Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new foreign minister, has given his maiden speech, which has left Daniel Pipes elated. It’s hard to disagree, given that it was through strength that Menachem Begin, a hardliner Likudnik, made peace with Egypt. “Here are some of the topics Lieberman covered in his 1,100-word stem-winder”:
Egypt: Lieberman praises Cairo as “a stabilizing factor in the regional system and perhaps even beyond that” but puts the Mubarak government on notice that he will only go there if his counterpart comes to Jerusalem.
Repeating the word “peace”: Lieberman poured scorn on prior Israeli governments: “The fact that we say the word ‘peace’ twenty times a day will not bring peace any closer.”
The burden of peace: “I have seen all the proposals made so generously by Ehud Olmert, but I have not seen any result.” Now, things have changed: “the other side also bears responsibility” for peace and must ante up.
The Road Map: The speech’s most surprising piece of news is Lieberman’s focus on and endorsement of the Road Map, a 2003 diplomatic initiative he voted against at the time but which is, as he puts it, “the only document approved by the cabinet and by the Security Council.” He calls it “a binding resolution” that the new government must implement. In contrast, he specifically notes that the government is not bound by the Annapolis accord of 2007 (“Neither the cabinet nor the Knesset ever ratified it”).
Implementing the Road Map: Lieberman intends to “act exactly” according to the letter of the Road Map, including its Tenet and Zinni sub-documents. Then comes one of his two central statements of the speech:
I’m still coming to grips with the reality of Europe being more fiscally prudent than the US. An American (who else?) think-tank head has framed the European opposition to Obama’s obscene deficit/bankruptcy/inflationary spending, with reference to “a certain backlash against the American economic model,” hubris I find difficult to parse. Such “vulgar Keynesianism” is not a model; it’s a crime!
I worry that Obama will work his magic on Merkel and the rest and convince them to adopt his voodoo economics. Then there really will be no place to run. A pied piper will have enticed the world over a cliff … (And I have family in Europe.)
Chancellor Angela Merkel, to her great credit, has said “Nein” to stimulus and bailouts. Disparagingly, American diplomats put it down to combined “profound German instinct against debt – and its accompanying inflation – with a widely held sentiment here that the US and Wall Street are to blame for creating the global crisis.”
“The White House recently signaled it has all but given up hope that the leaders Obama meets this week will make major commitments along the lines the US would like to see – either in terms of big spending packages for the economy or of additional troops or resources for Afghanistan.”
“Obama is expected to encounter an adoring public but a deep skepticism – even resistance – among heads of state.” …
“How well Mr. Obama can parlay his personal popularity into convincing leadership is a key question hanging over his global coming-out party. With many leaders blaming the United States for planting the seeds of the first global recession since World War II, America’s ability to continue as the world’s unrivaled power, whether in economic or other matters, is likely to be an undercurrent of meetings with the G-20 leaders, NATO, and in bilateral meetings with his counterparts.”
[SNIP]
As to “A War He Can Call His Own”; that’s old. Obama has always wanted to “maintain a meaty presence in Afghanistan, and “may even be conjuring up new monsters and new missions” we don’t know of yet. Europeans don’t like that; Demopublican globalists stateside do.
Update (April 1): Naturally, realize we must that, while Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel must be lauded for not wishing to take their respective countries down the road to ruin Obama has set us upon; the two European leaders are still only half as bad as Obama.
Both are working from the premise that unbridled capitalism, the system that has almost never been tried—the Unknown Ideal in Ayn Rand’s words—is the culprit in the meltdown.
The man who married a bimbo said he aims “to give capitalism a conscience, because capitalism has lost its conscience.” “This is a historic and unique opportunity to build a new world,” he added.
Brother Obama is down with that fallacy. So while Europeans will not heed him in as much as spending goes, they will find common grounds “on tax havens, hedge fund regulation, banking transparency and a worldwide cap on bankers’ pay.”
However crippling to capital markets and to financial freedom these and other draconian measure agreed upon in Europe will be—they do not rival the damage of bankruptcy.
Thanks to The Leader the American people elected, here in the US, we’ll be the beneficiaries of a double dose of poison: international regulation, with its attendant implications for national sovereignty, and bankruptcy.
Daniel Hannan (a Ron Paul fan) is a “writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999.” Hannan’s masterful use of the English language and articulation of first principles is unmatched in the American political landscape (and beyond), where intellectualism is frowned upon, and the use of anything more than Pidgin English is berated by boors.
Hannan’s dazzling display of rhetoric and reason are on the wane in the UK too. I also happen to believe that had he spoken out against corrupt Keynesianism in the age of Bush, who begat our economic woes, the American punditocracy would not have turned him into a sensation. It so happens that the boobs who could not get enough of Bush have had a bellyful of Barack.
Watch Hannan’s speech to the European parliament. Then listen to Cavuto questioning Hannan—how cumbersome and incapable of articulating principles is the former compared to latter. About one thing Cavuto is correct: the UK’s debt is minor compared to that of the US, which approximates 75 percent of the GDP. What Hannan says has been written before, here for example. But at least there is one English-speaking politician who’s piped up at last.
GLENN: We have now Daniel Hannan on the phone. He is a member of parliament for the European community. He’s the representative of the U.K. and he was on television last night and just a plain spoken guy and has a lot of credibility because, you know, he’s got the English accent and that always works. Daniel, how are you, sir?
HANNAN: Glenn, it’s great to talk to you. I mean, what a brilliant introduction. I think we should just call it quits there, don’t you think?
GLENN: You said last night on the program, and we barely even touched on anything. You said the conversation that we had on television you couldn’t have in the United Kingdom on the BBC.
HANNAN: Well, this is because organizations that are owned by the states generally tend to be on the left, and the BBC is I’m afraid no exception.
GLENN: So is this why what you said and there’s a YouTube video and we’ll send it out in our newsletter today. Is this why when you went to parliament and you said a couple of things that we’re going to play here, that it wasn’t really covered in the U.K.? It’s bigger over here than it was over there?
HANNAN: Yeah. I mean, I think you’ve got, you’ve got a bit of an alternative media in a way that there isn’t really in Europe, and I think what happened, what I was doing was attacking the money that’s being fire hosed at this financial crisis, you know, the bailouts, internationalizations and the subsidies and all the things that you guys are doing as well, the bailout of the auto industries and all this. The things that everyone within what we call the Westminster British, I guess what you would call within the Beltway kind of agreed on this in the early days, the pundits, the commentators, the politicians and obviously the bankers themselves. And so there was nobody really to articulate the view of those kind of 80% of people who said, well, hang on, wait a minute; why should I hand over more money and tax so that the government can give it to the banks, so that the banks can lend it back to me, if I’m lucky, for interest, you know? And that was that turned out to be a pretty widespread view, but it just didn’t have any articulation.
Now, I guess in the U.S. where you’ve got, you know, you’ve got programs like this one, you’ve got things like the Fox News TV, you’ve got a bit more of an outlet for those things.
GLENN: Yeah, a bit more, but they are trying to silence and discredit anybody that speaks out against it. Could you please
HANNAN: Never forget that you are the majority. I remember when I was 15 years old, I was at school and a guy, a conservative philosopher called Roger Scruton came to do a talk and I said to him, what do you think is the role of a conservative philosopher in this day and age? And he thought for a bit and he said, the role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true. And, you know, I think that’s what you should never, ever forget that what is called a kind of kooky, weird position by some of the political elites very often turns out to be very widespread support which is, of course, why you guys don’t like democracy, why they don’t like referendums, why they don’t like elections.
GLENN: Daniel, what do you see happening to England? You guys are out of money. The Bank of England, which, correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t know your system of government very well but it’s my understanding that that’s kind of like our treasury secretary, and he doesn’t say things like that. He doesn’t come out and make political statements. True or false?
HANNAN: No, I mean, it’s very, very unusual.
GLENN: Okay.
HANNAN: It’s almost unprecedented and it shows how serious things have got that he says this publicly. I mean, I’m sure he says them privately.
GLENN: And reestablish what he said this week.
HANNAN: He well, initially we reacted to the financial crisis as you did by spending a lot of money. The first instinct of a lot of politicians in a moment of crisis is to reach into somebody else’s wallet and ours were no different than yours and for a while people went along with it. It’s become clear it didn’t work. On all of the measures that bailout was a failure. But rather than admit that, Gordon Brown is stuck in this thing of saying, “Okay, I spent all this money and it doesn’t work. Oh, I’ll spend even more money. Maybe that will work even better.” Now, it got so serious that the governor of the Bank of England who is a kind of, how can I say it, he is a discreet figure, he doesn’t do interviews very often.
GLENN: He’s English.
HANNAN: When he comes out publicly and says, look, we can’t do this, we are out of cash, I think that’s very serious and I think we can assume that he’s been giving that message privately for a long time without success and so he feels he has to come out and say it to a wider audience. GLENN: Daniel, here’s what I’m concerned about. I have been concerned about the patterns that we have here in America. They have been going this way for a while. You are in are you still in France or are you in England?
HANNAN: You know what, at the moment I am in Switzerland. I’m in one of the few truly sovereign democracies in Europe.
GLENN: You know, our founders wanted us to be like Switzerland and, gosh, I wish we were. We would have had the hot chocolate and everything else. In France right now there are boss nappings. These unions are now kidnapping their bosses and holding them until they change their severance or their pensions or any other terms that they want. I am real concerned that there is a revolution that is on the we’re on the edge of a worldwide revolution where people think that they are fighting for the little man but it is actually a power grab after we have just tubed all of our economies. I mean, your people in England have been warning about, what do they call it, the summer of rage.
HANNAN: And that could well happen. And the reason it’s going to happen is people just don’t feel that the Democratic system is working. You know, this thing, I hear it all the time when I’m knocking on doors as a politician and I suspect congressional candidates do that as well, this constant thing of it doesn’t matter how I vote, nothing ever changes, they are all the same. Now, in Europe that’s pretty true because the decision making power isn’t really vested in any elected representative, whatever. It’s in the hands of the European commission and the rest of the kind of sending bureaucracy. And so what you are seeing with, what do you call this explosion of rage, what it really is is people feeling that the constitutional and Democratic mechanisms that are meant to articulate that point of view have failed and so they are going directly to the streets to do it in a different way.
Now, this is a remedial problem. There are a lot of things you can do to make the Democratic system work. There’s still time to avert this problem. But ultimately if you don’t give people any legitimate voice, they tend to take it out directly to the country in an angry and bellicose way.
GLENN: There doesn’t seem to be here in America a lot of people that understand this except the people, and when I talk to actual people, they all say the same thing, that this is getting out of control, that there is too much control, that they are disenfranchising us because they are not listening to us, they are not doing the things that as in England they are spending money and the vast majority of Americans say this is a bad idea; don’t do this. And yet they are doing it anyway. Is there any in Washington there seems to be very few people that understand what’s bubbling up underneath the surface. Do the people in your position in England understand and the rest of Europe understand what’s in their future?
HANNAN: I mean, I think in Britain we still have a system that’s kind of more or less Democratic and more or less it’s got a lot in common with yours and I think there is a lot of sensitivity. When you say Europe generally, if by Europe you mean Brussels, then absolutely not. Public opinion is seen in the EU as an obstacle to overcome, not as a reason to change direction. If you think that sounds extreme, you think I’m exaggerating when I say that, look at how they reacted to these no votes. You know, they have got this Constitution to give themselves more power to take more power away from the national capitals and it was put to a referendum and people kept voting no. France voted no, Holland voted no, Ireland voted no and the reaction in Brussels was, yeah, they didn’t really mean that. They were voting on something else. They misunderstood the question. So let’s just go ahead and implement it anyway. It’s like that scary poem which ends with the lines, wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place. I mean, that could be the that’s the slogan of the EU.
GLENN: So Daniel, what is what is your best advice here? I mean, we have eight million people listening here in America all across the country and you guys are ahead of us on everything. What is your best advice? What should Americans be looking out for? What should Americans, when we hear our politicians here say this is the solution, this is the direction, what have you learned through experience? Don’t do that.
HANNAN: Yeah, you should learn from our mistakes. I mean, the single biggest area where I could see you making this mistake is on this thing of the nationalized healthcare system. I mean, I hope that sanity is going to prevail. I know it’s been kicked around before and it hasn’t happened. I love my country even more than I love yours, you know, but god, I would love to get rid of our system and have something that puts patients in charge rather than putting doctors’ unions and bureaucrats in charge. That’s the single biggest thing. More widely than that, you know, you can spend your money better than politicians can. You’ve got a better idea of what to do with it than governments have. You know, we have this thing for 10 years in the U.K. which is saying the current government that we’ve got. Of people feeling that it was kind of mean for us to think that. You know, if you said I don’t want to pay any more tax, that was taken not as an intellectual critique of whether the government was better placed to spend the money than you were. It was taken as a sign that you didn’t want to because you didn’t care about the poor or, you know, you were greedy. And people who should have known better kind of got right along with that and talked themselves into this kind of wanting to wrap themselves in this great warm duvet of national solidarity. And, of course, the only beneficiaries of that are the state bureaucrats who take the money and laugh all the way to the bank.
GLENN: Daniel Hannan, I wish you the best of luck and we would like to stay in touch with you. You make an awful lot of sense and it’s easier to hear from one of our brothers in England and I think people I think you have a way of penetrating with a clearer voice because you are speaking about your country and we can see the similarities.
HANNAN: You’ve got a great system there. Think long and hard before you toss it away.
GLENN: Thank you very much. We’ll talk again, my friend.
HANNAN: Thank you.
GLENN: Wow, is that kind of sobering, Stu? Just amazing.
At this time on our road to serfdom, reader Michel Cloutier requests a little less platonic theorizing. He writes:
I’d like to read discussions about what we can do on the individual, or maybe local, level to help weather the storm. And please, let’s stay off the usual ’stockpiling of ammo and canned food’ thread.
Well, I’m glad “stockpiling of ammo and canned food” is what Michel has come to expect from BAB contributors. That’s a good start. A Mormon worth his salt will second that.
Seriously, we’re all doing the best we can to try and protect what is becoming harder by the day to protect: our livelihoods and property. So I’m game. Let’s discuss this. (And consider helping your host defray the costs associated with providing what she hopes is a helpful; supportive, instructive; educational, and prescient forum, for like-minded freedom lovers–a community.)
Update I: I’d like to thank you all for your very generous support in these hard times. Centuries ago, artists—among other creative folks—relied on discerning patrons to keep their work alive. Nothing has changed.
Mainstream intelligentsia is dishing out dirt, as usual. It is not only festooned with arrogant liars, but, worse: intellectual sloths; idiots bereft of the slightest affinity for reality, much less the natural laws of justice. Our side can begin to gain a rightful market share in the miasma that is the market place of ideas. But we need to work overtime at supporting and disseminating the truth and dissociating from the dreck. Out of chaos, some new, not-necessarily bad order may just emerge.
I know I nag, but if you have not yet signed up for the Mercer weekly e-newsletter, you can do so HERE.
Back to Surviving On The Road To Serfdom: I personally have quite a bit of faith in Peter Schiff, an investment adviser who follows the Austrian school of economics. What you have to understand is that, while Austrians are the only analysts to have both predicted and explained the meltdown, they cannot provide a timeline. For example, before house prices began to fall, my husband wanted to know when they would plummet. All could say was that prices would go down, although I could not say when, given that the crooks who’ve usurped the power of the purse would keep trying to re-inflate the bubble and keep prices high.
If you can, plan on surviving for two years without employment.
Update II (March 30): We spoke of understanding how easy Federal-Reserve credit leads to violent cycles of malinvestiment. Or as the inimical Peter Schiff puts it “The Government Liquored Them Up”:
Update II (March 31): TO SUM, here are some of your and my thoughts. (This is not investment advice; I do not, and am not qualified to dispense it):
• Gold
• Frugality
• Debt free
• Savings
• Refinancing mortgage at lower interest rates now on offer to those with good credit.
• Self-defense: if you dislike fire arms, consider an alarm system. It’s a deterrent. Mr. Van Wijk’s comment about not relying on The Powers is demonstrated daily. Residents of an old-age home in North Carolina are slaughtered by a gunman. The cop who did his professional duty and barged in, instead of waiting for backup, is hailed a hero. Yes, the default position is not to defend the folks. Also, remember that you don’t have the right de jure to self-defense in most states; if you defend yourself in your home you’re the one needing to justify your actions.
• Self-employment: our heroic South African readers have shown the way on this front. Also: chaos often leads to a reordering and to new opportunities. For example: my column is drawing more people now than during the halcyon years of free credit.
• Emergency supplies
• Tax revolt; I especially would like to see the property tax shakedown exposed in an organized, methodical way, resulting in repeal, preferably— but if not, a reduction of such taxes commensurate with the steep drop in the value of property. Property prices are going down; property taxes up.
• Educate others about liberty: ilanamercer.com is a great resource to turn people onto freedom. I’m doing the work; all you need to do is spread it.
• Keep fit; it helps with stress.
On a personal note: when we first arrived on this continent, and especially when we migrated from Canada to the US, we were convinced we were vastly poorer than the locals. We lived so much more modestly. In Canada, we were able to afford an apartment only. We clipped coupons and ate out for the first time two years after arriving in our new home. Until 2007, we had never owned a new car.
Things improved in the US. We purchased a home.
I had read a Fraser Institute paper that said immigrants took ten years to catch up to the locals. I put down our modest circumstances to that fact: we were still playing “catch up.” Now I know that this research, at least in our case, was bogus. The locals were living in Hog Central. We had practiced the frugality my in-laws (depression babies) had taught my husband.
Cars were bought cash (and hence; second hand, or used). The locals’ penchant for entering exorbitant leasing arrangements was a mystery to us. The credit card was treated as nothing more than a convenience, to be paid off in full every month (interest is horrendous if this is not done).
We’ve discovered that the locals are not that much wealthier, but, rather, more wasteful and credit happy.
