The Marsh Harrier

The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize escalates war

2009-11-30T20:31:00.013Z

This Tuesday we had the chance to see another performance of the teleprompter champion: Barack Obama in his official address regarding the future of the war in Afghanistan.

As expected, 34,000 additional US troops will be deployed in Afghanistan, increasing the total amount of troups to more than 100,000 soldiers. The objectives of this surge are "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future."

To fulfill these goals Obama has laid down three main directions:

Setting a military strategy to target insurgencies and emphasizing on training afghans soldier
Establishing political and economic cooperations with the afghan government in order to fight corruption and develop the economy via the agriculture
strengthening partnership with Pakistan to fight terrorist strongholds in afghan-pakistani border provinces

The US President also set a troop withdrawal date (december 2011), highlighting the fact that Americans do not seek nation building in Afghanistan.

Beyond this usual "Yes We Can" rhetorics, Obama is proving again that nothing has fundamentally changed compared to the G. W. Bush administration. Despite the apparent opposition of Obama to nation building, The US is inextricably heading towards this road when insisting on how to shape the Afghan governance and its economy.

The main Neoconservative fallacy is to think that it is possible to impose a western democratic style government to any countries. The world bank reports that 75% of the afghan people live in the rural areas which tends to organize its society into autonomous ethnic tribes. The former President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf mentioned, in the video below, that the Afghanistan political system used to be tied to a social contract called "Missah-ke-Milli" which united the different ethnic groups together in an independent manner.

The sovietization of Afghanistan, thirty years ago, was an attempt to establish a central authority imposing foreign values and culture to the entire territory. This experience ended with the worst military failure in the history of the USSR. It is therefore not ill-considered, as Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter from the Cato Institute described in the video below, to qualify the attempt to establish a Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan as over-optimistic and unrealistic.

It is consequently laughable for the advocate of "change" to apply the same recipes of his predecessor. It is even more laughable to see the former republican candidate, John McCain, supporting Obama's decision.

While the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize leaves the funding of this war in the hands of congress, it would be interesting to see how this will end knowing that the progressive wing of the democratic party as well as the libertarian wing of the conservative movement are against this policy.

Facts about why Obamanomics has been inspired by French Socialists

2009-03-15T16:36:00.017Z

When watching an extract of Fox News Hannity's show last Friday, I stumbled upon an interview of the republican conservative Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the US House of Representatives. Talking about Obama's first 100 hundred days in the oval office and his populist tendency, Gingrich stated that Obama's policies are influenced by French socialists close to the former French presidential candidate, Segolene Royal (referring to the page 11 of the obama's administration budget). Daniel Henninger from the Wall Street Journal confirms this theory by highlighting that Obama's rhetoric about taxing high income Americans is based on the studies from two French economists: Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.

The two pundits are well-known in the French and American liberal apparatus for their studies about income inequality throughout the second half of the 20st century and this consequently justify wealth redistribution from the wealthiest Americans to the medium/low income ones.
(Note that Alan Reynolds from the Cato Institute brilliantly demonstrates the flaws and inaccuracies of this theory)

I remember that during the inauguration ceremony of the 44th president of the United States, the French media making fun of Segolene Royal's statement about the influence that she presumably had on Obama's policies, but who contributed to her presidential campaign ? Thomas Piketty! Who is the man talking at a segolene's meeting on the video below? The same Thomas Piketty!

Thomas piketty économiste avec Ségolène Royal

by sandrinegarnaud

It is a sad day for America!

"Hooverism" is Obamanomics

2009-03-08T20:05:00.010Z

I reckon that I have a very masochistic occupation during my weekends: I use to watch US Liberal political shows, in other words I watch MSNBC. One of the most colourful liberal anchors of this channel is probably Rachel Maddow. Constantly denouncing and condemning the so-called right-wing intellectual fallacy on a very sarcastic tone with a simplistic and demagogic rhetoric, Ms Maddow is, for me, the liberal version of Ann Coulter.

In her show last Friday, she argued, that Republican President Herbert Hoover was somehow a fiscal conservative who cut spending and did nothing (nothing liberal of course) to resolve the economic depression.

Once again, farcical journalism is back: facts are replaced by grotesqueness.
Hoover was a proponent of tight collaborations between private companies and governments called sometimes volutarism or associationalism. Appointed as a secretary of commerce under the Warren G. Harding administration, he was willing to transform the free market nature of the US commerce with plans for the government to be "the economic interpreter to the American people". As a president, Hoover continued to surf on this wave of Wilsonian progressivism, by enacting the revenue act of 1932 which increased taxes by 30% on high-income Americans. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was also a brainchild of the the Hoover administration injecting billions of dollar to local governments, banks, and businesses to recover from the crisis. We always mention FDR as the originator of public works and reconstruction after the Great Depression but the true mastermind of this policy is unmistakably his predecessor. Indeed, Hoover was the genuine creator of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act and was one of the first to tour accross the US to advocate central planning and interventionism.

All these measures sound familiar to you? I would say that it tastes like Obamanomics, isn't it ? Well, One of the reasons that could drive liberals to lynch Mr Hoover is maybe because his policies were a total failure and they are therefore fearing the comparison between the 31st president of the United States and the 44th one alias "Mr Change".

"How could you believe in free-market capitalism after this financial mess ?"

2008-12-27T00:03:00.020Z

In the midst of the economic crisis that we are facing today, most of the so-called pundits argued that we are witnessing a failure of free-market capitalism and this is therefore the consequences of several economic deregulations made in the past twenty to thirty years. As these pseudo-intellectuals are flooding the international mainstream media, I have lot of friends who are asking me the following question: "How could you believe in free-market capitalism after this financial mess ?"

In my native country (France), We use to see the United States as the symbol of free market capitalism and Georges W. bush is one of his ferocious proponent. We consequently associates this philosophy to his administration failures to demonstrate that capitalism does not work and should thence be tightly regulated. However, if we look back to the US history of politics, we can easily shows that this is utterly inaccurate.

The end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th was shaped by progressivism. Followers of this philosophy pledge for a more interventionist role of the state in the economic and financial spheres, which is totally in opposition to free-market principles.
Abraham Lincoln was one of the first American president to put this doctrine in practice by increasing tariffs, leaning towards big corporations, and putting an end to the gold standard. Suspending the gold standard is indeed one of the cause of the economic booms and bursts that we faced during the 20th and the 21st century. Backing paper money by nothing leads to a vicious inflationary cycle that is lethal to the economy. Things went worse when the progressist administration of Woodrow Wilson created in 1913 the Federal Reserve (US central bank). The FED (abbreviation of Federal Reserve) was created to limit financial"panics" that occurred in the 19th and 20th century. During these tough financial periods where the amount of credit is tightened its role is to inject liquidity in the financial system, in order to dope the economy. Unfortunately, this system creates more inflationary pressure and send the wrong message to investors. To have a better understanding of this mechanism, I would recommend you to watch the video below. This video is from the most prominent libertarian and free market school of economics in the world: the Austrian School of Economics. Note that this video predates the current financial crisis

Eighty years after the great depression and ten years after the "dotcom" bubble the same kind of policy led the world to another burst.
in the the beginning of the 20th century The Fed decided to lower interest rates, that generated an economic boom as well as an era of prosperity. In this euphoria and in an attempt to pursue an interventionist agenda, the Clinton administration(policies also endorsed by the G. W. Bush Administration) decided to make housing affordable for those who cannot have access to this market. That is how para-governmental entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created and laws like the Community Reinvestment Act and the Taxpayer Relief Act were passed.
Moreover, to make Fannie and Freddie profit-making entities these organizations spread financial products based on these loans. The immediate results of these measures were successful in the sense that a lot of people were able to afford a mortgage. Regrettably, The same and predictable scenario happened. In 2004, the FED decided to increase his main interest rate. As most of these house owners contracted a variable interest rate mortgage, they progressively faced insolvency. All the financial institutions that purchased products based on those insolvent loans were in trouble and they contaminated the whole economy and the whole world. Please watch the following video for more details:

Apart from the two schools of economics cited above there are also lot of intellectuals, who are also backing this explanation (New York Times Columnist Russel Roberts, 2002 Nobel Prize of economics Vernon Smith) but the most spectacular demonstration of it was the interview of Peter Schiff (economic advisor of the Libertarian and 2008 republican candidate Ron Paul) two years before the economic meltdown on CNBC (video below):

You will understand that it is very difficult for me to say that free-market capitalism is responsible for this crisis when the US government tightly controls and regulates he financial sector. I am not denying that there was also corporate greed in this period, but this has more to do about the effects of the meltdown and not about its cause as William L. Anderson brilliantly pointed out in his article.

Clichés about free market capitalism

2008-12-26T22:01:00.011Z

First of all, I would like to welcome you to this blog, which is going to be the English version of "Le Busard Enragé". As I currently live in the UK and would like to share my views with a broader audience, it is needless to say that using the English language is a good way to achieve my goal.

The second reason that motivated me to do this blog is that I have a lot of English speaking acquaintances who have clichés about what is free-market capitalism and libertarianism - also called classical liberalism or simply liberalism in some European Countries -, especially during this financial turmoil. Indeed, free-market capitalism has become the scapegoat of all the problems in the world and is depicted as the evil to eradicate.

Some people use the term savage capitalism to talk about classical liberalism in order to emphasis on its alleged lack of morality. Unfortunately for them, this is a little bit too simplistic to be true. Libertarianism is rooted into the principles of Natural Law that has been studied from Aristotle to Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Scholatics. Murray Rothbard, an eminent intellectual of the libertarian Austrian School of Economics, acknowledged this heritage on his books: the Ethics of Liberty.

I am not going to go through all the prejudges that people usually have about classical liberalism but my aim in my next posts will be to bring you a more realistic view of what this philosophy is about.