This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the abolition of want to be accomplished by co-operation between the State and the individual. In attempting to insulate the citizenry from lifes vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204:
For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJs Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience Ill try one more, because its the link between Americas downgraded debt and Britains downgraded citizenry:
The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people.
Big Government means small citizens: It corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the earths surface and a quarter of its population. When youre imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.
#3
For all you know the Swedes just never did it long enough to burn through all their social capital from before the welfare state. Also, I suspect WW1 and 2 both burned through a lot of the UK's social capital even before that.
[Dawn] A REUTERS news feature built around the case of an unfortunate woman near Multan is a telling indictment of a society that is still stuck in mediaeval times. The woman was targeted in April by a band looking to settle a score with her husband. Moved by Dire Revenge™ and sustained by its own appalling concepts of retributive justice, the band cut off "six of Asma`s fingers, slashed her arms and lips and then sliced off her nose". The victim of the gory attack still lies in a Multan hospital, leaving her father to answer journalists who want to know whether she will ever be able to go back to her husband. Instead, given the state in which she is, they should be asking if she will ever return from the dead.
The news feature on Asma Firdous`s plight takes us on a course where we come across all the usual actors. The feudal lords that protect the system have as much a role to play as the conscientious supporters of the jirga and panchayat system. The rights activists have very much been a part of the honour-Dire Revenge™ narrative and they are includes in this saga too. Charting an excruciatingly painful but familiar route, the story ends, as all such stories do, after knocking desperately at the doors of the creators of the state`s writ: those who make and implement the law and those who are responsible for ensuring the rule of law. The charge-sheet against the government is as complete as it has ever been and the judiciary also gets as rude a wakeup call as convention and etiquette allow. Of the many issues related to the public, these law-related matters suffer most when the government and judiciary cannot have a working relationship. Free of their own little battles for supremacy, the judges and officers of the executive branch of state can be expected to jointly take up the reform of a system that is too toothless to protect the life and dignity of its women. People versus the state -- this is really a case that is crying out for a hearing.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/13/2011 00:00 ||
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Multan is a Pakistani city in that Moslem country where Ismailis are hounded like hunted beasts by their sect competition the Sunnis in a marvelous display of islamic religious tolerance
The mangoes of Multan district are as luscious as Fatima's breasts. Multani khussa (traditional curly toed slippers), embroidery on dresses for women and men( yes, men wear dresses in Multan ), furniture such as camel saddles, earthenware pottery, painted pottery, camel-skin ware ( camel-skin water flagons for that trip across the Dasht-i-Marg ), surgical instruments like flaying knives and flying carpets are a few of the city's major exports, with a great demand within the country as well.
Mangos form a large portion of Multan's agricultural export market.
Multan is an important agricultural centre. It produces rice, maize, tobacco, bajra( refrain from sniffing that up your nose), moong (lentils), mash (lentils), masoor (lentils), oil seed such as rape ( the seed not the game) are also grown in quantities in the district. Mangoes, citrus, guavas and pomegranate are the main fruits grown in the Multan district. Additionally, dates, jaman, pears, phalsa ( phalsa, also called the Arab Dildo) and bananas are grown in minor quantities in the district.
The city is also rich in minerals. These include , coal, fire clay, gypsum, silica and rock salt..all products of the blistering desert. Most of these are excavated by happy dancing kaffir labor.
Since Multan is agriculture-based, there is also plenty of livestock( camels) still growing at a positive rate, which has led to milk processing/dairy products units, ( Camel and Donkey milk)ice cream and pharmaceuticals.... such as the kind you smoke.
You can buy a ticket and go there but leave your Daisy Dukes at home.
Posted by: de Medici ||
08/13/2011 8:28 Comments ||
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How do you know so much about this fair city, de Medici?
[Dawn] TRAGEDY in Norway, conflagration in Britannia, sovereign meltdown in Europe, impasse, foreboding, downgrade and a deep sense of decline in the US: welcome to the West's 'autumn'? Given the magnitude and scale of the events leading into, and then emanating from, the so-called Great Recession, this is a question that has been seeking an answer for some time.
Global economic developments since 2008 have been narrowly -- and very wrongly -- characterised as a 'sub-prime' or a 'financial' crisis. In what has mirrored to a great extent, though arguably with not the same severity yet, the Great Depression of over 70 years ago, the current episode has not just been a financial or even macroeconomic crisis. A 'financial' crisis connotes something relatively short and sharp, occurring with regular frequency in some part of the globe, that tends to get fixed after the application of bank recapitalisation, monetary easing and other forms of policy intervention. While a recession is generally an outcome, it is usually typical in that it lasts 18 months to two years on average in the developed world.
However, some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them... events since 2008 (and even earlier, starting with what Alan Greenspan called the 'Great Moderation') have hardly been 'typical'. In fact, as underscored by the sovereign credit downgrade of the US, and the huge retrenchment of growth and jobs in Europe, recent events have been seismic and portend to what Mohammed El-Erian of PIMCO, the world's largest private bond investor, has called 'the new normal'. Decades of low growth, high unemployment and painful repair of public finances stare at the core of the global economy: US and Europe.
In addition to these events of great magnitude and severity, the confluence of the food and commodity prices super-spike since 2007 has produced a tsunami of social dislocation and discontent around the world. While this has spawned misery on a global scale in its wake, the impact has been hardest felt by countries with high levels of public debt that have constrained their ability to stimulate the economy with anti-cyclical policies, or to insulate the vulnerable with safety nets or other protection mechanisms. Commentators have rightly referred to the aggregation of risks as 'the perfect storm', or perhaps more appropriately in the current context, a true 'black swan' event.
Hence, since the start of this crisis, over 50 million jobs are estimated to have been lost globally, while initial estimates put the increase in poverty at close to 200 million people in Asia alone. Not entirely coincidental is the fact that roughly one-sixth of humanity, or one billion people, went hungry every day in the world in 2009.
In many ways, this pain is more concentrated and acute in the developed economies which are struggling with unemployment, wealth erosion and a loss of hope while much of the emerging world is still experiencing unprecedented prosperity. The scale of pain in Europe and the US can be gauged not just by the magnitude of deficit reduction required over decades to return to a measure of solvency, much of it in the form of expenditure-cutting, but by statistics relating to the pain of 'real' people.
In Europe alone, an estimated 22.5 million people are currently unemployed, roughly 10 per cent of its workforce, with Spain's unemployment rate at 21 per cent. Many of those seeking jobs are young and educated, with a large swathe who are facing a massive downshifting of their previously affluent lifestyle. In the US alone, close to six million properties are believed to have faced foreclosure action since 2007.
To a great extent, a similar toxic socio-economic environment had spawned widespread disillusionment and the student protest movements and inner-city unrest across Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, while giving birth to anarchist urban guerilla movements such as Baader-Meinhof or the Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades and the Greek 17 November organization, among others.
While state security apparatuses are much better equipped post-9/11 to snuff out terror activity, and any other geo-politic entity is unlikely to be a ready sponsor for such movements in the West, anarchy could yet be a recurring theme for years to come in Europe, particularly given the jobs outlook and the prospects for huge cutbacks in state entitlements and public services for years on end.
At the heart of the debate on how to deal with what some have come to regard as perhaps an existential crisis of the capitalist system, is essentially the question of who is going to pay for this -- i.e. what shape will the burden of adjustment take? As demonstrated in the debates in the US Congress, the ideological dividing line is between those who want to cut expenditure (Republicans), especially entitlement programmes that favour essentially the poor, and those who want to increase the tax incidence on the rich while keeping expenditure levels on key programmes more or less unaffected (Democrats).
A popular variant of the latter argument is that increasing public spending in an economic crisis is the best bet to balance the books later, as it will generate economic activity and therefore more tax revenue down the road. Policymakers, academics and the media are besotted with this notion in Pakistain as well, despite overwhelming evidence in our case, that much like a second marriage, this proposition reflects the triumph of hope over experience. We will explore in the next article the myth of this 'no cost', silver bullet 'solution' that essentially seeks to replicate what policymakers in the US have achieved: kicking the can down the road.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/13/2011 00:00 ||
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A popular variant of the latter argument is that increasing public spending in an economic crisis is the best bet to balance the books later, as it will generate economic activity and therefore more tax revenue down the road ... the myth of this 'no cost', silver bullet 'solution' that essentially seeks to replicate what policymakers in the US have achieved: kicking the can down the road.
What was once can you could kick has now become a huge rock you can hardly budge. Or perhaps a rock that has started to roll backwards despite all efforts to push it forward.
What has the world come to when you have to look to Dawn for cogent economic analysis.
#2
Much of what is said in this article is true. It's like a shotgun blast. What needs to be emphasized is this is worldwide. "In addition to these events of great magnitude and severity, the confluence of the food and commodity prices super-spike since 2007 has produced a tsunami of social dislocation and discontent around the world. We all here know that socialism fails and that is the true beast we must manage. To say that is a "crisis of the capitalist system" is bolix. Let people grow and develop. Freedom from government interference will release so much potential. Government must exist but not to the extent it is know. Government socialism as it is now can only impinge or warehouse people as they are demonstrating.
The freedom of capitalism is the fastest way out of this mess otherwise this will be a very very long winter. Government will learn the hard way if at all. They want the control.
#4
Note the clear tone of this article, unlike so many others in Dawn which discuss issues much closer to home. This author doesn't have to fear reprisals from institutions & systems he is criticizing.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
