DC - More Smoke and Mirrors from Wonderland

The AP reports the Senate Banking Committee is hashing out the details for a new consumer protection agency to handle things like credit cards and mortgages and to put it in the Federal Reserve.

It is things like this that prove to me almost daily what a good idea it has been not to go back to DC. I was born there in 1950, moved to the suburbs at age four and left the area at 17 to go to UVa. Except for a 13 months working in the Nixon administration and a few visits on government business in the Reagan years, I haven't been back.

The place reminds me of nothing so much as Lewis Carrol's fictional Wonderland - full of self-important people saying meaningless things which they think are pearls of profound wisdom.

All this high level palaver is supposed to make us safe form another financial crisis of the sort that took these worthies by surprise in 2008. A crisis that had been predicted by more serious and sensible observers for years.

Who, in their right mind and possessed of the relevant historical facts. can possibly believe that the crisis was in any way related to a deficiency of power at the Federal Reserve?

If those on Capitol Hill want to see the source of the mess we are still struggling with, I suggest they look in a mirror.

Spanish Judge Ties Chavez Regime to Terror, Assassination Plots

In Spain, a judge made the allegations of Chavez terror ties public on Monday in a 26-page indictment in which he charged six members of the Basque guerrillas ETA and seven members of the Colombian rebel group FARC with a series of crimes, including terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder.

It seems the leader of the new Bolivarian revolution was plotting the murder of a number of serving and former members of the government of Colombia while they were residing or visiting in Spain. Venezuela used their drug smuggling allies in the Colombian revolutionary army known by its Spanish initials FARC to set the plan in motion; and FARC turned to their revolutionary brothers in ETA, Spain's Basque separatist movement, for help in setting up surveillance of ther targets in Spain.

As I have pointed out before, the Bolivarian movement is not just another political movement or diplomatic initiative. It represents a changing of the guard in leadership of the Latin American left from Fidel Castro (who idolized Adolph Hitler before declaring himself a communist) to Hugo Chavez (who patterns himself after Bolivar whose inspiration was Napoleon). Megalomaniacs like Chavez can inflict great harm in their single-minded pursuit of power.

Reinforcing the Bolivarian connection, the investigating judge in Spain has asked his government to request that Cuba and Venezuela extradite the suspects residing in their territories.

The Other War - HUMAN EVENTS

This article from HE's Guns & Patriots email newsletter by Oliver North provides some very good data and insights on out ongoing border control problem.

I think Col. North is wrong about the solution, however. Rather than clamping ever-tighter on financial transactions, drug legalization will gut the entire crime syndicate operation overnight. We'll still need to spend some police resources on keeping drugs away from children, but they are getting them now.

On the other side of the balance we have jobs for Americans producing drugs consumed by Americans instead of all that money going overseas. Legalization would also cut into the corruption of government officials, especially in law enforcement, both here and in the countries where drugs are produced and shipped.

Drug policy has no warrant in the US Constitution and its time we dusted off that old piece of paper and started taking it seriously again. Given the perilous state of federal government finances, curtailing government to only those functions specifically authorized in the Constitution is about the only way we have any hope of restoring fiscal sanity.

Terror in the name of tradition - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source

From the Mail & Guardian of Jo'burg comes a very interesting article by an Oxford trained legal scholar on some of the absurdities and outrages of the South African government's policies regarding traditional tribal governance in the countryside.

To understand the scope of such a problem, imagine that our Indian reservations contained over half the land and half the people of the country and that, rather than imposing democratic forms (which was the US policy) we told them to go back to governing their territories by pre-Columbian standards.

There is an old saying that "hard cases make bad law" - and in this controversy it is possible that a particularly outrageous case might cause the pendulum to swing too far away from central government respect for traditional cultures.

The hard case is Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, king of the amaThembu. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for exercising his traditional powers by his own lights. If you want the details, read the article - some of it is too gruesome for me to describe here. The king has responded by announcing on January 14 the intention to secede. His territory covers 60% of South Africa's territory.

Secession, were South Africa to allow it, might well (this is my opinion, not the author's) lead to rebellion if the people find themselves without any hope of redressing their grievances through the South African courts.

On the other hand, the ANC-led government and the courts are at loggerheads about just how much authority traditional leaders like the king of the amaThembu should have. If the government have their way, some of the acts for which the king was convicted might well be within the law.

I found this article and the accompanying comments particularly interesting for the light it sheds on the push to bring Islamic law to Europe. Can any country function with two fundamentally different legal systems?

Economic Freedom Falling in Bolivarian Andes

This is an interesting piece from The Heritage Foundation using the recent announcement of the foundation's annual economic freedom rankings to contrast the performance of three nations of the Bolivarian bloc in South America with three contiguous countries pursuing much more pro-freedom policies.

To the embarassment of great economic thinkers of a progressive bent, freedom wins! Of course, freedom can be valued for its philosophical and theological merits. But, it also does a better job of delivering more goods to more people than the leviathan state so fondly embraced by communists, socialists, progressives or leaders of our own Democratic Party.

This study was, of course, done before the recent tragedy of the 8.8 earthquake near Concepcion, Chile. It will be instructive in following the recovery efforts to contrast the experiences of Chile and Haiti. Among other things, I expect it will demonstrate the superiority of a highly developed, free market economy in responding to human needs in the wake of natural disaster - something to also keep in mind in the global climate change debate.