ATTACK OF THE GLOBAL TAXERS
Whatever happened to "no taxation without representation"?
Are you aware that the American government has been slowly giving away its power to international bureaucrats to determine how its businesses and citizens are taxed?
Most wars do not turn out the way the people who started them intended. Setting aside the hot military wars, look at the consequences of the “war on drugs” and the “war on money laundering and tax evasion.” The global war on money laundering and tax evasion has failed in the three decades since it began in earnest, and it is now on its way to undermining the rule of law around the world, the legitimate role of financial institutions, and the right of sovereign governments to determine their own tax policies.
The new anti-money-laundering laws and regulations have resulted in millions of Americans who live abroad and others living outside their home countries being unable to get bank accounts and other financial services in the countries where they live.
Join the forum discussion on this postHUMANITY’S BEST DAYS IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE
I took part in a Munk debate on 6 November, in which Steven Pinker and I argued that "humanity's best days lie ahead" while Malcolm Gladwell and Alain de Botton argued against us. It was entertaining.
Here's the text of my opening statement:
Woody Allen once said:
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
That’s the way pretty well everybody talks about the future.
DEMOCRATS = SOCIALISTS = COMMIES
Socialists completely agree: there is no difference.In fact, they just released a video claiming that they can see at least 5 ways America is already socialist:CLICK TO VIEW THE VIDEO
HALF-FULL REPORT 11/06/15
Paris. I’m still at the NATO Conference on Global Security, where I spoke yesterday. I hope you enjoyed my Countering Russia’s Win-Lose with Win-Win. (Note: the audio has now been uploaded so you can listen to it.)
A number of attendees were shell-shocked – like the Russians – but all those from former Soviet/Russian colonies like Estonia, Romania, the Czech Republic or Ukraine reveled in the inside baseball, exchanging winks and big smiles.
In any regard, I made a lot of friends and learned quite a lot. For example…
Meanwhile, this is happening at soccer games in Poland – a huge banner raised by fans of a Christian knight with sword blocking boatloads of Moslems invading Europe. Poles know their history, how their King Jan Sobieski and his knights defeated the Ottoman army at the Battle of Vienna on September 12, 1683 and saved Europe from being conquered by Islam. Here’s the video…
Here’s the most satisfying headline of the week. You can hear the gnashing of teeth at the WaPo: From Coast-to-Coast Conservatives Score Huge Victories in Elections.
Which leads us to the HFR Hero of the Week. And a change and request. Rather than the HFR announce who it is, then you make comments in the Forum, our request is you send us an email ([email protected]) or post on the Forum who you think it should be during the week before the HFR on Friday. Okay? We’ll appreciate your thoughts and suggestions!
Another fun HFR… here we go!
COUNTERING RUSSIA’S WIN-LOSE WITH WIN-WIN
[This is the text of a speech I am giving today, 11/05, at a NATO conference on Global Security in Paris, sponsored by the US Defense Dept. and French Ministry of Defense. In attendance are ministers of defense and ambassadors from several European countries, as well as those from Russia and China.]
I’d like to ask you to perform a thought experiment. The key is to make it as real as you can in your mind, as if it’s actually happening.
Suppose there’s an ornate marble mausoleum in the center Berlin, Germany right now. Inside, enclosed in a glass case, is the preserved embalmed body of Adolph Hitler lying in state, with long lines of Germans waiting to reverentially pass by and pay their solemn respects to the Nazi leader.
Hard to imagine but hardly unimaginable. We all know that Hitler was trying to build nuclear weapons. Let’s suppose his scientists led by Kurt Diebner and Erich Schumann were successful, so that WWII ended with Truman nuking Hiroshima and Hitler nuking Leningrad – the war thus concluding not with the defeat of Nazi Germany but in a Mexican Standoff.
In the ensuing Cold War between the West and the Third Reich, Hitler would rapidly colonize Eastern Europe from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the entire Soviet Union. In response, the West formed NATO to protect itself from Nazi imperialism.
When Hitler died in March 1953 from warfarin poisoning slipped into his wine by the chief of the Gestapo, his body was placed in the Berlin mausoleum as a shrine of worship, and statues of him erected throughout the Nazi Empire.
Hitler and his successors of course suppressed all knowledge of the Jewish Holocaust, which was researched only by little known scholars such as Robert Conquest of Stanford. The horrific atrocity everyone knew about instead was the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocide of 12 to 15 million Ukrainians.
At last when the Nazi Empire broke down and collapsed in 1991, Nazi colonies like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, and Russia wasted no time in declaring their liberation, tearing down statues of Hitler, and asking to join NATO.
It was thought that Germany would now become part of the West at last, with a genuine peace that would include even its membership in NATO, but it was not to be. The successor government to the Nazis would remain antagonistic, its leader declaring that the collapse of the Nazi Empire was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." Hitler would remain enshrined in his Berlin mausoleum, Germany’s leader said, as “removing him would imply that generations had observed false values” during 58 years of Nazi rule.”
Of course you all see the analogy and some may incensed at it. And that’s the crux of the problem, the refusal to recognize the deep equivalence between Nazism and Communism, also known as Marxism-Leninism.
(LISTEN TO DR. JACK WHEELER'S SPEECH)
COULD THE CONNECTION BETWEEN FREEDOM AND PROSPERITY BE MORE CLEAR?
There was good news for Argentina last week.
It was expected that Daniel Scioli, the Peronist candidate and political heir of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, would win the presidential election. Much to most people's surprise, Maurico Macri, the more free-market-oriented mayor of Buenos Aires, won almost as many votes as Mr. Scioli, forcing a runoff, which Mr. Macri has a good chance to win.
The Peronists (named after former dictator Juan Peron) have had political control much of the last 70 years, and it has been a disaster for the country. In 1900, Argentina was one of the 10 highest-income countries in the world, having an estimated gross domestic product per capita of roughly 80 percent of that in the United States.
Successive Argentine governments have squandered much of the wealth and potential of the economy, so now Argentina ranks approximately 57th in per capita income.
In contrast, Chile moved toward enhancing economic freedom, including increasing free trade, the rule of law and protection of private property, and curtailing corruption. The result is that Chile now has the highest per capita income in South America.
“BAMLET” DITHERS WHILE CHINA TAKES THE SEA
If your neighbor’s house catches fire, is it wiser to call the fire department or to trust the good will of the flames to put themselves out?
Faced with strategic conflagrations scorching much of the globe, President Obama’s approach is to delay as long as possible then to attempt to negotiate with the blaze. If forced to act at last, he responds to wildfires with a water pistol.
For years, China has been constructing at least seven artificial islands atop reefs far from its mainland, in waters on which other countries have stronger claims. It’s a hostile takeover of the South China Sea with some of the most important sea lanes on the planet, vital in peace and war. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Japan and Taiwan looked to us for leadership.
Yet Obama has dithered like Hamlet. He should be nicknamed Bamlet. This situation has even greater resonance because it fits the Obama pattern of denial, delay, disarmament and defeat.
THE DOOM OF CHINA’S DEMOGRAPHIC DESTINY
China’s Communist Party has scrapped its hated one-child policy (see Note below) in a bid to shore up political support, but the move comes far too late to avert a collapse of the workforce and a demographic crisis by the late 2020s.
All couples will be allowed to have a second child under new rules agreed at the party’s closely-watched 5th Plenum in Beijing. The ban on larger families in cities will remain despite pleas from Chinese academics for total freedom.
The policy shift will make no difference to the workforce for almost 20 years and by then China will already be in the full grip of a demographic crunch.
“They have merely moved to a two-child policy. The family planning authorities are still there, and there is still an apparatus of state power intruding into people’s intimate lives,” says Jonathan Fenby, a China veteran at Trusted Sources.
China may already have left it too late to ditch the one-child policy. Critics say the damage has been evident for years, leaving aside the traumatic suffering of poor women seized by police after tip-offs and forced into late-term abortions, the indignity of “menstrual monitors” and the status of “illegal” children denied ration coupons and schooling.
THAT SCIENCE NEEDS GOVERNMENT SUPPORT IS A MYTH
Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science.
Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.
The linear dogma so prevalent in the world of science and politics—that science drives innovation, which drives commerce—is mostly wrong. It misunderstands where innovation comes from. Indeed, it generally gets it backward.
For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. This is a myth. In fact, there is still no empirical demonstration of the need for public funding of research and that the historical record suggests the opposite.
A HAPPY LIFE IS NOT PERFECT HAPPINESS
There is a great misunderstanding about what it means to live a happy life, and it can be summed up in the popular symbol of the smiley face.
Now, I like to smile. I love feeling that kind of glowing, delighted state of emotional bliss. It’s wonderful to be full of joy and love and laughter. But feeling those things doesn’t in and of itself make for a happy life; and just because we don’t happen to feel them in the moment doesn’t mean we are unhappy.
In fact, if simply feeling those emotions all the time was what constituted happiness, and if Aristotle was correct in saying that, "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence," then it would be a simple matter to find the right combination of drugs that would perpetually bathe our neurons with joyful chemicals, and we could all be perpetually happy and fulfill the aim and end of our existence.
But this smiley face view of happiness is a mistake.