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David Warren thinks about what we have unlearned.
… It was the ancient wisdom, in all sentient cultures, to stay when possible out of harm’s way. While watching those videos, it suddenly occurred to me why, in the archeology of ancient Greek ports in the Aegean Islands, the houses all seem to go up the nearest hill. Noticing this years ago, I’d thought, “Why the extra walk and climb? Was it just for the lovely view?”
Well, the Aegean Sea floor is earthquake prone, and all these islands are at risk of tsunamis. Perhaps from the living oral history of their own ancestors, these islanders had learned.
The civilization of the Nile was built around the annual inundation of the river; the houses once again erected on higher ground. The floods brought rich new sediment to the fields. But since the building of the immense Aswan hydroelectric works, it has been piling up instead, quite counter-productively, behind the dam. At the mouth of the river, the great fertile Egyptian delta is now shrinking away: eaten by the sea without replenishment. (It is a joke when this is attributed to “global sea rise.”)
It never made sense to build on river floodplains, or along the drainage path of a volcano, or on the low sands of a coastal hurricane strip.
Our ancestors didn’t do that sort of thing from choice. They’d farm danger zones, but not build in them. We only started doing that with modern developers, and modern building codes, after modern environmental studies, etc.
In each of these cases, and innumerable more, we see the modern tendency to confront nature, rather than playing along with her. There is a restlessness and impatience in our souls, which expresses itself in hubris, arrogance. This extends to grand egalitarian projects to change human nature, in variants of Stalin’s ambition to be “the engineer of human souls.”
Nature eventually defeats every such enterprise.
To paraphrase the Citizen’s inimitable Dan Gardner, it takes a lot of schooling, investment, and technology, to become stupid. Or if I might twist Hillary Clinton: “It takes a big city to raise an idiot.” …
Having been a cheerleader for Obama and his works, it takes a little cheek for The Economist to claim they’ve always favoured a smaller state. We’ll take it where ever we find it.
“IF SOMETHING cannot go on for ever, it will stop,” Herb Stein once observed caustically. The American economist’s aphorism has proved apt of late—as applicable to Hosni Mubarak’s regime as it was to America’s rising property prices. Could it apply to the growth of the state?
Government comes in many shapes and sizes. In some parts of the world, the state is too small. In Guatemala, where the tax take is around a tenth of GDP, private security guards are five times more numerous than the police and army combined. But most of the world has the opposite problem. The state has kept on grabbing an ever larger share of the economy in the rich world for a century (see chart), and the state’s regulatory sweep has increased as well.
As our special report this week concludes, the forces driving this growth are powerful—but so are the reasons why it needs to be halted. As a liberal paper, The Economist has long favoured a smaller state; but there are pragmatic grounds now for politicians of all sorts to make the state more productive. With ageing populations to care for, many rich-world governments are on course for bankruptcy—unless they raise taxes to levels that would wreck their economies. And emerging markets are watching, keen to cater to the demands of their ever richer citizens—and also to avoid the mistakes of the West. …
The administration’s Libyan flip flops are the subject of a few posts now. Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor is first.
The names of military operations can give a glimpse into the mindset of those in charge. For instance, Overlord, Dragoon, Husky, Torch, all from WWII. These names connote strength, power, dominance. In Viet Nam, Rolling Thunder was evocative of the administration strategy of threatened escalation; its successor operations, Linebacker I and Linebacker II, connoted something far different, a determination to hit the enemy hard. (This was the era of Dick Butkus and Ray Nitschke; people knew that linebackers inflicted pain and knocked people out.) More recently, Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were quite descriptive of American intentions. My favorite operational name is Ripper, the sobriquet given by Matthew Ridgeway to the offensive to push Chinese forces back to the 38th parallel and to retake Seoul. That name oozed aggressiveness and violence.
And today, the Obama administration brings us . . . Operation Odyssey Dawn? That sounds like the name of some kid born at a California commune, circa 1970. Operation Odyssey Dawn? Really? What does that mean, exactly?
The best explanation I can come up with is that the Pentagon is trying to warn the country that we’re at the beginning of a long, strange trip. And they may be right. …
Roger Simon thinks Hillary has assumed the presidency.
Only Barack Obama could make Nicolas Sarkozy look good.
Why did it take our president so long to act in Libya with the international community fairly begging us to do something? Is it because there is a weird similarity between Muammar Gaddafi and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright — both men jawing on publicly with radical rhetoric while privately enriching themselves to the maximum degree possible in their individual instances? (Easy to imagine Wright as a Third World despot.)
Or is it just Obama’s natural predilection to do nothing that we first saw writ large when he failed to support the democracy demonstrators in the streets of Teheran in ’09? …
Nile Gardiner has the last of these comments.
Earlier this week I gave an interview to Fox News, talking about how the president seems paralysed in the face of the Libyan crisis, as Colonel Gaddafi’s forces make progress towards the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, leaving death and destruction in their wake. While Barack Obama has dithered, and his Secretary of State has worshipped at the altar of the United Nations, one of the most brutal tyrants on the face of the earth is getting away with murder, with a death toll that could reach as high as 15,000. It is a sad day when the foreign policy of the United States, the world’s greatest power, is subordinated to the whims of the UN, for decades a playground for dictators and unabashed anti-Americanism. …
The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Interview is with Paul Singer.
At the height of the housing bubble, hedge-fund manager Paul Singer was shorting subprime mortgages. By the spring of 2007, he was warning regulators on both sides of the Atlantic that the world was facing a major financial crisis.
They ignored him. Now the founder of Elliott Management says the biggest banks are headed for another credit meltdown. Among the likely triggers for the next crisis, Mr. Singer sees one leading candidate: Monetary policy “is extremely risky,” he says, “the risk being massive inflation.”
In some areas gas prices have reached $4 per gallon, and now Americans must brace themselves for higher grocery bills. This week the Labor Department reported that February wholesale food prices posted their sharpest increase since 1974. News like that has driven Mr. Singer to the history books: He treats visitors to his 5th Avenue office to a copy of a 1931 treatise on German currency debasement, Constantino Bresciani-Turroni’s “The Economics of Inflation.”
Mr. Singer—who launched Elliott in 1977 and has delivered a 14.3% compound annual return (compared to the S&P 500′s 10.9%)—is not comparing today’s Federal Reserve to the Reichsbank of the early 1920s. Rather, he’s once again warning financial regulators. This time the message is: Don’t take for granted investor faith in a major currency.
While at Harvard Law School, Mr. Singer turned down a research job with his intellectual hero, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to pursue a career in finance. Today, he’s still looking for heroes among the stewards of the major currencies. Central bankers, particularly at the Fed but also in Europe, “seem to be acting as if they have unlimited flexibility to ease monetary policy,” he says.
He specifically targets the Fed’s “unprecedented” policy of sustaining near-zero interest rates and its exercise in money-printing, “Quantitative Easing 2,” that has it buying medium- and longer-term securities from the Treasury. “In effect they’re treating confidence in fiat money—in paper money—as inexhaustible, that it’s a tool that’s able to be used not just in the throes of crisis,” but also as “a virtually complete substitute for sound fiscal, regulatory and taxing policy.”
Fed officials, he adds, “really seem to think that inflation is something they can deal with very easily and very quickly. I don’t believe they’re right.” He notes that, in the late 1970s, inflation was only in the high single digits yet curing it required interest rates of 20% and a collapse of the bond market. …