Category Archives: Political Economy

UPDATE II: Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment (& The Killing Continues)

Founding Fathers, Labor, Old Right, Political Economy, Republicans, Russia, Socialism, South-Africa

Excerpted from “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” now on WND:

“During the final presidential debate, Republican contender Mitt Romney got my hackles up (unnecessarily) with the following invocation of apartheid:

‘I would also make sure that [Iran’s] diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world. The same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.’

Why unnecessarily? Romney is unremarkable among Republicans. Pushing revolutionary radicalism on the Old South Africa was the goal not only in high diplomatic circles, but among most Republicans.

With a few exceptions.

As I document in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,’ ‘For advocating ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, members of his Republican Party issued a coruscating attack on Ronald Reagan.’

Reagan favored ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, together with a tough resistance to communist advances in the Third World. But political pressure, not least from the Republican majority, mounted for an increasingly punitive stance toward Pretoria. This entailed an ‘elaborate sanctions structure,’ disinvestment, and a prohibition on sharing intelligence with the South Africans. In 1986, the Soviet Union, which had until the 1980s supported a revolutionary takeover of white-ruled South Africa by its ANC protégés, suddenly changed its tune and denounced the idea. Once again, the US and the USSR were on the same side—that of ‘a negotiated settlement between Pretoria and its opponents.’

Senator Lowell P. Weicker Jr., in particular, stated: ‘For this moment, at least, President Reagan has become an irrelevancy to the ideals, heartfelt and spoken, of America.’

South Africa was just one more issue on which Republicans had slipped between the sheets with the fashionable left. Today they are as eager as the next drug-addled supermodel to press flesh with Saint Nelson Mandela and the functionaries who run the dominant-party state of South Africa. That is, run it into the ground. … ”

The complete column is “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment.” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE I (Oct. 27): IT’S ALL ABOUT FACTION. As was noted in “Mining Mitt’s Apartheid Moment,” “…the ANC … is powerless to stop intimidation. In South Africa, the sacked workers are in the habit of killing scabs who want to work.”

Reports RT:

South African police fired stun grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse striking miners who tried to foil a rally of the nation’s largest union. The miners say the union reached an unfavorable deal with Amplants mine without their consent.
The Anglo American Platinum mine in Rustenburg has announced an agreement to reinstate 12,000 miners fired earlier this month for staging illegal strikes and failing to appear at a disciplinary hearing. The credit for the deal was taken by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM).
“[Amplants] agreed to reinstate all the dismissed workers on the provision that they return to work by Tuesday,” the NUM announced Saturday, a day after the breakthrough in talks.
But the Amplants workers said they were neither aware of nor happy with the deal.
“We know nothing about it. We were not consulted, we only heard about it on the radio,” Ampants miner Reuben Lerebolo told AFP.

UPDATE II (Oct. 27): The indefatigable Adriana Stuijt (@AdrianaStuijt) tweets out:

“Oxford-educated SA investment company owner Alexander Theo Otten murdered at #Velddrift http://bit.ly/ThZFld”

The Golden Jay Taylor

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Political Economy

Canada is interested in what my friend Jay Taylor has to say about gold. Mr. Taylor is a New-York based investor and broadcaster who invests and broadcasts in the Austrian tradition (gold bug).

On the real price of gold:

“… An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold, but what is a dollar?”

Since there is no measure of the worth of the dollar, “Mr. Bernanke can create 2 trillion dollars more out of nothing, which is like taking an inch off a yardstick every year and still calling it a yardstick.”

What an ounce of gold buy, using the commodity based “Rogers International Raw Materials Fund, L.P.,” is rising steeply.

Gold’s real price has surged to “crisis levels,” retort Jay’s smart Canadian interviewer (whatever that phrase means). “The yardstick is getting shorter and shorter in dollar terms,” and the gold-mining sector is doing swell.

Jay predicts that gold could hit $2500 an ounce. An Austrian economics purist, Jay ventures that we are in deflationary times, thus the price of gold could fall, as its purchasing power rises.

You don’t have to convince me. “Gold Is A Girl’s Best Friend (& Bona Fide).”

UPDATE II: On The Radio Show Of ‘Austrian’ Jay Taylor

Economy, Ilana On Radio & TV, libertarianism, Media, Natural Law, Political Economy, South-Africa

I will be a guest on The Jay Taylor Radio Show (“Turning Hard Times into Good Times”).

Date: Tuesday, June 26, at 3:30 EST.
Topic: Into the Cannibal’s Pot, as it applies to private property rights, gold in South Africa, and the backdrop to the establishment of Apartheid.

Jay Taylor is a New-York based investor and broadcaster, who invests and broadcasts in the intellectual tradition of Austrian economics. We met at the New York Junto gathering, where I was the month of May’s featured speaker.

I was delighted to hear that the topic of the talk—“Natural Rights in ‘Into the Cannibal’s Pot’: Abstractions or Facts of Life?”—resonated with Jay.

Jay is a treasure. Tune in to support his work. (And, it goes without saying, go easy on me.)

UPDATE I (June 26): You can listen to the show here.

UPDATE II (June 27): An MP3 of my segment is here.

CNN Bimbo Holds Out Hope For Socialism

EU, Europe, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Socialism

This week, CNN’s ERIN BURNETT, HOST of OUTFRONT, and “a valued member of the OUTFRONT Strike Team,” whatever gimmick that stands for, entertained the possibility that President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party might just “save Europe’s economy and ours.”

Burnett’s babbling was boosted by “striker” Bill Gross, CO-CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER of PIMCO, who positively spun the political platform of Francois Hollande by describing France’s manifestly socialist agenda as “pro-growth,” and as “a different way forward.”

I listened to the Gross man live on TV. CNN’s transcriber failed to transcribe Gross’s salutary reference to France’s founding principles of “liberté, égalité, fraternité, writing in their place: “(INAUDIBLE)”

But here is Mr. Gross(out)’s verbatim nod to the blood-drenched, illiberal French Revolution and its legacy:

I think what [Hollande] is trying to do is favor labor as opposed to capital. Remember the (INAUDIBLE) [Gross actually said “liberté, égalité, fraternité”] and you know he’s moving in that direction. To the extent that he moves only gradually, I think that’s a positive. What France needs, what Euro land needs is growth. And to the extent that they can prevent a continuing recession, then the growth is going to be positive.

An “anti-austerity vote in France” Erin’s strike-man has conflated with a “pro-growth” agenda.

The Law is a pamphlet published in June, 1850, by Frédéric Bastiat, a great classical liberal “economist, statesman, and author.” Bastiat castigated his countrymen for becoming “the most governed, the most regulated, the most imposed upon, the most harnessed, and the most exploited people in Europe.”

In 1860, Bastiat saw France as a society that “receives its momentum from power”; a passive people who “consider themselves incapable of bettering their prosperity and happiness by their own intelligence and their own energy.”

“So long as they expect everything from the law,” he warned, “their relationship to the state [would be] the same as that of the sheep to the shepherd.”

Moreover, Bastiat, who had a mind like no other, did not share Mr. Gross’s fondness for French “fraternity.” “Enforced Fraternity Destroys Liberty,” he proclaimed.

“In fact, it is impossible for me,” wrote the great man, “to separate the word fraternity from the word voluntary. I cannot possibly understand how fraternity can be legally enforced without liberty being legally destroyed, and thus justice being legally trampled underfoot.”

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ILANA