NO TO A “SUPERPOWER POPE.” Mercifully, the new pope is not the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Shortly after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the 266th pope, Cardinal Dolan demonstrated why my prayers had been answered. The American had been bypassed.

Out of the papal conclave and into the limelight charged the vainglorious Dolan (who, it has to be said, harbored hopes of becoming pope). He then suctioned himself to the television cameras, American style. No other cardinal elector granted interviews on emerging from the Sistine Chapel; they were enjoined to secrecy.

Not the American cardinals. According to the Associated Press, these prolix self-promoters held daily press briefings near the Vatican to a room packed with reporters and television crews.

This was vulgarity, not transparency.

Not for nothing was the vow of silence once considered a test of character and spirituality in Christianity and in other faiths. This universal value has been inverted by American pop culture and pop religion. In the US, a deeply private person is considered defective; a blabbermouth who does and says anything on camera is canonized.

Dolan, by CBS’s telling, “broadcasts a weekly radio show,” and “was hardly silent during the cardinals’ self-imposed hush order.” For his vulgar electioneering, the Archbishop of New York was dubbed by Kean University historian Christopher Bellitto “The Ed Koch of Catholicism.” Having gigged with liberal comedian Stephen Colbert, Dolan’s showman credentials are “better” than Koch’s.

American public life is such that even our pick for pope (Dolan) struts his stuff like a “Jersey Shore” reality star.

The two-day long conclave gave us a glimpse of the sublime. The elevated atmosphere was sustained by the crowds in St. Peter’s Square. Dolan shattered the majesty and solemnity of that event at a press conference where he alone was in-attendance. There, Dolan disgorged the obligatory niceties about Pope Francis I. Cardinal Bergoglio was an “inspired choice.” May he persevere for years to come (“Ad Multos Annos”).

Then, like most Americans in public life, the man nicknamed “America’s pope,” “a happy warrior” and “the bear-hug bishop,” brought the discussion back to … himself. Out of the blue, Cardinal Dolan announced to the world that his “niece Kelly” had given birth.

How inappropriate.

To the girls at CNN – Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and their dominatrices – vulgarity equals “charisma.” “Isn’t Dolan wonderful?” they gushed (suddenly ignoring the cardinal’s pesky attachment to Catholic doctrine).

At CNN, the new Vicar of Christ quickly became the first Latino-American pontiff and was bestowed with the ultimate honorific. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Italian parents, the cable-news crazies hailed Pope Francis I as their first “non-European pope.”

Let us give thanks that the world was spared the self-promoting sins of a “superpower pope” and his entourage.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS ON THE RACK. That is the meme sounded by all big media covering the conclave. This the brilliant Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew all too well.

After “asbestos, tobacco, guns and lead paint, the next jackpot for tort lawyers was … sex,” explained Daniel Lyons of Forbes Magazine. In 2003, Lyons hashed out all there is to say about the $5 billion sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. Many of these class-action claims are bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories.

Sexual abuse litigation is big business, a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew that the Church was on the rack; that the victim movement had found a way to bleed the Church dry and rob it of its moral authority.

Prescient man that he is, Benedict XVI likely quit because he realized that the Church was no longer a haven from the toxic tides of populism and liberalism, and that he was powerless to halt this momentum.

Although the breakdown of boundaries in society is at the root of the rot around us, the Roman Church will not be permitted to survive in the only way it was intended to function since antiquity: as a hierarchical organization.

As the clamoring demos believe, they are every bit as smart as men like Benedict. The faithful, moreover, no longer see themselves as members of a community of believers, but as members of gay, lesbian, feminist, black, brown and plain angry clans. Unless the Church recognizes and recompenses their brand of identity politics – the masses will bring it down.

Right on cue – and by baring their breasts, of course – “ladies” demonstrated at the outskirts of St. Peter’s Basilica why the ordination of women should be out of the question.

In the fullness of time, however, the Pussy Riot sisterhood will storm the Sistine Chapel to ride roughshod over the Church and its wise old men.

The question is: How long of a reprieve does the Church of Rome have?

Recently by Ilana Mercer: The Survivalist's Guide to u2018Obammunism' & Beyond

NO TO A “SUPERPOWER POPE.” Mercifully, the new pope is not the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Shortly after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected as the 266th pope, Cardinal Dolan demonstrated why my prayers had been answered. The American had been bypassed.

Out of the papal conclave and into the limelight charged the vainglorious Dolan (who, it has to be said, harbored hopes of becoming pope). He then suctioned himself to the television cameras, American style. No other cardinal elector granted interviews on emerging from the Sistine Chapel; they were enjoined to secrecy.

Not the American cardinals. According to the Associated Press, these prolix self-promoters held daily press briefings near the Vatican to a room packed with reporters and television crews.

This was vulgarity, not transparency.

Not for nothing was the vow of silence once considered a test of character and spirituality in Christianity and in other faiths. This universal value has been inverted by American pop culture and pop religion. In the US, a deeply private person is considered defective; a blabbermouth who does and says anything on camera is canonized.

Dolan, by CBS’s telling, “broadcasts a weekly radio show,” and “was hardly silent during the cardinals’ self-imposed hush order.” For his vulgar electioneering, the Archbishop of New York was dubbed by Kean University historian Christopher Bellitto “The Ed Koch of Catholicism.” Having gigged with liberal comedian Stephen Colbert, Dolan’s showman credentials are "better" than Koch’s.

American public life is such that even our pick for pope (Dolan) struts his stuff like a “Jersey Shore” reality star.

The two-day long conclave gave us a glimpse of the sublime. The elevated atmosphere was sustained by the crowds in St. Peter's Square. Dolan shattered the majesty and solemnity of that event at a press conference where he alone was in-attendance. There, Dolan disgorged the obligatory niceties about Pope Francis I. Cardinal Bergoglio was an "inspired choice." May he persevere for years to come ("Ad Multos Annos").

Then, like most Americans in public life, the man nicknamed “America’s pope,” “a happy warrior” and “the bear-hug bishop,” brought the discussion back to … himself. Out of the blue, Cardinal Dolan announced to the world that his “niece Kelly” had given birth.

How inappropriate.

To the girls at CNN — Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and their dominatrices — vulgarity equals “charisma.” “Isn’t Dolan wonderful?” they gushed (suddenly ignoring the cardinal's pesky attachment to Catholic doctrine).

At CNN, the new Vicar of Christ quickly became the first Latino-American pontiff and was bestowed with the ultimate honorific. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Italian parents, the cable-news crazies hailed Pope Francis I as their first “non-European pope.”

Let us give thanks that the world was spared the self-promoting sins of a “superpower pope” and his entourage.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS ON THE RACK. That is the meme sounded by all big media covering the conclave. This the brilliant Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew all too well.

After “asbestos, tobacco, guns and lead paint, the next jackpot for tort lawyers was … sex,” explained Daniel Lyons of Forbes Magazine. In 2003, Lyons hashed out all there is to say about the $5 billion sexual-abuse shakedown to which the Catholic Church has been subjected. Many of these class-action claims are bogus, backed by the discredited excavation of false memories.

Sexual abuse litigation is big business, a racket facilitated by courts that are conduits to theft. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI knew that the Church was on the rack; that the victim movement had found a way to bleed the Church dry and rob it of its moral authority.

Prescient man that he is, Benedict XVI likely quit because he realized that the Church was no longer a haven from the toxic tides of populism and liberalism, and that he was powerless to halt this momentum.

Although the breakdown of boundaries in society is at the root of the rot around us, the Roman Church will not be permitted to survive in the only way it was intended to function since antiquity: as a hierarchical organization.

As the clamoring demos believe, they are every bit as smart as men like Benedict. The faithful, moreover, no longer see themselves as members of a community of believers, but as members of gay, lesbian, feminist, black, brown and plain angry clans. Unless the Church recognizes and recompenses their brand of identity politics — the masses will bring it down.

Right on cue — and by baring their breasts, of course — “ladies” demonstrated at the outskirts of St. Peter's Basilica why the ordination of women should be out of the question.

In the fullness of time, however, the Pussy Riot sisterhood will storm the Sistine Chapel to ride roughshod over the Church and its wise old men.

The question is: How long of a reprieve does the Church of Rome have?

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. She blogs at BarelyABlog.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

The Best of Ilana Mercer

“No statist lies are safe from his scrutiny,” writes Lew Rockwell about economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s latest book. What follows is my conversation with professor DiLorenzo aboutOrganized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, and the timeless economic truths to which it speaks.

1. ILANA MERCER: A microscopic decrease in the increase in government spending has sent our overlords in DC into apoplexy. A cut in oink-sector spending, they’re claiming, will destroy the chances of an economic recovery. It is the exact opposite. You point this out in the chapter on “The Myth of Government Job Creation”: “Government spending increases unemployment because it crowds out so much private sector job creation” (p. 202). Explain with reference to the zero-sum nature of government spending – the cost of a government job, and Bastiat’s “What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen” principle.

THOMAS DILORENZO: Every dollar that the government spends is a dollar that is not spent (or saved) by individuals, families, businesses, and entrepreneurs. Therefore, whenever government grows, private enterprise – the sole source of real job creation – shrinks and unemployment there rises. Each government job destroys several genuine, private sector jobs because of all the bureaucracy and red tape. For example, government may spend $200,000 to give one person a $30,000/year job. And government “jobs” are usually involved in doing something that no one but a few politicians ever voiced a preference for. Private sector jobs, by contrast, cannot survive unless they are part of an enterprise that succeeds in satisfying genuine consumer wants. By contrast, Keynesians like Paul Krugman would have us believe that prosperity is created whenever government takes money out of our bank accounts (with the threat of forcing us to live in a cage for years if we do not pay) and letting government bureaucrats squander the money instead. Part of the Keynesian mantra is that such spending could and should be on “anything” – it doesn’t matter, as long as it is government that is doing the spending. The biggest year of private sector economic growth in American economic history was 1946 when the nation was in the middle of a two-thirds reduction in federal government spending as the military was demobilized from World War II. This proves that the Keyensians were always dead wrong, but of course they and their political patrons ignore this reality.

2. MERCER: You quip: “In Washingtonese, if one proposes a $100 billion spending increase, and actual spending increases by ‘only’ $90 billion, they call it a $10 billion budget cut.” We’re in the grip of exactly this kind of a paradox. How is the “Washington Monument Syndrome” playing out in its “sequesteria” version?

DILORENZO: The “Washington Monument Syndrome” is an old bureaucratic trick that is so named because the head of the National Park Service closed down the Washington Monument – the most popular tourist attraction in Washington, D.C. – in the 1960s after Congress refused to fully fund his pie-in-the-sky spending wish list. Tourists from every state, on their annual vacations, called their congressmen to complain, forcing them to give the Park Service bureaucrat all the money he wanted. State and local governments routinely use this sleazy gimmick by immediately threatening to shut down police protection, garbage collection, ambulance service, school buses, and whatever else would impose the maximum pain on the public whenever there is talk of fiscal responsibility. The Obama administration has taken this to buffoonish extremes by threatening to close down airports, etc., were government spending to increase by about one percentage point less than they wish over the next ten years. No one in Washington has proposed cutting a single cent out of the federal budget despite the fact that the surest route to economic recovery would be to chop federal spending in half, and then in half again next year.

3. MERCER: Like tax havens, tax loopholes are ethical and efficient. Your point about efficiencies is especially good: “The time spent by citizens trying to legally avoid taxes is in fact a good investment of their time.” Decode the Orwellian Doublespeak of phrases like, “simplifying the tax laws ” and “revenue neutrality.”

DILORENZO: Politicians and statist economists intentionally confuse the public when they refer to proposed tax increases as “tax reform” and to tax cuts as “wasteful” or “unnecessarily complicated.” I have long agreed with Milton Friedman’s dictum that the cause of freedom and prosperity is always served by any tax cut, of any kind, at any time. One has to realize that the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Depriving political parasites of revenue is always and everywhere a good idea. The rhetoric of “revenue neutrality” really means that under no circumstances should government – unlike everyone else in society – ever, ever spend a penny less next year than this year. Any tax reform should therefore never, ever, end up putting more money in the pockets of the public at the expense of the political parasite class.

4. MERCER: Expect the “compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office” from Obama’s health care plan, you forewarn. But as Obama’s army of harpies at CNN would argue, his politburo of proctologists has involved itself in the insurance industry merely to enhance markets. Or, to “bring down costs.” Dispense with this idiotic notion.

DILORENZO: Government intervention always causes costs to rise and quality to decline. This has always been true; it has especially been true in the field of health care in places like Canada and Great Britain where healthcare was nationalized long ago. There is no reason to believe that the socialists in the Obama administration are better at socialism than were the Soviets, the Eastern Europeans, the Chinese, the Cuban government, or anyone else. The absence of a market feedback mechanism based on profits and losses guarantees government failure. Public choice economists refer to a “bureaucratic rule of two” with regard to governmental provision of any type of service, based on hundreds of empirical articles that show that, on average, a government takeover of any function will double the per-unit cost of providing the product or service.

5. MERCER: You write: “At the heart of the U.S. government’s continued takeover of the health care sector of the economy was a law passed during the Obama administration that would eventually drive the private health insurance industry out of business and transform it into a de facto nationalized industry.” Elaborate. Since, as you repeatedly warn, the natural laws of economics cannot be repealed, what will these health care exchanges achieve? How will they invariably be funded? What will be the cost to business? To the millions who’re losing coverage? Who will ultimately fork out for the per-head fee imposed on medical plans?

DILORENZO: The Obama version of health-care socialism forces insurance companies to cover people with expensive diseases without charging them higher rates to compensate for the additional risk. This effectively will force the insurance companies to pay out billions in health care costs, and then the Obammunists will impose price controls on the industry because that’s what socialists always do once they intervene in a market by forcing businesses to offer something for nothing, thereby driving demand through the roof. The price controls will cause massive bankruptcy, at which point the argument will be made that what is needed is “single-payer healthcare,” a euphemism for health-care socialism or government-run monopoly. In the meantime, they seem to be imposing hundreds of relatively small, hidden taxes to come up with the revenue to keep the scheme going.

6. MERCER: The Obamacare Survival Guide is a best-seller on Amazon. The market is producing survivalist literature to help Americans navigate the treacherous shoals of this law. What does it tell you? Like me, you must know plenty of Obama-heads (doctors too) who shrugged off the idea that further centralizing health care – a modest healthcare expansion totaling $2 trillion, I believe – would cost them anything at all. As The Lancetrecently confirmed, in the UK’s National Health Service funding is inversely related to patient outcomes. You speak of “inputs” and “outputs.”

DILORENZO: I cited a study by the late Milton Friedman entitled “Inputs and Outputs in Medical Care,” published by the Hoover Institution some twenty years ago. In it the Nobel laureate economist showed that, historically, as government became more and more involved in health care by taking over hospitals and funding Medicare and Medicaid, inputs – in terms of money spent – skyrocketed while “output” in terms of patients served declined. He spoke of something called “Gammon’s Law,” named after a British physician named Max Gammon, who noticed that with healthcare socialism in England, increased “inputs” in the form of massive amounts of money spent always seemed to disappear “as though through a black hole” with little or nothing to show for it in terms of health care.

7. MERCER: You touch briefly on the “private component of GDP.” Free-market thinkers get that the private economy alone produces wealth. But no. GDP is a political construct, defined, tracked and manipulated by the D.C. political machine. Unpack the GDP gambit for us, down to its deceptive components.

DILORENZO: Including government spending in the definition of GDP was a creation of John Maynard Keynes, who defined it as C (Private Consumption) + I (Private Investment) + G (Government Purchases) + X-M (Net Exports). In so doing, Keynesians concluded that the most prosperous year in American economic history – 1946 – was actually a year of revival of the Great Depression with a precipitous drop in economic activity because of the huge decline in federal government spending after World War II. Of course, this was NOT a year of depression but an explosion of private investment, consumption, and job creation.

8. MERCER: About that elusive economic recovery: My colleague Vox Day (who sadly called it a day on WND) argued that, “The Great Depression 2.0 will be worse than its predecessor.” Day chalked that up to today’s unprecedented levels of debt, consumption and credit, private and public. It’s a hunch. But I think you’ll disagree.

DILORENZO: No one can predict something like this, especially since today’s economy is vastly different from the 1930s. Capital markets are much more sophisticated, for one thing, although government regulators by the thousands do their best to destroy them – and with them what’s left of American capitalism. Predictions like this always ignore the resilience of entrepreneurs. As the Austrian Business Cycle theory of Mises and Hayek contends, it is the boom period where all the damage is done in the form of “malinvestment” – in the latest bust this was mostly in real estate. During the recession or depression is when entrepreneurs are forced to become more efficient, more inventive, more creative – or else. This is how the Japanese recovered from something much worse than a depression – long years of war and the dropping of atomic bombs on their country – in a little over a decade.

Recently by Ilana Mercer: The Goods on Grain and the Big Agra-Government Alliance

"No statist lies are safe from his scrutiny," writes Lew Rockwell about economist Thomas J. DiLorenzo's latest book. What follows is my conversation with professor DiLorenzo about Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government, and the timeless economic truths to which it speaks.

1. ILANA MERCER: A microscopic decrease in the increase in government spending has sent our overlords in DC into apoplexy. A cut in oink-sector spending, they're claiming, will destroy the chances of an economic recovery. It is the exact opposite. You point this out in the chapter on "The Myth of Government Job Creation": "Government spending increases unemployment because it crowds out so much private sector job creation" (p. 202). Explain with reference to the zero-sum nature of government spending – the cost of a government job, and Bastiat's "What-Is-Seen-and-What-Is-Not-Seen" principle.

THOMAS DILORENZO: Every dollar that the government spends is a dollar that is not spent (or saved) by individuals, families, businesses, and entrepreneurs. Therefore, whenever government grows, private enterprise — the sole source of real job creation — shrinks and unemployment there rises. Each government job destroys several genuine, private sector jobs because of all the bureaucracy and red tape. For example, government may spend $200,000 to give one person a $30,000/year job. And government "jobs" are usually involved in doing something that no one but a few politicians ever voiced a preference for. Private sector jobs, by contrast, cannot survive unless they are part of an enterprise that succeeds in satisfying genuine consumer wants. By contrast, Keynesians like Paul Krugman would have us believe that prosperity is created whenever government takes money out of our bank accounts (with the threat of forcing us to live in a cage for years if we do not pay) and letting government bureaucrats squander the money instead. Part of the Keynesian mantra is that such spending could and should be on "anything" — it doesn't matter, as long as it is government that is doing the spending. The biggest year of private sector economic growth in American economic history was 1946 when the nation was in the middle of a two-thirds reduction in federal government spending as the military was demobilized from World War II. This proves that the Keyensians were always dead wrong, but of course they and their political patrons ignore this reality.

2. MERCER: You quip: “In Washingtonese, if one proposes a $100 billion spending increase, and actual spending increases by ‘only’ $90 billion, they call it a $10 billion budget cut.” We’re in the grip of exactly this kind of a paradox. How is the “Washington Monument Syndrome" playing out in its "sequesteria" version?

DILORENZO: The "Washington Monument Syndrome" is an old bureaucratic trick that is so named because the head of the National Park Service closed down the Washington Monument — the most popular tourist attraction in Washington, D.C. — in the 1960s after Congress refused to fully fund his pie-in-the-sky spending wish list. Tourists from every state, on their annual vacations, called their congressmen to complain, forcing them to give the Park Service bureaucrat all the money he wanted. State and local governments routinely use this sleazy gimmick by immediately threatening to shut down police protection, garbage collection, ambulance service, school buses, and whatever else would impose the maximum pain on the public whenever there is talk of fiscal responsibility. The Obama administration has taken this to buffoonish extremes by threatening to close down airports, etc., were government spending to increase by about one percentage point less than they wish over the next ten years. No one in Washington has proposed cutting a single cent out of the federal budget despite the fact that the surest route to economic recovery would be to chop federal spending in half, and then in half again next year.

3. MERCER: Like tax havens, tax loopholes are ethical and efficient. Your point about efficiencies is especially good: "The time spent by citizens trying to legally avoid taxes is in fact a good investment of their time." Decode the Orwellian Doublespeak of phrases like, "simplifying the tax laws " and "revenue neutrality."

DILORENZO: Politicians and statist economists intentionally confuse the public when they refer to proposed tax increases as "tax reform" and to tax cuts as "wasteful" or "unnecessarily complicated." I have long agreed with Milton Friedman's dictum that the cause of freedom and prosperity is always served by any tax cut, of any kind, at any time. One has to realize that the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Depriving political parasites of revenue is always and everywhere a good idea. The rhetoric of "revenue neutrality" really means that under no circumstances should government — unlike everyone else in society — ever, ever spend a penny less next year than this year. Any tax reform should therefore never, ever, end up putting more money in the pockets of the public at the expense of the political parasite class.

4. MERCER: Expect the "compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the post office" from Obama's health care plan, you forewarn. But as Obama's army of harpies at CNN would argue, his politburo of proctologists has involved itself in the insurance industry merely to enhance markets. Or, to "bring down costs." Dispense with this idiotic notion.

DILORENZO: Government intervention always causes costs to rise and quality to decline. This has always been true; it has especially been true in the field of health care in places like Canada and Great Britain where healthcare was nationalized long ago. There is no reason to believe that the socialists in the Obama administration are better at socialism than were the Soviets, the Eastern Europeans, the Chinese, the Cuban government, or anyone else. The absence of a market feedback mechanism based on profits and losses guarantees government failure. Public choice economists refer to a "bureaucratic rule of two" with regard to governmental provision of any type of service, based on hundreds of empirical articles that show that, on average, a government takeover of any function will double the per-unit cost of providing the product or service.

5. MERCER: You write: "At the heart of the U.S. government's continued takeover of the health care sector of the economy was a law passed during the Obama administration that would eventually drive the private health insurance industry out of business and transform it into a de facto nationalized industry." Elaborate. Since, as you repeatedly warn, the natural laws of economics cannot be repealed, what will these health care exchanges achieve? How will they invariably be funded? What will be the cost to business? To the millions who're losing coverage? Who will ultimately fork out for the per-head fee imposed on medical plans?

DILORENZO: The Obama version of health-care socialism forces insurance companies to cover people with expensive diseases without charging them higher rates to compensate for the additional risk. This effectively will force the insurance companies to pay out billions in health care costs, and then the Obammunists will impose price controls on the industry because that's what socialists always do once they intervene in a market by forcing businesses to offer something for nothing, thereby driving demand through the roof. The price controls will cause massive bankruptcy, at which point the argument will be made that what is needed is "single-payer healthcare," a euphemism for health-care socialism or government-run monopoly. In the meantime, they seem to be imposing hundreds of relatively small, hidden taxes to come up with the revenue to keep the scheme going.

6. MERCER: The Obamacare Survival Guide is a best-seller on Amazon. The market is producing survivalist literature to help Americans navigate the treacherous shoals of this law. What does it tell you? Like me, you must know plenty of Obama-heads (doctors too) who shrugged off the idea that further centralizing health care – a modest healthcare expansion totaling $2 trillion, I believe – would cost them anything at all. As The Lancet recently confirmed, in the UK's National Health Service funding is inversely related to patient outcomes. You speak of "inputs" and "outputs."

DILORENZO: I cited a study by the late Milton Friedman entitled "Inputs and Outputs in Medical Care," published by the Hoover Institution some twenty years ago. In it the Nobel laureate economist showed that, historically, as government became more and more involved in health care by taking over hospitals and funding Medicare and Medicaid, inputs — in terms of money spent — skyrocketed while "output" in terms of patients served declined. He spoke of something called "Gammon's Law," named after a British physician named Max Gammon, who noticed that with healthcare socialism in England, increased "inputs" in the form of massive amounts of money spent always seemed to disappear "as though through a black hole" with little or nothing to show for it in terms of health care.

7. MERCER: You touch briefly on the "private component of GDP." Free-market thinkers get that the private economy alone produces wealth. But no. GDP is a political construct, defined, tracked and manipulated by the D.C. political machine. Unpack the GDP gambit for us, down to its deceptive components.

DILORENZO: Including government spending in the definition of GDP was a creation of John Maynard Keynes, who defined it as C (Private Consumption) + I (Private Investment) + G (Government Purchases) + X-M (Net Exports). In so doing, Keynesians concluded that the most prosperous year in American economic history — 1946 — was actually a year of revival of the Great Depression with a precipitous drop in economic activity because of the huge decline in federal government spending after World War II. Of course, this was NOT a year of depression but an explosion of private investment, consumption, and job creation.

8. MERCER: About that elusive economic recovery: My colleague Vox Day (who sadly called it a day on WND) argued that, “The Great Depression 2.0 will be worse than its predecessor.” Day chalked that up to today's unprecedented levels of debt, consumption and credit, private and public. It's a hunch. But I think you'll disagree.

DILORENZO: No one can predict something like this, especially since today's economy is vastly different from the 1930s. Capital markets are much more sophisticated, for one thing, although government regulators by the thousands do their best to destroy them — and with them what's left of American capitalism. Predictions like this always ignore the resilience of entrepreneurs. As the Austrian Business Cycle theory of Mises and Hayek contends, it is the boom period where all the damage is done in the form of "malinvestment" — in the latest bust this was mostly in real estate. During the recession or depression is when entrepreneurs are forced to become more efficient, more inventive, more creative — or else. This is how the Japanese recovered from something much worse than a depression — long years of war and the dropping of atomic bombs on their country — in a little over a decade.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. She blogs at BarelyABlog.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

The Best of Ilana Mercer

Recently by Ilana Mercer: The Managerial State's Media and MedicalLapdogs

What follows is the second part of a conversation with Karen De Coster, CPA. (Read Part I.)

Karen De Coster is an accounting/finance professional and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the corporate state, food politics, and essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings.

ILANA MERCER: Two months after he had started following the food philosophy you espouse, and 30 pounds lighter, I told the spouse that he was a Karen De Coster fan. Thinking that I was accusing him of some indiscretion, he barked, "What the bleep are you talking about?" He was then informed that his almost overnight weight loss and newly found well-being were due to your recommendations about low-carb, primal/paleo eating. Before KDC, my husband had been gaining weight and swooning — not for any romantic reason, mind you, but, likely, from a prediabetic condition. Although we were raised on real food and had always eaten "things natural," the spouse was wedded to carbs — bread, rice, and mounds of pasta. Then he began eating like nature intended, and has never looked back. Tell us what he (and millions like him) was experiencing, what "going paleo" means, and why it cured him.

KAREN DE COSTER: If Sean, who had supplemented real food with some bad foods, was so dramatically affected by a total switch to the paleo-primal lifestyle, imagine how others would be transformed by it! Most Americans eat a diet dominated by pre-packaged, highly processed foods, even more so than fast food. In fact, during your next trip to the grocery store, survey the contents of peoples' carts and you will observe that most carts are loaded to the gills with boxes, bags, and cans of processed foods, along with a cornucopia of sugar-laced, liquid calories.

Food journalist Michael Pollan has often spoken about how grocery stores are laid out so that shoppers are tempted to buy as much convenience food as possible. Staples such as milk are always the furthest items from the entrance door so that shoppers have to weave their way to the back of the store, and along that path will be the industrial food machine's most profitable (in terms of profit margin) items such as pop and snacks. Pollan challenges shoppers to stick to the perimeter of stores, where the whole foods are found.

Many people refer to the modern diet of convenience as the SAD (Standard American Diet). However, I always refer to the food system that produces the SAD as the Industrial Food Machine. There is nothing uniquely American about this diet at all. These foods are created by the industrial system. The industrial machine is churning out what I call u2018chemicals laced with food.' The designation "American" is used because America had the industrial infrastructure to produce these foods, though many of them did not even originate here. Our industrial system has been very efficient with food production while it is heavily backed by a political subsidy scheme, so America is really the first country to fully embrace the lifestyle of eating inexpensive, processed crap that takes little or no preparation time. The term Western Pattern Diet would be a more accurate description of what has actually taken place.

However, this industrial diet is no longer uniquely American. Due to the efficiency of our production and distribution channels, we have exported our convenience food ways all over the world. Add to that the American political machinations that support and maintain an omnipotent corporate state (system of government-business alliances), and you have a mega-industrial organism that is fully supported by the power of government decrees.

When people adopt the paleo-primal way, that essentially means that they give up the industrial diet that consists mainly of refined grains; processed foods in a can, bag, or box; carbohydrate-rich snack foods; refined sugar; refined salt; sweetened, liquid calories; industrial oils; fast foods; and maybe even industrial meats that are the end result of confined animals loaded up on processed grains, steroids, and hormones.

I don't always like the term "paleo" used alone, because the original "paleo diet" is more restrictive and a tad doctrinaire. It calls for the elimination of all foods not available during the Paleolithic era, which essentially means Neolithic foods such as dairy. I like to think in terms of adopting a real food lifestyle as vs. a dogmatic diet. "Diet," to me, implies the short term; such as someone wanting to lose weight fast to fit into a wedding party dress. A lifestyle is a shift in thinking from the short term to the longer term. This change in lifestyle means defying the conventional wisdom that has been heavily influenced by politicking and powerful special interests.

Giving up the industrial diet is difficult in the short term because of the intentionally addictive properties of modern foods. Refined sugars — and replacement sweeteners — and refined salts are just as addictive to some people as nicotine or heroin. Yet people don't like to be told they are addicted to carbs, but it's not difficult to see that behavior in people who are close to you.

It has taken a long time, but finally, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has received the bad rap it deserves. Always, the industrial system is ready to trot out yet another "food" that is cheap to produce, and it hooks consumers with carbohydrates and refined salt. Two of the cheapest items found in so many foods, HFCS and soybean oil, are heavily subsidized by the government-agricultural alliance known as Big Agra. While HFCS is starting to fall out of favor due to a media thrashing of the product's downside, soybean oil seems to be in almost everything, and that's because soybean subsidies have increased exponentially since about 1997.

I think people seem to forget how resilient the human body is in terms of healing, and at any age. One doesn't have to be a twenty-something to experience the power of going paleo-primal. Quitting the industrial diet and gravitating toward real food, even on an 80-20 mix, brings most folks much success and quick healing for all the various things that ail them. Cutting out gluten, sugar, processed foods, and industrial oils alone will usually produce a drastic change in weight, health, and/or appearance. The paleo-primal lifestyle brings one back to eating the kind of food that humans evolved to eat.

Let's remember that carbohydrates are not bad because they are carbs; it's the kind of carbs that we are eating nowadays that are destructive. So many foods are processed and refined. Refined grains are a staple for most people in America because they are a source of cheap calories. Real carbs from real foods — potatoes, vegetables, and fruits — are not the root of the carb addiction in people. True, some folks just have to stay away from carbs as much as possible because they can't adapt. Additionally, some people may enjoy the natural fructose in fruit, but they keep their fruit intake at a minimum to avoid eating too much simple sugar.

MERCER: Whenever people hear that one generally avoids pasta, breads, cereals — grain-based products — you get the stare. "Everything in moderation," people will intone. "Some whole grain products are essential to your health." True or false?

DE COSTER: It's amusing to see how often "essential" and "grains" are used together, and no, grains aren't essential for robust health. For starters, they are not nutrient dense. Additionally, they are loaded with carbohydrates, hence their addiction. For many people, it's not much different than eating sugar. When considering the importance of the three macronutrients — carbohydrates, protein, and fat — carbs are the only one not essential to sustain life.

Yet grains are cheap thanks to the existence of powerful political-business alliances robbing taxpayers to redistribute booty to Big Agra. To counter the anti-white attack of earlier years (white potatoes, white flour, white rice), the whole grain campaign was created. The government and its assorted offshoots — grain lobbies and national nutritional organizations in cahoots with the medical establishment — ramped up the crusade to brainwash consumers on the whole grain question. The Whole Grains Council still uses the slogan "Eat Grains at Every Meal."

Unfortunately, people are still walking around in the fog of the unknown, believing that whole grains are, as you noted, "essential" for life and health. The government-Big Agra alliance established grains as the foundation of the federal food pyramid, and since that time we have witnessed 30+ years of mounting obesity and the prevalence of modern disease. The industrial food system is churning out a zillion gimmick products to leverage the pro-grain propaganda, and the marketing whizzes excel at throwing simplistic slogans at consumers through advertising channels. Still, people order wheat bread in restaurants, and most of it is nothing more than white bread with caramel coloring added. And they don't have a clue! They think they are making the "healthy" choice. Other breads are labeled "whole grain," but they only contain a portion of whole grain flour. Understandably, people are confused by the terminology of wheat, whole wheat, and whole grain. Most of this market is very deceptive.

Not only are grains not essential, but it's also important to remember that grains can be destructive to some people. We have not evolved to eat grains, and some people cannot adapt to grains without suffering adverse health effects. Furthermore, grain eaters become sugar burners instead of fat burners, and then they can't understand why they keep getting fatter on their "healthy" diet. Another point that most people don't understand is that modern wheat is not your grandfather's wheat. Modern wheat has been cross-bred and hybridized many times through the years, so its molecular structure has taken a drastically different form.

Grains contain anti-nutrients (gluten, lectin, phytic acid), and our bodies cannot break down these anti-nutrients. That is why many traditional foodies will soak, sprout, and ferment grains, even though those traditional methods don't necessarily make grains a whole lot more digestible.

MERCER: What did you cook for your Christmas feast?

DE COSTER: Pastured ham from a half hog that came from Melo Farms, my pork/chicken farmers. The pig led a happy pig life, spending her days foraging the pasture and eating organic supplements. Probably something made out of fresh-grown yams, too. I get them from a local farmer who is not a big government certified organic, but he doesn't spray and he applies organic methodology. Lastly, Brussels sprouts are a great early winter vegetable here in Michigan. I have a huge stalk fresh-picked. For drink, I get fresh-made Michigan apple cider (Honeycrisp apples) from Hy's Cider Mill. I make drinks with the cider, local honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, and perhaps something to "spike" it up.

MERCER: "Spiking" is especially essential in an era of galloping statism. I call it "medicating." As the Irish say, "Water is a good drink if taken in the right spirit." Thanks Karen.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. She blogs at BarelyABlog.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

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A headline on the Huffington Post blared: "Comfort Dogs Sent To Newtown From Chicago Area To Help Community After Sandy Hook Shooting." CNN's top dog Anderson Cooper followed — or led the pack; who cares? — with a similar segment about insourcing dogs to comfort the afflicted community of Newtown, Conn.

One day after the massacre of 20 children and seven adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, "a group of golden retrievers from the Chicago area made a cross-country journey to … Newtown."

Woof, woof, or barf, barf?

Are there no companion dogs in Newtown, Conn.? Must expert dogs be brought in to properly minister to the mourners? Apparently so. Even the neighborhood dog is now unqualified for the big time.

The pornography of public grief in our country is almost as warped as the evil (not ill), mother-slaying, mass murderer responsible for the Sandy Hook carnage. There is very little dignity in the freaky spectacle of mass contagion — where members of the public turn professional mourners, flock to memorial happenings for victims they never knew, and mill about for hours in the hope of being discovered by the master of ceremonies, the journalist.

These ritualistic displays are symptomatic of our festering cultural commons.

At the center of this festering culture that turns victims into a backdrop and prop to the state's army of experts is the journalist.

I wager that as I write, MC Anderson Cooper is reconfiguring his CNN "Hero of the Year" Awards. This low-watt, dim bulb of a journo-cum-activist chooses America's heroes each and every year, based on how many tears they shed.

The victims of killer Adam Lanza have become a sideshow in the nation's pornography of grief. Tragedy is denuded of any dignity, reduced to a showy public affair to be managed by the Managerial State's media and medical lapdogs.

Besides, this blow-by-blow, wall-to-wall coverage of the events in Newtown — and of every related utterance on the issue since, official or other — is the very essence of the postmodern deconstruction of the discipline of journalism.

If there is no edifying information on the case, no reporting needs to take place.

It is at times like these that I miss my dear friend Tom Szasz, RIP more than ever, although I know that Dr. Szasz does not miss the times we are living through.

Szasz, the author of the seminal Myth of Mental Illness and other books, devoted decades of his life to dismantling the rickety scaffolding upon which psychiatry was founded. In his work, professor Szasz exposed over two centuries of physical torture and tortured logic, taking the necessary analytical and empirical solvents to the state-empowered fraternity of sorcerers that is psychiatry.

Consider: Medicine uses the same principles to explain health and disease. Conversely, the pseudo-science of psychiatry and its legions of followers use one set of principles to explain rational behavior; another set to explain irrational behavior.

When a person does something ghastly, psychiatry concludes, post hoc, that he has ceased being a morally responsible agent, and herewith acquired a disease. Do we ever seek chemical causes for positive and extraordinary actions? No. As the benefactor of mankind does good things, we attribute his actions to choice. As a murderer like Adam Lanza perpetrated evil, we attribute his deeds to causes: to a diseased mind or an inattentive mother.

The paradox at the heart of this root-causes fraud is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after evil deeds have been committed (reasoning backward is an error of logic). Good deeds have no need of mitigating circumstances. Left-liberals of this mindset (among them most conservatives, who are now liberals in all but name) acknowledge human agency and free will if — and only when — adaptive actions are involved.

At the root of it all is the rejection of the existence of unadulterated evil. Rather than accept the reality of evil — sh-t happens, live with it and be prepared to proceed against it — misconduct has been medicalized.

To listen to the nation's psychiatric and journo mumbo-jumbo is to come to believe that crimes are caused, not committed; that perpetrators — mere victims of societal forces — don't do the crime, but are driven to their deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors: bullying, the availability of firearms, or an imaginary organic brain disease for which no scientific evidence exists.

The nation's handlers — the centralizing forces on both sides of the bifurcated political spectrum — are the true "Mad Hatters."

And these self-serving tele-twits and pinko pukes have gone into high gear.

Since a killer is never evil, only ill — it is assumed that with government imprimatur, the modern-day witch doctor and his potions can exorcise that evil, for evil is, after all, a manifestation of organic disease. Just like cancer. (Not!)

Placing wicked behavior beyond the conceptual strictures of traditional morality makes it amenable to "therapeutic" interventions.

Currently being "debated" are still tighter controls over contrarians and incarceration before the fact, gun bans and confiscation, and yet more gun-free zones, where outlaws are free to shoot the law-abiding like they would fish in a barrel.

If we accept these prior-restraint arguments, then we must apply them ad absurdum. We would have to forthwith stop all teenagers from driving. Or do as the (crap) country of Britain does: tear a child from the arms of a mother if the mother is obese or holds opinions unpalatable to her political and psychiatric masters.

“As soon as we surrender the principle that the state should not interfere in any questions touching on the individual’s mode of life,” wrote Ludwig von Mises in 1927, “we end by regulating and restricting the latter down to the smallest details.”

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. She blogs at BarelyABlog.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

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Karen De Coster is an accounting/finance professional and a freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and sometimes unpaid troublemaker. She writes about economics, financial markets, the medical establishment, the corporate state, food politics, and essentially, anything that encroaches upon the freedom of her fellow human beings.

ILANA MERCER: State-subsidized Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are the intensive rearing facilities in which the animals we eat live wretched lives and die a ghastly death. Libertarians ("bookish buffoons" you call them) generally consider these death camps for critters as exemplars of the free market. Most have not awoken to the fact that factory farms (CAFOs) are antithetical to the free market. Explain.

KAREN DE COSTER: The CAFO concept is an industrial concept. Large numbers of animals began to come out of CAFOs in the 1950s, and then more so through the 1970s and 1980s, when cattle and pigs began to come predominantly from the CAFO system. That time period saw the shift from the family farm to large industrial factory farming.

The confinement model aims at economies of scale — that is, the highest output at the lowest cost. In the meat industry, this model sacrifices food quality and raises ethical concerns in order to maintain desired profit margins. Yet many libertarians (and I am a market anarchist) who refuse to explore the facts of food politics still believe that the mega-industrial machine is the epitome of the free market. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the United States as well as Europe, there are billions of dollars per year in government subsidies to support this model of animal agriculture.

First, the government subsidies artificially lower the cost of feed that saves the industry, as a whole, billions per year. This allows for a large reduction in operating costs. The competitors of these industrial-factory farms are those farmers who choose to farm their animals in diversified, pasture-based systems where they produce their own forage, and without government subsidies. Additionally, farm bills come with massive incentives to influence investment in the industrial-factory farming system, and this spurs artificial growth.

The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), a mandatory spending program, doles out financial and technical assistance for agriculture conservation. It's actually a welfare program for CAFOs because these large-scale operations leave behind a massive trail of environmental and biological destruction — soil erosion and sedimentation, polluted watersheds, and manure and wastewater issues. This impacts the air, water, and land quality. There are also public health consequences from the routine administration of antibiotics that is necessary to keep animals alive within an intensely confined area.

Thus the government contributes to the cost of conservation practices to clean up the mess to sustain profit margins in the industry and keep the industrial farms operable. An EQIP contract can pay up to 90 percent of the costs for planning, design, capital, labor, maintenance, and training for conservation projects. This program was funded to the tune of $1.75 billion for fiscal year 2012. The subsidies are just one reason why this industrial agricultural model has been called unsustainable.

Government policy has created CAFOS, and many years of supplementary government policies serves to maintain their existence. If the industrial-factory model farmers were left to clean up their own mess to sustain operations and pay their own costs, the industry model would be unprofitable. Instead, these streams of subsidies enable low-cost industrial food and healthy profit margins, and this is what the pasture-based farmers are up against.

Lastly, to your point, what kind of human beings are comfortable with the fact that these livestock are indeed abused while they live the life of hell, kept barely alive in squalid conditions, with no mercy for them in their death? I'm not sure how the house pet — cat, lizard, or other furry rat — is seen as sacred while we allow animals, who eventually become our food, to be tortured and maimed. Not only is the food product adversely affected in terms of quality, but also, the means of getting the food to the table are appalling and unethical.

MERCER: The USDA food pyramid, the "nutrition-diet establishment," the Standard American Diet (SAD), and the Sovietized medical establishment that pushes food orthodoxy: How much, in your opinion, are they to blame for the fact that Americans prefer to eat food out of a box? We are not nearly as lazy or as statist as the French, yet the French have managed to cling to a fine culinary tradition.

DE COSTER: The government deserves all of the blame because the food pyramid was not founded on science, but rather, it was based on politics and serving special interests. The food pyramid is a purely political animal developed by politicians for political purposes. It was Senator George McGovern and his Select Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that gave us these politicized and destructive federal dietary guidelines.

The food politics of the Committee were set in motion and McGovern's Dietary Goals for the United States were hammered out at the hands of federal politicians and a journalist who wrote the final draft. These dietary guidelines attacked the meat and dairy industries while they propped up the powerful grain cartels. The guidelines were heavily influenced by lobbying from the food industry foot-soldiers who vilified animal fat and won, in spite of the numerous, highly qualified scientists who debunked their political agenda with the power of science. The Dietary Goals for the United States (The McGovern Report) were issued in 1977, leading to the 1980 publication of Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first edition. Since that time, the government has had a non-scientific lock on dietary-nutritional central planning.

This political catastrophe set the stage for the Industrial Food Machine corporatocracy and 3+ decades of the government Conventional Wisdomists and their Big Food allies making Americans fat and sick, while also sending our calamitous food "culture" overseas to make everyone else fat and sick, too.

And thirty years after McGovern put the wheels in motion by politicizing personal eating habits and empowering the Political Food Machine, he received the World Food Prize in 2008 for "increasing the quality, quantity, or availability of food in the world." So here, quantity refers to the subsidized, mega-grain industry, harmful GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms), and decrepit CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Organizations). Quality refers to industrial, processed, ready-made crap-in-a-box-or-bag fortified with "healthy vitamins" and marketed as nutritious because the plasticized foods conform to the government's low-fat, high-carb dietary guidelines and fraudulent food pyramid. And availability means all forms of food welfare, foreign subsidies, and the use of political force to sell subsidized agricultural products overseas. Dr. Mary Eades, a member of the ancestral health community, once said that "the government pyramid sells agricultural products; it doesn't sell health."

The French are indeed far lazier and prone to socialist norms than we are in the US. But they don't have the legion of Diet Dictators that we have here, in the form of government councils, special interest lobbies, propaganda squads, and nutrition nannies and czars. The French, in spite of similar agricultural methodology and subsidies, maintain a food culture that carries over from generation to generation. That is something we have never had here in the states. France hasn't had to deal with the folly that has raged here in the US, including a war on fat, meat, alcohol, and other fine food traditions.

MERCER: Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. As convention has it, Americans should give thanks to Native Americans for having taught them to plant corn. Even if this palliative history – this bit of myth-making – were true, all in all corn is a modern-day curse, is it not? Give us the goods on corn and Thanksgiving. What "primal" recipes made their way onto your Thanksgiving dinner table?

DE COSTER: Corn is at the top of the government's list for subsidies. The current farm bill gives billions per year to commodity producers of corn. According to the EWG farm subsidy database, corn subsidies in the US totaled $82 billion from 1995-2011. These subsidies take the financial risk out of the system, thereby allowing for a fabricated sustainability. Hence we have the corn-bred Industrial Food Machine.

Cheap corn is a staple in processed, industrial foods. No matter how unhealthy these products are known to be, they become the preferred choice of food for consumers looking for bargains in order to chop at their family budgets.

Additionally, we have had 30+ years of federal alternative fuel subsidies to support ethanol production. In the early 1980s, the government's ethanol subsidies made it worthwhile for everyone to risk getting into the corn growing game. They did, and the subsidies drove down the price of corn while the government's tariffs on sugar drove up prices of that product. These government interventions brought us an economical alternative to the tariff-burdened sugar: high fructose corn syrup. Like soybean oil, HFCS is found in so many processed foods, as well as beverages. Nowadays, you have to go to a Mercado (a Mexican market) to buy coke with cane sugar instead of the usual HFCS.

The pilgrims may have celebrated with corn as a way of showing gratitude for their plentiful harvest, but growing that corn involved risk, capital investment, much labor, and it offered no subsidies.

For a primal Thanksgiving, I have access here to free-range, heritage turkeys; raw butter; locally grown organic sweet potatoes, and fresh-off-the-farm stalks of Brussels sprouts. I make my own mayonnaise from free-range eggs, vinegars, olive oil, and nut oils. It takes 10-15 minutes to make a big batch that stays good long enough to use it all. This gives me a pass on the government's horrific soybean oil, most of which is made from subsidized, genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Furthermore, Monsanto corn will never make it to my Thanksgiving table.

MERCER: Speaking of the devil, what's up with the misguided love establishment libertarians have for GMOs and Monsanto?

DE COSTER: Wrong-headed libertarians worship Monsanto and exalt the Frankenfoods (GMO) industry because they believe these "food" innovations are advancing mankind and therefore represent the ultimate free market. No matter what your views on the science of genetically modified foods, the Big Food-Big Agra complex, as I have mentioned, is a heavily subsidized and government-enabled corporatocracy.

Stay tuned for Part II of my conversation with Karen.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. She blogs at BarelyABlog.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

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There's David Petraeus, former CIA director, formerly a four-star general who cultivated his own celebrity. There's his mistress-cum-stalker, the bombastic, narcissistic Paula Broadwell, who despite — or, rather, because of — her pockmarked character has been propelled to prominence by the country's elites.

There's Petraeus' even skankier BFF (Best Friends Forever), Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, and her dysfunctional twin. Primped like street walkers, the twins can be seen in pictures, flanking their BFF and his ungroomed, graying wife, Holly Petraeus.

The fawning press takes the position that this — the flotsam and jetsam of American society — is indeed an aristocracy of talent and merit. Broadwell, they tell us, was soul-mate and intellectual companion to our grandiose general. Their mating was a meeting of minds. Woe is me!

In the tradition of this "meritocracy" is U.S. Marine General John Allen. Mentored by Petraeus, Allen is the top American commander in Afghanistan, and candidate for supreme commander of NATO. Allen and Kelley were caught in flagrante. As a shrinking segment of America toiled to support these ponces in-style, the two had been exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 steamy, pixelated pages over the course of two years.

On behalf of the twin sister of the Tampa tease, Allen and his mentor Petraeus went so far as to join forces and intervene in a (no doubt sordid) child-custody dispute, heard in the District of Columbia Superior Court.

Petraeus's paramour blew her cover as the lover some months back. The pushy, dumbbell-obsessed lightweight is said to have threatened the cheap-looking BFF (Kelly). One source dismissed the threat as a mere "cat fight"; the other hyped it as a "stay away from my guy, or else" broadside. (And the difference between these "barbed" observations?)

Described by ABC's Brian Ross as a "name-dropping, social-climbing, bored socialite, who ingratiated herself to the brass through parties and favors," the Tampa tease's grating self-importance played out on a 911 call," in which she demands protection from the media. "u2018Cause I'm an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability" she told the dispatcher in Kim-Kardashian twang.

Why appeal to the rights of private property, when you enjoy the prerogatives of celebrity?

As for Broadwell's romp through elite institutions stateside and abroad: A graduate of West Point, Broadwell holds degrees from and a research associate's position at Harvard. She was made a poster girl for "Inspired Women Magazine." By invitation of our country's cognoscenti, Broadwell took her groupie tour to C-SPAN's Book TV, and on the speaker's circuit. (Bristol Palin is there too, commanding between $15,000 and $30,000 a pop.)

Richly revealing is the Ph.D. in "Petraeus" on which Broadwell is "working." Broadwell's "thesis" tells you all you need to know about intellectual life in the West.

This Anatomy-of-a-Leader dissertation was green-lighted by the Department of War Studies at King's College London, no less, where Broadwell was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate.

“The description of Broadwell's doctoral research,” reports a Forbes magazine academic, “is almost identical to ‘her publisher's summary of [the book] All In: The Education of General David Petraeus."

Not only has Broadwell's praise to Petraeus been accepted as a doctoral dissertation, but it would appear that this affectionate biography was ghostwritten by one Vernon Loeb.

I rest my case. Military top brass and the brassy broads who attach themselves to Rome's Army do not stand aloof from the state and its supermarket culture.

Its evil imperial reach notwithstanding, the military is manacled by doctrinaire mediocrity, multiculturalism, feminism, affirmative action (fem and other), and every postmodern pox imaginable.

And this is only the froth on the top. I wonder what next big shoe is fixing to drop.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] lives at www.ilanamercer.com. Her latest book is Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.

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Reading through David Frum’s Unpatriotic Conservatives, a shabby indictment against those he lazily blankets as “paleoconservatives,” I was reminded of a fascinating paper Jörg Guido Hülsmann of the Mises Institute delivered some years back entitled The Production of Signs and the Growth of the State.

“The most important class of signs are the words we use, in particular the words of the written language,” explained Hülsmann. We come to understand “the fundamental facts of moral and political life: religion, liberty, love, hope, faith, property, justice, and all other purely intellectual things” through the configurations we create with letters of the alphabet.

How fragile then are those cherished concepts, and all the more so in the hands of a manipulator such as David Frum. Frum’s style of debate is Kafkaesque.

Take this paragraph:

The antiwar conservatives aren’t satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

Note how Frum dictates the terms of debate. He starts off by generously welcoming “questions” about the war on Iraq. But with the next breath Frum constricts the scope of discussion, making the acceptance of the “war on terror” a prerequisite.

By the by, the National Review’s blog really showcases the essence of the “girlie-boys,” to use Ann Coulter’s coinage for this lot. Recall, the “boys with the bowties” dropped Coulter’s syndicated column after September 11 when the firebrand columnist suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that we should invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. Considering that the neoconservatives at the NR advocate the two of Ann’s moves, I’ve a strong suspicion as to what prompted the firing caprice.

Christianity!

Or more appropriately, Coulter’s contention that converting Muslims to a religion of peace might do the trick. This was beyond the pale for the multicultists at the NR (who also regularly chide the Pope).

It’s hard not to notice how similar the simpering on the NR’s blogistan is to Mrs. Frum’s infamous e-mail. Danielle Crittenden had done a mass mailing to her pals after her hubby had coined the axis of evil phrase, expressing her “hope you’ll indulge my wifely pride.”

Rod Dreher of NR exudes the same fake saccharine humility: “I suppose it might be unseemly to praise one’s own magazine,” he blogs, “but I am proud to be associated with a publication responsible for David Frum’s magnificent essay.” As Golda Meir once said, “Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.”

In response to Jonah’s whine that “paleos have been goading and mocking” him, not least by naming his mag the “Goldberg’s Review,” I suggest substituting the “Goldberg Variations.”

Bach’s monumental score for the keyboard ought to remind Jonah that the West that paleolibertarians and conservatives love and wish to peacefully restore is the civilization epitomized by the faith-inspired beauty of Bach. It’s the West reflected in the poignancy and “deep pain” Pope John Paul II expresses these days with every fiber of his crippled frame. The picture of this righteous man, head clasped in hands, overcome with sorrow at the savagery unfolding, trumps the nasty specter of the American metropole at its most shameful, cheered by the “girlie-boys” at NR.

A testament to his manipulation of language is that the "facts" Frum marshals for each of the raps he draws up against paleos don’t coincide with the accusations:

The antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism… And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.

Frum’s mode of argument is slightly more sophisticated than Michael Savage's. Savage yelled that he’d demonstrate to his viewers “Why We Fight.” If language means anything, then the reason we fight against Iraq must directly relate to an aggression Iraq has visited on us, at the very least.

Instead, Savage began screening and rescreening the attack on the Twin Towers, amidst hysterical yelps of, “This is Why We Fight.” His frenzy incites the same in the recipient of the distorted message, thus subverting reason. Note how the signs Guido Hülsmann speaks of have been severed from what they signify — the message Savage conveys is that we fight Iraq because Saddam brought down the Twin Towers. On the facts, this is false.

The sophistry of the State’s speechwriter is similar: As evidence that Pat Buchanan “espouses defeatism,” Frum dredges Buchanan’s observation that other than to use their might, Americans do not understand the conflicts and terrain they plunge into. This is an intelligent observation about American insularity and cultural chauvinism.

Frum affects a similar disconnect between the indictment and the evidence he advances against Toronto Sun foreign correspondent Eric Margolis. Margolis recommended non-aggressive ways in which Arabs might prevent war against Iraq. This Frum labels as a “yearning for defeat.” If one respects the words used by the communicator — Margolis — and their meaning, rather than resort to conjecture, then what Margolis was saying was aimed at trying to peacefully thwart American aggression and prevent defeat for all involved.

As is evident from his tittle-tattle tome (and like his wife), Frum is a gossip. His essay is in keeping with this unfortunate character trait. He produces a series of vignettes designed to "prove" that paleos developed an ideology (which, in the case of paleolibertarians, is as old as the natural law), in order to compensate for alleged career failure.

So we discover that the delightful Paul Gottfried doesn’t entertain his students and that paleos are among the more “fractious and quarrelsome folk in the conservative universe.” (Frum fails to allow that non-conformists do tend to be “belligerent,” the word my spouse uses for his wife.) To discredit paleoconservative or paleolibertarian ideas, however, one must tackle the ideas, not the personalities. Claiming that Paul Gottfried, a consistently engaging and interesting intellectual, didn’t win a popularity contest with a bunch of 19-year-olds fails to tackle his ideas. Nor can he be refuted by the fact that he teaches at a small college. In order to be taken seriously, Frum must deal with the substance, not personalities or professional travails vis-à-vis the mainstream.

I can’t speak for paleoconservatives, but paleolibertarians care first about the effects of the state on civil society. In the words of Lew Rockwell:

Paleolibertarianism holds with Lord Acton that liberty is the highest political end of man, and that all forms of government intervention — economic, cultural, social, international — amount to an attack on prosperity, morals, and bourgeois civilization itself, and thus must be opposed at all levels and without compromise.

Everything flows from the passion for “the Old Republic of property rights, freedom of association, and radical political decentralization.” What Frum calls our “obsessive denunciations of Martin Luther King” is borne of the understanding that “civil rights” legislation is inimical to property rights and freedom of association.

Perforce, Frum charges paleos with racism. And he mocks us for allegedly being incapable of reconciling our alleged belief in “the incorrigible inferiority of darker-skinned people,” with our perception that “darker-skinned people are gaining advantage over whites."

What a skilled obscurantist!

While the strength of the paleolibertarian team comes from its enduring commitment to natural rights and justice, the strength of the Frum faction comes from its endorsement of the Almighty State. Yet, the State is conspicuously absent from Frum’s silly screed.

Frum must certainly be aware that the State redistributes wealth from those who create it to those who consume it. Frum must also be aware that libertarians oppose this coercive distribution of wealth by the State. And even Frum must be cognizant of discernible trends in wealth creation and wealth consumption. Ditto where crime is concerned: Certain populations are more likely to be perpetrators, others more likely to be victims.

Are these observations racist? To the extent that it is a relevant variable in crime and welfare, paleos comment honestly about demographics.

Yes, certain segments of society are gaining at the expense of others, but there is nothing inexplicable here if one considers the entity whose bidding Frum does so effectively. The ousting of white males from positions of prominence is courtesy of State directive! Surely even David Frum knows that. The beef paleolibertarians have is with the State for seizing and redistributing private property, for prohibiting the rightful exercise of freedom of contract and freedom of association, and for making all-out self-defense impossible.

Jonah claims, incidentally, that David Frum is “libertarian on the economy.” I don’t know any libertarian who supports the pseudo-science of climate change and the concomitant advocated policies, which Frum apparently does. But if he has a libertarian streak, Frum must have heard of property rights. Why, then, is it a racist notion that productive Americans should not have to subsidize free riders? Frum heaps scorn on Buchanan for having said that “many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second.”

Just as property rights are not a new paleo idea, but rather a little Lockean indulgence taken very seriously by the American founders, so too are paleo ideas on foreign policy and American adventurism, rooted in, to quote Felix Morley, the traditional American attitude of “opposition to what George Washington called u2018overgrown military establishments.'” Frum’s attempt to cast paleo ideas as new and discontinuous is ignorant of the history of the ideas.

Equally revealing about the Frum framework is his aversion to objective truth. He says that “race and ethnicity are huge and unavoidable issues in modern life, and the liberal orthodoxies on the matter tend to be doctrinaire and hypocritical.” Paleo refutation, however, he condemns because it too advances orthodoxies. Does it not occur to this doxy of the State that some “orthodoxies” may be true? Is it not possible that what Buchanan and Harvard economist George Borjas report about immigration is simply correct?

As I’ve written, and with reference to Borjas’ work, it is true that since the 1965 immigration amendments, “the United States has been granting entry visas to persons who have relatives in the United States, with no regard to their skills or economic potential.” “Immigrants today are less skilled than their predecessors, more likely to require public assistance, and far more likely to have children who remain in poor, segregated communities.” An influx of the unskilled is, moreover, responsible for the lowering of wages across the board, something that hurts poor Americans, especially blacks.

Since 1965, mass immigration has constituted the quintessential “swamping by the central state of an existing population for political ends,” to quote paleolibertarian economist, Murray N. Rothbard. Those who laud the changing US, and want more of the same, ignore the fact that this radical transformation, good or bad, has been engineered by the State, to which Frum is in thrall.

Again, the State’s speechwriter pries words from their meaning. This time Chronicles’ Thomas Fleming catches static for asserting that we “would soon be a nation no longer stratified by class, but by race as well. Europeans and Orientals will compete, as groups, for the top positions, while the other groups will nurse their resentments on the weekly welfare checks they receive from the other half.”

Why, pray, is this statement evidence of “racial animus”? Orientals and Europeans, if I am not mistaken, are the highest earners. They shoulder the tax burden. I would think that as a “libertarian on economics,” Frum would be irate that, for being high achievers, certain people are denied equal treatment under the law.

Once again, Frum’s appended slur doesn’t jibe with the utterance of the slurred.

Frum’s impoverished coda is full of journalistic jingoism about the epoch September 11 has unleashed. Paleos, spoilsports that they are, have failed to celebrate one of the most formidable consolidations of State power in recent American history. For this failure, David and the “girlie-boys” are going to turn their backboneless backs on us.

To Frum’s “War is a great clarifier,” we offer Ludwig von Mises’ words: “War only destroys; it cannot create. War, carnage, destruction and devastation we have in common with the predatory beast of the jungle.” A good synonym for neoconservative.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] is a columnist for WorldNetDaily.com. For more about her work, please visit www.ilanamercer.com.

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The film Spy Games reached a crescendo as retiring CIA officer Robert Redford transfers $282,000 of his life's savings to an account in the Cayman Islands. The money is supposed to help pay for the rescue of Redford's bureau protégé Brad Pitt, who has been "burned" by his employers at the CIA for going solo. Pitt turns rogue, when he has a revelation. He discovers that working for the CIA is a dirty business. For years, Pitt manages to swim in some very polluted waters until he becomes romantically entangled. The object of his affections is a bitter British bit, who herself is no stranger to blood sports. In one of her varied incarnations as a human rights activist, this gentle soul blows up a building. In the process, she kills the son of a Chinese diplomat. Unbeknownst to Pitt's love interest, the CIA offers her up to the Chinese in exchange for an American captive operative. No great loss, says I, but not according to Pitt, who attempts to rescue the girl from this infernal pit. In the process, Pitt is captured, tortured, and is about to be put to death, when Redford pulls a clever stunt.

As the Cayman Island transaction is playing out on the screen, my mind becomes tangentially – but necessarily – preoccupied. I confess, I can easily become bored during a film, and am wont to tug at the sleeve of my better quarter and, not unlike a two-year-old, ask questions: "I'm not sure," I tell the wincing man, "that Redford would be able to complete such a transaction now, not with the new anti-terrorism laws." "Can't you leave me in peace," comes the poor man's tortured reply, a line he has commandeered from Basil Fawlty of Fawlty Towers.

Back home, I attempt to search for the relevant information among the sea of "Legislation Related to the Attack of September 11." The contagion includes nine "Bills and Joint Resolutions Signed Into Law, nine "Other Resolutions Approved," fifteen items of "Legislation With Floor Action," and dozens of "Legislation Without Floor Action." Sure enough, the protagonist – not to mention the screenplay writer – in Spy Games would have found his style cramped somewhat by the new USA PATRIOT ACT. Banker's secrecy agreements notwithstanding, Redford's broker would probably be wise to "file a report of a suspicious financial transaction." An amendment to this act indeed mandates that a registered broker submit a suspicious activity report.

The bills that have already been signed into law have been exposed many times over for their assaults on liberties, assaults that are not commensurate with safety. The banking subterfuge is no different, and neither is it new. As Veronique de Rugy of the Cato Institute notes, "Financial transactions and bank accounts in the United States have been monitored for some time now." Unfortunately, this monitoring – a spying game that the American Bankers Association pegs at roughly $10 billion a year – didn’t detect the nine SunTrust accounts used in Florida by the terrorists involved in the attack of the World Trade Center.

The USA PATRIOT ACT is indeed supposed to provide "Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." In theory, the Act could certainly make an alien with terrorist affinities "ineligible for admission or deportable," that is if such ties were readily traceable. The Act cannot void of vipers the many U.S-based Jihad nesting grounds, set up for the purpose of funneling ideological trainees into the terrorism trade, just as "French laws monitoring bank accounts and illegal activities don’t stop Algerian terrorists living in France from regularly murdering people by placing bombs in subways."

If the existing votes-for-visas immigration policy were not bad enough, Bill S1424 proposes to grant officials "permanent authority" to confer an "S" visa on an alien if he can supply critical information with respect to criminal or terrorist organizations. The thought of bureaucrats freely using visas as bait to recruit operatives for the intelligence community is chilling. Still less confidence-inspiring is the notion of releasing into American neighborhoods individuals who are in a position to rat out an al-Qaida member.

Then there are the Resolutions condemning any "discrimination" against Muslim Americans. Aware as we are that freedom of association has long been prohibited, and forced integration mandated – does this Resolution also condemn sensible security-related profiling? If so, it is positively perilous to our safety.

Many – if not most – bills have deceiving titles. The appellation of the "Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act" masks a bailout bill for the airline industry. Other bills like the one proposed by, wouldn't you have guessed, "the Hildebeast," are worse than useless. Sen. Clinton spearheaded an increase in funding to "mental health providers serving public safety workers affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11." The de reguer therapy used to "treat" such workers would be crisis intervention and debriefing. This psychotherapeutic modality is useless as far as efficacy goes, and may even be harmful to its recipients.

A cursory perusal of the legislation related to the attack serves as an intemperate – and much needed – reminder that the "work" of the legislator is plain fatuous. What on earth are these people doing by issuing "a joint resolution expressing the sense of the Senate and House of Representatives regarding the terrorist attacks launched against the United States"? Or how about a joint resolution encouraging every United States citizen to display the flag of the United States? Or one "condemning any price gouging with respect to motor fuels during the hours and days after the terrorist acts of September 11"? To paraphrase journalist Barbara Amiel's memorable words, government is keeping out of our bedrooms, but what is it doing in every other room?

I don't mean to sound callous, but being blown up by terrorists is no reason to give victims awards for valor. The deaths are a result of horrible happenstance; they are not conscious acts of bravery. Yet there is a spasm afoot to confer the highest of honors on "civilian employees of the Department of Defense who are killed or wounded by a terrorist attack."

Fido has not yet been given the Purple Heart for his olfactory contributions to the September 11 rescue efforts. But one giddy Rep. by the name of Benjamin Gilman wants Congress to recognize the Furry Brigade "for their service in the rescue and recovery efforts in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001." (What can I say? "Blessed Be the Cheese Makers for They Shall Inherit the Earth." See "The Life of Brian.")

Advance such consistently puerile notions in a private sector job, and you stand to be fired, or at the very least examined for the presence of a brain infarct. Here's an idea for our parochial parasites: Stop groping greedily and obscenely for the "Stimulus Package" in order to revive the economy. Instead, resign. In pirate parlance, "walk the plank"! Get a job! Do your patriotic bit for the Nation.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] is a freelance writer. Please visit her website.

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Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical giant and manufacturer of the anthrax-fighting drug Cipro, is experiencing a windfall. The sudden demand for Cipro could not have come at a better time for a company that had been in a slump and was hemorrhaging due to a considerable operating-profit shortfall. The financial press’ accounts of how Bayer was scouting for bailout partners have now given way to detailing Bayer’s moves to triple its production of Cipro. With Cipro, Bayer will be vying for some of the $643 million the Bush administration plans to put towards increasing stockpiles of antibiotics.

Indeed Bayer is scrambling to fill every order placed by government. The company is running its facilities 24 hours a day, seven days a week, has placed its Connecticut plant on an accelerated production schedule, and has even reopened a defunct German plant. Try as it may, the likelihood that Bayer will meet consumer demand for Cipro is slim, if not anorexic.

In a command economy, government would decide when the demand for anthrax tablets has been satisfied, but not in a free market. In a free market, consumers direct supply and demand. And in a free market, increased demand leads to increased supply, as producers compete with one another to satisfy the demand. When the demand for Cipro has approximated the supply of Cipro, buyers – not the government – will have indicated their needs have been satisfied. But Bayer’s promise to triple the production of Cipro – cranking out 200 million tablets over the next three months – may do little to satisfy a demand driven by almost as many Americans.

When there is a shortage of a good, it is safe to say that it is a result of government incursion into the economy. In the Cipro shortfall, the likely culprits are FDA regulations and the patent system.

FDA regulations go some distance towards explaining why our choices are limited so as to make Cipro the only drug that has been approved for the treatment of the inhaled – and the most lethal – form of the disease. But FDA regulation does not explain why, once a shortage has occurred in an already approved drug, the self-regulating market mechanisms cannot kick in to overcome the scarcity. The FDA process has, moreover, been streamlined in recent years in order to allow for the introduction of various AIDS drugs.

In contrast, the patent system hasn’t changed an iota in terms of the length of the patent granted. As bad as FDA regulation is, patent law constitutes even more of a barrier to entry into the pharmaceutical market. In the case of Cipro, the acute scarcity of the drug is indeed a creation of the law. The anthrax panic, preceded by the September 11 events, has amplified the manner in which patents subvert the market and invite – even require – further central planner tinkering.

How would consumer demand have been heeded in a market unhampered by patent? The same events that have hitherto occurred would have unfolded; the sudden urgent demand for the drug would have been followed by a shortfall of supply. Large demand and short supply would initially send the price of Cipro rocketing. Profits in an unhampered pharmaceutical market would signal to the many drug makers that it’s time to enter into Cipro production.

These processes have all transpired, save one: Drug makers are not permitted to respond to the street signs of the free market, to profits. The law prohibits pharmaceutical companies from competing for Cipro market share, supplying the demand, and, in the process of creating competition, dealing a blow to the Bayer monopoly price tag. Because of specific patents Bayer has obtained, other companies cannot bring supply and demand into equilibrium, thus satisfying buyers.

Whether one thinks that granting to an inventor a near 20-year monopoly on the manufacture, use or sale of a product is the right thing to do, is quite apart from acceding that a patent places a barrier on entry into the market. This barrier is the essence of monopoly. Capturing a large market share by pleasing consumers does not a monopolist make. But appealing to government for a grant of privilege that gives the rent seeker the legal power to restrict access into the market, so that he is undeterred by competition, qualifies. Making sure that there is only one price and that a competitive price – a function of the presence of other sellers in the market – cannot arise, is also the practice of a monopolist.

Certain provisions in India’s patent law, while making her something of an untouchable to the international pharmaceutical kingpins, account for a thriving generics industry. Compare the monopoly price of $350 U.S. for a course of Cipro to the competitive price for Cipro set by profitable Indian generic companies. The latter is roughly $20 for a course of treatment. Cipro does not have a competing substitute in the market that is not covered by Bayer’s patent. The patent has survived challenges, which would explain why, in turn, the monopoly price remains unchallenged. In the absence of competition, the product’s high price does not markedly reduce sales or force a market adjustment on the seller. This patent has pretty much guaranteed that Bayer reaps a considerable profit irrespective of price or less-than-robust sales.

On how the patent holder can generate scarcity and draw a monopoly profit, the distinguished free market economist Sir Arnold Plant wrote: “…Whereas in general the institution of private property makes for the preservation of scarce goods, property rights in patents…make possible the creation of a scarcity of the products appropriated which could not be otherwise maintained.” In his essay Property and Ownership, Plant noted that the legislator enables the beneficiary of a patent to secure an income from the monopoly conferred upon him by restricting the supply in order to raise the price.

A patent, in effect, allows an inventor to forcibly prevent others from practicing the patented invention, even if another inventor arrived at the invention independently, an exceedingly common occurrence. Merely arriving first at the patent office can give inventor A a legal edge over inventor B, who stumbled in 5 minutes later. Try as it may, the law fails to nullify the moral claim to practice an invention that inventor B can assert.

The validity of the moral claim of concurrent inventors notwithstanding, the fact that Bayer’s Cipro patent expires only in December 2003, and the fact that Bayer is the only company that is allowed to produce ciprofloxacin until then, leaves us with the reality of shortages. There is no telling whether Bayer might relent and license the drug to other drug makers, thus enabling generics to fill the demand generated in the aftermath of September 11. The anthrax threat has, however, drastically altered the consumer’s tolerance.

It is the aim of the U.S. government to be able to treat 12 million people for 60 days of incubation. This is the calculus of probabilities courtesy of a central planner. But why is the government justified in facilitating access to the medication for only a fraction of the population? If every single paying American wishes to secure a course of Cipro, if only as a psychological antidote, why not? Tommy Thompson, U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services would like to control what American consumers access. If the present rise in firearm sales is anything to go by, Americans are looking out for themselves. Americans want Cipro, and they want it now!

Not content with Bayer’s assurances to meet demand, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) inadvertently expressed what amounts to unease about the hampered drug market. “I’d still feel a lot better with several competitors,” said the Senator, adding that “it goes without saying that if we increase the number of manufacturers producing ciprofloxacin, we are more likely to have enough on hand, should we need it”.

The fact that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson, has gone ahead and asked Congress to suspend the patent on Cipro is neither here nor there. It tells us nothing substantive about the patent system, but speaks volumes about the nature of government. It tells us that government can as easily revoke monopoly privileges as it can revoke genuine liberties. It tells us that when you make the law – just or unjust – you can also break it.

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] is a freelance writer. She has written on intellectual property for Mises.org (where a version of this article first appeared), for Insight Magazine, the Financial Post, and Ideas On Liberty. Please visit her website.

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Assisted
along by this view is Medea's latter-day sister, Andrea Pia Yates.
Last month, Yates, whom the media persist in calling "a Houston
mom," (technically incorrect and morally reprehensible) methodically
drowned her children aged 6 months to 7 years.

One
reporter wondered why the police had offered no explanation for
how Yates drowned five children without any escaping. Let's see:
How difficult is it to corral your unsuspecting, completely trusting
and likely adoring charges for bath time? A promise of ice cream
after ear scrubbing used to do wonders with my no-longer tiny tot.

The
reporter's assumption about the woman's daintiness forms part of
the "vocabulary of motive" now being established by the
experts and the media. Accordingly, a woman will engage in violence
only when provoked, or brought to the brink of desperation. Premeditated
brutality is simply not part of her biology. If a woman is driven
to kill, it is for good reason. Conversely, When men kill or abuse,
it is because they are hardwired to do so.

If
she kills her newborn, and, in the case of Yates, throws in the
rest of the brood, the woman is said to have likely suffered from
Postpartum Depression. Deployed as a legal defense, PPD may see
her exonerated. Canadian killer and sex offender, Karla Homolka,
who combined with feral gusto an active social life with the dedicated
activity of abduction, murder and rape, was able to avail herself
of the Battered Woman defense.

Homolka
is immortalized on video raping and killing three women, including
her sister. Because of her gender, the experts that are now pontificating
about Yates don't consider Homolka a sadist or sexual deviant. The
consensus in psychological circles is that sexual deviance in women
is practically non-existent and hence recidivism unlikely. Consequently,
Homolka did not receive the mandated treatment our state-run prisons
administer to sex offenders. What she got was a jailhouse protocol
called "Improving Your Inner Self." This New Age fatuity
has helped her, in her words, to "get rid of mistrust, self-doubt,
and misplaced-guilt." While this monster was growing her dangerously
gargantuan ego on the taxpayer's dime, research had already begun
to unveil sexual deviance in women, indicating that it was far more
prevalent than previously thought. The public, however, would continue
to be shielded from the realities of women's crimes.

The
rhetoric intended to exculpate Yates continues relentlessly. "Yates,"
we are told, "had spent her adult life catering to the deepest
needs and visions of others." When she did commit acts of aggression,
these were only ever turned on herself in the form of a failed suicide,
leading one mental health maven to proffer that this murder is a
form of suicide by proxy. Yates, he says, lost touch with reality
to such a degree that she thought of killing her children as killing
herself. He doesn't explain why, with all the confusion about her
psychic boundaries, Yates herself emerged unscathed, which is more
than we can say about the children.

No
less repugnant are the collectivist explanations for this crime.
"There's blood on everybody's hands," fluted one infanticide
expert. The premise here is that children belong to "Rotten
Rodham's" Village, and that somehow, because raising kids ought
to be a tribal affair, the blame for killing them must also repair
to members of the clan. The same casuistry was offered up in defense
of the marauding Hutus for killing almost a million Tutsis in Rwanda.
Progressives deflected from the deeds of the machete wielding mobs,
by blaming the genocide on the amorphous forces of Western Imperialism.

Anyone,
who has been at the receiving end of abuse from a mother, a wife
or a female lover, knows that these explanations simplify and infantalize
women. We persist in draining the crimes women commit of moral or
rational content, writes Patricia Pearson in her 1997 book entitled
When
She Was Bad. Pearson combines "chilling real life examples
with scholarly research" to show that violence committed by
women is every bit as ferocious, albeit different, as violence perpetrated
by men.

Stripped
of the clinical vernacular that attenuates their deeds, women hold
their own in the country's crime statistics. "Women,"
writes Pearson, "commit the majority of child homicides in
the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal
rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter
of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killing of newborn,
and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults." The African-American
man living in Chicago, for instance, is at the greatest risk of
being killed by an intimate partner. Eighteen percent of black men
killed in Chicago between 1966-1996 died at the hands of their mates;
65 percent of these men had no record of violence, abuse or other.
"Ten to 20 percent of the six to eight thousand Sudden Infant
Deaths reported each year in the US conceal accidental or deliberate
suffocation," usually by mothers. How many deadly assaults
by mothers are finessed as the "condition" termed Munchausen
syndrome by proxy is hard to tell.

Nowhere
are the myths about female pacifism more robust than in spousal
violence orthodoxy. There are hundreds of sociological surveys conducted
with mathematical randomness that attest to the fact that women
assault their partners as often as, or more often than, men do.
Gender symmetry in violence between couples is as well documented
as it is well concealed by government number crunchers. In the acclaimed,

Moral Panic: Biopolitics Rising, Prof. John Fekete references
the dozens of two-sex surveys conducted in Canada and in the US
over the past 30 years. All "show that women in relationships
with men commit comparatively as many or more acts of physical violence
as men do, at every level of severity." It is a slap for a
slap, beating for beating, knifing and shooting for knifing and
shooting, on the evidence of women's own self reports. The fact
that women are more likely to be injured in domestic altercations
points to differences in physical strength between men and women,
not in culpability. Physical weakness is not to be equated with
moral innocence. What we have here is indeed one of the most astonishing
episodes of dishonest science in our times.

Women's
aggression is different to that of men, which is why it so easy
to misconstrue. From an early age, women opt for underhanded and
manipulative strategies such as "bullying, name calling, excommunicating
and gossiping," to achieve their ends. Consider honor killings,
undoubtedly the grisliest of crimes against women. In the Palestinian
Authority, fathers and brothers murder 20 to 40 women every year
in order to defend family honor. But when studying female aggression
in the territory, anthropologist Ilsa Glaser observed that women's
gossip plays a causal role in the events leading up to the butchering.
By spreading gossip about the targeted woman, and by putting pressure
on the men to act, women were instrumental in instigating the murders.
Although preparing the grounds for murder is not tantamount to taking
a life – the fact remains that women are in on the act.

Anthropological
insight strongly advances our case. In her book Mother
Nature: A history of mothers, infants and natural selection,
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shows that the maternal instinct, which supposedly
elevates women above men, is not as natural as mother's milk. In
primate species, mothers are known to reward males who kill their
young by soliciting copulation with them. And there are many conditions
in the wild "under which mothers abandon and cannibalize the
young." If, like me, you are not fond of extrapolating from
monkeys to men, then Hrdy supplies human parallels of "sex-selective
infanticide in several of the world's cultures." Here, as in
the Palestinian Authority, women are willing participants.

Besides
irreparably biasing any potential pool of jurors, the Woman-as-Madonna
myth making renders the victims of Andrea Yates faceless. Is there
any point asking the reader to imagine each child once he grasped
that death was about to dawn? The baby girl might have just whimpered
briefly and then ceased. Imagine the older children; think of the
woman's deadly grip, the small bodies convulsing, the little limbs
flailing until, no more. Think of the resolve necessary to take
a life, to say nothing of 5 lives.

All
of which suggests that the old stereotypes must be replaced with
a nuanced understanding; one which recognizes that if women can
match men in almost every way that is good and fine – then
so can they harbor the potential to be as sinister as men.

July
17, 2001

Ilana
Mercer [send her mail]
is a freelance writer. Please visit her
website.

Ilana
Mercer Archives

Never
before, in de Tocqueville's estimation, had a rule undertaken without
force to direct and bring all its subjects into uniformity. For
all their brutality, even the Roman emperors left the "details
of social and private occupations" to their subjects. Not so
this benevolent tyranny, which seemed capable of degrading men without
tormenting them. In its mission to eradicate the natural inequalities
of men, de Tocqueville feared this "administrative despotism"
would also diminish their imagination and their passions.

The
outsized infants of the contemporary victim movement, who can bring
to its knees an entire industry with the aid of benevolent public
health bureaucrats, lobbyists, and sycophants of the law, would
have de Tocqueville gasping, "I told you so." For he warned,
not of tyrants, but of the ruler as guardian. Unlike a parent, this
guardian would not be "preparing men for manhood," but
seeking to keep them in perpetual childhood by sparing them the
trouble of thinking and living.

What
would de Tocqueville have said about the "free agency"
of an individual whose demand for a risk-free society is met with
a safety militia so intent on saving him from himself that it compels
him to coddle his spineless frame with an ergonomic seat at his
place of work; it fits his aspirin bottle with a cap only the jaws
of life can pry open; it monitors the supplements he takes, and
even promises to find a way to teach him to leave off the fries
he so loves to eat. Most frightening is that, as this benevolent
power robs him of his ability to make full use of himself, the individual
will paradoxically see the losses as benefits.

This
governance "does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does
not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies
a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than
a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government
is shepherd." According to de Tocqueville, it would be futile
to call on a people "which has been rendered so dependent on
the central power, to choose from time to time the representatives
of that power". When people sink "below the level of humanity,"
even voting – ostensibly an act of free will – is meaningless.

It
is a perverse irony that has people concerned more with the insane
ramblings of Nostradamus, than with the coming full circle of de
Tocqueville's closely argued words. The effect of the creeping statism
de Tocqueville foresaw, however, fails to give pause, because the
minds and hearts of people have been conquered. For a large portion
of the population, government has become a source of wealth through
its redistribution of money, benefits, services, contracts, franchises,
and licenses. In the US and Canada, government spending at all levels
now accounts for approximately 50 percent of national income. Over
half of the Canadian population receives more money in benefits
than it pays in taxes. In addition to directly employing approximately
20 million American civilians, the US government allots half of
its spending to social welfare.

For
the banditry of expropriating and then redistributing some people's
wealth, citizens reward governments with the power to continue doing
the same in perpetuity.

American
rugged individualism is indeed in retreat. A survey conducted for
the First Amendment Center in NY revealed that the Amendment is
facing a veritable onslaught from the American public, a majority
of whom would happily restrict the kind of public speech certain
groups find offensive. Those surveyed applauded government involvement
in rating TV shows, as did they feel that while campaign contributions
are a form of free speech, they should be restricted. Fully 51 percent
of the sizeable sample surveyed felt the press has too much freedom,
and 20 percent feel government should be able to veto what newspapers
publish.

Decades
after de Tocqueville, Lenin declared that freedom was no more than
a "bourgeois prejudice". Canadians have lived by this
credo. They have always donned their penchant for government as
a sign of civility, and they take pride in a Constitution that expressly
promotes limits to freedoms. Americans, on the other hand, are guilty
of betraying their very souls. By relinquishing their proud radical
libertarian roots, Americans have confirmed the worst of Alexis
de Tocqueville's fears.

June
22, 2001

Ilana
Mercer [send her mail]
a freelance writer. She is an ex-South African, an ex-Israeli, and
about to become an ex-Canadian! She’s currently en route to the
State of Washington from where she hopes not to be ex-communicated.

Ilana
Mercer Archives

In happier times, Toronto's garment district was abuzz with Trotskyite debate and the wrangling of trade union leaders, laments Naomi Klein in her book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Now, she says, the district's warehouses have only one "remaining capitalist function," and that is to showcase advertising billboards.

From here on in, the book is devoted to the machinations of a capitalist cabal, intent on colonizing the minds of consumers by peddling larger-than-life brands over and above products; the kind of brands that expand to rob people of their "public and personal spaces," their culture, their jobs, even their freedoms.

The lineup of culprits is long: Microsoft, Nike and the various "sneaker pimps," Intel, The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Apple, The Body Shop, Starbucks and so on.

A self-confessed "mall rat"-which would explain her obsession with the gimmicks of marketing to the exclusion of an understanding of market forces-Ms. Klein is a leader of the anti-globalization movement, and has been described by the Times of London as "probably the most influential person under the age of 35 in the world." All the more surprising considering that this soundbite-rich, deeply silly monograph is more conjecture than fact; Ms. Klein draws causal relationships where none exist, and finds culpability in the absence of any proof.

It sounds flaky, she explains, but the corporate takeover really gained momentum after a 1993 event known in marketing circles as "Marlboro Friday." It was then, ironically, that the branding of products seemed poised for its demise: On that apparently fateful day, Phillip Morris slashed its prices in response to competition from "bargain brands." According to Ms. Klein's subjective interpretation of market competition, if a brand like Marlboro was "stooping to compete on the basis of real value," the public must have called the corporate bluff and rejected the cachet of the name brand.

Alas, the brands recovered. In their truest and most advanced incarnation, they have become "about corporate transcendence." Products that will flourish in the future are increasingly presented as concepts rather than as commodities. For the next 446 pages, the same savvy American consumer who forced Phillip Morris to fight harder for its market share on "Marlboro Friday" suddenly turns into a helpless pawn of the marketing moguls.

Like a solemn commissar, Ms. Klein bolsters her theme with scores of exuberant, non-incriminating interviews with ad executives and CEOs, which she portrays as sinister confessions. The endless accounts of advertising gimmicks are meant to expose the malignant franchises that devour local shops, public spaces and "host cultures." The fluffy jargon does nothing to conceal that in reality, this is an unremarkable selection from the trillions of capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Advertising has become this sophisticated and, as a result of the dizzying array of choice in the market, has shifted to selling lifestyles, attitudes and atmospheres. Long gone are the days when advertisers merely educated and informed the few who could afford their products. The plenty generated by mass production means producers must labour to capture consumers' attentions. Corporations can no more be demonized for their promotional methods than lovers for preparing candle-lit dinners as preludes to seduction.

Further, in her discrete demarcation between big and small, local and transnational business, Ms. Klein ignores the fact that consumer patronage grows a small business into a large one. To her, consumers are dim. They buy products they neither need nor want, and even when their purchases are unsatisfactory, they keep at it. If they are so incompetent, why allow them to vote?

Ms. Klein describes the horrors of the branded neighborhoods, schools and towns – "public" areas that fall prey to the logos and brands of corporations.

This happened because of tax base erosion, for which Ms. Klein blames the Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney trinity. With big, good government in retreat, big, bad business is forced to pick up the slack. The fact that Ms. Klein's monopoly public schooling is producing ignoramuses becomes the fault of corporate cash infusions that have allowed big business to infiltrate campuses.

Ms. Klein extends this seamless corporate conspiracy to the co-opting of the pharmaceutical industry, the censorship of news, the upstaging of sports events and the overthrowing of local retailers by branded superstores. She descends into obscurantism when describing the apocalyptic branding of life: "Cross-promotional brand-based experiences that combine buying with elements of media entertainment and professional sports to create an integrated branded loop … using ever-expanding networks of brand extensions to spin a self-sustaining lifestyle web." What in bloody blue blazes does this mean?

Evidently in no small part, corporations are responsible for censorship. Klein claims that somehow private enterprise can pose a threat to free speech. What escapes the obtuse Klein is that government alone has the power to violate speech rights by using the force of the law. One indictment is of Wal-Mart for pulling sexually explicit magazines in accordance with customers' wishes. This champion of local activism cries "censorship" when the moms and pops in a community peacefully exercise the power of the boycott. However, when government bans publications, they disappear or go underground. Procure them at your peril! When an outlet decides to heed its particular constituency by not carrying a publication, said item can be found elsewhere. Alas, the distinction is lost on Ms. Klein.

Ms. Klein rounds up by anointing those who vandalize billboards as the leaders of the new anti-corporate resistance movement. Somehow Ms. Klein, who despises the falseness of consumerism, has failed to detect the poseur in these self-styled "culture jammers and anti-corporate campaigners."

Ilana Mercer [send her mail] is a freelance writer based in Seattle.

I
followed up with a column in a local newspaper in which I identified
Dahl’s faux pas with second wave feminism whereby women are seen
as a besieged political class fighting to unseat the ruling class
whose members refuse to let go of patriarchal privilege and power.
Dahl and colleague, John Dewey Jones, director of the school of
engineering science, protested to the editor that I had failed to
divine the laudable context of Dahl’s message. Here is the gist
of Prof. Jones’ rebuttal: Dahl didn’t say what Mercer alleged she
said, but even though she didn’t say what she is alleged to have
said, what Dahl didn’t say is accurate (see satire “Yes, Prime Minister”).
Plainly, both Dewey and Dahl deny the quote, but go on to reinforce
its message, namely that girls work hard because of society’s expectations;
boys often don’t because they dominate society. Voila, second-wave
feminism!

There
are so many disturbing things about this pronouncement not least
its blanket condemnation of half the population. Here is a woman
who should know something of the scientific method, yet is advancing
opinion based not on data, but on radical feminist ideology. To
anyone who has any doubts, feminism and second wave feminism in
particular is a theory, no more, no less, and a conspiracy theory
at that, since it claims that throughout history men have conspired
to dominate women.

The
position of men right now contradicts this dogma. It is quite striking
that an educator like Dahl can shrug off the facts: Women continue
to live longer than men. Five times as many young men as women commit
suicide, men are twice as likely to be unemployed and find it twice
as hard to get another job, and men are infinitely more likely to
suffer industrial accidents and diseases which may destroy their
lives. Boys, moreover, are far more likely to be slapped with the
diagnosis of learning disabled than girls, and subjected to the
Ritalin assault, as are they less likely to graduate from high school
and go on to college.

Judging
from the letters I received from students at SFU, our devoted faculty
are blithely unaware of the experience many men have on campus.
Wrote one student: “…I cannot seem to escape the biases of feminism
no matter where I turn. Every female teacher somehow manages to
bring the argument around to point out that males overrun everything.
If I produce any artwork with any sort of tall thin form in it,
I immediately am criticized for producing artwork that involves
phallic symbolism. Thus meaning that I obviously am promoting male
dominance in society”. The young man described this as “wearing
of his spirits”. The academe, once dedicated to freedom of expression
and learning, now let’s philistines hound males for producing personalized
imagery.

The
wild fire of radical feminism has pretty much engulfed universities,
evidently not sparing the computing science departments. Women’s
studies courses and English departments are littered with its lumpen
jargon, which takes the tack of reducing works of literature and
art to the bare bones of power relationships in society. When treated
with this academic acid, great artists like Shakespeare, Tolstoy,
or T. S. Eliot are dissolved into pale, patriarchal ruling class
oppressors. Text is routinely deconstructed and shred using sophistic
constructs, my point being that radical feminism is nothing but
a subjective world-view based on a narrow insular and partial view
of history. Why then is it touted as an immutable truth fit to guide
public policy?

Up
until the last stages of the industrial revolution, writes columnist
Barbara Amiel in her book Confessions, societies were preoccupied
with the propagation of its members. The division of labour was
the culmination of necessity and biology; it was necessary to make
the most of man’s superior physical strength and woman’s ability
to bear children. For a few children to have survived, explains
Amiel, a woman had to give birth to ten or twelve. Were women not
pregnant or in labour for most of their arduous lives, the tribe
would not have lingered. There are other biological differences
that separate the sexes. These have become taboo to study or discuss.
Men do have an advantage in the perception of spatial-geometrical
relationships. This advantage was vital in earlier societies that
relied on brute force and hunting for survival.

Feminism
is staple doctrine in the secondary schools as well, and it animates
the child-centered education system and the 1960s vision its teachers
hold. My daughter’s schooling has for the most transmitted sentimentality
over reason, attitude and mush over canon and curriculum. She has
been forced-fed a pedagogic diet of pop psychology. Her female teachers
have been feminists who promote every mythical, politically correct
orthodoxy that pervades the Zeitgeist. The dyed-in-the-wool feminist
teachers will invariably greet a show of individualism or a sharp
retort from the child with sly assertion – not reasoned argument.
No doubt, the child-centered progressive public schooling is bad
for girls and boys alike, but it is probably particularly bad for
boys.

Some
research has indicated that boys thrive in a disciplined structured
learning environment. The child-centered schooling shuns discipline
and moral instruction, and promotes co-operative working habits
and groupthink over individual achievement. Boys like competition
and are hard wired for it. But when they invariably bubble over
with unbridled testosterone, rather than challenge, discipline,
and harness their energies, they are all too often subdued with
Ritalin. While the child-centered schooling system, with its lax
standards, and shopping mall assortment of flimsy courses is girl
friendly – it is hostile to boys. Boy biology is demonized, and
boys are made over in the emotional image of woman, or at least
in the image of the caricature-of-woman feminists promote.

SFU
Prof. Doreen Kimura, on the other hand, is not wont to theorize
into the ether. She has demonstrated empirically that there is “no
evidence for systemic discrimination against women…and that when
women do apply for science jobs they get preferential treatment”.
Her findings, reported in the National Post, confirm that women
“self select out of certain science careers.” She confirms that
men and women differ cognitively in how they solve problems. As
I’ve indicated, men, on average, are better at spatial tasks, mathematical
reasoning and co-ordination of visual and motor activities. Given
these findings, women would not be equally represented in professions
such as physics and engineering.

After
years of producing bad science on the wage gap, Statistics Canada
has finally admitted the pay gap is not due to discrimination, something
the quasi-free market Fraser Institute demonstrated almost 2 decades
back. The faulty premise held by public school educators like Dahl
and Jones is equally hard to relinquish because it is politically
expedient: The fight is on for power not truth

An
aside: What do you think would have befallen Prof. Dahl had she
ventured that the only reason women are underrepresented in the
engineering sciences is because they are lazy and know a man will
eventually take care of them? I wager the Prof.’s fitness to teach
women would have been called into question.

June
15, 2001

Ilana
Mercer [send her mail]
is a freelance writer based in Seattle.

Asha's
Mums, One
Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads, and Daddy's
Roommate," are unadulterated advocacy. Scant wonder
the books are turgid and cumbersome and cannot be pried from their
pitch i.e., that same-sex families are just groovy. What is unforgivable
about such pamphleteering is that it leaves children out in the
cold. The upbeat little tikes in the books are simply parroting
the say-so of the advocates.

Let
us begin with the silliest of the three: Asha's Mums tells
a completely contrived tale. The two authors must have racked their
unsupple minds to come up with a plot that would show the perils
from a hostile world to a child with two mums. Since these perils
are few, our authors concocted a story that doesn't gel.

Asha
is excited over an impending trip to the Science Center. But all
that changes when the u2018homophobic' teacher calls on the child to
explain why her permission-slip sports the signatures of two mothers.
You can, after all, only have one mother, reasons the teacher. The
poor child vows never to go back to school, so mum Alice materializes
in a flash to upbraid the oppressive pedagogue.

In
yet another scene designed to push buttons, Asha's sunny painting
of her family, two mums front and center, initiates a discussion
in class. And what would such a discussion be without the progeny
of the prototype bigoted parents piping up? "My mum and dad
said you can't have two mothers living together…it's bad."
No sooner do the cherubic kids silence the voice of the dissenting
rube kid than mummies Sara and Alice swoop down to ensure that opinion
about same sex parents remains monolithic. Yes, to sexual diversity,
no, to diversity – and freedom – of opinion.

With
teacher on the straight and narrow all are primed for one last lesson.

You
can have two mummies "just like you can have two aunts and
two daddies". It is seemingly never too late to start teaching
the lessons of moral and intellectual equivalence: everything is
the same, no one thing is better or preferable. Judgement must be
suspended at all times.

Essentially
this tale is a series of sensibility tweaks. Nothing in the permission-slips
my daughter brought home over the years ever said, "all sexual
partners in the household sign on the dotted line." What's
generally requested is a signature of a single parent or a guardian.
The authors decided to use the permission-slip ruse as part of their
coming-out project.

Further,
unless I don't get the birds and the bees, Asha was conceived with
the aid of a man. Whether Asha is a product of artificial insemination,
adoption or shotgun, somewhere a man exists with half of her DNA.
He might be a deadbeat dad or just a sperm donor. He may even be
a poor sod toiling to send the mums maintenance while they remain
mum about him. From this obfuscating tale he has, however, been
expunged.

Straining
at the seams with condescension, One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue
Dads is dedicated to "Jacob, who has only one mom and one
dad" but doesn't need your sympathy "because they're both
pretty great parents". This bit of comedy lays bare just how
indifferent the story is to what children want. Can you honestly
imagine a child jumping up and down demanding an extra dad "just
like Lou has?" The story has been compared to Dr. Seuss. It
shouldn't. One Dad Two Dads lacks Dr. Seuss's delicious sense
of the absurd, the kind that tickles kids pink. And kids, in the
absence of indoctrination, will detect this imposter.

The
book starts with a little guy telling of the domestic bliss that
comes with having two blue dads. Code Blue is an unfortunate metaphor
for gay: the dads are said to be the same as every other non-hypothermic
dad except for their hue. How did they get this way? "They
were blue when I got them." And that's okay because it seems
reasonable to assume that people are born to their sexual orientation.
But then comes the clincher: "They are blue because… they
are blue. And I think they're wonders – don't you?" It
is one thing to suggest the dads were simply born blue but quite
another to declare them wonders by virtue of their tinge. Why impart
to children that the value of a person is a function of his sexual
orientation? People are wonderful because of their character, because
of what they do, not because of who they bed.

Towards
the end, the pigmentally checkered dads begin to multiply and some
green dads appear on the scene. Like Oscar Wilde's signature carnation,
green is a good deal more festive. However, I think that more than
anyone, Wilde, who is often appropriated by the gay community, would
have found the attempt to define the Self in terms of sexual preference
insulting. After all, the great wit's most favorite organ was still
his brain.

Belinda's
Bouquet is more honest. One can sense some attempt at adopting
a child's perspective. The book does indeed speak to differences.
The only hint of the same-sex burden is that the two mothers are
the ones who strategically dispense the nuggets of wisdom. If I
wanted to be difficult I might ask why u2018mama' teaches poor chubby
Belinda to chant "My body belongs to me" every time someone
comments about her weight. Wouldn't "mind your own business,"
or "you're no oil painting" have been more effective?
But one can't hope to divine every bit of feminist affectation.

The
themes of adult selfishness, divorce and same sex union converge
in yet another children's storybook, the last on my list. Published
by Alyson Wonderland publications, Daddy's Roommate is a
particularly sad tale. The little narrator here has no name! This
isn't surprising when you realize the children in these books exist
to affirm their parents. What is alarming is that the educators,
who stand firm behind these books, and who routinely tout the self-esteem
catechism in schools – overlooked the sagging sense of self
exhibited by the tots in the books.

The
nameless narrator tells us his parents have just divorced. With
nary a reference
to the sadness of this event, he blurts out; "Now there's somebody
new
at Daddy's house. Daddy and his roommate Frank live together, work
together, eat together, sleep together." From here on in it's
pretty much Brown Dad Blue Dads all over again, detailing
the good times the dwarfed child spends with the two larger-than-life
men.

Mummy,
like the child, is a conduit in the service of the men's outing.
She tells no-name boy that Daddy and Frank are gay and that "being
gay is just another kind of love". "Daddy and his roommate
are very happy together," chants the child. "And I am
happy too!" So long as Dad has found his true self so will
the boy arrange his feelings accordingly. It is indeed a cruel farce
that has a child spouting homilies in the service of a parent's
project.

What
would I have considered an honest narrative?

"My
name is Ben. I am very sad. My mum and dad are divorcing. Frank
is my dad's new friend. My mum and dad held me tight. I told them
I wanted my old home back again, and I cried."

May
10, 2001

Ilana
Mercer [send her mail]
is a freelance editorial page writer.

With
his cri de coeur "The West Wants In", Mr. Manning is said
to have bolstered the cause of national unity. Like that other dubious
abstraction, u2018the public good', national unity has become a totalitarian
term, inimical to freedom. The human condition is simply too genuinely
diverse to be able to unite nationally. For some, national unity
is destined to be a coerced state of being: As soon as the pathology
of an overreaching federal government starts to fuel that regional
fever of freedom, governments let this ideological cobra out of
its sack so that it can mesmerize citizens into submission. As Murray
N. Rothbard pointed out, genuine nationality is not to be equated
with state-decreed unity or with the modern nation-state.

The
unity we have in Canada is the provenance of the proto-centrist
Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his minions. With mounting Western,
and to a lesser degree Quebecker, discontent, Canada can hardly
be termed a true federation, since she is no longer made up of voluntary
partners that retain sovereignty over their own affairs. The question,
of course, is whether an Administration, rooted in the PM's hegemony
is what unity is all about. And if so, what kind of unity is achieved
through the threat of "tough love" and the indenturing
of some provinces to others?

More
charitably, I would venture that in the unlikely event that Preston
Manning had led a secessionist movement, it may have succeeded.
For the most, the point-persons for Western secession speak a utilitarian
language. From where they are perched, it all seems to boil down
to the costs versus the benefits of being in Canada. With the West
paying many times over for the privilege of Confederation, proponents
of autonomy correctly pronounce the balance sheet to be badly skewed.

Still,
secession has not really been defended as the mainstay of the liberties
of a sub-national region. No doubt, economics undergirds secessionist
sentiments; the fruits of Western foresight and initiative (read
Alberta) are siphoned off by the center and funneled to PM Jean
Chretien's patronage playgrounds. The unending pelf perpetrated
by the Canadian Liberal government is indeed reason enough for the
West to leave. But unless secession redux can be achieved, to wit,
a renewed historical and philosophical understanding of the importance
of the right to secede, secession is doomed to be no more than an
eddying view to Jean Chretien's omnipotent centrism. Secession must
emerge as a higher-not subordinate-principle. It isn't, because
its proponents neglect the soul of secession.

Mises
Institute scholar, David Gordon, in Secession,
State & Liberty properly captures this essence. "Secession,"
writes Gordon, "arises from individual rights". The right
to withdraw is defendable on the basis of individual – not
group – rights. As I see it, secession is the political complement
of the right of free association.

The
American Founding Fathers understood this. Thomas Jefferson viewed
extreme decentralization as the bulwark of the liberty and rights
of man. Consequently, the U.S. was created as a pact between sovereign
states with which the ultimate power lay. Sadly, the U.S. has progressed
from a decentralized republic into a highly consolidated one. In
the US, to speak of the Rights of the States, much less of secession
gets you consigned to the lunatic fringe.

Canada,
on the other hand, was born of a highly centralized regime, and
has always cleaved to an expansionist national policy. Yet, paradoxically,
it is Canada in recent years that has outstripped the U.S. in spurring
powerful regional movements and in reviving secession as an arduous
but valid political route.

Preston
Manning is an idealist. He staked out unprecedented positions in
the Canadian polity on the wrongs of deficit spending and on the
need to return the product of their labor to Canadians in the form
of tax cuts. He courageously denounced the zero-sum-game of extant
identity politics, where benefits to some groups accrue at the expense
to others.

Would
that Mr. Manning had been less slavish about Canadian federalism,
he might have led a mighty secessionist movement. More than any
other Canadian politician, Manning has the cerebral agility to have
articulated the philosophy of secession and liberty. Instead, what
did his pro-federalist plea get him and us? Through no fault of
his own, Mr. Manning failed to quell the boorish vilification of
Westerners by Eastern buffoons. In fact, for some reason, he incited
the Liberal lickspittle media to new heights of Western libel. For
wanting to be free men and women, we are repeatedly depicted as
unruly, treasonous, and racist mouth-breathers.

Would
Mr. Manning have ever achieved the real goal of decentralizing the
Canadian nation-state? Could he have inched the Canadian mind-set
any closer to holding a purely functional view of government, where
it secures individual rights and no more? I doubt it very much.

Outlining
the broadest of distinctions, economist, Prof. Walter Block, wrote
in the Journal of Markets & Morality: "libertarians
favor freedom in both economic and social spheres, while conservatives
agree with only the former position and liberals with only the latter".
In short: "right wingers advocate liberty in commercial but
not personal affairs, while left wingers invert this stance, defending
freedom in the bedroom but not in the boardroom."

Preston
Manning, of course, was a conservative through and through.

This
much can be said, however, about the Canadian national psyche:

Canadians
are in the habit of routinely expunging the best and brightest from
their midst. To sustain its system of forced egalitarianism, this
nation is doubly vested in banality (the fatuous, yet prized prattle
of a Naomi Klein, a John Ralston Saul or a Mark Kingwell come to
mind; these Canadian nationalists have also been embraced by American
leftist proponents of the Culture of the Commons). The mediocre
give Canadians consolation. And the mediocre serve national unity
like no other: they reduce cognitive dissonance and bring about
that much coveted Canadian deadpan homogeneity. Indeed, mediocrity
in Canada is essential to survival. Mr. Manning was a populist,
a man of intellect and integrity.

Mr.
Manning was certainly not mediocre which is why Canadians disliked
him so.

Mr.
Manning might have further distinguished himself had he rejected
the coercive concept of national unity and realized that free people
live in the kind of communities where the Beltway or Ottawa cannot
make a difference in their lives.

March
29, 2001

Ilana
Mercer is a freelance editorial page writer.

But
let us first dispel the notion that the California power market
was in any way decontrolled. On the contrary, there was a vestige
of deregulation in the state-controlled electricity wholesale market
California implemented in 1998. But not only had the state forced
the electricity companies to sell their power plants to independent
investors, but the new owners were compelled to sell electricity
to the state-managed power exchange, which set the daily power prices.
In this ersatz free market, utilities were prohibited from entering
long-term contracts with electricity producers and had to buy power
on a daily basis.

Californians
and their politicians have a fetish with natural gas plants, which
are expensive and relatively unprofitable. This refusal to diversify
helped make natural gas prices soar. The growth in population and
economic development in California contributed to a dramatic increase
in demand for power. Retail prices, however, were regulated. Strategically,
voters-cum-ratepayers were shielded from the "real scarcity
that prices reflect". Shortages were inevitable.

All
the indications are that Ontario and Alberta are following the same
path of managed, fictive markets. The mother monopoly, Ontario Hydro,
may no longer exist, but, for its progeny, Hydro One and Ontario
Power Generation, it's business as usual. The utilities continue
to have free access to taxpayers' funds, which they use with glee.
And the Independent Electricity Market Operator, an arm of the government,
will be in the wings to run the wholesale market. Where have we
heard this be before? Rent seeking from industry has already commenced,
as business seeks-and is rewarded with-subsidies at the expense
of the taxpayer. Ontario, like California, is attempting to apply
market principles to what is root and branch a government operation.

Shortages,
unfortunately, have not developed in the kind of visceral, anti-intellectual
arguments floating about. Government messes up in California, and
the foot soldiers for the Total State cite the mess as proof for
the need for yet more government intervention. A disaster that is
a culmination of decades of regulation is blamed on markets that
were never allowed to work.

To
further obfuscate the issue, out of the woodwork has emerged a new,
more sinister breed of regulator. The various Canadian utilities
portray themselves as market enthusiasts, with a difference. Theirs
is ostensibly a middle of the road, genteel "free" market,
with carefully placed "market" incentives balanced by
bureaucratic benevolence.

Their
model suits what they refer to as the consumer's special relationship
with electricity, a non sequitur if ever there was one; The claim
supports just as well the exact opposite argument.

So
crucial is our need for it, how can electricity be left to bureaucrats
whose bungling is rewarded with increased budgets; who fob bankruptcy
onto the taxpayer; whose imperatives for making profits and avoiding
loses are weak at best; whose salaries are inflated, and who regularly
override the consumer's vote with political expedients? How, furthermore,
can this precious commodity be left to those so lacking in scruples,
that they would use expropriation through taxes for their unvetted
projects? It's infinitely preferable that electricity be entrusted
to private enterprise. Only it raises initial capital voluntarily.
And if private enterprise is to survive, it must not only apply
careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavours, but, above
all, it must satisfy the customer.

On
the cards for some Canadian jurisdictions is a Third Wayism, an
interventionism, but not a free market in power. It is precisely
this hydra-headed monster that has caused the California market
to implode.

In
1940, economist Ludwig von Mises warned that middle of the road
interventionism leads to socialism. Interventionism, and in particular
price control, must eventually cause a failure to bring supply and
demand into balance through the price system. Any price fixing below
true market level invariably results in increased demand and scarcity.
When politicians make a commodity cheaper so as to procure votes,
the good becomes scarce. With rising demand and unchanged supply,
chronic shortages ensue. Once scarcity develops, the regulator must
step in, and begin fixing prices of labour and materials at every
stage of production.

Our
state-mediated utilities may be able to buy and sell on the free
market.

But,
unlike private firms, they need not respond to profit and loss signals.
So long as they have taxpayer funds to make good their losses, these
creatures have the option to produce at a loss. Thus, in a market
in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the
information they convey in an unhampered market. They will not guide
producers to satisfy consumer demands to the same extent that the
free market does.

California's
Governor, Gray Davis wants to fully nationalize the grid. He is
also promising to sue power companies – or even jail their managers
– for not selling their juice below market value. He wants to
ban power producers from exporting electricity to other states.
Theft of private property is also on his agenda, as he threatens
to use "eminent domain" to seize power plants. Ludwig
von Mises was right. Interventionism leads to socialism and its
attendant tyranny.

February
16, 2001

Ilana
Mercer is a freelance writer based in Vancouver, Canada.

This week Americans celebrate the birth of Abraham Lincoln. The true legacy of Lincoln usually gets drowned in the perennial gush about a president whose name is synonymous with freedom and the end of slavery. Lincoln's role in bringing to an end the Jeffersonian ideal of a limited, constitutional government, with powers vested in sovereign states, remains relatively unexamined.

The direction in which Lincoln took America is not without significance for Canadians. For one, the current vilification of the Canadian West resembles in tenor the vilification of the American South. Westerners – and Quebecers – have grown accustomed to the boorish responses from government when they speak of exercising freedom of association by peaceful secession. The seeds of the assorted libel they confront can be traced to the Lincoln legacy.

As a chronicler of Lincoln, Professor Tom DiLorenzo notes: "in 1861 most Americans – North and South – still believed that the right of secession was fundamental to preserving freedom and self government." There were the stirrings of the New England secessionists in 1803, as well as a secessionist movement of the Middle Atlantic States in 1861. The South's battle, very plainly, was for its constitutionally guaranteed independence, framed by the Founding Fathers' vision of a limited central government with little jurisdiction over state institutions.

The view of secession as the bulwark of liberty was widely echoed among prominent intellectuals and editorialists of the day. Lord Acton, the great classical liberal, viewed Southern secession as an attempt to preserve a constitutional liberty. Abolitionists in the North generally agreed that the South had a right to peacefully secede, as did they claim this right for themselves.

It would be ironic if this weren't the case. After all, the American Revolution was born of secession from empire. The Constitution was a pact between sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay, and these states devolved to the central government its limited powers. With this "confederation of sovereign states", the Founders intended to curb the overreach of a central government.

With only 15 percent of Southerners being slave owners, the South was no more fighting to preserve slavery than the North was fighting to abolish it. But let's accept for the sake of argument Lincoln's facade, and grant that slavery was the reason he waged the War Between the States, thus violating the Constitution.

Surely in order to redeem him, it's essential to establish at the very least that to this alleged end, Lincoln was morally justified in causing the death of more than 620,000 people, the maiming of thousands, and "the near destruction of 40 percent of the nation's economy?" To Mises Institute scholar David Gordon, the answer is clear: "The costs of an action," writes Gordon in Secession, State & Liberty, "cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to morality."

The Lincoln vision can certainly be gleaned from views such as the one he expressed in an 1862 letter to the New York Daily Tribune: "My paramount object…is to save the union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it…" The imperative of keeping the races apart is another reoccurrence in Lincoln's addresses.

Could he have held these racist views, the kind that made him a onetime supporter of a scheme advocating the shipping of slaves back to "their own native land," and still wage war solely to free the objects of his derision? Perhaps, but unlikely given his subsequent actions.

For one, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation guaranteed that slaves were freed only in the parts of the Confederacy inaccessible to the union army. Union soldiers, for their part, were permitted to confiscate slaves in rebel territory and put them to work for the union army. In areas loyal to the union, slaves were not emancipated. After the war, Lincoln offered little land to the freed men; most of the land was parceled off to his constituent power-base, the railroad and mining companies.

The economic undertow offers better insight into the Lincoln mission. The South, which supplied 75 percent of exports, was on the cusp of becoming a low tariff, free trade zone. Lincoln feared this would disadvantage the North, and in particular his rich industrialist supporters. Much like the Canadian equalization payments through which the government plunders the West, Lincoln imposed punitive tariffs as a means to distribute wealth from the South to northern manufacturers.

Of course, a less malevolent lot than Lincoln's republicans could have instead edged the nation towards a peaceful prosperity by joining with England, France, other European countries, and the Confederate states between which free trade was underway. But for this, they would have to scale back tariffs and the political patronage these schemes afforded. Such a requirement would have been inimical to Lincoln's Whig Party philosophical underpinnings, namely, protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare and fiat money, the essential building blocks of a centralized power.

Filling in the gaps in the Lincoln lore would not be complete without his rap sheet of civil liberties abuses. Like Bill Clinton, Lincoln conducted a war without the consent of Congress. He declared martial law, confiscated private property, suspended habeas corpus, imprisoning about 30,000 Northern citizens and 31 legislators without trial, censored telegraph lines, and shut down newspapers for opposing the war.

The ignoble institute of slavery dissolved relatively uneventfully in most slave societies around that time, with only Haiti and the U.S. resorting to violence. This makes Lincoln's victory a pyrrhic one indeed.

Ilana Mercer is a freelance writer based in Vancouver, Canada.