren nodig om in 1982 de begrafenis van Brezjnew bij te wonen.

Politiek analiste Maria C. Werlau maakte verleden jaar een uitgebreide studie voor de Asociación para el Estudio de la Economia Cubana (ASCE). Zij constateert dat het praktisch onmogelijk is het bezit van Fidel Castro te schatten. Zij constateert dat Cuba technisch een socialistische economie is gecontroleerd door Fidel Castro die op arbitraire wijze over dit geld beschikt en er gebruik van maakt. Als inkomstenbronnen noemt zij o.a. een deel van de opbrengsten in de toeristensector, de inkomsten van Cubanen die in het buitenland werken en de verkoop van Cubaanse goederen aan buitenlanders waaronder Cubaanse kunstwerken.

Marzo Fernandez herinnert zich een voorval waaruit blijkt dat Castro met zijn financiën en met die van de staat omgaat ’als ging het om de twee broekzakken van dezelfde broek.’ In 1991 had Marzo Fernandez 20 miljoen dollar nodig om een belangrijke transactie van tarwe te kunnen betalen. De vice-president van de Staatsraad Carlos lage herinnerde Fernandez er aan dat in eerdere situaties Castro persoonlijk geld had geleend. Lage bracht de schriftelijke boodschap over en Castro zei bereid te zijn het geld te lenen. Hij waarschuwde wel en zei dat de lening natuurlijk niet bedoeld kon zijn om tekortkomingen in de planning of administratie op te lossen. Daarom wilde hij het geld terughebben met een boete van 10% over het bedrag. Het geld werd uiteindelijk overgemaakt op een Bank in Rotterdam in Zwitserse Franken.

Deze getuigen waren niet in Cuba te horen; het televisieprogramma Mesa Redonda had wel een buitenlandse gast namelijk de ex-Labourvolksvertegenwoordigier George Galloway. Hij sprak in lyrische bewoordingen over Cuba want ‘het licht van het voorbeeld Cuba verlicht de weg die Latijns-Amerika nu volgt tégen de dominantie en voor de verdediging van zijn onafhankelijkheid en eigenontwikkelingsmodel.’ Over Castro’s rijkdom zei Galloway dat ‘zijn rijkdom het volk is, hij zwemt niet in de dollars maar in de liefde en de bewondering van zijn volk.’ Galloway was destijds een tegenstander van de oorlog in Irak en moest daarom de Labour Party verlaten. Berucht waren zijn loftuitingen aan o.a. Saddam Hussein en zijn zoon Uday. In 1999 zei hij hen nog:’Ik wil u laten weten dat we altijd met u zijn tot aan het eind.’

De VLD heeft hetzelfde probleem als de VVD in Nederland: ze bestaat maar voor een deel uit liberalen, het andere deel bestaat uit neoconservatieven.

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2006. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use. SOTU focuses on the relationship between individual addresses as compared to the entire collection of addresses, highlighting what is different about the selected document. You are invited to try and understand from this information the connection between politics and language–between the state we are in, and the language which names it and calls it into being.

This study examines reforms of public expenditure in industrialised countries over the past two decades. We distinguish ambitious and timid reformers and analyse in detail reform experiences in eight case studies of ambitious reform episodes. We find that ambitious reform countries reduce spending on transfers, subsidies and public consumption while largely sparing education spending. Such expenditure retrenchment is also typically part of a comprehensive reform package that includes improvements in fiscal institutions as well as structural and other macroeconomic reforms. The study finds that ambitious expenditure retrenchment and reform coincides with large improvements in fiscal and economic growth indicators.

Why do people argue that Muslims will be taking over Europe?

Laziness, as always, is a good excuse. People like projecting trends unchanged indefinitely into the future--witness the recent UN prediction that by 2300 there would be a quarter-trillion humans living on Earth. Taking demographic trends and projecting them indefinitely into the future can be an entertaining past time. As the history of demographic studies has demonstrated time and time again, however, the results aren’t particularly useful as anything but historical articles.

Europeans who use these arguments are particpating in the long-standing fear about being overwhelmed by immigrants. In The Identity of France, for instance, Braudel commented how in the early 20th century, native French were hostile to the then-current crop of immigrants--Belgians, Italians, Spanish, Poles--because of their strong Catholicism and distinctive languages. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, Poles and other Slavs served similarly as threatening spectres to Teutophone areas. Even in the United Kingdom, that European country singularly without much of a pre-Second World War history of immigration, Irish Catholic and eastern European Jewish immigration reliably created national hysterias. In all of these cases, of course, existing ethnolinguistic frontiers remained more or less intact, save where they were altered by wartime population exchanges. The descendants of Slavic immigrants in the Republic of Austria have now become Germanized; the descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants in France have been firmly Gallicized; even the descendants of Hispanophone immigrants in Catalonia have become Catalanized.

Something strange is happening in the Russian economy. Since 1999, it has delivered stellar growth numbers of almost 7 percent per year, with virtually all of the growth coming from the private sector, which has been led not only by the recovery in the oil and metals sectors, but also by retail and construction. It only took off a few years after privatization because other market reforms were lagging and new owners needed to consolidate their ownership.

The state, in contrast, has learned little, and continues to fail. Most branches of the state, including law enforcement, the armed forces, public healthcare and education, the bureaucracy and public infrastructure, are patently flawed. The common denominator in all of these problematic sectors is public ownership.

Under these circumstances, a rational and accountable government should pursue two related courses: accelerated privatization and comprehensive reforms in the public sector. Sensibly, the government was doing so until 2003. But the last three years have brought a halt to all reforms, and this situation is expected to continue until President Vladimir Putin has left office.

Incredibly, underperforming state corporations are swiftly gobbling up successful private firms on a major scale. According to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the share of gross domestic product created by private companies fell from 70 to 65 percent last year.

The most spectacular renationalizations have been in the oil industry. From 1987 to 1996, the old state-owned corporations managed to halve output in Russia’s oil industry through mismanagement and pervasive criminalization. Fortunately, insiders successfully privatized the LUKoil and Surgut oil majors, allowing for some economic recovery. In the other companies, however, the situation remained dire. The Russian government realized that drastic measures were necessary and succeeded in privatizing several of the most criminalized companies in sales to young outside businessmen.

By 1999, 90 percent of the oil industry was in private hands and, over the next five years, oil production rose exponentially, at an average annual rate of 8.5 percent, as foreign technology and expertise were brought in to revive Russia’s old brownfields. Meanwhile, international oil prices rose, allowing the government to fill its coffers by means of ever-higher taxation of the oil companies.

By 2000, Yukos was paying $6 billion in taxes, far more than anybody would have considered it worth when it was privatized in 1995, proving that legalization and a sensible taxation policy generate much larger state revenues than nationalization. Corporate governance improved in parallel. The stock market favored the newly privatized companies and was waiting for the promised privatization of Rosneft and Zarubezhneftegaz.

Although the privatized economy was booming as never before, renationalization began in 2003.

(...)

Renationalization is being driven by the interests of state officials looking to extend their power and wealth. The government does not even promote these moves until they have already happened, and there is no apparent socialist ideology behind nationalization.

In January, at his annual press conference, Putin said, "We have about 10 relatively large private oil companies. . . . Nobody is going to nationalize them; nobody is going to interfere with their activities. They are going to develop according to market conditions, like private companies. I think that this kind of balance is better for the Russian economy today, and this includes active participation from our foreign partners and shareholders." Meanwhile, a new draft law has named 39 strategic industries that the Kremlin wants to dominate, and renationalization proceeds on course.

Indeed, if no good argument can be found for renationalization, no positive effect is likely to materialize.

With the likes of Douglas Coupland, George Walden and Stephen Hawking as fans, taking the Simpsons seriously is no longer outre but de rigeur.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of our age. So great, in fact, that it not only reflects and plays with philosophical ideas, it actually does real philosophy, and does it well.

How can a comic cartoon do this? Precisely because it is a comic cartoon, the form best suited to illuminate our age.

To speak truthfully and insightfully today you must have a sense of the absurdity of human life and endeavour. Past attempts to construct grand and noble theories about human history and destiny have collapsed.

We now know we’re just a bunch of naked apes trying to get on as best we can, usually messing things up, but somehow finding life can be sweet all the same. All delusions of a significance that we do not really have need to be stripped away, and nothing can do this better that the great deflater: comedy.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because it reflects reality by abstracting it, distilling it and presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can

The Simpsons does this brilliantly, especially when it comes to religion. It’s not that the Simpsons is atheist propaganda; its main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but the arrogance of particular organised religions that they, amazingly, know the will of the creator.

For example, in the episode Homer the Heretic, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way: by watching the TV, slobbing about and dancing in his underpants.

Throughout the episode he justifies himself in a number of ways.

"What’s the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean, isn’t God everywhere?"
"Don’t you think the almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?"
"And what if we’ve picked the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder?" Homer’s protests do not merely allude to much subtler arguments that proper philosophers make. The basic points really are that simple, which is why they can be stated simply.

Philosophy’s First Family
Of course, there is more that can and should be said about them, but when we make decisions about whether or not to follow one particular religion, the reasons that really matter to us are closer to the simple truths of the Simpsons than the complex mental machinations of academic philosophers of religion.

And that’s true even for the philosophers, whose high-level arguments are virtuosi feats of reasoning, but are not the things that win hearts and minds. They are merely the lengthy guitar solos to Homer’s crushing, compelling riffs.

However, being simple is not the same as being simplistic, which is one of the greatest crimes in the Simpsons’ universe.

We can see this when Homer’s house catches fire, in what could be seen as divine retribution for his apostasy.

But what actually led to the fire was not God’s wrath but Homer’s hubris and arrogance. Sitting on his sofa thinking smugly, "Boy, everyone is stupid except me," he falls asleep, dropping his cigar.

What really caused the fire was thus a slippage from the simple into the simplistic. Homer’s mistake was to think that because the key points which inform his heresy are simple, that the debate is closed and he has nothing left to learn from others. But this is being simplistic, not keeping things simple.

Small dots, big picture

Revealing simple truths about simplistic falsehoods is not just a minor philosophical task, like doing the washing up at Descartes’ Diner while the real geniuses cook up the main courses.

For when it comes to the relevance of philosophy to real life, all the commitments we make on the big issues are determined by considerations which are ultimately quite straightforward.

Pointillist paintings, such as this by Seurat, use thousands of tiny dots
A rich philosophical worldview is in this sense like a pointillist picture - one of those pieces of art in which a big image is made up of thousands of tiny dots (see Seurat image, right). Its building blocks are no more than simple dots, but the overall picture which builds up from this is much more complicated.

Yet we need reminding that the dots are just dots, and that errors are made more often not by those who fail to examine the dots carefully enough, but those who become fixated by the brilliance or defects of one or two and who fail to see how they fit into the big picture.

And the Simpsons certainly plays out on a broad canvas.

Any individual or group is shown to be ridiculous when only their pathetic and partial view of the world is taken to be everything. That’s why no one escapes satire in the programme, which is vital for its ultimately uplifting message: we’re an absurd species but together we make for a wonderful world.

The Simpsons, like Monty Python, is an Anglo-Saxon comedic take on the existentialism which in France takes on a more tragic hue. Albert Camus’ absurd is defied not by will, but mocking laughter.

Abstract themes

Another reason why cartoons are the best form in which to do philosophy is that they are non-realistic in the same way that philosophy is.

True heir to Plato, Simpsons creator Matt Groening
Philosophy needs to be real in the sense that it has to make sense of the world as it is, not as we imagine or want it to be. But philosophy deals with issues on a general level. It is concerned with a whole series of grand abstract nouns: truth, justice, the good, identity, consciousness, mind, meaning and so on.

Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can.

That’s why it is no coincidence that the most insightful and philosophical cultural product of our time is a comic cartoon, and why its creator, Matt Groening, is the true heir of Plato, Aristotle and Kant.

Polls place Colombia’s center-right incumbent Álvaro Uribe so far ahead (ElectionGuide.org) in Sunday’s presidential election that the public opinion firm Angus Reid Consultants is calling the race "a chronicle of a victory foretold." Carlos Gaviria and Horacio Serpa, Uribe’s main opponents, are polling nowhere near Uribe, but hope to force a runoff by cutting Uribe’s share of the vote to less than 50 percent.

Uribe—who took office in 2002 and recently changed constitutional law so that he could run again—has focused on security (IHT) in the violence-prone nation, plagued by a four-decade-long civil war between leftist guerillas and right-wing paramilitary groups and a resilient drug trade. Experts say his overwhelming popularity is due to pragmatism, not ideology. As Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue put it in this recent CFR Background Q&A, "Uribe has done a masterful job at bringing a measure of security to the country and reassuring people." Uribe’s firm-fisted approach—cracking down on the left-wing guerillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) while striking an amnesty agreement with their rival, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC)—has effectively stifled violence, but the International Crisis Group reports that some of his other putative achievements are questionable. While crime has dropped, critics say Uribe has been too conciliatory toward the paramilitaries, and some allege links (Center for International Policy) between these violent groups and the government. Uribe’s security plan has raised some human rights concerns as well, and Amnesty International says under Uribe "there has been no substantive improvement in the human rights situation." Still, greater stability has virtually assured Uribe reelection.

Uribe’s economic policies are proving more controversial. The economy has expanded in recent years, but his support for the free trade agreement signed with the United States earlier this year has been a contentious issue within the nation, and differs sharply from the protectionist policies of neighboring countries.

The reelection of a rightist president would stand in contrast to the accession of Peru’s Ollanta Humala and Bolivia’s Evo Morales (BBC), not to mention the rhetoric of the region’s ideological godfather, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. But some experts say talk of Latin America’s left turn is an oversimplification. Jorge G. Castañeda recently wrote in Foreign Affairs of Latin America’s "two lefts," citing Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, whose policies hardly resemble those of the protectionists and populists. According to the Miami Herald, the region is "more divided than at any time since the end of the Cold War."

Of course, U.S. ties with Latin America have also worsened over the years; in an interview with cfr.org, CFR Senior Fellow Julia Sweig says "they have nowhere to go but up." Washington, which has backed Uribe’s security policy, worked with him on the war on drugs, and appreciated his support for a U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, clearly would be pleased to see him returned to office, though some in the United States have criticized U.S. policy on Columbia, summarized in this report from the Congressional Research Service. The alliance has led Uribe’s opponents to claim the president is overly beholden to American interests: "Colombia has many products to sell, but the country is not for sale" (Pravda) is the refrain of a recent television advertisement supporting Gaviria. But polls indicate Colombia’s voters are fixated on basic security, and that this should be enough to propel Uribe toward another term.

Representative James Sensenbrenner (via Voxbaby) says:

It is offensive to me to think we have legislators who are considering selling US citizenship for $2,000.

Many economists would agree: $2,000 is well below the equilibrium price.

The congressman goes on:

US citizenship is not for sale. It is a privilege bestowed upon those who appreciate its value, and who contribute to our nation by living in a manner that reflects the principles and ideology of being an American.

I wonder how many Americans would qualify for the privilege under this criterion. Those of us lucky enough be born in the United States often take U.S. citizenship for granted. By contrast, immigrants uprooting their lives, leaving behind friends and family, to find new hope in a foreign land often have a deep appreciation of the value of being an American.

That is how my grandparents felt about it when they immigrated from Ukraine. I bet the same is true of many Mexican immigrants today.

Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does not—in the name of some pseudo-tolerance—permit genital mutilation, "honor" killing, and forced marriage. One might have expected a more robust defense of this position from the Dutch, and indeed the international left, but instead there has been a response of extraordinary and sullen ungenerousness, as if a lone woman defying taboo and standing up to violence has in some way let down the side and become a menace to multiculturalism.

It will be delightful to have Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Washington. But the American Enterprise Institute, which has offered her a perch, is not the place where she is most needed. In Holland, every day, extremist imams preach intolerance and cruelty, and, when they are criticized, invoke the help of foreign embassies to bring pressure on the Dutch authorities. They face no risk of expulsion.

The strongest economic argument against immigration is the claim that immigrants free-ride on government-provided goods. There’s a lot to say about this claim; here I limit myself to one point.

The goods and services that people complain immigrants cause to be overused are either government-supplied goods and services (for example, government schools) or goods and services that are heavily subsidized by government (for example, medical care). No one complains that immigrants are over-using supermarkets, movie theaters, auto dealerships, or clothing stores. That is, private enterprise seems quite able to ’absorb’ immigrants and prevent overcrowding and free-riding. Problems arise almost exclusively with goods and services supplied or subsidized by government.

I understand that on pure utilitarian grounds it’s too simplistic to say "Oh, the solution is for government to stop supplying these things." Given that government is supplying or heavily subsidizing X, Y, and Z, and given that immigrants can use X, Y, and Z, problems are indeed created.

The narrow cost-benefit solution might well be further restrictions on immigration -- I say "might," not "is" -- even if, in my opinion, such restrictions are unethical because they violate the basic human rights of Americans and foreigners alike.

But even if we conclude that, on pure cost-benefit grounds, the best course of action is to restrict immigration further because immigrants overuse public-supplied and subsidized goods and services, why blame immigrants? Why point accusing fingers at immigrants? Why not blame government for supplying and subsidizing things that it ought not supply and subsidize?

The root problem is not immigration; it is government provision and subsidization of goods and services that should be supplied by the market.

1. Rights. If there are such things as universal human rights, these surely encompass the right to live where you want, and to work for any employer who’d hire you. If I have a right to live in London, why should that right be denied to someone else, merely because they had the bad luck to be born elsewhere?
2. Utility. Immigration is good for us. Every time you buy a newspaper from a Pakistani, or hire a Polish plumber, you are admitting this much. Of course, in theory it’s possible that this gain is mitigated by the downwards pressure on wages and job opportunities caused by the increased supply of labour. But this doesn’t seem to happen in practice. This paper (...) by Christian Dustmann concludes:

We find little evidence of overall adverse effects of immigration on native [labour market] outcomes. If there is evidence of negative effects on employment in any group, then it is for those with intermediate education levels, but this is offset in the aggregate by positive effects on employment among the better qualified. Estimated wage effects...are if anything positive but statistically poorly determined.

(...)
Net, then, immigation is a boon. As for its small adverse impact on the lower qualified, this is a case for either redistributive taxes or for better education - not for restricting immigration.
3. Practicality. The idea of managed immigration is just impractical - the Home Office is too incompetent. Existing policy just allows in criminals and deters the law-abiding. In abolishing the Immigration and Nationality Department, we’d save £1.5bn a year and allow in law-abiding people.
4. Culture. Free immigration would send benefical signals. It would signal that there are some things - "controlling our borders" - that government just cannot do, and it would get away from the contemptible macho posturing to the contrary. Second, it would signal that government believes in a common humanity - that the (considerable) benefits of living in Britain should be free to all humankind.
Now, I’m not saying here that immigrants should have rights to welfare benefits. They have a liberty right to live where they like, not a claim right upon our money (...). I suspect most hostility to immigration is based upon the failure to see this distinction.

If there were only one religion … there would be danger of despotism, if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.

Religious regulation was found to be the strongest predictor of religious persecution even when controlling for other possible explanations, including: being located on civilizational fault lines, religious homogeneity, the level of armed conflict, population growth and density, economic strength, income inequality, economic crisis, ethno-religious overlap, and gender disparity. The results showed that a state’s formal restrictions of religion contribute to religious persecution by legitimating government threats toward religious believers in reaction to pressures created by the social forces seeking to regulate religion. Another important finding is that the results remained the same even when controlling for a close tie between religion and ethnicity.

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government’s statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the "monotheists") and unbelievers (the "polytheists" and "infidels").

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

Freedom House knows this because Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi dissident who runs the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs , gave us a dozen of the current, purportedly cleaned-up Saudi Ministry of Education religion textbooks. The copies he obtained were not provided by the government, but by teachers, administrators and families with children in Saudi schools, who slipped them out one by one.

Some of our sources are Shiites and Sunnis from non-Wahhabi traditions -- people condemned as "polytheistic" or "deviant" or "bad" in these texts -- others are simply frustrated that these books do so little to prepare young students for the modern world.

We then had the texts translated separately by two independent, fluent Arabic speakers.

Religion is the foundation of the Saudi state’s political ideology; it is also a key area of Saudi education in which students are taught the interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism (a movement founded 250 years ago by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab) that is reflected in these textbooks.

Scholars estimate that within the Saudi public school curriculum, Islamic studies make up a quarter to a third of students’ weekly classroom hours in lower and middle school, plus several hours each week in high school. Educators who question or dissent from the official interpretation of Islam can face severe reprisals. In November 2005, a Saudi teacher who made positive statements about Jews and the New Testament was fired and sentenced to 750 lashes and a prison term. (He was eventually pardoned after public and international protests.)

The Saudi public school system totals 25,000 schools, educating about 5 million students. In addition, Saudi Arabia runs academies in 19 world capitals, including one outside Washington in Fairfax County, that use some of these same religious texts.

Saudi Arabia also distributes its religion texts worldwide to numerous Islamic schools and madrassas that it does not directly operate. Undeterred by Wahhabism’s historically fringe status, Saudi Arabia is trying to assert itself as the world’s authoritative voice on Islam -- a sort of "Vatican" for Islam, as several Saudi officials have stated-- and these textbooks are integral to this effort. As the report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks observed, "Even in affluent countries, Saudi-funded Wahhabi schools are often the only Islamic schools" available.

Education is at the core of the debate over freedom in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden understands this well; in a recent audiotape he railed against those who would "interfere with school curricula."

(T)he same set of Saudi texts proudly cited in the new 74-page review of curriculum reform now being distributed by the Saudi Embassy -- are shaping the views of the next generation of Saudis and Muslims worldwide. Unchanged, they will only harden and deepen hatred, intolerance and violence toward other faiths and cultures.

We study the effects of the progressive elimination of the system of industrial regulations on entry and production, known as the "license raj," on registered manufacturing output, employment, entry and investment across Indian states with different labor market regulations. The effects are found to be unequal depending on the institutional environment in which industries are embedded. In particular, following delicensing, industries located in states with pro-employer labor market institutions grew more quickly than those in pro-worker environments.

I think something important is being missed by some people involved in the immigration debate. For the moment, forget about immigration and simply think about population growth among U.S. citizens. What happens as population grows? The economy grows along with it. New housing developments are put in place, another Safeway, another bank, another 7-11, another set of medical and law offices are built, all sorts of new businesses are started or existing businesses expand. Think about the difference in your own town, if it’s grown, over the last few decades. Is there another Subway anywhere? Yes the supply of labor increases as more and more people enter the labor force with population growth, but because there are more businesses, because the town and economy have grown, demand for labor grows as well. Because of that, wages do not necessarily rise or fall as population grows, though relative differences in the supply of labor across skill classes can cause adjustments. Essentially, the new population creates the goods and services it needs to support itself. Remove the new population, and the economy would be smaller and so would the number of jobs.

Immigration is no different. Just because a million people come here and get jobs does not mean that 1 million U.S. citizens lose their jobs. The immigrants both create new goods and services and purchase goods and services, and the economy grows to accommodate the new entrants. This is not a zero sum proposition where one person necessarily displaces another because the economy is static, as more people show up there is more growth. I have a hard time believing that the value of what immigrants create in goods and services is smaller than what they are paid, and therefore that they are a drain on the economy even allowing for some of the money to be sent home. But even if they are paid their marginal products (I doubt they are paid more than that), in what sense are they not contributing to the economy exactly what they are taking out of it? Isn’t that one of the defenses of capitalism, that each worker is paid according to what they contribute at the margin?

Immigration is no different than population growth in this sense. Every year population increases, and as that happens the economy replicates itself and grows larger. The same with immigration. As new immigrants enter, new businesses, etc. are created, and there is economic growth through replication of the existing economy. Both the supply and the demand for labor increase and wages do not necessarily fall as overall employment increases, though as noted above large changes in some skill classes, e.g. a large influx of low skill labor, can force markets to adjust by changing prices to encourage labor to move where it is needed more. That is what markets do, adjust prices to direct the flow of resources, and if they are failing at this important job, then government can intervene to fix the problem without building a fence along the border. If we were to gather up every illegal immigrant and send them home tomorrow, both the supply and the demand for labor would fall and that is where, I think, many people err in their thinking about this issue, i.e. they presume that sending an immigrant home necessarily opens up a job for a U.S. citizen. But that fails to consider the demand side of the equation and the loss of jobs due to the fall in the demand for goods and services from reducing the immigrant population.

A few months ago, in an interview with Jim Lehrer, Vice President Dick Cheney—who has been leading the call for tough action on Iran—said that the country has been “a problem for a long time.”

Not that long, apparently. Go back to March 1996. Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, which was eagerly seeking to win energy business in Iran. The Clinton Administration had imposed sanctions on Iran a year earlier. “I think,” said Cheney, “we Americans sometimes make mistakes. There seems to be an assumption that somehow we know what’s best for everybody else and that we are going to . . . get everybody else to live the way we would like.”

Cheney argued that a unilateral approach would backfire and urged the United States to follow the lead of European countries that were seeking to expand business and trade with Iran. According to a Reuters account, Cheney said history “proved that international influence was derived from economic activity and clout”—not from threats and provocations. “We seem now to have exactly the opposite idea,” he was quoted as saying. “We basically are going to shut you out and close the door and turn off the relationship and that will force you to do what we want you to do.”

Two years later, in a speech at the Cato Institute, Cheney was even more scathing toward American sanctions on Iran. He said that in 1997 America’s partners in the Middle East had refused to allow U.S. military forces to be based on their territory in anticipation of taking “military action against Iraq in order to get [it] to honor the U.N. resolutions.”

And why were our friends being so recalcitrant? In part, Cheney explained, because the United States “had been trying to force the governments in the region to adhere to an anti-Iranian policy, and our views raised questions in their mind about the wisdom of U.S. leadership. They cited it as an example of something they thought was unwise and that they should not do . . . The nation that’s isolated in terms of our sanctions policy in that part of the globe is not Iran. It is the United States. And the fact that we have tried to pressure governments in the region to adopt a sanctions policy that they clearly are not interested in pursuing has raised doubts in the minds of many of our friends about the overall wisdom and judgment of U.S. policy in the area.”

“The good Lord,” he told the crowd at Cato, “didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is.”

When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

One of the most vexing things for artists and intellectuals who live under the compulsion to applaud dictators is the spectacle of colleagues from more open societies applauding of their own free will. It adds a peculiarly nasty insult to injury.

Stalin was applauded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Mao was visited by a constant stream of worshippers from the West, some of whose names can still produce winces of disgust in China. Castro has basked for years in the adulation of such literary stars as Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Even Pol Pot found favour among several well-known journalists and academics.

Last year a number of journalists, writers and showbiz figures, including Harold Pinter, Nadine Gordimer, Harry Belafonte and Tariq Ali, signed a letter claiming that in Cuba “there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959 . . .”

Arenas was arrested in 1973 for “ideological deviation”. He was tortured and locked up in prison cells filled with floodwater and excrement, and threatened with death if he didn’t renounce his own writing. Imagine what it must be like to be treated like this and then read about your fellow writers in the West standing up for your oppressors.

None of this is news, and would hardly be worth dredging up if the same thing were not happening once more. Hugo Chavez, the elected strongman of Venezuela, is the latest object of adulation by western “progressives” who return from jaunts in Caracas with stars in their eyes.

GOOGLE, YAHOO and Sun Microsystems were all founded by immigrants — from Russia, Taiwan and India, respectively. There is near-universal agreement that skilled immigrants are an enormous boon to the American economy.

But what about the millions of unskilled laborers who arrive in this country every year?

Recent public discourse would have us believe that they poach American jobs, lower wages and sponge off welfare. Yet economic research suggests a different picture: Unskilled immigrants are good for the U.S., and the U.S. is good for them.

Until the late 1990s, when a boom in native-born self-employment occurred, immigrants were more likely than natives to work for themselves. Immigrant small businesses, from the Korean corner market to the Mexican landscaping service, are, well, as American as apple pie. The labor market is not a zero-sum game with a finite number of jobs; immigrants create their own work.

A key question for economists has been whether the influx raises or lowers "native" American wages. UC Berkeley’s David Card, who studied patterns in different U.S. cities, concludes that immigration has not lowered wages for American workers. George Borjas of Harvard counters that immigration reduced the wages of high school dropouts by 7.4% between 1980 and 2000.

Most economists have sided with Card. For one thing, his studies better capture the notion that immigrant labor makes work easier for all of us and brings new skills to the table. Additionally, as Card points out, the percentage of native-born high school dropouts has fallen sharply over the previous decades, creating a shortage of unskilled laborers that immigrants fill. In 1980, one in three American adults had less than a high school education; by 2000, this figure had fallen to less than one in five.

Gianmarco Ottaviano of the University of Bologna and Giovanni Peri of the National Bureau of Economic Research have shown that immigrants and low-skilled American workers fulfill very different roles in the economy. For instance, 54% of tailors in the U.S. are foreign-born, compared with less than 1% of crane operators. A similar discrepancy exists between plaster-stucco masons (44% immigrant) and sewer-pipe cleaners (less than 1% foreign-born). Immigrants come to the United States with different skills, inclinations and ideas; they are not looking to simply copy the behavior of American workers.

New arrivals, by producing more goods and services, also keep prices down across the economy. Even Borjas — the favorite economist of immigration restrictionists — admits that the net gain to the U.S. from immigration is about $7 billion annually.

And over the coming decades, the need for immigrant labor will increase, according to demographers. The baby boom generation will need more healthcare and more nursing homes. The forthcoming Medicare fiscal crunch will require more and younger laborers to finance the program.

Some argue that we should employ a more restrictive policy that allows in only immigrants with "needed" skills. But this assumes that the government can read the economic tea leaves. Most bureaucrats in 1980 did not foresee the building or biomedical booms of the 1990s, or the decline of auto manufacturing.

We should not trust government to know what kind of laborers we will need 20 years from now. The ready presence of immigrant workers — including the unskilled — makes all businesses easier to start, and thus spurs American creativity.

We should not forget that immigration is good for the immigrants themselves. It often means the difference between extreme poverty and the good life.

Card finds that post-1965 immigrants, as recorded in U.S. census data, have a good record of assimilation. Second-generation children have, on average, higher education and wages than the children of natives. Of the 39 largest country-of-origin groups, the sons of 33 and the daughters of 32 of those groups have surpassed the educational levels of the children of natives.

Finally, it is fitting that both Card and Borjas are themselves immigrants. Borjas emigrated from Cuba when he was 12, and Card came from Canada to earn his doctorate at Princeton. Their very debate shows how immigrants have become central to the American enterprise.

Yes, immigration brings some real costs. But most of these problems are concentrated in a few border and urban areas; federal policy can help correct the imbalances.

Americans have heard from politicians for more than 200 years that immigration will cause the sky to fall. Yet each time it has only made us stronger.

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems. We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point – that is the Almighty God. Undoubtedly through faith in God and the teachings of the prophets, the people will conquer their problems. My question for you is: “Do you not want to join them?”

He was also Kennedy’s ambassador to India in the early 1960s. While there, Galbraith gave a series of speeches on economic development in which he hailed the role of government planning as opposed to economic freedom. In one speech, Galbraith stated, "The market cannot reach forward to take great strides when these are called for. . . . To trust to the market is to take an unacceptable risk that nothing, or too little, will happen." As is well known, the Indian government did not take the "risk" of relying on the market but, instead, stuck with its system of detailed controls over every industry. As is also well known, nothing, or too little, happened. India was mired in poverty which only began to lift after some decontrol started in 1991.

Crop bans generate easy income for precisely the groups the U.S. opposes (the Taliban in Afghanistan, the FARC in Colombia). These groups sell protection services to farmers and drug traffickers. Absent the bans, groups like the Taliban and the FARC would be much poorer. Rebuilding a country like Afghanistan is hard enough without a ban on the major crop. Farmers there are merely supplying a good demanded by consumers around the world. Policies to reduce that demand, such as non-prohibitory sin taxes, are defensible. Bans on crops like poppy or coca are not.

Cuban President Fidel Castro was furious when Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $550 million last year. This year, the magazine upped its estimate of the communist leader’s wealth to a cool $900 million. Castro, who says his net worth is nil, is likely the beneficiary of up to $900 million, based on his control of state-owned companies, the U.S. financial magazine said in its annual tally of "Kings, Queens & Dictators" fortunes Thursday.

Kings and sheikhs of the oil-rich Gulf Arab states still top the Forbes list, to be published in its May 22 edition.

Saudi King Abdullah is number one with an estimated $21 billion, followed by Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei at $20 billion and United Arab Emirates’ President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan at $19 billion.

Among Europeans, Prince Hans-Adam II of Liechtenstein improved upon his family fortune of palaces, real estate and artwork with an investment in a U.S. producer of hybrid rice, for total estimated riches of $4 billion.

Perhaps the most industrious of the leaders listed is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, with a net worth of $14 billion.

Forbes estimates the renowned racehorse breeder also helped raise Dubai’s gross domestic product from about $8 billion to nearly $40 billion since 1994 by diversifying its industries outside of oil and making successful investments overseas.

"He would probably be the shrewdest of the bunch," said Luisa Kroll, associate editor at Forbes.

Africa’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of Equatorial Guinea, made the list of wealthiest leaders for the first time. He is estimated to hold up to $600 million, the magazine said, although an oil boom has not prevented his country’s slide down the United Nations’ development rankings.

Castro had said he was considering suing after Forbes released its 2005 list, scoffing then his wealth was estimated to be close to that of the queen of England.

"Do they think I am (former Zairian President) Mobutu (Sese Seko) or one of the many millionaires, those thieves and plunderers that the empire has suckled and protected?" he said last year, referring to his capitalist archenemy, Washington.

This year, Castro would be well above the British monarch. Queen Elizabeth came in with some $500 million in estates, gems and a stamp collection built by her grandfather. The list does not include Buckingham Palace or the crown jewels.

Who messed up Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld is the usual nominee. For conservative hawks, attacks on the U.S. Defence Secretary provide a way to attack the war without attacking the larger administration. And for liberal opponents of the war, attacks on Rumsfeld provide a way to attack the war without attacking the military that planned and executed that war.

Now comes an important new book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor. Their story bears hard on Rumsfeld. But it daringly points a finger at a normally blame-proof figure: the general who actually planned and led the Iraq campaign: General Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command during both the Afghan and Iraq wars.

It was General Franks who adamantly refused to engage in post-war planning for Iraq. Long before George W. Bush was elected president, CentCom (then led by Gen. Anthony Zinni--a future opponent of Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam) had drawn up a contingency plan for war with Iraq. This plan was a huge and heavy Colin-Powell-style plan, which contemplated the use of at least 380,000 troops. It deviated in almost every way from the plan actually adopted in 2003--with one exception. To quote Gordon and Trainor: "There was a gaping hole in the occupation annex of the plan. CENTCOM would have the responsibility of general security. But there was no plan for the political administration, restoration of basic services, training of police, or reconstruction of Iraq." The principal author of the Zinni plan: his deputy, Tommy Franks.

As the war plan moved from the realm of the contingency to the realm of the real, Franks continued to refuse to think about what would happen after the shooting ceased. Gordon and Trainor again: "Franks told his commanders that his assumption was that Colin Powell’s State Department would have the lead for the rebuilding of Iraq’s political institutions and infrastructure."

In October, 2002, however, Franks’ assumption was invalidated: At Rumsfeld’s insistence, the President agreed that the Department of Defence would assume overall responsibility for the postwar occupation.

Rumsfeld’s civilian deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, welcomed this responsibility as an opportunity to put Iraqis in charge of their country’s reconstruction. But there was only one organized group of Iraqis able to serve as a transitional, provisional government: Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC). And General Franks fully shared the fierce, almost unreasoning, hatred for the INC that pervaded the State Department and CIA.

The INC, for example, proposed to recruit a brigade of Free Iraqi forces to enter Iraq with the coalition. "Franks remained unenthusiastic, to say the least. After a briefing from [Feith’s aide Bill] Luti on his pet project, Franks turned to Feith in a Pentagon corridor, letting him know where he stood: ’I don’t have time for this f--king bullshit,’ Franks exclaimed."

Franks wanted to race to Baghdad as rapidly as possible. To achieve his plan, he bypassed thousands of Iraqi Fedayeen fighters. These black-garbed guerillas ambushed and killed American soldiers--and then faded into the landscape. The Americans could not chase or identify them because Franks’ determination to travel light had sent U.S. forces into battle with few or no interpreters.

In late March, Franks’ deputy commander, John Abizaid, discreetly asked the INC for help. Chalabi offered 1,000 men. Gordon and Trainor point out that while Franks had previously disdained Luti’s proposal to train a carefully screened Iraqi force, his command now proposed a variant of the plan "conceived in haste to deal with unexpected difficulties."

But by the time the INC men landed in southern Iraq, the emergency had passed, and Franks had reverted to his previous attitude. "The fighters arrived with virtually no provisions and no welcome. They were ushered into a busted-up hangar. . . . For weeks, [the local commander] scrambled to find a way to arm and equip them. . . . They never played a significant military role."

Franks flew into Baghdad on April 16 to meet with senior U.S. commanders. He told them they should prepare to pull out within 60 days. "Franks laid down the rule that was to guide the next phase of the operation: The generals should be prepared to take as much risk departing as they had in their push to Baghdad." Franks intended to hand over responsibility to a new Iraqi government. But he himself had guaranteed that no such government was waiting to go.

Franks lived by his own "quick out" principle. He retired from the army in July, 2003, selling his memoirs for a reported $5-million, booked a busy speaking schedule, and joined the board of the Bank of America.

John Kenneth Galbraith, economist, had died aged 97. He visited Soviet Russia in 1984, and wrote in the New Yorker magazine:

"That the Soviet economy has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics... and from the general urban scene... One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets, the close-to-murderous traffic, the incredible exfoliation of apartment houses, and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops... Partly, the Russian system succeeds, because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."

This was untrue when he wrote it because the shelves were empty, the goods poor, the service non-existent, the houses shoddy and the people wretched. The Soviet government sponsored shops where communist officials could buy good quality foreign goods, but in which its own currency was not accepted. Galbraith thought the US and Soviet economic systems would converge. The Soviet system collapsed 7 years after he wrote.

I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

George W. Bush campaigned on the sanctity of the oath of office. His signature move on the campaign trail in 2000 was to end his stump speech by pantomiming the oath of office, raising his right hand in the air, his left positioned as if on an imaginary Bible, declaring that he would “swear to not only uphold the laws of the land, but I will also swear to uphold the honor and the dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.”9 Has he lived up to that promise “to uphold the laws of the land”? From free speech and unreasonable searches to war powers, habeas corpus, and federalism, we will examine the president’s words and actions in light of the constitutional duties imposed by the oath of office. The pattern that emerges is one of a ceaseless push for power, unchecked by either the courts or Congress, one, in short, of disdain for constitutional limits. That pattern should disturb people from across the political spectrum. The criticism expressed in this study is often harsh, but the evidence is there as a matter of public record for all fairminded people to see—and it paints a disturbing picture of presidential indifference to constitutional safeguards and principles.

In its official papers and public actions, the Bush administration has endorsed a vision of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a vision that includes
• a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech—and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;
• a president who can launch wars at will, and who cannot be restrained from ordering the commission of war crimes, should he choose to do so;
• a president who can lock up American citizens at will and forever—without any meaningful oversight by the judiciary; and
• a federal government with the power to supervise all areas of American life, from education to marriage and through the end of life.
It is a vision, in short, unimagined by our Constitution’s Framers.

When considering the legal changes the administration has sought to impose in the name of the war on terror, it is vitally important to consider the nature of that war. The administration has taken to calling it “The Long War.” Unlike other wars, this one will not end with a peace treaty signed at a diplomat’s table. It will take decades, and when victory is achieved, we may not know with any certainty that we’ve won. Thus, the extraconstitutional powers we tolerate now will be available for all future presidents, scrupulous or otherwise. And our entire constitutional system repudiates the notion that electing good men is a sufficient check on abuse of power.

Public-private partnerships are problematic, in my view. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and private-public partnerships absolutely corrupt the private sector.

"De groeiende bewijslast voor het verband tussen de producten en schade aan het reproductieve systemen is schokkend", zegt David Santillo, wetenschapper voor Greenpeace International en een van de auteurs van het rapport. "Wij vragen dat elk chemisch product dat de gezondheid mogelijk kan beschadigen, wordt verwijderd als er een veiliger alternatief beschikbaar is."

De beweeglijkheid van de Vlaamse zaadcellen is zich aan het herstellen. Terwijl in 1995 maar 28 procent ervan voldoende kwaliteit had voor bevruchting, is dat aantal nu gestegen tot 46 procent. "Sinds 1995 zien we jaar na jaar een herstel inzake beweeglijkheid. Maar nog niet inzake vorm: 7 procent van de cellen is normaal", aldus professor Frank Comhaire, androloog aan de UZ Gent, op basis van een langetermijnstudie bij 600 gezonde mannen sinds 1978. De gunstige evolutie hangt samen met de gelijklopende daling van dioxines in het Vlaamse milieu. Hiermee relativeert professor Comhaire een alarmerend rapport van milieuorganisatie Greenpeace, dat stelt dat het gemiddeld aantal zaadcellen in het sperma met 50 procent gedaald is in 50 jaar en de mannelijke onvruchtbaarheid verdubbeld is sinds 1960.

It was said that after their return to power in France in 1815, that the Bourbon dynasty monarchs and their aristocracy had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing"--learned nothing about governance, legitimacy, or the public welfare; and forgotten none of the insults and injuries visited upon them during the First Republic and Napoleon’s Empire.

Now it looks as though Bolivia’s president Evo Morales is today’s equivalent of the Bourbon King Louis XVIII. Decoupling Bolivia from the world economy will be costly and painful. Having your major extractive industries run by political hacks will be very destructive. And doing so in a way that will maximize the alienation of Brazil and Spain is just plain stupid.

Spain on Tuesday warned Bolivia that nationalisation of its energy sector would have “consequences [for] the bilateral relationship”, a threat that could lead to the ending of debt relief.

The Spanish government said it was “deeply concerned” by the nationalisation law introduced by Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftwing president, and complained about the “way the changes were promulgated”.

Repsol YPF, the Spanish energy group, has invested more than $1bn in Bolivian gas production, which accounts for 18 per cent of the company’s total energy reserves and 11 per cent of production. Brazil’s Petrobras is another big investor, and other international companies could be forced to write off their Bolivian gas reserves, analysts said....

Reacting angrily to Mr Morales’ decision to seize control of gas fields using army troops and annul existing contracts, Antonio Brufau, Repsol’s chairman, told Argentine radio: “We were told there would be time for negotiations, but obviously this was not the case.”

In Brazil, which receives half of its natural gas from Bolivia, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called an emergency meeting of his cabinet and Petrobras executives, amid fears that any supply interruptions could trigger an energy crisis in South America’s largest economy. Mr da Silva intended to consult other South American leaders about how to respond to the “unfriendly” move, his spokesman said.

The terms Left and Right have been used to refer to political affiliation since the early part of the French Revolutionary era. They originally referred to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France, specifically in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, when the moderate royalist Feuillants sat on the right side of the chamber, while the radical Montagnards sat on the left.

Many of the causes we now think of as paradigmatically left-wing — feminism, antiracism, antimilitarism, the defense of laborers and consumers against big business — were traditionally embraced and promoted specifically by free-market radicals.

1. Is the state the solution to problems or the cause? The BNP and Respect are both statist (or, if you like, collectivist) parties. They believe the state should control the economy and/or our country’s ethnic composition.
2. When interests clash (as they do) who do you support? Rich or poor? Talk of left and right avoid these interesting questions in favour of tribalism. This is worse than moronic. It has the effect of removing admirable views - such as classical liberalism - from popular attention. And this is wholly pernicious.

I generally identify myself as progessive (yes, we can change the system to make it better), liberal (do whatever bollocks you like until you are infringing on the rights of others)and most certainly pro-poor: I’d like them (us) to be rich. It always amazes me that people think I’m on the right, in the sense of being a Tory or something.

On October 17, 2000, eleven months before 9/11, Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, of The Blackstone Group, L.P, purchased, from Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, the participating mortgage secured by World Trade Center, Building 7.1 April 26, 2001 the Port Authority leased the WTC for 99 years to Silverstein Properties and Westfield America Inc. The transaction was authorized by Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg. This transfer from the New York and New Jersey Port Authority was tantamount to the privatization of the WTC Complex. The official press release described it as "the richest real estate prize in New York City history". The retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America Inc. On 24 July 2001, 6 weeks prior to 9/11 Silverstein took control of the lease of the WTC following the Port Authority decision on April 26. Silverstein and Frank Lowy, CEO of Westefield Inc. took control of the 10.6 million-square-foot WTC complex. "Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the WTC, which comprised about 427,000 square feet of retail space." Explicitly included in the agreement was that Silverstein and Westfield "were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed". In this transaction, Silverstein signed a rental contract for the WTC over 99 years amounting to 3,2 billion dollars in installments to be made to the Port Authority: 800 million covered fees including a down payment of the order of 100 million dollars. Of this amount, Silverstein put in 14 million dollars of his own money. The annual payment on the lease was of the order of 115 million dollars. In the wake of the WTC attacks, Silverstein is suing for some $7.1 billion in insurance money, double the amount of the value of the 99 year lease. Silverstein Properties Inc. is a Manhattan-based real estate development and investment firm that owns, manages, and has developed more than 20 million square feet of office, residential and retail space. Westfield America, Inc. is controlled by the Australian based Lowy family with major interests in shopping centres. The CEO of Westfield is Australian businessman Frank Lowy. The Blackstone Group, a private investment bank with offices in New York and London, was founded in 1985 by its Chairman, Peter G. Peterson, and its President and CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman. In addition to its Real Estate activities, the Blackstone Group’s core businesses include Mergers and Acquisitions Advisory, Restructuring and Reorganization Advisory, Private Equity Investing, Private Mezzanine Investing, and Liquid Alternative Asset Investing.7 Blackstone chairman Peter G. Petersen is also Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Chairman of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His partner Stephen A. Schwarzman is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Peter G. Petersen is also named in widow Ellen Mariani’s widow civil RICO suit filed against. George W. Bush, et al. Kissinger McLarty Associates, which is Henry Kissinger’s consulting firm has a "strategic alliance" with the Blackstone Group "which is designed to help provide financial advisory services to corporations seeking high-level strategic advice."

LET ME TELL YOU about the next war. It will start sooner than you think — sometime between now and September. And it will be precipitated by the $700-million Russian deal this week to sell Tor air defense missile systems to Iran. When the war begins, it will be between Iran and Israel. Before it ends, though, it may set the whole of the Middle East on fire, pulling in the United States, leaving a legacy of instability that will last for generations and permanently ending a century of American supremacy. Despite the high stakes, the Bush administration seems barely to have noticed the danger posed by the Russian missile sale. But the signs are there, for those inclined to read them. As international pressure over their nuclear program mounts, the Iranians have become increasingly bellicose toward the U.S. and Israel. On Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel was a "fake regime" that "cannot logically continue to live." On Wednesday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, warned that "if the U.S. ventured into any aggression on Iran, Iran will retaliate by damaging the U.S. interests worldwide." Israel has upped the rhetorical heat as well. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated Israel’s determination to "make sure no one has the capability or the power to commit destruction against us." This alone should make any observer jittery. In June 1981, Israel unilaterally launched an airstrike against a nuclear reactor near Baghdad. Iran’s nuclear facilities are dispersed and well-concealed, making a preemptive Israeli strike far more difficult this time around. But there’s no reason to doubt Israel’s willingness to try. Of course, there’s no firm evidence that Iran has offensive nuclear capabilities. And even a successful military strike against Iran would be a risky move for Israel, potentially igniting regionwide instability. Absent external meddling, Israel has a substantial incentive to wait to see if a diplomatic solution can be found. But Russian brinksmanship is about to remove Israel’s incentive to pursue a peaceful diplomatic path. Russian leaders continue to mouth the usual diplomatic platitudes about democracy and global cooperation, but Russia is actually playing a complex double game. On Tuesday, Russia launched a spy satellite for Israel, which the Israelis can use to monitor Iran’s nuclear facilities. On the same day, Russian leaders confirmed their opposition to any U.N. Security Council effort to impose sanctions against Iran, and their intention to go through with the lucrative sale of 29 Tor M1 air defense missile systems to Iran. "There are no circumstances which would get in the way of us carrying out our commitments in the field of military cooperation with Iran," declared Nikolai Spassky, deputy head of Russia’s National Security Council. The upcoming deployment of Tor missiles around Iranian nuclear sites dramatically changes the calculus in the Middle East, and it significantly increases the risk of a regional war. Once the missile systems are deployed, Iran’s air defenses will become far more sophisticated, and Israel will likely lose whatever ability it now has to unilaterally destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The clock is ticking for Israel. To have a hope of succeeding, any unilateral Israeli strike against Iran must take place before September, when the Tor missile deployment is set to be completed. At best, a conflict between Israel and Iran (with resulting civilian casualties) would further inflame anti-Israel sentiment in the Islamic world, with a consequent increase in terrorism, both against Israel and against the U.S., Israel’s main foreign backer. At worst — if the U.S. gets drawn into the conflict directly — the entire Middle East could implode, terrorist attacks worldwide would increase, the already overstretched U.S. military would be badly damaged and U.S. global influence would wane — perhaps forever. So what is Russia up to? Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst, suggests that Russia’s oil and gas oligarchs wouldn’t shed any tears over a war in the Middle East, especially if it’s a war that ensnares the U.S. and keeps oil prices high.

Here’s a story about someone roughly my age. He (call him a he) grew up in a close family whose parents and family friends were fascinated by politics, both academically and practically. He inherited this love of politics, and read the subject at university. To him, a political career was a vocation, just as someone born into a musical family might become a musician.

He also inherited his parents’ strong sense of social justice, and support for the underdog. And he grew up in an inner city whose economy was ravaged by the Thatcher recession of 1980-81, where the police recklessly attacked innocent people, and whose democratically elected council was shut by Thatcher. He naturally joined the Labour party at a young age, and found his friends there.

But by the time he became an MP, the party had changed. The party he joined was that of the underdog and civil liberties. It became the illiberal mouthpiece of plutocrats.

What should he do? Should he abandon the vocation he’s had since childhood? Leave the party he’s loved for over 20 years? Should he speak against the trend the party’s taking?

These would be self-indulgent egotistical gestures - which would be out of character. They wouldn’t improve the life-chances of any of the people he joined the Labour party to help. They wouldn’t, in themselves, change the party’s course.

So, he bides his time, suppresses his true opinion, and works with the party. He might, he figures, be able to ameliorate, at the edges, some of the party’s worst excesses. And he signals his distance from the party, by, for example, publicly worrying about the growing gap between politicians and people, or by drawing attention to the convention of cabinet collective responsibility, thus showing that he’s bound by rules he hasn’t internalized.

I don’t know if this story describes any New Labour minister, or several. But it could.

What it does describe, but for details, are eastern European communist regimes. Even quite senior figures repressed their doubts about the system, preferring to work within it. Such preference falsification, says Timur Kuran, helped to sustain communism. As everyone repressed their true opinion, everyone thought that everyone else supported the system, when in fact few did.

But this could not last. Eventually, some tipping point caused the doubts to surface. And once everyone knew it was safe to speak the truth, Communism collapsed amazingly quickly.

Maybe there is a parallel here with New Labour. Maybe it’s sustained by the preference falsification of quite senior figures. If so, it too could, like Communism, collapse suddenly and unexpectedly.

I’m not making a forecast here. I’m making three points.

1. Power doesn’t merely corrupt. It enslaves. Many rulers are not as free as we think. This, in a different context, is one message of Xenophon’s Hiero.

2. What matters in politics is not the particular individual occupying any office. Office determines character more than character determines office.

3. There’s something deeply dysfunctional about political institutions. The great thing about markets is that they cause bad people, acting for bad motives, to do good things. Our political institutions cause good people, acting for good motives, to do bad things.

There’s a whole genre of free-market literature that defends sweatshops and the like on the grounds that they’re the best available option for their workers—jobs they’ve freely chosen because the immediate alternatives are all worse. I don’t reject that argument outright, but I’ve never found it entirely satisfying either. That’s partly because some of those sweatshop titans don’t just give their charges low wages and long hours; they engage in direct coercion or fraud. It’s one thing to choose a job because the other alternatives look worse. It’s quite another to find yourself cheated out of your pay at the end of the day or, worse yet, held captive on a citrus farm with hundreds of other workers and threatened with death if you try to leave. (That last one’s a real case in South Florida, where employers Ramiro, Juan, and José Ramos were convicted in 2002 of extortion and slavery.)

But there’s another problem with the argument, a factor that’s in play even with enterprises that deal with their workers honestly and nonviolently. Yes: Sometimes what look like lousy conditions to us are the best option an employee has, and if you shut down their workplace they’ll be even worse off. But sometimes the only reason those conditions are the least bad choice available is because the other possibilities have been cut off by legal fiat.

I’m referring not just to illegal immigrants, who for obvious reasons have little recourse if they’re defrauded or enslaved, but to guest workers, who come here only under a strict set of rules that prevent them from changing jobs, let alone striking out on their own. (As my colleague Tim Cavanaugh put it last week: "You could make the case that small business startups have been the single greatest national benefit of immigration. It’s an idiocy worthy of, well, the United States government to make the promise of immigration dependant upon your ability to find a clock-punching job at an already-existing company.") This isn’t free labor operating in an open marketplace. It’s a workforce whose power and mobility has been limited by law.

There’s no excuse for stealing from your workers or for forcibly keeping them on the job. But crackdowns on abusive employers will bring little justice if the result for their victims is a one-way ticket home. I ate at the Charles Street Kawasaki two or three times myself, before the immigration gendarmes rolled in, and I remember that the workers were friendly, helpful people. I even recall tipping a bit more than usual, not realizing my money would end up in someone else’s pocket. If they were treated as poorly as the government says they were, then those workers certainly deserve a chance to be free of Kawasaki’s clutches. Not to be sent back to Asia or Latin America, but to find a better job, openly and legally, at the Italian restaurant across the street.

Greenpeace is een organisatie die naast de zeer terechte acties rond de bescherming van de omgeving en de natuur eveneens agressieve lobbying activiteiten heeft tegen o.m. kernenergie. Het Tsjernobyl document moet m.i. in dit laatste kader geplaatst worden, met het daaraan gekoppelde gebrek aan wetenschappelijke geloofwaardigheid. Een diagonale lectuur toont een typische opbouw van het document. Het document bevat deels ruimgekende informatie, die de geloofwaardigheid van het document laat aanvoelen. Deels bevat het halve waarheden, meestal geloofwaardige citaten of gegevens uit hun context genomen, die twijfel zaaien. Tenslotte bevat het flagrante desinformatie op basis van zgn. objectieve bronnen, die echter niet weerstaan aan enige kritisch wetenschappelijke analyse. In het Greenpeace document wordt de objectiviteit van de studie van het Tsjernobyl Forum en in het bijzonder van het IAEA aangevallen. Deze studie, opgesteld in samenwerking met o.a. de FAO en de WHO, werd uiterst zorgvuldig uitgevoerd. In ons aanvullend onderzoek, samengevat in onze vermelde brochure, hebben we geen enkele aanduiding gevonden van een subjectieve benadering. De brochure "Tsjernobyl 20 jaar later" van het Studiecentrum voor Kernenergie is een neutraal, wetenschappelijk gefundeerd en derhalve zo objectief mogelijk verslag over de gevolgen van Tsjernobyl. Het steunt op jarenlang multidisciplinair en internationaal onderzoek onderworpen aan uitgebreid peer review.

De wetenschappelijke wereld onderzocht de voorbije 20 jaar de gezondheidseffecten van de radioactieve besmetting. Sinds 1990 vond men een duidelijke toename van schildklierkanker bij personen die als kind een grote blootstelling aan radioactief jodium opliepen. De toename is het grootst onder de personen die ten tijde van het ongeval jonger waren dan 4 jaar. Men stelde tot nu toe een 4 000-tal gevallen vast en naar verwachting zal het verhoogde risico nog jaren aanhouden. Van de personen die schildklierkanker kregen zijn er maar enkele overleden. Ervaring in Wit-Rusland heeft geleerd dat de overlevingskans voor deze vorm van kanker tot op heden nagenoeg 99 % bedraagt. Het is moeilijk om andere gezondheidseffecten wetenschappelijk aan te tonen. Dit wil niet zeggen dat er geen bijkomende kankers of erfelijke afwijkingen zouden zijn, maar dat we niet in staat zijn ze te onderscheiden van het natuurlijke voorkomen. Een beperkende beperkende factor voor epidemiologische studies is de barre economische situatie waarin de getroffen gebieden na het uiteenvallen van de Sovjet-Unie terechtgekomen zijn, met een verslechtering van de gezondheidszorg en een daling van de gemiddelde levensduur. In de gegeven omstandigheden zal het zeer moeilijk zijn om wetenschappelijk zinvolle conclusies te trekken over eventuele erfelijke effecten, aangeboren afwijkingen of andere kankers buiten schildklierkanker.

New Economist points to a lot of articles on the political economy of happiness, including Mark Easton’s article in The New Statesman. Easton writes,

North of the border, the Scottish Executive supports an organisation called the Centre for Confidence and Well-being which aims to make Scotland 15 per cent more optimistic within ten years. "Optimism is a major component of happiness and I think it’s the part that we can most immediately see is missing from Scottish life," says the centre founder, Carol Craig.

Maybe the students can march around singing "Always look on the Bright Side of Life" from Monty Python’s "The Life of Brian."

Easton continues,

It is a vision shared by Richard Layard, who has been pressing the government to employ another 10,000 fully trained psychotherapists. His book Happiness: lessons from a new science is the bible of Britain’s new utilitarians - a sweeping manifesto for well-being, arguing for policies that would lower consumer spending, reduce mobility of labour and restrict growth - heretical talk, one imagines, inside the Treasury.

Just what we needed. Another scientific excuse for totalitarianism.

Iedereen had het over daders van Noord-Afrikaanse origine. Sommigen zagen in de terughoudendheid van media weer een weerzinwekkende uiting van politiek-correct denken van mismaakte links-utopische denkers.

Maar misschien ging het ook over één van de de fundamenten van een democratische rechtstaat: niemand is schuldig zolang zijn schuld niet bewezen is door een rechtbank.

Sommige mensen zijn in naam van de Westerse (met een hoofdletter) waarden zeer snel bereid om één van de meest fundamentele principes van een rechtstaat overboord te gooien, vooral als zij denken een bewijs te zien van de ondergraving van onze westerse waarden door de islam.

Hun denken is even gevaarlijk voor de maatschappij als de extreme denkers en de extremisten in naam van de voornoemde godsdienst.

Mijnheer Paul Beliën heeft op zijn website die ik nog steeds niet wil vernoemen, omdat het een website is waarvan ik vind dat ze pure haat uitstraalt, de laatste dagen bij herhaling gesproken over de daders op de moord van Joe Van Holsbeeck "van Noordafrikaanse origine".

Hij heeft opgeroepen, Martens Junior achterna, "Geef ons wapens!". Hij heeft gepleit om het recht in eigen handen te nemen en zelf rechter te spelen. De rest wil ik niet herhalen.

Vanavond berichten de media dat een Pool zou bekend hebben. Ook de dader van de moord zelf zou een Pool zijn.

Polen, het land van de vroegere paus, een bijna honderd procent katholiek land, een voorbeeld van westerse integratie ("Let Poland be Poland !"), jarenlang zijn de burgers daar onderdrukt door een vuile communistische dictatuur. De Polen horen bijna als vanzelfsprekend tot onze Europese cultuur, als kuisvrouw, metser, of ik weet niet wat. Ze zijn hier met open armen ontvangen, door u, door mij, officieel of officieus.

Als dit waar is, dan is mijnheer Beliën "proper rechts" ontmaskerd als een kleinburgerlijk bekrompen racistisch denkertje. Een zegen voor iedere Westerse democratie. Ik beleef er waarlijk geen genoegen aan.

Britain’s economic growth is recovering, partly due to the massive influx of Czech, Polish and other Eastern European workers, according to a report published tomorrow by the Ernst & Young Item Club. The Item Club, the only forecaster to use the Treasury’s economic model, believes interest rates would be 0.5 percentage points higher and gross domestic product 0.2 per cent lower were it not for an estimated 300,000 new workers from Eastern Europe alone. Professor Peter Spencer, the chief economic advisor to the Item Club, said: "The steady flow from the most recent accession countries to the UK has proved remarkably positive for the economy… we are looking at a very positive cost-benefit ratio." Sceptics have feared that migrant workers are keeping wage inflation too low in poorly paying jobs and placing pressure on Britain’s hospitals, schools and other public services. However, Spencer said that whereas previous waves of immigration have been limited to small areas of London and the South East, recent migrants from Eastern Europe have settled throughout the UK. The Home Office says that between June 2004 and December 2005, 48,000 Eastern Europeans registered for work in London, compared with 51,000 in Anglia and 40,000 in the Midlands. Item says that these workers have also managed to plug labour shortages in an array of businesses. "This influx has benefited a wide swathe of regions and industries … by increasing the flexibility of the economy and spreading the burden on housing and local services," said Spencer. "The stereotype of this all being about just the Polish plumber is well wide of the mark." For instance, government data says nearly a third of these migrant workers have found jobs in business administration. Only 4 per cent of Eastern Europeans who have registered since May 2004 work in the construction industry. However, the arrival of hundreds of thousands new workers has also coincided with a rise in unemployment in the UK, albeit from historically low levels. Critics also argue that 80 per cent of the jobs taken by migrant labourers pay less than £6 an hour. Sir Andrew Green, the chairman of Migration Watch, an independent think tank, said: "We should not be starry-eyed about East European immigration. They are good workers and employers benefit from buying non-unionised, sometimes skilled, labour." "But there is also a downside. Most of these workers take low-paid jobs and so they are holding wages down at the bottom end of the labour market. This makes it more difficult to achieve the Government’s aim of moving 1m people from welfare to work." Green also believes new arrivals are driving up house prices for first-time buyers. He is sceptical of Item’s contention that the new labourers will ease Britain’s pension crisis. "That aspect of the report is more politically correct than economically correct," he said. Item predicts that Britain’s economy will economy grow by 2.3 per cent in 2006, rising to 2.6 per cent in 2007 and 3 per cent in 2008. The report also notes revivals in the housing market and consumer spending and expects interest rates to be held at 4.5 per cent for the rest of the year.

Turkish Atomic Energy Agency (TAEK) President Oktay Cakiroglu confirmed on Wednesday (12 April) that the country’s first nuclear plant will be built in the Black Sea province of Sinop. The facility is expected to help meet the country’s energy demand over the next 15 years. TAEK carefully studied the details about proposed locations, focusing on criteria such as sea temperature, climate, wind and general weather, Cakiroglu told a parliamentary commission. After eight possible locations were chosen, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan decided on Sinop, he said. A100 MW pilot reactor will be constructed by 2009, followed by three power plants with a total capacity of 5,000 MW, expected to be in service by 2012. Turkey has uranium reserves totaling around 10,000 tonnes, according to the authorities -- enough to last 50 years. Turks have been debating the pros and cons of building a nuclear power plant for almost 30 years. Previous governments tried to get such a project going three different times, but ended up shelving their plans in the face of opposition from environmental groups. Environmentalists, as well as the opposition Republican Peoples’ Party, have also objected to the Sinop project, citing its high price tag and security concerns. But Energy and Natural Resources Minister Hilmi Guler says authorities are determined to press ahead. "The reactions concerning nuclear energy originate from the non-detailed examination of the issue. When the issue is explained in detail, the people will see that their reactions are baseless," Guler said. The current commitment to build the plant stems from rising fuel prices and the desire for energy independence. According to Guler, Turkey must invest approximately $128 billion in energy infrastructure by 2020 to keep pace with rising demand and to move from dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. He says Turkey’s current energy needs amount to 88m tonnes of petrol, with 72 per cent of that amount currently being met by foreign suppliers.

In an interview in the The New York Times Magazine that will appear this coming Sunday, Madeleine Albright reveals, among other things, that even at 68, she works out three times a week "and I can leg-press up to 400 pounds." This follows a discussion of how she does not expect to re-marry, partly because, as she says, "I’m intimidating, don’t you think?"

Earlier we have seen the translation of document ISGP-2003-00028868 (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1600367/posts ) where it talks about Training Non Iraqi Foreign Arab Terrorists in February 2003 to help the Iraqis in their war against the coalition forces. Some may have dismissed this document by saying that the Iraqis wanted every possible help on the eve of the war, and thus they argued that there was no connection between Saddam and terrorists. However now comes this Iraqi Intelligence document CMPC-2003-005935 that is dated November 22 1999 and it talks about the plan for the year 2000 and that includes the Training of Arab Feedayeens which mean training non Iraqi Foreign Arab Terrorists. Who are those Feedayeen Foreign Arab Terrorists? Are they Al Qaeda, Hamas, etc…? This document is another proof of Saddam great connection to Terrorism and dated back to the year 1999-2000, a long rooted connection to terrorism. Saddam Regime is a TERRORIST REGIME and we had all the rights to remove him after 9/11/2001.

Beginning of the translation of page 2 of document CMPC-2003-005935

In the Name of God the Most Merciful the Most Compassionate

The Presidency of the Republic

The Intelligence Apparatus

Mr: The Respected Director

Subject: Projects of a Plan

Below are projects of the plan for the year 2000 and according to the budget suggested for it in the spending budget of the year 2000 and as follow:

1. Prepare an armored brief case to protect the VIPs 180 days.

2. Study on the Epoxy used currently in preparing the IEDs and the possibility of finding another type that will not affect the explosive.

3. Studies and researches of the materials that increase the intensity of the explosive.

4. Prepare theoretical and applied lessons on the popular explosives 120 days.

5. Training of the Arab Feedayeens- within the plan of the year 2000.

Establish tournaments specialized in the explosives 30 days

Please review and your command with regards

Signature…

Khaled Ibrahim Ismail

Senior Chemist

22/11/99

The effectiveness of aid is reduced by corruption in the donors as well as by corruption in the recipients. Maybe we should handle foreign aid the way Tyler Cowen thinks that we handle subsidies for the arts. That is, by using tax preferences and matching grants, we could subsidize "patrons of the poor." Individual donors might fight corruption at both ends of the foreign aid chain.

You can compare 1968 Fords, Chryslers, and Volkswagens, but nobody will ever be able to compare the Nixon administration of 1968 with the Humphrey and Wallace administrations of the same year. It is as if we had only Fords from 1920 to 1928, Chryslers from 1928 to 1936, and then had to decide what firm would make a better car for the next four years…. Imagine buying cars the way we buy governments. Ten thousand people would get together and agree to vote, each for the car he preferred. Whichever car won, each of the ten thousand would have to buy it. It would not pay any of us to make any serious effort to find out which car was best; whatever I decide, my car is being picked for me by the other members of the group.

(One criticism) of the market is that it privileges exit over voice — that is, it gives people the freedom to act like consumers and withdraw from situations they oppose, but allows little scope for the freedom to act like citizens and shape their social situations through shared discussion. But this is a false dichotomy; for it is precisely the right of exit that is the strongest guarantee of voice. The complaints and suggestions of an equal partner who is free to withdraw his or her productive contribution are bound to be taken more seriously than those of a subjugated partner who has no choice but to put up with whatever develops. Putting an iron curtain around a cooperative venture does not make it more cooperative. The sort of participatory democracy that anti-authoritarian leftists favor is thus more closely affiliated, more naturally allied, with Misesian market democracy than with political democracy.

Social Security participants face a significant amount of variation in the returns they get as a result of law changes. Law changes – necessitated by actuarial imbalances – pass demographic risk on to participants. This risk can be considerable, which casts doubt on the characterization of traditional Social Security as safe. One might wonder how political risk compares with the financial risk that participants would face with a system of individual accounts. In our previous work (Nataraj and Shoven 2003), we showed that a 60-40 stock-bond portfolio provides a mean lifetime IRR of 6.2 percent with a standard deviation of 2.03 percent. In contrast, a pure pay-as-you-go system (in which benefits are updated every year to reflect demographic changes) generates a mean lifetime IRR of 1.02 with a standard deviation of 0.55 percent. The risk and returns calculated in this paper are similar. Between 1977 and 2004, the average IRR for an average earning single male in the 1960 birth cohort was 0.525 percent, while the standard deviation of the time series of IRRs was 0.8 percent. There can be no doubt that the deal offered by Social Security has changed over the years. The debate over personal accounts, therefore, is not one of “safe” versus “risky” benefits, but one of portfolio choice.

John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador, said Monday that he intended to offer a Security Council resolution on Tuesday that would publicly identify four Sudanese individuals responsible for atrocities in Darfur and possibly force a vote on whether the panel would impose sanctions on them. "We’ve been pushing sanctions for years, and the effort was always to make it clear to the government in Khartoum that there would be individual consequences," Mr. Bolton said in a telephone interview. He said he decided on the move after learning that China and Russia had objected to action against the four individuals. Their names were circulated among Council members last Thursday under a so-called silence procedure that would have applied the sanctions unless they met opposition. On Monday, China said it opposed the sanctions, and Russia said it backed China’s view. Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, said that taking action now would complicate African Union-sponsored peace talks on the conflicted Darfur region under way in Abuja, Nigeria. "At this sensitive moment, to publish the list of names will have a negative effect on the negotiations there," he said. The four — including a member of government, as well as fighters from pro- and anti-government militias — are charged with committing atrocities and undermining peace efforts in Darfur. The sanctions include travel bans and freezes on assets. Mr. Bolton said he was surprised by the response of China and Russia, despite the two countries’ traditional reluctance to endorse sanctions, because these were aimed at individuals rather than countries. "That’s the whole idea of targeted sanctions, not to have a broader effect than necessary," he said. "These are people who are involved in atrocities and killing people and turning people into refugees." Mr. Bolton said he hoped China and Russia would reconsider their opposition, avoiding a showdown vote. Both countries are permanent members with veto power. "This will be in effect a test of the Council to see if the sanctions procedure is going to work at all, and we have moved slowly, unfortunately slowly, but we certainly have come to the point where it’s time for a decision," he said.

We’re told repeatedly that the scientific consensus on climate change is that it is happening, we’re causing it and it’s all going to be a huge disaster. The argument seems to be that because there is indeed this consensus we all need to leap to attention and do whatever it is we are told. Perhaps it is worth looking at the emerging consensus about some of the underlying economics upon which the said consensus is based. You might recall that a couple of years ago David Henderson and Ian Castles started to attack the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) which are the economic forecasts of global growth. The numbers from these are then used to provide the emissions numbers which are then fed into the climate models. If the numbers from the SRES are incorrect then we get GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) from those efforts of the climate modelers: no, not the past or current results but those for the future. One part of the criticism was that by using Market Exchange Rates (MER) rather than the more correct Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) the SRES models were grossly over-estimating the future rise in emissions. This of course, via the climate models, feeds through into gross over-estimates of likely future warming. At first this idea was simply rejected out of hand, but a number of economists have continued to pursue the train of thought. It’s worth noting that the consensus is that the SRES does indeed overestimate future growth and thus future emissions. Quite how much and thus quite how much GIGO we’re seeing in the results of the climate models is still at issue but the consensus amongst the economists is that the economic models need to be re-visited and corrected. For they are providing incorrect numbers upon which all of the other science is based. If the "scientific consensus" argument is to have any validity shouldn’t we actually be taking note of all of them? Including the ones that show that future warming or change is over-estimated? Sadly, it is the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which seems to be ignoring that consensus.

I disagree with your characterization of Bush as being famously loyal — a view so widely stated that you can be excused for repeating it. Bush is loyal ONLY to toadies, suck-ups and sycophants. Anyone who shows an ounce of independence — or loyalty to the country above loyalty to him — is punished or dispensed with. You mention Paul O’Neill, but a better example is Larry Lindsey. His estimate of the cost of the war was mildly embarrassing back in 2002 because it was higher than the absurdly low estimates being peddled by the White House at that time. So they threw him overboard, even though he may have done more to get Bush elected than anyone else, including Karl Rove. Now, as you know, Lindsey’s estimate looks absurdly low. As I say in my book, loyalty with Bush is strictly a one-way street: total loyalty is demanded, but none is ever really offered in return.

Given that this is the case, I have never understood why so many people — both inside and outside the administration — continue to give Bush so much loyalty. I can only conclude that it is borne more from fear than agreement with his policies. I think there is genuine fear of crossing the president, although I have never been able to uncover the precise mechanism through which it is communicated — even in my own case. Nevertheless, it is real — just as fear of the unknown is real. I think somehow he communicates to everyone he comes in contact with that they will suffer if they go against him. And his obsessiveness about leaks — combined with Patriot Act powers — has shut off back channels that have previously existed in every presidency.

There is a CRYING NEED for an investigative reporter to plumb the depths of how this works and why so many people submit to it — even when Bush has poll ratings so low as to barely show a pulse. Even behind closed doors, with guarantees of confidentiality, I cannot get FORMER administration people to say a bad word about the guy even when they have been badly treated by him in some way. The climate of fear is pervasive.

even a dumb nuclear power program beats coal, which emits greenhouse gasses, particulates, and more radioactive material per kilowatt-hour produced (in the form of radon) than nuclear plants

Bottom line: illegal immigration has had a (small) positive economic impact on the American economy as a whole; its sole negative impact has been tiny and limited to one segment of the workforce (high school dropouts); and if we’re really worried about high school dropouts, everyone agrees they have way bigger problems than competition from illegal immigration anyway. If this is the best we can come up with after 20 years and 8 million illegal immigrants, there really isn’t a serious economic argument to make against immigration from Mexico. Cultural backlash is pretty much all that’s left.

The linkage is absurd for two different reasons. The first is that current illegal immigrants are not Muslims (for Europe, of course, the situation is slightly different) and have no connection with or allegiance to Islamic organizations, terrorist or otherwise. Most of them are Catholics. They are no more likely to support Islamic terrorism than the people already here—probably less likely. The second is that the U.S. doesn’t control its borders, isn’t going to control its borders, and probably cannot at any acceptable cost control its borders, in the sense relevant to the terrorist issue. In 2004, the most recent year for which I found figures, there were more than eighty million tourist arrivals in North America, presumably most of them in the U.S. Anyone with sufficient resources and ability to pose a serious terrorist threat can get into the country as one of those tens of millions—he doesn’t have to scramble through a tunnel under the U.S./Mexican border. And making it a criminal offense to hire illegal aliens will have very little effect on those aliens who are working for al-Qaeda. They already have a job. There are, of course, many other arguments pro and con on the subject of immigration, a subject I may return to in a later post. But this one isn’t an argument, it’s pure demagoguery.

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn’t been a nuclear plant ordered up since then. Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America’s electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that’s not including the nuclear workers).

Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program.

Yes, the old should be protected from precariousness because they are exhausted; the sick, because they are too weak. But privileged students under the age of 26? They cannot endure 24 months of precariousness at the prime of life, the height of their energy?

Since graduating college last June, my daughter has already quit two jobs, with her friends and family strongly supporting her decisions. Her problem was that the jobs demanded too little from her. At her age, she would rather do temp work and keep busy than have a job with benefits where she just sits and waits in vain for an assignment. She is against boredom, not precariousness. The French are different.

Only about 0.2% of consumer spending in the U.S. ... went for Internet access in 2004 yet time use data indicates that people spend around 10% of their entire leisure time going online... Based on expenditure and time use data and our elasticity estimate, we calculate that consumer surplus from the Internet may be around 2% of full-income, or several thousand dollars per user.

The Euston Manifesto

Norm, Nick, Pooter, Harry’s. No doubt many other places.

I’m agin’ it of course.

With this document we hope to publicly assert our progressive, democratic, egalitarian, internationalist principles in the face of recent attacks upon them from the Right and, to our dismay, the Left.

I’m actually deeply offended, seriously so. How dare some portion of "the left" claim that those on "the right" do not share the same desires? I am clearly of the right and:

1) Progressive? Of course I am. I do quite honestly believe that we can make this a better world not just for ourselves but for all. That we can indeed through government action progress to a better place.

The difference might be that I am certain that the government action should be less government action but I still believe in, insist upon even, a progression from the current state.

2) Democratic? It’s people like me who argue for power to be taken out of the hands of the vote-stealers and placed in the one truly democratic place possible, those of the people themselves. Each and every individual voting for themselves in every action they take.

3) Egalitarian? Of course I am. Equality of opportunity clearly, and I’ll even go with a certain amount of equalizing of outcomes provided those proposing them can accept Kenneth Arrow’s point: all efficient outcomes can be achieved using a competetive market, by adjusting the starting position. Markets are the solution, not the problem.

4) Internationalist principles? It is exactly people like myself, those grim faced right wingers who are internationalist. We are the people who argue for free trade, for the abolition of national borders as far as the allocation of resources is concerned.

The arrogance with which all of those virtues are claimed for "the left". The pure bloody pomposity of it, that a disagreement about how to achieve them is taken as a sign that the goals themselves are not desired.

There have been repeated claims that this past year’s hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq’s senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie. After the Kuwait war in 1991, when Rolf Ekeus arrived in Baghdad to begin the inspection and disarmament work of UNSCOM, he was greeted by Zahawie, who told him in a bitter manner that "now that you have come to take away our assets," the two men could no longer be friends. (They had known each other in earlier incarnations at the United Nations in New York.)

At a later 1995 U.N. special session on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Zahawie was the Iraqi delegate and spoke heatedly about the urgent need to counterbalance Israel’s nuclear capacity. At the time, most democratic countries did not have full diplomatic relations with Saddam’s regime, and there were few fully accredited Iraqi ambassadors overseas, Iraq’s interests often being represented by the genocidal Islamist government of Sudan (incidentally, yet another example of collusion between "secular" Baathists and the fundamentalists who were sheltering Osama Bin Laden). There was one exception—an Iraqi "window" into the world of open diplomacy—namely the mutual recognition between the Baathist regime and the Vatican. To this very important and sensitive post in Rome, Zahawie was appointed in 1997, holding the job of Saddam’s ambassador to the Holy See until 2000. Those who knew him at that time remember a man much given to anti-Jewish tirades, with a standing ticket for Wagner performances at Bayreuth. (Actually, as a fan of Das Rheingold and Götterdämmerung in particular, I find I can live with this. Hitler secretly preferred sickly kitsch like Franz Lehar.)

In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein’s long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president’s State of the Union address in January 2003.

De Amerikaanse president George Bush heeft toestemming gegeven voor de lekken over Irak naar de pers. Dat bevestigde Lewis Libby, de voormalige kabinetschef van vicepresident Dick Cheney, aan de procureur die belast is met het onderzoek naar de zaak over CIA-agente Valerie Plame. Libby wordt ervan verdacht de identiteit van de CIA-agente te hebben bekendgemaakt aan de pers, wat een misdrijf is in de VS. Libby bevestigt in een document dat hij een gesprek had met journaliste Judith Miller. Dat document stelt dat ’de deelname van de verdachte aan een belangrijk gesprek met Judith Miller op 8 juli slechts plaatsvond nadat de vicepresident aan de verdachte had gezegd dat de president specifiek toestemming had gegeven aan de verdachte om bepaalde informatie te onthullen uit het NIE-rapport over de inlichtingendiensten’.

When I talk of the social market economy, I mean that the market is social, not that it needs to be made social

Belgium, Germany and Hungary impose the highest taxes among OECD countries on the pay of a single person on average earnings, while Korea, Mexico and New Zealand take the least, according to the latest edition of the OECD’s annual publication Taxing Wages.

For a single-earner married couple with two children on average earnings, by contrast, Turkey, Sweden and Poland impose the biggest ‘tax wedge’, while Ireland, Iceland and the United States take the smallest slice in tax. Taxing Wages compares the shares of employee earnings taken by governments in OECD countries through taxation by calculating what it calls the ‘tax wedge’, the difference between labour costs to the employer and the net take-home pay of the employee, including any cash benefits from government welfare programmes.

In 2005, single individuals without children earning the average wage in services and manufacturing industries faced a tax wedge of 55.4% of the cost of their labour to their employers in Belgium, 51.8% in Germany and 50.5% in Hungary, compared with 17.3% in Korea, 18.2% in Mexico and 20.5% in New Zealand. The average for OECD countries was 37.3%.

For a one-earner married couple with two children on average earnings, the tax wedge ranged from 42.7% in Turkey, 42.4% in Sweden and 42.1% in Poland to 11.9% in the United States, 11% in Iceland and 8.1 % in Ireland. The average for OECD countries was 27.7%.

These tax wedges result from the combined effects of a range of policy instruments at the disposal of governments: personal income tax, employee and employer social security contributions, payroll taxes and cash benefits. Variations in their levels reflect the differing priorities of governments and voters in different countries with respect to the desired level, composition and financing method of government expenses, including social benefits.

Tax wedges have shrunk over the past few years in most OECD countries, partly reflecting governments’ desire to get more people into work so as to offset the effects on output and prosperity of ageing populations. However, these tax cuts have been limited by the need to maintain sufficient government revenues. In 2000, the average tax wedge for single persons without children was 37.9%, with Belgium at the top end of the range, with 57.1%, and Korea and Mexico at the bottom end, with 16.4% and 16.8% respectively.

Some countries have focussed their tax wedge reductions on lower paid workers, as this is the group that often experiences particularly high unemployment rates. The reductions in the tax wedge for single workers earning two-thirds of the average wage have fallen particularly sharply since 2000 in France (47.4% to 41.4%), Hungary (48.5% to 42.9%) and the Slovak Republic (40.6% to 35.3%).

A tax hike of 12.8 percentage points (one standard deviation) leads to 122 fewer hours of market work per adult per year and a 4.9 percentage point drop in the employment-to-population ratio. It also increases the size of the shadow economy by 3.8 percent of official GDP, and it reduces by 10 to 30 percent the share of national output and employment in "Retail Trade and Repairs," in "Eating, Drinking, and Lodging," and in a broader category that includes "Wholesale Trade and Motor Trade and Repair." The evidence suggests that tax rate differences among rich countries are a major reason for large international differences in market work time and in the industry mix of market activity.

Immigration has been extensively studied by economists, and the literature suggests there are two main effects. First, immigrants have relatively low skills on average, so they drive down the wages of domestically born low-skilled workers. Second, immigrants tend to have different skill sets, so they increase the beneficial diversity of the workforce, making firms that hire immigrants and the overall economy more productive.

New Orleans is an example that illustrates the latter. A friend recently returned and mentioned how quickly the city is snapping back to life. He saw construction under way throughout the city, performed by swarms of workers who appeared to be predominantly Spanish-speaking. Without those construction workers, restaurants, hotels and other businesses might still be closed.

In the aggregate, cheaper construction makes it easier for firms to invest, grow and compete in the global marketplace. And there are many other areas where immigrant skills complement those of native-born Americans.

How big are these beneficial effects? A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper by economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri was the first to attempt to quantify the benefits of labor force diversity. Their striking conclusion was that the benefits of immigration to U.S workers are positive and quite significant. They say that "immigration, as we have known it during the nineties, had a sizeable beneficial effect on the wages of U.S.-born workers."

One of the clearest and most compelling studies of the effect of immigration on natives’ labor market opportunities was conducted by David Card of the University of California at Berkeley and published in Industrial & Labor Relations Review in 1990. Specifically, Professor Card examined the effect of the Mariel Boatlift — which resulted in 125,000 new Cuban immigrants arriving in southern Florida between May and September of 1980 — on the labor market in Miami. This sudden and unexpected wave of immigration increased the city’s labor force by 7 percent. Most of the new workers were unskilled. Yet Professor Card found that the wages and employment opportunities of unskilled workers who already lived in Miami were not hurt by this large inflow of immigrants. “Even among the Cuban population,” he concluded, “wages and unemployment rates of earlier immigrants were not substantially affected by the arrival of the Mariels.” He reached his conclusions by comparing Miami with other cities that were not affected by the Mariel Boatlift. This study, which is a model for research, was specifically mentioned in Professor Card’s citation when he was awarded the Clark Medal, a prize given by the American Economic Association every other year. The central finding of David Card’s study of the Mariel Boatlift — that an unanticipated influx of immigrants does not have a harmful effect on the employment or wages of natives — has been replicated in other settings by other researchers.

Why does immigration apparently have such a benign effect on natives’ wages and employment opportunities? The answer to this question is not clear, but it is probably more complicated than the simple response that immigrants take jobs that U.S. workers do not want. One likely factor is that, in addition to increasing the supply of labor, immigrants increase the demand for goods and services produced in the U.S. This leads to higher wages and employment for all workers in the U.S. Immigration can also result in an increase in capital investment. And many immigrants become entrepreneurs, creating jobs for other immigrants and natives. Immigrant entrepreneurs may be particularly likely to develop export opportunities for American products given their connections abroad and language skills.

The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Amid all the squeals in Washington at the yawning US trade deficit with China, one strikes a specially resonant political chord: that unfair Chinese competition is annihilating US manufacturing industry and “stealing American jobs”. The assertion is so common it has assumed the status of fact. Yet it is almost entirely false.

For a start, the bilateral imbalance may be overstated. After ironing out the wide discrepancies between both sides’ data, Oxford Economics, a consultancy, finds China’s share has hovered at about a fifth of the total US merchandise deficit since 1995. ...

The US is still the top manufacturing nation, producing almost a quarter of global output, the same as in 1994, while Japan’s share has shrunk. ... True, more output is from plants owned by non-US companies, some of which have displaced indigenous production. That may fuel popular perceptions of national decline, particularly because greenfield factories usually shun the old rust belt. But corporate nationality is irrelevant to overall economic welfare, except insofar as foreign-owned plants often out-perform locally owned ones.

What of China as “job thief”? US manufacturing employment is in long-term decline, just as it is in other rich countries. But that is chiefly because of impressive productivity gains. ... Of course, Chinese competition has claimed some US manufacturing jobs. But Oxford Economics puts the losses from 2000 to 2010 as low as 500,000 – no more than the US labour force sheds each week. ...

If US manufacturing is stronger than many Americans believe, China poses a weaker challenge than is often supposed. Its output is still less than half that of the US – and many of its industries are suffering a severe profits squeeze. Indeed, to call China a manufacturing economy is something of a misnomer. In reality, it is the world’s biggest final assembly shop, with minimal local value-added.

As a forthcoming report by the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, on average two-thirds of the value of Chinese products is imported... Furthermore, China’s much-ballyhooed “high-tech” exports are a quirk of customs classification: most are low-margin electronics products, such as DVD players. ...

Many big-ticket Chinese exports are of things no longer made in the US or that have never been made there. A large renminbi revaluation would merely shift Chinese production to even lower-cost locations elsewhere. Increases in China’s still low productivity levels will have a similar effect as higher wages make low-skilled, labour-intensive output increasingly uncompetitive.

At the same time, more sophisticated activities will spring up to replace it. That has already happened in steel, where China’s capacity has exploded in the past few years. It will soon be repeated in the car industry ... China needs to export vehicles profitably in volume.

That is a prospect to strike fear into Detroit. But the main reason is not because Chinese car companies are likely to develop overnight into super-competitive Toyota clones. It is because decades of mismanagement and failure to produce what the market wants have pushed US carmakers to the edge of the abyss. It will not take much to tip them over.

Moving steadily up-market is a natural, indeed inevitable, feature of economic development. The biggest worry for the US ... is not that China will follow the same path but that their own economies will stop doing so. There is no intrinsic reason why that should happen and few signs of it as yet. But if it does happen, they will have only themselves to blame.

This January the US imported almost $3 billion in goods from France and almost $0.2 billion in goods from Cambodia. She collected about $30 million in tariffs on the imports from each country. In fact she collected slightly more from Cambodia.

A lot of people are worried about China as an economic threat to the United States. I’m not. China’s economic success is good for Americans. When Americans buy toys and clothes and iPods made in China it means that we have more people and capital available to make other things.

A variation on the Chinese threat is that someday, if they keep growing, they’ll pass us. This is the view that economics is like the Olympics. If you don’t finish first, you’re stuck with the bronze or silver medal or worse, you don’t even get to the medal stand. But economic success is not like the Olympics. It’s not a zero sum game. I care about my children’s opportunity to live a fully human live, choosing to use their skills as they see fit. A successful China enhances that. I hope China does great in the meanwhile. The Chinese are desperately poor. Who would be so heartless as to hope that they stay that way?

So here’s a mental experiment. Even with China’s tremendous growth over the last 20 years, America’s per capita income is many times higher than China’s. What if you woke up one more morning and discovered the whole thing was a lie. The Chinese had mismeasured their national income information and it turned out that the Chinese, in fact, had a per capita income many times that of the United States. It could be true, you know. Maybe they really are really, really, really rich. How would it change your well-being? Would it make any difference whatsoever?

Richard Cobden, was born in Heyshott, near Midhurst, Sussex, on 3rd June, 1804. His parents had eleven children and spent his early life in extreme poverty. Richard’s father was an unsuccessful small farmer and eventually he was forced to distribute his children to numerous relatives. Richard was sent to an uncle in Yorkshire where he was treated very badly.

Cobden received very little formal schooling and at the age of fourteen became a clerk in the textile industry. A year later he was working as a commercial traveller. After developing knowledge of the cotton trade, Cobden decided to start his own business. In 1828 he joined with two other young men to start a company selling calico prints in London. The business was an immediate success and by 1832 Richard Cobden was living in an affluent part of Manchester. After eight years Cobden and his partners had turned a £1,000 investment into £80,000.

Cobden had made enough money to spend time travelling. Between 1833 and 1837 he visited France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, America, Egypt, Greece and Russia. Cobden collected information about these countries and in 1835 published his book, England, Ireland and America. In this book Cobden warned that in the future Britain would find it difficult to compete with the emerging economic power of America. Cobden was also extremely critical of the way that Ireland was being ruled. In the book Cobden also advocated a policy of free trade, low taxation, reduced military spending and an improvement in our system of education.

In 1837 Richard Cobden became a member of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and joined Thomas Potter and John Shuttleworth in the agitation that resulted in Manchester achieving a democratically elected local council. In 1838 Cobden was one if the first men to be elected as a Manchester alderman.

In October 1837, Joseph Hume, Francis Place and John Roebuck formed the Anti-Corn Law Association in London. The following year Cobden joined with Archibald Prentice to establish a branch of this organisation in Manchester. In 1839 Cobden and the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association presented a petition to Parliament. With four-fifths of all MPs representing rural constituencies it soon became clear to Cobden that petitions in themselves would not achieve the repeal of the Corn Laws.

In March 1839 Cobden was instrumental in establishing a new centralized Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden was now able to organize a national campaign in favour of reform. Cobden recruited a number of talented speakers to the movement, the most important of which was John Bright, who at that time was Britain’s most successful orators.

In 1841 General Election Cobden became the MP for Stockport. Although Cobden continued to tour the country making speeches against the Corn Laws, he was now in a position to constantly remind the British government that reform was needed. The economic depression of 1840-1842 increased membership of the Anti-Corn Law League and Cobden and John Bright spoke to very large audiences all over the country. By 1845 the League was the wealthiest and best organised political group in Britain.

The failure of the Irish potato crop in 1845 and the mass starvation that followed, forced Sir Robert Peel and his Conservative government to reconsider the wisdom of the Corn Laws. Irish nationalists such as Daniel O’Connell also became involved in the campaign. Peel was gradual won over and in January 1846 a new Corn Law was passed that reduced the duty on oats, barley and wheat to the insignificant sum of one shilling per quarter became law.

Richard Cobden was now a national hero but because he had neglected his business in Manchester he was now deeply in debt. His supporters raised £8,000 as a reward for his efforts and he used this money to purchase Dunford, the farmhouse where he was born in Heyshott.

After the resignation of Sir Robert Peel, the new Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, offered Cobden a post in his government. Cobden refused and now switched his attention to campaigning for parliamentary reform and state supported education.

Cobden was completely opposed to the aggressive foreign policy of Lord Palmerston. Cobden joined with John Bright to campaign against the Crimean War (1854-1856). The two men were much abused by the press and some MPs even accused them of treason.

The British public shared the government’s enthusiasm for the war and in the 1857 General Election, both Cobden and John Bright lost their seats in Parliament. By the 1859 General Election the public had forgiven Cobden for his anti-war stance and he was elected to represent Rochdale. Lord Palmerston, offered Cobden the chance to become President of the Board of Trade. However, Cobden declined saying he could not as a matter of principal serve under Palmerston.

Cobden believed that international trade was essential if war between major powers was to be avoided. William Gladstone, the Chancellor of the Exchequer agreed and recruited Cobden to negotiate a new trade agreement with France. In 1860 Britain and France signed a commercial treaty that reduced the tariff on a variety of goods.

The outbreak of the American Civil War upset Cobden who was a great admirer of American democracy. Cobden feared that the British government might intervene on the side of the Confederacy. Cobden was a passionate supporter of Abraham Lincoln but he did not live to see the Union victory. On 2nd April, 1865, Richard Cobden died of an acute attack of bronchitis.

Seven years ago, when I was visiting Germany, I met with an official who explained to me that the country had a foolproof solution to its economic woes. Watching the U.S. economy soar during the 1990s, the Germans had decided that they, too, needed to go the high-technology route. But how? In the late ’90s, the answer seemed obvious: Indians. After all, Indian entrepreneurs accounted for one of every three Silicon Valley start-ups. So the German government decided that it would lure Indians to Germany just as America does: by offering green cards. Officials created something called the German Green Card and announced that they would issue 20,000 in the first year. Naturally, they expected that tens of thousands more Indians would soon be begging to come, and perhaps the quotas would have to be increased. But the program was a flop. A year later barely half of the 20,000 cards had been issued. After a few extensions, the program was abolished.

I told the German official at the time that I was sure the initiative would fail. It’s not that I had any particular expertise in immigration policy, but I understood something about green cards, because I had one (the American version) myself.

The German Green Card was misnamed, I argued, because it never, under any circumstances, translated into German citizenship. The U.S. green card, by contrast, is an almost automatic path to becoming American (after five years and a clean record).

The official dismissed my objection, saying that there was no way Germany was going to offer these people citizenship. "We need young tech workers," he said. "That’s what this program is all about." So Germany was asking bright young professionals to leave their country, culture and families; move thousands of miles away; learn a new language; and work in a strange land -- but without any prospect of ever being part of their new home. Germany was sending a signal, one that was accurately received in India and other countries, and also by Germany’s own immigrant community.

Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration -- perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe’s mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this, but there’s a cycle at work. European societies exclude the immigrants, who become alienated and reject their societies.

One puzzle about post-Sept. 11 America is that it has not had a subsequent terror attack -- not even a small backpack bomb in a movie theater -- while there have been dozens in Europe. My own explanation is that American immigrant communities, even Arab and Muslim ones, are not very radicalized. (Even if such an attack does take place, the fact that 4 1/2 years have gone by without one provides some proof of this contention.) Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

The United States has a real problem with flows of illegal immigrants, largely from Mexico (70 percent of illegal immigrants are from that one country). But let us understand the forces at work here. "The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world," writes Stanford historian David Kennedy. That huge disparity is producing massive demand in the United States and massive supply from Mexico and Central America. Whenever governments try to come between these two forces -- think of drugs -- simply increasing enforcement does not work. Tighter border control is an excellent idea, but to work, it will have to be coupled with some recognition of the laws of supply and demand -- that is, it will have to include expansion of the legal immigrant pool.

Beyond the purely economic issue, however, there is the much deeper one that defines America -- to itself, to its immigrants and to the world. How do we want to treat those who are already in this country, working and living with us? How do we want to treat those who come in on visas or guest permits? These people must have some hope, some reasonable path to becoming Americans. Otherwise we are sending a signal that there are groups of people who are somehow unfit to be Americans, that these newcomers are not really welcome and that what we want are workers, not potential citizens. And we will end up with immigrants who have similarly cold feelings about America.

Two of the great economists of the 20th century were John Kenneth Galbraith and Frederic Hayek. They held very different views about advertising, which to a large extent reflected their views about the capitalist system more broadly.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s most famous book was The Affluent Society, which was published in 1958. In it, he argued that corporations use advertising to create demand for products that people otherwise do not want or need. The market system should not be applauded, he believed, for satisfying desires that it has itself created. Galbraith was skeptical that economic growth was leading to higher levels of well-being, because people’s aspirations were being made to keep pace with their increased material prosperity. He worried that as advertising and salesmanship artificially enhanced the desire for private goods, public spending on such items as better schools and better parks suffered. The end result, according to Galbraith, was “private opulence and public squalor.” Galbraith policy recommendation was clear: Increase the size of government.

Frederic Hayek’s most famous book was The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944. It argued that an extensive government role in the economy inevitably means a sacrifice of personal freedoms. Hayek also wrote a well-known critique of Galbraith in 1961, addressing in particular Galbraith’s view of advertising. Hayek observed that advertising was merely one example of a broader phenomenon: Many preferences are created by the social environment. Literature, art, and music are all acquired tastes. A person’s demand for hearing a Mozart concerto may have been created in a music appreciation class, but this fact does not make the desire less legitimate or the music professor a sinister influence. Hayek concluded, “It is because each individual producer thinks that the consumers can be persuaded to like his products that he endeavors to influence them. But though this effort is part of the influences which shape consumers’ taste, no producer can in any real sense ‘determine’ them.”

Although these two economists disagreed about the roles of advertising, markets, and government, they did have one thing in common: great acclaim. In 1974, Hayek won the Nobel prize in economics. In 2000, President Clinton awarded Galbraith the National Medal of Freedom. And even though their most famous works were written many decades ago, they are still well worth reading today.

Unmanned aircraft, having performed well in Iraq and Afghanistan, are coming to a police department near you. Declan McCullagh gives the lowdown on drone usage for border patrol, marijuana hunting, and something called "thermal rooftop inspections." A Maryland Sheriff’s department has already used the "CyberBUG" to snoop on a biker gathering at a local fairgrounds, and the Gaston County, NC, police department is rolling out an unmanned air force of its own. Unmanned aircraft have been used since 2004 to patrol the Arizona border (with Mexico, presumably, not Utah). Unless I missed something, none of yesterday’s testimony on unmanned aircraft at the House transportation subcommittee mentioned any privacy concerns. The only real objection came from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which worries that UAs will collide with manned aircraft...

Financial systems in most developing countries generally serve only the social and economic elites of their populations. Currently, less that 10% of remittance recipients are estimated to have access to banking accounts, loans or other basic financial services. But the scale and scope of LAC remittances can be a powerful tool to open up these financial systems, and thereby multiply economic impact for millions of families and their communities. Over the past five years, remittances have undergone dramatic changes. Over the next five years, the system can be entirely transformed. By the end of this decade, remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean can move from the current “cash-to-cash” system into the electronic or digital transfer system of “accounts-to-accounts.” The technology is already available; what is needed are innovative business plans and appropriate regulatory frameworks. The costs of sending money can continue to fall. Millions of poor people can be brought into the financial system, and remittances can be leveraged by linking flows to local microfinance institutions, home mortgages, and even the securitization of bonds for on-lending to local small businesses. The millions of decisions made each year to migrate and remit are individual decisions made in the best interests of individual families. These decisions are grounded in the reality of the lives of the families involved, not by some econometric model, abstract theory, or government policy. Remittances have now been “discovered.” The challenge ahead is to provide these millions of hard-working migrants and their families with more options to use their own money...