La herencia que deja

Por Arcadi Espada.

Realmente queda mucho PSOE por hacer, como dicen los promotores del manifiesto. De este párrafo se deduce cuánto: «Cuando aplicamos, ciertamente obligados, políticas contra la crisis, ajenas a nuestra orientación ideológica y a nuestros valores, perdimos otra parte de nuestro crédito». El párrafo tiene mérito, porque describe la actitud con que Zapatero encaró la crisis y la desolación estratégica de la izquierda. La clave está en esa aposición hiriente: «Ciertamente obligados». El sujeto no está explícito, pero puede adivinarse. En una escala de lo más abstracto a lo más concreto el sujeto va desde la realidad a Merkel. Pero cualquiera aceptará que, para lo que nos ocupa, los dos entes son lo mismo.
No sé bien si estos laboriosos socialistas han calculado las implicaciones de verse obligados por la realidad. Para empezar, no se entiende la queja implícita. Un partido cuyos valores y orientación ideológica son incompatibles con la realidad es un partido condenado: la primera condición para cambiar el mundo es instalarse en él. Pero si la incompatibilidad con la realidad se da ejerciendo el poder la enfermedad es gravísima, porque el poder diseña en buena parte la realidad. Un partido que, gobernando, afronta una realidad incompatible con sus valores (y por lo tanto una realidad ideológica, por así decirlo, y no, por ejemplo, la realidad de una catástrofe natural) tiene dos posibilidades: o cambiar la realidad o cambiar de valores. Nada de eso hizo Zapatero, que aceptó los dictados de la realidad, manteniendo el corazón a salvo. Y que en la cuadratura del círculó presumió (y lo que presumirá) de haber salvado a España, sin advertir a qué paroxismo de contradicción había llegado cuando salvar a España supuso arrumbar los valores del Partido Socialista.
No hay una salida de izquierdas a la crisis. Si la hubiese, nuestro primer izquierdista la habría aplicado porque no era un hombre que se arredrase fácilmente: ahí está la Alianza de Civilizaciones y el ministerio del Concepto. Su farsa máxima, que ahora pretenden proseguir los laboriosos, fue que sí la había, pero le obligó la realidad teutona. Farsa y socialdemocracia, y pleonasmo, todo en estado puro, que prueba que la oposición es el lugar preferido de la izquierda para pasar una crisis. Pasarán los años y la actualidad dudará sobre esa sentencia; pero entonces saltará la Historia y recordará el caso de aquel presidente que se instaló como oposición de sí mismo, derrocándose.
(El Mundo, 22 de diciembre de 2011)

World Cup 1986 semifinal - Yugoslavija vs URSS


Mítica final e increíble último minuto en esta semifinal histórica del Mundial de España.

No todos quieren comer moringa

Por Tania Díaz Castro.


Exquisito plato de moringa con tomate. Nueva forma de alimentación orientada por el régimen de los Castro para todos los cubanos. ¡Excelente sustituto de la carne y el arroz con frijoles negros!
LA HABANA, Cuba, diciembre, www.cubanet.org -Han transcurrido sólo unos días de la repartición inesperada y gratuita de posturas de moringa por los pueblos del oeste habanero: Santa Fe, Cangrejeras, Baracoa, Jaimanitas y repartos aledaños a Punto Cero, donde reside el viejo líder de la Revolución, y sus pobladores responden con gran escepticismo.

La autoridades han regalado posturas de este árbol, conocido como ¨ milagroso ¨ desde la antigua India, regalaban a todos los vecinos, mientras mencionaban las maravillosas propiedades alimenticias de la planta.
-Ni bistec ni medicinas vamos a necesitar -dijo un anciano- mientras cargaba con tres posturas, sembradas en bolsas de polietileno.
Hoy, al ver que no han vuelto a repartirlas y que el bistec con papitas fritas sigue ausente, son muchos los que recuerdan los años de la fiebre del noni, aquella otra planta, llamada ¨fruta del diablo ¨, en la que muchos creyeron porque se divulgó en todos los medios de comunicación cubanos no sólo que ofrecía una mayor calidad de vida, sino que además de eliminar las lombrices intestinales,  contenía un agente anti carcinógeno capaz de neutralizar el avance del cáncer en su primera etapa.
El fruto maduro del noni, muy parecido a la papa, hoy se ve a montones regado por aceras y calles, con su olor penetrante y desagradable, sin que nadie le preste la menor atención.
-Con la moringa, va a pasar igual que con el noni, que ya nadie se acuerda de él; me dice uno de esos cubanos del barrio, que se las saben todas.
Al parecer, es un secreto a voces que la nueva fiebre viene “de arriba”, porque al ex gobernante cubano Fidel Castro ahora le ha dado por estudiar el cultivo de la moringa, no sólo para resolver el problema económico y la salud de los cubanos, sino porque según noticias provenientes de México y de la emisora Radio Miami de noviembre pasado, la médica de cabecera de Fidel se ha referido a que las propiedades antioxidantes de la moringa han ayudado a que su paciente de Punto Cero, levante las defensas durante el tratamiento de quimioterapia que recibe.
Aún así, no todos los cubanos quieren comer moringa. Tal vez beberla en infusión por las mañanas, ya que no hay leche ni pan con mantequilla, se pueda aceptar, pero sería demasiado sustituir, con esas extrañas y pequeñitas hojas de moringa, la carne vacuna –aunque sólo exista ya en nuestro imaginario popular-, que fue una de las comidas más tradicionales del país antes de que la revolución iniciara hace ya medio siglo el “proceso de actualización” –para decirlo en su idioma- de nuestros hábitos alimentarios.
Esperemos que al debilitado Comandante se le pase la nueva obsesión sin obligarnos a sembrar todo el país de moringa. Los mayorcitos aún recordamos su Cordón de La Habana con el café caturra, su Zafra de los Diez Millones, sus vacas maravillosas que harían que la leche nos llegara por tuberías, su revolución energética  y el largo etcétera de sus alucinantes ideas que nos han hundido en la absoluta miseria en que estamos hoy casi todos los cubanos…menos él, por supuesto.
Una vecina de la cuadra, fanática de la botánica y del Comandante, al preguntarle qué opinaba sobre este asunto, me contó que en días pasados, cuando escuchó en una estación de radio extranjera que una bolsita de moringa la compran los indígenas de América del Sur a diez mil guaraníes, descubrió lo bueno que era Fidel con su pueblo.
-¿Por qué? –le pegunté intrigada.
-¿Cómo que por qué? ¡Porque hasta nos la regala!

Let’s Take the ‘Con’ Out of Neocons. Don Boudreaux

Here’s a letter to USA Today:

Correctly noting about Iraq that “Institutions like the military were not fully formed, territorial disputes were not resolved, and key questions relating to oil were up in the air,” Danielle Pletka complains that American troops were withdrawn too early from that troubled country (“We got out of Iraq too soon,” Dec. 27).
Ms. Pletka works for the American Enterprise Institute.  That organization’s members rightly understand that Uncle Sam’s interventions into America’s domestic economy are typically motivated by narrow interest-group pressures or by economic ignorance (or by both) – and that, either way, the results are generally harmful.  So it’s truly a mystery why Ms. Pletka and her AEI associates insist so boisterously that Uncle Sam’s interventions into the affairs of some foreign nations are indispensable for the improvement of those nations’ domestic institutions.
When operating abroad, do U.S. government agents and employees grow wiser and better informed than when they operate here at home?  Do they become less susceptible to the wiles of special-interest groups?  Are U.S. government operatives’ magnanimity, courage, insight, and public-spiritedness enhanced simply by stepping onto foreign soil?  And do the complexities, trade-offs, and uncertainties that make domestic intervention in America so likely to unleash regrettable unintended consequences not exist outside of America?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030
So bumbling at home; so balletic abroad.  Go figure.

Ha Joon Chang: Wrong on Free Trade, Markets and Development

By Mark Pennington.


My first post on 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism addressed Ha Joon Chang’s dubious debating tactics when discussing ‘free market economics’. I turn now to some of Chang’s more specific critiques of economic liberalism to illustrate these tactics in greater detail.


Summarising his work in Kicking Away the Ladder and Bad Samaritans Chang tries to debunk the claim that free trade and open markets are the key to prosperity in developing countries. He claims that historically free trade was rarely if ever practiced by developed nations such as Britain and the USA. To the extent that they prescribe free trade for today’s developing nations, therefore, free market economists and their political supporters are guilty of a ‘do as I say, not as I did’ hypocrisy. What the developing world needs is the freedom to pursue the protectionist industrial policies that Chang himself favours. The economic success stories of East Asia owe their prosperity to high levels of state intervention and not to ‘neo-liberalism’.
To put it mildly, Chang misrepresents free market economics and offers a highly selective view of the evidence on trade, markets and development. First, few if any free market economists have ever claimed that Britain or the US were historical paragons of free trade. At most they have suggested that relative to previous historical eras nineteenth century Britain and the US benefited from a broad package of market-oriented policies of which free trade (especially in Britain, though less so in the United States) was a part. Similarly, they have been foremost in attacking the residual protectionism that exists in the developed world today – notably the European Union Common Agricultural Policy and equivalent schemes in the US. While Chang has every right to suggest that free market economists are in error the charge of hypocrisy is disingenuous because these economists have been critical of protectionism whenever and wherever practiced. Arguably, rich country politicians who preach free trade while refusing to reform domestic protection may be guilty of hypocrisy – but this is not a charge that can be directed against free market economists themselves.
Second, Chang misrepresents the place of free trade in the overall package of institutions and policies supported by free market economics. The classical liberal case has never been that international trade is the engine of development per sebut that free trade offers an extension of the benefits provided by domestic market oriented policies – such as improvements in the security of property rights, largely private ownership of industry and a broad reliance on competition rather than central planning. Free trade can extend the benefits of these policies and may be especially important for smaller countries that have very limited scope for internal trade. Recognising this perspective is crucial when separating correlation from causation in understanding development outcomes. The fact that Britain and especially the USA had protection in place during industrialisation does not imply that it was the protection that caused the growth. Rather, the negative effect of protection may have been more than offset by other policies – such as improved security of property rights, low taxes, low government spending, and strong internal competition. Thus, though it pursued an external policy that was often highly protectionist, nineteenth century America also benefited from the creation of an enormous internal free trade zone where the free movement of goods, labour and capital enabled gains from trade across a massive territorial area.
Significantly, Chang fails to acquaint his readers with any of the empirical literature that has sought to decipher the causal role of protection in development relative to other factors. Douglas Irwin and Stephen Broadberry, in particular, have questioned the role of tariffs by showing convincingly that the sectors of the US economy that were supposed to benefit most from ‘infant industry’ protection did not in fact experience strong growth. Thus, at the time the US overtook Britain in the nineteenth century it did so largely by increasing labour productivity in the service sector – and not through gains in protected sectors of manufacturing industry. Similarly, high growth in Argentina and Canada in the late nineteenth century was largely due to growth outside the specific industries which were supposed to benefit from import tariffs. Protection in Britain meanwhile – notably the Corn Laws, actually slowed the industrialisation process by preventing the transfer of resources out of agriculture and into industry. *
Chang cites a number of small countries (such as Finland) that had elements of state intervention during the nineteenth century but succeeded nonetheless. Again however, he makes no effort to put this evidence in a broader context of other policies. Typically, Chang seizes on any evidence of state intervention however small to claim that it must have been the intervention that did the developmental heavy lifting. Interestingly, he does not apply the same criteria when accounting for declining economic growth in Europe and the United States over the last thirty years. During this period there has been privatisation of state-owned industries and liberalisation of labour markets – but these trends have been accompanied by substantial government spending and significant increases in regulation elsewhere (see on this blog ‘ America’s Thirty Year Experiment with ‘Radical Economic De-Regulation). Nonetheless, Chang asserts that the ‘dominance’ of free market economics must be to blame for recent ills. On planet Chang, state intervention no matter how extensive cannot be considered a legitimate explanation for declining economic performance. Reading Chang’s book one is left with the impression that Europe and the United States during the Victorian era were models of Keynesian interventionism, even though they had government expenditures between 5 and 10% of GDP, minimal regulation and virtually non-existent welfare states. Europe and America of today by contrast are depicted as practitioners of rampant laissez faire – even though government spending runs at between 40 and 60% of GDP alongside constantly escalating regulation.
Chang’s analysis of East Asian development is no more impressive. Though it is true that South Korea and Taiwan pursued protectionist policies during the 1960s and 1970s and experienced strong growth their performance was eclipsed by that of Hong Kong and Singapore which operated much closer to a free trade model. China post 1978 meanwhile, though it is far from a laissez faire economy has undergone one of the most significant economic liberalisations in world history – a liberalisation that has promoted unprecedented economic growth. Not surprisingly, Chang is quick to claim that the continuing existence of industrial policies and active government involvement in the financial sector are the cause of this growth. Yet, as Jasheng Huang has shown, the growth that started the Chinese economic boom had little to do with any such policies – it was the result of a huge boost in agricultural productivity following Deng’s massive programme of rural privatisation in the early 1980s. More recently, residual government controls in industry and finance have thwarted the Chinese industrial sector. Insofar as the Chinese have developed successful industrial companies (such as Lenovo) these have been Chinese in name alone. Nearly all such companies although operating in China are formally owned and registered in Hong Kong where they have access to one of the most liberal capital markets anywhere in the world. Far from China’s system of financial controls being the cause of their success it has been the ability of entrepreneurial start-ups to exit from these restrictions and to re-enter China on the more liberal terms granted to ‘foreign investors’ that has been critical. **
Perhaps the worst misrepresentation of free market economics in 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism occurs in chapter 15 where Chang claims that ‘they’ – the ‘free market economists’ – attribute lack of development in poorer countries to the absence of entrepreneurial spirit. I know of no free market economist who has ever made such claims. From Peter Bauer in the past to William Easterly in the present free market economists have argued that entrepreneurship is a universalaspect of the human condition. What matters is whether social and political institutions channel this entrepreneurship towards voluntary exchange and positive sum games or whether institutions encourage entrepreneurs to engage in rent-seeking activity focused on the predatory transfer of wealth. The primary obstacle to the poor in much of the developing world is the absence of secure title to property and a maize of regulatory restrictions which limit access to markets, confine people to the ‘informal sector’ and which benefit predatory elites that monopolise access to the legally recognised economy. Chang offers no account of how these obstacles would be addressed by his protectionist/ high regulation agenda. Were developing countries to follow his advice they would be destined to a future that would institutionalise crony capitalism on a truly massive scale – the very sort of crony capitalism that is now disfiguring much of the developed world as well.
* Broadberry, S. (1998) How Did the United States and Germany Overtake Britain? A Sectoral Analysis of Comparative Productivity Levels, 1870-1990, Journal of Economic History, 58: 375-407.
Irwin, D. (2000) Did Late Nineteenth Century US Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry, Journal of Economic History, 335-360.
Irwin, D. (2000) Interpreting the Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late Nineteenth Century, American Economic Review, 165-169.
** Huang, J. (2008) Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

¿Qué es el liberalismo clásico? - What is classical liberalism? Nigel Ashford



Dr. Nigel Ashford explains the 10 core principles of the classical liberal & libertarian view of society and the proper role of government:

1) Liberty as the primary political value
2) Individualism
3) Skepticism about power
4) Rule of Law
5) Civil Society
6) Spontaneous Order
7) Free Markets
8) Toleration
9) Peace
10) Limited Government

Dr. Ashford is Senior Program Officer at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University.



Fuente: Yvonne Caldera Lollett.

"Las mentiras de un Chávez en campaña" 1998


Fuente: Amy.

Wladyslaw Theodor Benda (1873 – 1948)


illustration from The Shrine Magazine
A Pebble From India
illustration from The Shrine Magazine
illustration from The Woman’s Home Companion
illustration from The Country Gentleman
illustration from Hearst’s International
illustration from McCall’s
illustration from The Shrine Magazine
Theatre Number
Tropical Beauty
illustration from Collier’s Weekly
illustration from Hearst’s International
illustration from Hearst’s International
illustration from The Saturday Evening Post
illustration from Cosmopolitan
Zebra Rider


Fuente: American Gallery.

Edward Elgar Variations on an Original Theme "Enigma" Op.36, Complete



Edward Elgar Variations on an Original Theme "Enigma" Op.36

New Philharmonia Orchestra
Giuseppe Sinopoli Conductor


From Rags to Riches: Fighting India's Caste System with Capitalism: From the "Village to the Palace"

By Mark Perry.

NEW YORK TIMES -- "As the founder of a successful offshore oil-rig engineering company, Mr. Ashok Khade is part of a tiny but growing class of millionaires from the Dalit population, the 200 million so-called untouchables who occupy the very lowest rung in Hinduism’s social hierarchy.

“I’ve gone from village to palace,” Mr. Khade exclaimed, using his favorite phrase to describe his remarkable journey from the son of an illiterate cobbler in the 1960s to a wealthy business partner of Arab sheiks.

The rapid growth that followed the opening of India’s economy in 1991 has widened the gulf between rich and poor, and some here have begun to blame liberalization for the rising tide of corruption. But the era of growth has also created something unthinkable a generation ago: a tiny but growing group of wealthy Dalit business people.

Some measure their fortunes in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a handful, like Mr. Khade, have started companies worth tens of millions. With their new wealth they have also won a measure of social acceptance.

“This is a golden period for Dalits,” said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit activist and researcher who has championed capitalism among the untouchables. “Because of the new market economy, material markers are replacing social markers. Dalits can buy rank in the market economy. India is moving from a caste-based to a class-based society, where if you have all the goodies in life and your bank account is booming, you are acceptable.”

Milind Kamble, a Dalit contractor based in the city of Pune in Maharashtra State, said that out of the 100 or so members of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry in his city, only one was in business before 1991.

“We are fighting the caste system with capitalism,” he said.

Watch a four-minute video here profiling Mr. Khade.   


HT: Colin Grabow



Entrevista a Francisco Cabrillo. Víctor Gago


Esta semana, Víctor Gago entrevista al economista Francisco Cabrillo en Contemporáneos. Catedrático de Economía de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, director del Máster en Derecho, Economía y Políticas Públicas del Instituto Ortega y Gasset y presidente del Consejo Económico y Social de la Comunidad de Madrid, Cabrillo es autor, entre otros títulos, de Economistas extravagantes (2007) y Grandes errores en economía (2001). También es colaborador de Libertad Digital, La Ilustración Liberal y de FAES.