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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page). Relocating to Boise? Use my realtor, neighbor, and friend, Cindy Smith csmith@1realtyone.com.
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
Another Leftist Loses It Over at the Huffington Post, Martin Lewis writes a letter asking General Pace to arrest President Bush! Even more bizarre is that he defends this crackpot idea vigorously against other leftists who point out that, as much sympathy as they have for the idea, the Constitution does specify that the military is subordinate to civilian authority. See Article II of the U.S. Constitution: The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States....So what has Martin Lewis done? See 18 USC 2385: Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; orBecause Lewis' letter is addressed to General Pace, 18 USC 2388 could apply as well, depending on whether the courts can agree on whether the AUMF qualifies as a declaration of war: (a) Whoever, when the United States is at war, willfully makes or conveys false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies; orI think asking General Pace to arrest the President of the United States qualifies as an attempt to "cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny". One of the things that has always impressed me is how willing the Bush Administration is to tolerate statements that, during World War II, would have led to arrest, trial, and imprisonment. So much for "Bush=Hitler." UPDATE: Amusingly enough, liberals have been swarming in the comments section over at Volokh Conspiracy to explain why a military coup overthrowing the elected civilian leadership is constitutional, lawful, and appropriate. The Most Encouraging Words That I've Read in a Long Time From PJ Harrison and DR Weinberger, "Schizophrenia genes, gene expression, and neuropathology: on the matter of their convergence," Molecular Psychiatry 10:[2005]40. They compare the state of research into Alzheimer's and schizophrenia: In the absence of definitive genes or pathogenic molecular mechanisms, it is not surprising that there is no equivalent of the secretase inhibitors and vaccines being developed in Alzheimer’s disease. However, the situation seems about to change; indeed, it may be changing already.About 1% of the adult population of the U.S. suffers from schizophrenia; as of the early 1990s, the costs of both treatment and lost productivity was $61 billion a year. This is the single most destructive of the psychoses--especially because it seems to disproportionately hit the upper end of the bell curve of intelligence. Friday, August 24, 2007
And For Really Big News... One of the things that I like about living in Boise County is that what constitutes "big news" is a bit different here than in other places. Heck, even what constitutes "big news" in Boise (which is in Ada County, just to confuse you) is a bit different from other parts of America. A reporter from an Ohio newspaper called me up a while back to interview me about the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog. While discussing Boise, I mentioned that (at least at that point), murders were rare enough that they were a front page, above the fold news story. Some murders would remain front page stories for days on end, just because there is so little murder here. This Ohio reporter sounded a little disappointed when he told me that at his newspaper, murders were so common that sometimes they weren't even considered worth putting inside the newspaper. They weren't news. Well, here's the headline from the latest issue of the Idaho World, Boise County's newspaper--and as the masthead observes, Idaho's oldest continuously published newspaper:  Click to enlarge Hey, that's big news here! But what would they do if they had a really big news story to report? What font size would they use? I fear that the headline "Global Thermonuclear War" would be so big that the "G" would take up the whole front page. Labels: welcome to Idaho Imagine If All Bars Or Abortion Clinics Were Shut Down For Four Days Snowflakes in Hell points me to this astonishingly stupid editorial in the August 24, 2007 Philadelphia Daily-News:
Pretty obviously, any hunter who is aware of this will take care of purchases ahead of time. The problem is that there are a fair number of hunters who are going to be surprised--and every gun store in the state is going to twiddling their thumbs for four days. But the logic just gets worse: Instead of sitting around moping, why not take a field trip? Ride through some of the state's larger cities and their suburban towns, where gun violence has grown. Let's call it a reality check. Some of these guns used to kill are on the street, thanks to straw purchasers who patronize the state's gun stores, and then sell the guns illegally.The hunting weapons, with a few exceptions, aren't the cause of the violence in Philly. It's largely handguns. Maybe they should ask why it is that the hunting parts of Pennsylvania--which are awash in guns and Republicans--don't have anywhere near the problem with murder that Philly and cities with the misfortune to be too close to Philly have? Hint: it's the culture, and the unwillingness to send murderers away, not the guns. Labels: gun rights The Al-Haramain Suit CNN's God's Warriors mentioned this foundation which is alleged to be a terrorist support group, based in Oregon, and interviewed Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who grew up in a "mystic" Jewish family in Ashland (a very New Age sort of place), became first a Muslim (which his parents thought was really cool), then joined what Gartenstein-Ross now alleges was a terrorist support group. No word if Mom and Dad still thought that this was cool. I hope that they would have gotten a little peeved if Daveed had showed up at the door wearing a swastika armband, but you can never tell what aging hippies are going to think is a sign of a child's intellectual independence. Anyway, Zombietime (which is fast becoming one of my favorite deranged leftist tracking sites), has a very, very detailed web page about the background to the suit, and the results of watching the hearing before the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals here. She has also has some reporting about the behavior of reporters after the hearing--swarming around the attorney representing Al-Haramain, while ignoring lawyers representing the U.S. government and AT&T (who has gotten dragged into this because they are alleged to have exposed their fascist sympathies by trying to help the government catch terrorists). One of these days, if the left isn't careful, they are going to find out that this isn't a game--that al-Qaeda and friends aren't like-minded progressives because they have the same enemies. When Robert Ferrigno's novel Prayers for the Assassin describes the Golden Gate Bridge lined with the heads of homosexuals, that's not a wild leap of imagination, but the likely consequence of the left's obsession with making sure that America loses the war on terrorism. And yes, as much as the left wants to believe that it is possible to make sure we lose the war on terrorism without al-Qaeda winning, this fight is a zero-sum game. Labels: terrorism Wow! I Never Would Have Guessed! There are moments that you find yourself reading or hearing someone make a statement that just makes your head spin, and you find yourself asking, "Are you really this utterly clueless?" One of those moments was many years ago, sitting outside at All-American Burger on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, shortly after Tom Hayden's forces had taken over the city government. There were two "progressive" sorts having a chat at the next table, from their accents, not West Coasters. One of them observed, "The Los Angeles economy is very robust, in a laissez-faire sort of way, but you know there is absolutely no provision for public policy planning." Gee, you think there might be a connection? I think back to where I lived in Santa Monica, as the New Yorkers arrived, gratified that apartments were available near the ocean, relatively cheaply, and without having to engage in the bizarre sub-sub-sub-sub-subletting commonly done in New York City to get into a rent-controlled apartment. And so within a few years--they passed a rent control law to help make Santa Monica like the place that they couldn't afford to live. Sometimes people recognize that there is a gap between what they would like to believe, and what is. When we first moved to Boise, we met a doctor and his wife at a social event. When he finished his residency, and they were ready to settle down, they looked all across the country--and picked Boise, because they wanted to have kids and raise a family. They somewhat sheepishly admitted that while they were both very, very liberal, and felt a little strange about moving to Boise--they also admitted that it was a much better place to raise a family than the liberal areas where they might have felt politically more comfortable. At least they recognized (in some abstract sense) that there was a gap between their politics and what was good for child rearing. Bryan Fischer brought to my attention this article about Boise's homosexual activist community from the June 6, 2007 Boise Weekly that shows a really serious cluelessness:
Now, it is certainly possible that what makes California a bad place to raise kids has nothing to do with California's liberalism. (Notice that I said, "liberalism," not tolerance. California isn't really tolerant; it's just intolerant of different things.) But May-Chang doesn't seem to have even considered the possibility that stepping "back 10 years" about one issue might be the reason for the other differences, as well. UPDATE: Just to be clear on this: I'm not saying that California's very supportive approach to sexual orientation is what makes it a bad place to raise kids (although I don't think it is a positive, either). I'm saying that all this stuff goes together: the supportiveness of homosexuality, the tolerance of groups like NAMBLA, the unwillingness to punish violent crime (while pursuing gun ownership like it is somewhat sort of perversion). Labels: homosexuality Not Newsworthy Oh yeah. This is one of those stories that reminds you that liberalism has lost its way (if it ever had it). From the August 22, 2007 Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Some of the Seattle newspapers and media used the photos. But not the Post-Intelligencer! The P-I elected not to publish the photos, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns, which editors felt outweighed the newsworthiness of the images. "We have no confirmation that these men's behavior was anything but innocuous, and to forever taint them by associating them with terrorism under these circumstances is not consistent with our policy," said David McCumber, P-I managing editor.The comments from readers are pretty amazing. The leftists (who seem to dominate the Seattle area) are convinced that this is all racism and paranoia and neo-conservatives out to market fear. Amazing. I am beginning to wonder if I just imagined what happened on 9/11. Labels: political correctness, terrorism When Even Artsy Sorts Make Fun of an Event... You know it has passed from edgy/pseudo-sophisticated to just plain dumb. This column by Violet Blue (which anywhere else you would assume was a nom de plume, but heck, in the open ward that is California her parents might well have given her that name) in the August 23, 2007 San Francisco Chronicle is occasionally a little too explicit for me to quote, but these opening paragraphs really capture the idiocy of artsy pretense associated with the Burning Man festival: Burning Man and safer sexI've long been of the opinion that most of this countercultural stuff that San Francisco is awash in would evaporate overnight if the government confiscated all wealth exceeding one million dollars. It would also starve the Democratic Party of resources. When Engineers Get Bored You end up with Rube Goldberg gadgets like this. What's funny is that Rube Goldberg only drew these absurdly complex devices, while people like this are making them. This Well-Intentioned Proposal Is Doomed A member of the Atlanta City Council is proposing a law that is doomed to failure--and that's really unfortunate. From the August 22, 2007 Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Black youth culture"? No, it actually comes out of the black gang culture. (The ACLU may not recognize that there's a diference.) Lots of jails and prisons don't allow belts, both for the risk of suicide and the potential to use a belt as a weapon. Gang members and young black men who wanted to look like gang members stopped wearing belts--and intentionally wearing their pants baggy to expose their boxers--as a way of saying, "I'm a gang member--or I want you to think I'm one." Now it has become fashionable--in spite of being among the most unclassy styles that I have never seen. I completely sympathize with Councilman Martin's concerns. My guess is that Martin wants young black men to be seen by whites as decent and respectable members of American society, and is therefore attempting to rid Atlanta of this absurd symbol of gang culture. It reminds me of bikers wearing swastikas in the 1950s and 1960s. Did they wear swastikas because they sympathized with the Nazis? No, but it was a way of saying, "I'm bad, and I spit on everything that my parents' generation did." Unfortunately, the problem with such an ordinance isn't just that the ACLU will challenge it as "racial profiling" or violating freedom of speech. The problem is how do you define "undergarments"? Boxer shorts are not so different from shorts in appearance these days. Would someone wearing briefs, then boxer shorts, then sagging pants be in violation if the boxer shorts were visible? For women, the definitional problem is even more severe. The camisole used to be considered an undergarment, but now many women wear them as outerwear. Spaghetti strap camisoles with a bra strap showing would certainly qualify as a violation of Martin's proposed ordinance. (Not to mention that the combination looks ridiculous.) But the camisole alone can range from profoundly provocative to really, really gross, depending on who is wearing it. Is a camisole an undergarment or not? I don't have much hope for an ordinance like this to be enforceable. It's rather like banning the wearing of swastikas, which even ignoring freedom of speech claims, is too easy to get around. You can define a swastika, but what happens if someone wears a swastika with one arm broken off? It's no longer a swastika within the law, but everyone stills knows what it is. Somehow or another, there needs to be a great spiritual change in black inner city America to solve this particular problem. There are a lot of serious problems that laws can fix, but I rather doubt that this is one of those problems. Labels: vulgarity CNN's God's Warriors CNN has run three, two-hour programs about God's Warriors, which seemed to be trying to draw some moral equivalence between Islamic jihadists, Jewish extremists, and the Christian Religious Right. The problem was that while there are vast numbers of Islamic jihadists beheading people, raping, murdering, etc., there's a real shortage of those among Jews and Christians. Yes, there was the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, and there have been other dangerous Jewish extremists out there. But I suspect that if you totaled up all of them over the last 30 years, their victims wouldn't exceed a typical day's victims from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Yes, CNN reminded us of abortion clinic bombings and assassinations by Christian pro-life murderers (and yes, I use "pro-life murderer" together for the irony of it all). But again, the Christian "God's warriors" that CNN profiled weren't terrorists--they were people working through the political process, trying their best to raise their kids, really no different from their liberal counterparts. I suppose if CNN had compared the Religious Right to libertarian ideas about minimal government, they could have made the Religious Right look like dangerous totalitarians (or something close). But being CNN, they can only really compare the Religious Right to liberalism or leftism--at which point the Religious Right is less statist than liberals, and far less statist than the average hardcore left-wing Democrat. You can argue about which values should be given preference in writing laws--the majority (why the Religious Right has generally supported allowing legislatures and initiatives to prevail) or the elite (why the liberals and left rely on judges to overturn popular government). But such a comparison doesn't make liberals and leftist look too good. What really impressed me was the amount of attention that this report gave to Ron Luce's evangelistic operation Teen Mania, which runs an event called Battle Cry. Luce is 46, someone who came out of a very messy family situation, was headed down to destruction when he found Jesus, and turned his life around. I was also impressed with some of the people that CNN interviewed that work for Teen Mania--one 22 year old young lady who, in spite of what I am sure was CNN's best effort to make her look like a fanatic, came across as a reminder that no matter how broken a life we have had, we can move beyond it. Best of all was the contrast between what happened when Battle Cry came to San Francisco, and the bunch that showed up to protest that groups like Battle Cry shouldn't be allowed in San Francisco. To quote Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who told counterprotesters at City Hall on Friday that while such fundamentalists may be small in number, "they're loud, they're obnoxious, they're disgusting, and they should get out of San Francisco." (Those lefties: so tolerant that they excuse pedophilia and naked half-transgendered people in public, but not Christians encouraging kids to turn away from a culture of drugs, suicide, and despair.) As I mentioned last year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors actually passed a resolution condemning Battle Cry. As much as CNN may feel the need to draw bogus moral equivalences, they failed. What is wrong with Islam isn't a few kooks on the edges, but a large and dangerous faction of Islam. Teen Mania runs a school in Texas where they train their people. They have all sorts of very strict rules: no smoking; no alcohol; no R-rated movies; and skirts have to be a certain length. Amanpour had the nerve to suggest that this was like the Taliban. Yes, except the Taliban executed homosexuals, "loose women," prohibited girls from receiving an education; banned clapping at sporting events; made apotasy from Islam a capital crime; blew up the symbols of other religions. Yes, that's quite similar to a dress code. How did I miss the comparison? Labels: media manipulation, terrorism Tuesday, August 21, 2007
My Wife and I Had A Fascinating Conversation This Evening... With a man a bit older than us. He's been married for more than 30 years--but in a discussion of living in the Bay Area, he casually mentioned that he knew the place and the perversions well. He had walked away from the homosexual life when he became a Christian in 1971. It is always gratifying to meet those who have been successfully freed from bondage to sin. There are homosexuals who can't break the bonds that hold them. I wish that I knew why. I wish that there was more known about the causes and cures. But there are men like this who have fought the battle and won. They are no different from those who have fought the battle with alcoholism, or sexual lust, or gluttony, or materialism, or hatred. We all fight battles with sinful desires. Some people are more successful at those battles than others. But pretending that there is no sin is like pretending that there is no gravity, because it is inconvenient. Labels: homosexuality Transgender Politics I can't claim to be surprised. I don't know if Professor Bailey's book is junk science or not--but I do know that the fact that certain people get offended by it doesn't make it wrong. From the August 21, 2007 New York Times:
If only it stopped with being compared to a Nazi and ferocious criticism!
I can't say that I'm surprised by stunts like this. I've written about a lot of controversial stuff over the years: gun control; free markets; capitalism; why racism (all kinds of racism) are bad. But there's only one topic that has produced obscene phone calls to my kids, attempts to get me fired from jobs, threats of violence--and my expulsion several years ago from the Volokh Conspiracy blog (for remarks that I had made eight years earlier). That topic is homosexuality. There is no tolerance for certain points of view in the academic world today, and anyone who questions whether homosexuality is really just an "alternative lifestyle" is outside the pale--unlike anti-Semites, people that believe the CIA blew up the World Trade Center, and whatever else passes for acceptable leftist wisdom these days. Labels: homosexuality, transgender Monday, August 20, 2007
Pontiac 2005 Sunfire Repair Manual: Remove & Replace Power Window Mechanism Does anyone have this? Amazingly, there are no repair manuals available locally that come up to 2005. Homophobia & The Left Interesting article about how when The New Republic's Scott Thomas Beauchamp articles turned out to be fraud--and a member of the The New Republic's staff named McGee anonymously informed people investigating the fraud that Beauchamp's wife was a fact-checker for the magazine (and apparently a fact-checker on her husband's article)--they fired him. And then, the left started to engage in smears of McGee because he was gay!
Labels: homosexuality, low standards of journalism Yale Law Journal Article About Guantanamo Bay It's here. Make sure that all your friends who compare it to Nazi concentration camps read it. If this appeared in the Weekly Standard, no one would take it seriously. But Yale Law Journal? Labels: terrorism Big Mosquito Part of why Instapundit gets orders of magnitude more readers than me is his sharp wit when engaged in satire. After discussing an article in the New York Times admitting that DDT is a necessary part of saving lives in the Third World--and that there seems to be consensus on this: The debate over DDT is over. There's scientific consensus. Anyone who disagrees is a DDT denialist and a mouthpiece for Big Mosquito. Labels: enviromental lunacy What's The Truth On This? Theodore Dalrymple's article in the August 17, 2007 City Journal had a claim to it that seemed just a bit extreme to be true: According to the August 14, 2007 Times of London, this was not a response to the Glasgow bombings, and the guidelines were quite a bit less severe than this:
I agree that sensitivity is a good thing, and Dalrymple's article seems to be inaccurate--but it is rather odd that the multiculturalists are so concerned about being "sensitive" to Muslim concerns, and completely unconcerned about the concerns of Christians. Of course, that's because Christians don't make a habit of blowing up or beheading people that offend them. Labels: terrorism Canadian Health Care System I hear terrible things about it from my relatives who live in British Columbia. Now there's this story about a Canadian woman who had to be flown to the United States to deliver--because there weren't enough intensive care neonatal units in all of Canada to take care of her quadruplets. From the August 17, 2007 Calgary Herald: One of the criticisms that I have long heard is that Canada's health care system works well for "normal" health care problems, but tends to fail for anything advanced or specialized. I had not realized that premature birth was specialized or advanced. Over at Small Dead Animals, Kate expressed her anger over the failure of the Canadian health care system: After my mother died, my brother quipped sarcastically that no one should be admitted to Regina General unless they first survived two hours on a vibrating gurney.Along with Kate's depressing story, there are gobs of comments by Canadians (some of them in the health care business) recounting what a disaster it has turned out to be: and: It's not just rural areas that are suffering. My wife’s elderly grand parents have been to the emergency room in Mississauga 4 times in the past few years. They have not had to wait less than 6 hours on any of those visits. Even the local clinics for minor stuff usually come with a 2 hour wait. There is no benefit from our health care system to working people in this country. We get poor service at a premium cost.and: and this comment that reminds of the joke about how in most urban areas, "Order a pizza. Dial 911. See which gets there first." Profit motive may not make us very happy as a method for getting people taken care of, but it's reliable and consistent in getting things done: Another personal story: My dog was sick so I took her on a weekend to Vetrinary Emergency Hospital paid the fees and she was attended to in 30 minutes. My daughter had to be attended to after a cat attack and went to the local emergenency for the required stitches and shots.It took 4 hours but it was paid for indirectly by my taxes. What kind of society offers faster treatment to its pets than to its kids.Welcome to Leftyland.and this remark from a Canadian doctor: The problem with a monopsony (fi you want to define the Public Health care system that way) is that it results in an inefficient quantity purchased as compared to a competitive market.
Labels: health care Sunday, August 19, 2007
Gun Stuff A friend brought over some of his toys this evening. I haven't shot a rifle in some years now (more by being too busy than anything else). One of them was a Century International Arms copy of the H&K 91. This uses a U.S. made receiver and a number of imported parts to get around the import ban on assault weapons that President George Bush I put in effect back in 1990. I've always heard very good things about the H&K 91, and it does seem to be a well-made rifle. There are a few quirks of the design that I don't know if I dislike them because they are different from what I am used to in battle rifles, or because it is genuinely a poor idea. For example, the H&K 91 has what seems to me to be an excessively complex charging handle compared to the M1 Garand, M14, M16--just too many moving parts for something that is just forcing the bolt back against the recoil spring. Another H&K quirk (at least until quite recently) is that there is no bolt hold open on the last shot. When you have fired the last shot from the magazine, the bolt closes again, and you get only a "click" when you pull the trigger. The owner called this the "dead man click," presumably because if you are in combat, and you hear this click, it tells you that you are out of ammunition, and whoever you are firing at now has you at a disadvantage. The design that I am more used to on combat weapons--where the magazine locks the bolts open, enabling you to drop the magazine, insert a fresh magazine, release the bolt, and be ready to resume firing--seems much more logical to me. Yet another H&K quirk is that it seems that you have to cock the bolt in order to remove an empty magazine. At the magazine release is a simple button--definitely more intuitive than an M14 magazine release. The H&K 94 was a fun little weapon. Since it fires 9mm, the recoil isn't bad at all. I've fired the MP5, which is the full auto version of the H&K 94, and I think highly of it. All the same design quirks that bug me about the H&K 91 apply to the H&K 94 as well. This is the first time that I have ever fired an M1 Garand. This is really a pretty impressive weapon, considering that it was introduced into service 70 years ago, and has been out of front line U.S. service for 50 years. I still can't get used to the spring clip flying up and out of the gun after the last shot! Labels: gun history, gun technology Democrats Rewriting History A nice video of Democrats whose names (Reid, Clinton, Edwards) you know explaining why Iraq and Iran are threats to the security of the United States. If they want to argue today that they were duped by the Bush Administration in 2002, that's fine. But how to explain the remarks from Democrats in 1998? They were duped by the Clinton Administration? Labels: terrorism Pretty Astonishing Video of an SUV With Minigun I'm not sure what actual use something like this might have. Presidential motorcade? Only in a comic book, or North Korea. Labels: gun technology Lunatic Fringers I take a look to see who is linking to me, and sometimes, I am just astonished. For example, this paranoid blog linked to my 1995 History Today article about the plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt. Why? Because America is on the edge of a military coup d'etat: If all the "dominionist Christians" in the United States got together and organized a coup d'etat, there wouldn't be enough of them to take over Horseshoe Bend. I'm pretty sure that I've never met one. The only place that I have ever seen a "dominionist Christian" is being interviewed on some Bill Moyers documentary. I ran into a book in an airport bookstore recently that blathered on about the imminent dominionist Christian takeover of America, and the more I read, the more I began to wonder what country he had been visiting. I sense a lot of projection going on from the left; because they are intent on imposing their viewpoint on the majority (which even many liberals would be taken aback by), they assume that anyone that disagrees with them is on the edge of coup d'etat. Rafting on the Boise River We went rafting on the Boise River today, from Barber Park down to Ann Morrison Park. (Click here for information on renting a raft. It cost us $42.40 to rent a four person raft with four lifejackets and two oars.) This wasn't a white water adventure. I was told that the worst of the rapids we went through were class 1--maybe class 0.5, according to my daughter! I'm not a spectacularly strong swimmer--in fact, I didn't learn to swim even at my current unimpressive level until I bought a house with a pool in California some years back--so I've always regarded the trips that you see in films with considerable trepidation. Anyway, this was a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, floating, occasionally getting some adrenalin rush as we went over somewhat rough water, and enjoying the beauty of the tree-lined banks of the river. Labels: welcome to Idaho Food Aid I mentioned a couple of days ago a New York Times article about how food aid sometimes makes problems worse in the Third World. One of my readers tells me: If you are interested in the topic I suggest P.T. Bauer's Reality and Rhetoric. It was published in 1984 so is probably a bit dated, but it is the classic in the field of development. He lays it on the line. Development aid harms far more than it helps, for good reasons any libertarian would understand. Aid empowers the already powerful. Labels: economics, foreign aid |
