Category Archives: Bush

On the Three Amigos in the Ottawa Citizen

I wrote an op-ed for the Ottawa Citizen about the three amigos’ Cancun conference—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President Bush, and Mexican president Vicente Fox. The column is supposed to run today, Saturday, April 1. To read The Citizen online one has to subscribe. I’ll scan the page and post it on the website as soon as I get the tear sheet. I wrote the thing right after submitting my WorldNetDaily column, so I’m quite drained.

Update: “A Vacation from Reality” can be read by clicking here and enlarging the scanned page. Here’s an excerpt:

So long as the U.S. and Canada remain relatively high-wage areas with tax-funded welfare systems, they will experience migratory pressure from a low-wage country such as Mexico. Protectionist policies, the kind Bush is guilty of, immeasurably worsen this pressure. If people can’t sell their wares into foreign markets, they’re more inclined to relocate in search of better economic prospects. Unhampered trade, not NAFTA, might diminish this pressure.

We Are The World

Bush, Economy, Free Markets, Government

“Whether the economy is better off for their labor is a debate nobody will have. An interminable supply of such workers creates its own economic realities, chief of which is a shift to labor-intense, rather than innovation-oriented, forms of production. A never-ending supply of cheap and unskilled workers actually retards the productivity and progress of a modern economy by preventing mechanization and delaying important breakthroughs, thus reducing competitiveness.

More importantly, the purely economic argument about the price at which American workers will perform menial work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound—a nation. Render asunder the idea of a nation, make borders obsolete—and the world is your labor market.

Bush has zero understanding of things metaphysical—and has no appreciation for the bonds that unite members of a civil society in common purpose. He brazenly contends that Americans won’t do certain work. But he leaves out that they can’t afford to toil at a price that is a function of an artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants.

Bush’s Brave New Borderless World is at work here, not the invisible hand.”

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily column, “We Are The World.” It deals with the “Bush-backed immigration bill, penned by the unholy McCain-Kennedy-Specter trinity.”

Henry Hazlitt and the Government-Spending Hazard

America, Bush

The national debt is reason enough for the impeachment of W. Today, as The Christian Science Monitor reports, it totals $8.3 trillion. Democrats are quite right to tar “Bush as the president who squandered the Clinton-era track record of fiscal responsibility.” As our national debt stands, we would not be admitted into the company of socialists: The European Union. The EU “expects member nations to hold deficits below 60 percent of GDP.”

The US doesn’t qualify.

The evidence goes to show that government growth as a share of GDP coincides with a decline in GDP growth. Governments in high-income developed economies have now been steadily accreting for decades. The decline in prosperity or in real growth rates in these nations has been concomitant: As government share of the GDP rises, so has GDP in the OECD nations been declining. ‘A 10 percent increase in government expenditure as a share of GDP results in a 1 percent point reduction in GDP growth.’

If they do nothing else, Americans should switch off Fox News and open Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson (the first makes you too dumb to comprehend the last). There they will learn that there is no free lunch. To finance his Welfare and Warfare wantonness, Bush calls on the Federal Reserve and the printing press to print money. Inflation is an increase in the money supply. This practice—inflation—raises prices and depreciates the value of the currency. The new money will generate price hikes throughout the economy. The endemic price hikes and economic distortions that follow are a byproduct of this legalized counterfeiting.

And that invariably means poorer people, not politicians—Americans should also know that the parasites in charge, the ones they give their unremitting support to, will always get richer; you and I poorer.

Why? The new money reaches the politically connected first. They get fat checks well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect their purchasing power. Corporate cronies like Kellogg Brown & Root, the construction arm of Cheney’s Halliburton, and the Bechtel Corporation are good examples of war profiteers who’ll benefit first from counterfeit coinage.

By the time you and I, politically unconnected suckers that we are, experience a meager rise in money income, rising prices will have obliterated the tiny gain.

Further reading: Government Growth Impoverishes, Blame Government for the Economic Bust, Wartime Socialism, and Deficit Disorders.

Bush Cries Croc Over Dubai

Bush, Government, Islam

As you know, those who furiously plugged the Dubai Ports deal were equally energetic about cussing Americans for their alleged racism. These Kudlow-and-company types must also think Americans are all liars. When polled people claimed to be concerned with national security. Their detractors, however, assert they were concealing rank racism and Islamophobia.

Indeed, the Dubai debacle has served as the all-time low-life litmus test—in their self-righteous haste to substitute ad hominem arguments for substantive debate, neoconservatives and their left-libertarian allies in this affair truly showed their skunk appeal.

Needless to say, Americans are not a bigoted lot. To them the deal was so obviously dicey—most of the Bush administration’s schemes are. Even if DP World were the most apolitical, service and safety-oriented franchise in the world, unheard of in a government-owned entity, the deal would still raise serious security reservations.

Rather than lose face, President Bush, a scheming and antagonistic character, has shifted from the eff-off position to the I’m-right-so-eff-you posture. He said “the collapse of the Dubai ports deal sends the wrong message to American allies in the Middle East.”

That’s vintage Bush logic for you. It’s a lot like his, “We are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” asininity. As though the mess in Mesopotamia and terrorism in the US were mutually exclusive occurrences.

By logical extension, close relationships with our Arab allies do not necessarily require extreme displays of faith and confidence. Building trust can be a gradual and slow process. The fact that we have not let DP World have the run of the ports is not a rejection of friendship; it’s merely an exercise of choice. The one doesn’t preclude the other. Only in Bush’s simplistic and manipulative mind could the people’s will (anathema to him) be framed in this way.

Besides, if Bush is so concerned about how the Arab world views us, he should not have invaded a sovereign Arab country, killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, and propelled the place into a bloody civil war.