Compassionate Socialized Medicine in Action – This story from the BBC relates the tale of a cancer patient who has been “left to rot” by her country’s socialized health care system. She spent fourteen months working through the British public option, only to have the hospital cancel appointment after appointment. Denied the medication she needed, she finally collapsed. After being rushed to the hospital, she was told that an emergency appointment would take another three months. So she broke down and called a greedy private doctor who, for £140, saw her in three days.
No Eat List – A Seattle restaurant has invoked its right to refuse service to anyone. In this instance that means TSA workers. The owner of the restaurant is a frequent flyer who’s evidently been felt up by TSA goons one too many times, and he’s instructed his staff to ostracize those who’ve taken up violating the Fourth Amendment as a profession.
Parasites on Parade – Public-sector union workers have descended on state capitols in Wisconsin and Ohio to demand their right to continue to feed at the public trough. Unsustainably high public-sector pensions are among the chief causes of budgetary problems in states all across the land, but union workers are determined to get theirs (yours), regardless of the consequences. Whatever the outcome of this particular episode, or of the broader financial crisis, it is becoming clear that the libertarian class analysis is the correct one. It’s not about bourgeois vs. proletariat or left vs. right. It’s about the tax consumers vs. the tax payers. Which one are you?
Inflation Hits Dictators Hardest – As we’ve all heard by now, Egyptian protestors took to the streets to demand the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. US foreign aid kept Mr. Mubarak in power for thirty years, and President Obama, for one, was “shocked! Shocked!” that there had been a corrupt dictatorship in Egypt the whole time. After three weeks, Mubarak stepped down with nothing but $70 billion to show for all those years of “public service.” Egypt now has a military government, something the US media hails as a great victory for freedom. Similar protests have spread to Bahrain, Tunisia, and now Libya, where Nutjob-in-Chief Gaddafi has declared open season on anyone who so much as looks at him cross-eyed.
Far be it from me to dash anyone’s romantic notions about the demonstrations, but the protests did not start off as a spontaneous movement of millions of people yearning to be free. Instead, the whole thing was kicked off by concerns over rising food prices. Egypt is one of the world’s biggest food importers, and most of the population is dirt poor to boot. When prices started to spike up, people took to the streets.
Ben Bernanke has been quick to deny any culpability for rising food prices (or for rising commodity prices). He has reiterated that inflation is “very, very low” – no matter what your lying grocery bill may tell you. Evidently Bernanke believes that rising global food prices are caused by “animal spirits” or “irrational exuberance” in the agricultural sector. They’re absolutely, positively, not related in any way whatsoever to the unprecedented increase in the money supply engineered by central banks all over the world, chief among which is the Federal Reserve.
2 comments:
The following comment was submitted by Nick Rowe, and inadvertently deleted by the author (who really shouldn't try moderating comments from his iPhone). Sorry about that, Nick...
Nick Rowe has left a new comment on your post "Lagniappe":
Well, not quite right on Egypt.
Egypt has ALWAYS had a military government since the 1952 Revolution.
Nasser and Sadat were both members of the Free Officers Movement. Mubarak was the Air Chief Marshall. Suleiman IS (not WAS) an active duty Lieutenant General.
The military of Egypt is, was, in the foreseeable future will be in charge of Egypt.
There's good reason to believe that the military orchestrated these demonstrations to prevent Mubarak's son from becoming president. They certainly didn't do anything to dissuade the protesters, like kill them with their machineguns, tanks, and fighter/bombers.
The Egyptian military has been the source of political stability. When the Muslim Brotherhood and the communists rose up in the past, the military slaughtered them. They won't be doing that again any time soon.
At best, the "protests" were an appeal to the military for some wage and price concessions. There was absolutely ZERO chance of a liberal opposition movement taking power, and ZERO chance of a muslim fundamentalist revolution.
Sean Hannity greatly overplayed the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Left greatly overplayed the prospects of democracy. They were all badly uninformed about Egyptian politics and used the protests to gain and maintain attention.
The protests throughout the muslim world are related ONLY in the sense that spreading word has emboldened the opposition. But the "opposition" is very different in different countries.
In Libya, the opposition are people fed up with dictatorship. In Bahrain, the opposition are the Shiite muslims. In Egypt, they were hungry, unemployed, and underpaid people.
A good resource I used to brush up on Egyptian recent political history was Wikileaks. There's no better way to find out what the truth of any matter is, is to listen to what they say when they don't think anyone else is listening.
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