Cheerful or not

Two kinds of austerity || Washington Examiner

This approach to austerity, also known in the United States as the “balanced approach,” has unfortunately proven a recipe for disaster. In a 2009 paper, Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna looked at 107 attempts to reduce the ratio of debt to gross domestic product over 30 years in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They found fiscal adjustments consisting of both tax increases and spending cuts generally failed to stabilize the debt and were also more likely to cause economic contractions. On the other hand, successful austerity packages resulted from making spending cuts without tax increases. They also found this form of austerity is more likely associated with economic expansion rather than with recession….

While the debate over austerity continues, the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that austerity can be successful, if it isn’t modeled after the “balanced approach.” It’s a lesson for the French and other European countries, as well as for American lawmakers who often seem tempted by the lure of closing budget gaps with higher taxes.

Real Fake Missiles? || Arms Control Wonk

There is a huge discussion about what sort of technological path these ICBMs might represent, if any.  Allow me to articulate just one view, which I suspect is the view of at least some people in the intelligence community.  North Korea imported Scud missiles from Egypt, then proceeded to build an entire missile program on this technology.  North Korean enlarged the Scud into the Nodong, stuck a Scud on top of a Nodong (Taepodong 1) and then clustered some Nodong engines with another Nodong on top (Taepodong 2.)

Now, North Korea has imported the R-27 (SS-N-6) — a better baseline technology that uses more energetic propellants: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).

North Korea has apparently reconfigured the Taepodong 2, sticking an SS-N-6 on top of a cluster of Nodong engines, topped by a smaller SS-N-6-derived third stage (vernier engines only, it seems).  North Korea also enlarged the SS-N-6 much as it enlarged the Scud, creating the Musudan IRBM.  North Korea may try to replicate the approach it took to Scuds, just with a better technology.  So, North Korea may try to either cluster SS-N-6 engines or stack SS-N-6-derived stages on top of one another.  One of the big debates we are having now is about what North Korea might be able to squeeze into the 2 m first stage of the new ICBM.

Communism Still a Horror; People Still Flee || Via Meadia

May Day, that great holiday of the international communist movement, and news comes from Miami that two young actors have joined more than a million other Cubans in fleeing the Castro dictatorship to the United States….

[Some] of this world persist in seeing something romantic and attractive in the most squalid ideological failure and the most grotesque system of mass repression devised in the history of the world. I am, of course, referring to communism. Cuban communism, for all the murders, repression and systemic failure attending it, is not the worst communist government ever built. The North Koreans, the Cambodians, Mao, and of course the great architects Stalin and Lenin themselves, were more murderous than the Castro brothers and did more harm….

Communism is a system that, whatever noble intentions may animate some of its delusional followers, places petty and tyrannical bureaucrats in charge of the life of a people. Artists, writers, thinkers, entrepreneurs, mystics, social reformers, advocates of liberty: all these people are the particular targets of the baying, vindictive and irrational hatred of the narrow, cramped souls and power-crazed fanatics this sorry system empowers.

Communism is an engine for putting the worst people in a society in charge of the best and the most creative; the results are the awful charnel houses and environmental disaster scenes that mark the communist and formerly communist worlds everywhere the virus spread.

That Javier and Anallin had to get out of this stale and stultifying world to stretch their creative vision and try their wings is no surprise. That they have had to leave friends and families behind is a tragedy, and just one more of the injustices that stains the record of this failed regime.

The new old lie || The New Criterion

[C]ritics should think again about the implications of their insistence that war is meaningless, especially in the American context. In their effort to direct the culture toward new ideals by dismissing the old ones, they have focused inward and lost sight of an important truth. War requires at least two sides. If war is just meaningless, then the motivations and causes of each side do not matter—they are equally invalid or valid. That conclusion should make even the most dedicated cynic recoil, because in those terms, when the wrong side wins, war, combat, and its aftermath become fraught with meaning. In that sense, at least, the critics should realize that there is coherence, meaning, in the chaos of war.

War, after all, is about competing purposes, competing causes, competing ideals—produced by polities, defined by policymakers, put into action by military professionals, and fought for by average soldiers. War itself does not care about the relative merits of those ideals, but the outcome of war, and therefore the outcome of combat, determines which ideal wins. The outcome of war determines which cause gets to survive, thrive, and guide the lives of people in peace, and just as importantly, which cause does not get to shape the peace. Most vitally, war decides which ideal gets to be fought for again. War is regrettably a part of the human condition, and it is many awful things, but it is never meaningless….

What MacLeish and Jones understood was that no matter what the weaknesses they saw in existing American ideals, those ideals were better than the alternative. That is as true today as ever, and that is what scares the critics. If they accept that truth, then they will have to explore what has made the existing ideals consistently better than the alternative ones. In the process, they will discover that the foundational American ideals are not just relatively good, but that they are inherently good. As such, they can be refined and improved, but they must be preserved, not replaced.

Since the critics hold on to their utopian progressivism with a religious fervor, such an assessment would cause a crisis in faith, so it is exceedingly unlikely for them to undertake it. It is much easier, after all, to call war meaningless butchery, and dismiss all other views as sentimental propaganda—mere entertainment for the uninformed masses.

If the country is an ideal, and the ideal is just, then Horace had it right: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. To say that this is never true, to insist that war is always meaningless, is not art. It is the new old lie, and an ugly one at that.

Toward the Conquest of World Poverty || Reason

Progress can often be defined as the stuff that happens while humanity is preoccupied with everything that is going wrong. On the surface, the first decade of the 21st century looks like an ugly parade of terrorism, war and economic convulsion. But in one important sense it stands as possibly the greatest decade in human history. And that’s no accident.

Among the most vicious enemies of human welfare is poverty. In a world plagued with limited resources, bad governments and unsound economic policies, it often appears to be an inescapable scourge. Most people paid no attention in 2000 when the United Nations proclaimed the goal of halving the number of earth’s inhabitants living in extreme poverty by 2015, compared to 1990.

But way ahead of schedule, the target has already been hit. For the first time since it began tracking, says a new World Bank report, “the data indicate a decline in both the poverty rate and the number of poor in all six regions of the developing world.”

In 1981, 70 percent of those in the developing world subsisted on the equivalent of less than $2 a day, and 42 percent had to manage with less than $1 a day. Today, 43 percent are below $2 a day and 14 percent below $1.

“Poverty reduction of this magnitude is unparalleled in history: Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period of time.”…

The start of most global trends is hard to pinpoint. This one, however, had its big bang in the early 1970s, in Chile. After a socialist government brought on economic chaos, the military seized power in a bloody coup and soon embarked on a program of drastic reform — privatizing state enterprises, fighting inflation, opening up foreign trade and investment and unshackling markets.

It was the formula offered by economists associated with the University of Chicago, notably Milton Friedman, and it turned Chile into a rare Latin American success. In time, it also facilitated a return to democracy. Chile was proof that freeing markets and curbing state control could generate broad-based prosperity, which socialist policies could only promise.

If that experiment weren’t sufficient, it got another try on a much bigger scale when China’s Deng Xiaoping abandoned the disastrous policies of Mao Zedong and veered onto the capitalist road. The result was an economic miracle yielding growth rates that averaged 10 percent per year.

The formula was too effective to be ignored. Over the past two decades, poorer nations have dismantled command-and-control methods and given markets greater latitude. Economic growth, not redistribution, has been the surest cure for poverty, and economic freedom has been the key that unlocked the riddle of economic growth.