Pro Commerce

Metastasize

It is rather shocking to realize that the institution of government is like a metastasizing cancer tumor. Never in human history has a national government reduced its expenditures except after a war.

Neither political party in the United States has effectively reduced government growth. One party, the pro-slavery party has actually promoted rapid growth of the government cancer.

I have two points to make that mitigate the general observation about government as cancer. First, is that governments below the federal level that cannot go into debt on a large scale are forced to learn some modicum of expenditure control. Similarly government at the level of water districts and rural fire departments seem to be well managed.

Second, while the cancer rule of metastasis is not negated, there are governments that are well run. I have personally dealt extensively with the Japanese government and with the Swedish government. In both cases every effort was made to keep departments small and efficient and run by people of the highest caliber.

While I have found some mitigation, the American federal government is a metastasizing cancer and no one has ever made it clear that government is a far greater danger than global warming or political extremism.

Luttwak

I interviewed Edward Luttwak many years ago when I had a public radio program.

He was one of the most enjoyable and interesting interviews I can remember.

If you want to see his thinking, check out this interview and be patient.

Luttwak makes several import points that resonate with me. One is that Israel is cohesive because it is surrounded by insane and numerous enemy's. A nation of Jews would not ordinarily be a cohesive society as anyone can tell by reading Torah and related books.

He also points out that the chances of the Arab spring being related to democracy are sheer fantasy.  He doesn't have much regard  for the power of  Iran nor the wisdom of Turkey.

Important note:  Luttwak points out that the current Foreign Minister of Turkey is a babbling idiot. This accounts for many of the absurdities we read about Turkey. Much of it is coming from the Foreign Minister  Ahmet Davutoğlu.  Apparently the foreign services of the world discount whatever comes out of his mouth.

You will enjoy reading Luttwak.  Thanks to my friend David Boxenhorn for finding this article.

No more "best blogs" summaries

I love doing 'best' blogs on the 1st and 15th but my readership drops on those days.

My readership has serious annual fluctuations to begin with.  It is over 70,000 monthly readers from Thanksgiving to May Day and half that for the rest of the year.

The "best of" was designed to help the weekly and monthly readers.  It seems to have been uninteresting to the daily readers...and they count with me.