©2016 By ILANA MERCER 

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee for 2016, has something in common with Donald Trump: Sinophobia.

During a 2011 visit to Zambia, she warned about “a new colonialism in Africa.” This time, the Chinese were to blame. As Clinton sees it, the Chinese are extracting wealth from the continent by buying its raw materials. “We saw that during colonial times it [was] easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave,” she griped.

Clinton was adamant. She did not want to see a European-style colonial redux in Africa.

Certainly Chinese state capitalism is not free-market capitalism. But is Chinese mercantilism not preferable to American militarism, an example of which is Libya, a north-African recipient of madam secretary’s largess? Not according to Mrs. Clinton.

As Clinton sees it (as do, no doubt, the Paul-Ryan Republicans and the Bernie Sanders socialists), the “old colonialism” saw underdeveloped nations “bilked by rich capitalist countries,” a phrase used by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. According to these highly politicized, socialist, zero-sum formulations regarding colonialism, class warfare and “income inequality,” one person’s plenty is another’s poverty. The corresponding antidote invariably involves taking from one and giving to the other—from rich to poor; from North to South.

The notion, however, of a preexisting income pie from which the greedy appropriate an unfair share is itself pie-in-the-sky. Wealth, earned or “unearned,” as egalitarians term inheritance, doesn’t exist outside the individuals who create it; it is a return for desirable services, skills and resources they render to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages—and wealth. People in the West produce or purchase what they consume—and much more; they don’t remove, or steal it from Third Worlders. Wrote the greatest development economist, Lord Peter Bauer, in Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion: “Incomes, including those of the relatively prosperous or the owners of property, are not taken from other people. Normally they are produced by their recipient and the resources they own.”

Not unlike Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who “dramatically increased U.S. foreign aid” (as reported approvingly in Foreign Affairs magazine); Mrs. Clinton also committed more funds to the Agency for International Development during her tenure as secretary of state.

When it comes to Africa, it’s worth noting, however, that four or five decades since decolonization; colonialism, dependency and racism no longer cut it as explanations for Africa’s persistent and pervasive underdevelopment. “Pseudo-scholars such as [the late] Edward Said and legions of liberal intellectuals have made careers out of blaming the West for problems that were endemic to many societies both before and after their experiences as European colonies,” noted Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, in a 2002 issue of American Outlook.

The truth is that colonization constituted the least tumultuous period in African history. This is fact; its enunciation is not to condone colonialism or similar, undeniably coercive, forays,only to venture, as did George Eliot in Daniel Deronda, that “to object to colonization absolutely is to object to history itself. To ask whether colonization in itself is good or bad is the same as asking whether history is a good or bad thing.”

“The decolonization process” in Africa “was substantially completed by the end of the 1960s,” notes Harrison, in the aforementioned Culture Matters. Yet half of the more than 600 million people south of the Sahara live in poverty. In at least eighteen countries life expectancy is below fifty years, and half or more of women are illiterate. In at least thirteen countries, half or more of the adult population is illiterate. Since the colonial powers decamped, economic conditions have declined across the Dark Continent. Democratic institutions have been slow or have failed to emerge.

The colonialism humbug, unhelpful in explaining and hence helping the Third World, was once “conventional wisdom that brooked no dissent.” Now, claims Harrison, it is rarely mentioned in intellectually respectable quarters. “For many, including some Africans, the statute of limitation on colonialism as an explanation for underdevelopment lapsed long ago.” “Moreover, four former colonies, two British (Hong Kong and Singapore) and two Japanese (South Korea and Taiwan) have vaulted into the First World.”

A former USAID (United States Agency for International Development) official, Harrison, also author of Underdevelopment is a State of Mind, knows of what he speaks: “Over the years, the development assistance institutions have promoted an assortment of solutions,” from land reform, to sustainable, and culturally sensitive, development. Billions of dollars later, “rapid growth, democracy and social justice” remain rare in Africa.

As the researchers cited insist, human behavior is mediated by values. Nevertheless, their cultural argument affords a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: People do what they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way. But what precisely accounts for the unequal “civilizing potential,” as James Burnham called it, displayed by different groups? Why have some people produced Confucian ethics (Clinton and Trump’s dreaded Chinese), or Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?

Such an investigation, however, is verboten—a state-of-affairs another Harvard sociologist, Orlando Patterson, blames on “a prevailing rigid orthodoxy,” which is the preferred academic phrase for political correctness:

Culture is a symbolic system to be interpreted, understood, discussed, delineated, respected, and celebrated as the distinct product of a particular group of people, of equal worth with all other such products. But it should never be used to explain anything about the people who produced it.

Still another process that has eluded Africa is detribalization. Tribe burrows deep in Africa’s marrow and, some might contend, infects its lymphatic system in a bad way.

Historians (and certainly treacherous politicians) are in the habit of commending the West for detribalizing and condemning us for Trump-style tribalism.

The beginning of the English nation began with Anglo-Saxon colonizers who massacred the Britons, recounts historian Kenneth M. Newton. “The descendants of these Anglo-Saxons went on to colonize America, replacing the ‘Red Indians.'” The “bloody nature of the various colonizations in the past” notwithstanding, in the case of England, what emerged was “a distinct identity for a people descended from diverse ethnic groups that had previously tended to slaughter each other.” That nation produced Shakespeare, Newton, and George Eliot.

The American Founding Fathers were sired and philosophically inspired by the same Saxon forefathers—and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. They went on to forge a constitution that transcended their tribe, as we are constantly lectured by the likes of Clinton and Ryan.

Perhaps for all their continent’s “backwardness,” a concept development economists are no longer allowed to deploy, Africans are at least constitutionally more true to their nature than Westerners, who prefer to tame their tribalism and risk perishing.

©ILANA Mercer
The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
The Libertarian Alliance &  Constitution.com
June 10, 2016

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So what do I think of the next president? I didn’t like his predecessor’s “New New Deal,” so why would I like Barack Hussein Obama’s Great Great Society?

H. L. Mencken called elections “a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Henry Hazlitt said that “government has nothing to give to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else.” But while robbing Peter to pay Paul is a philosophical given to the clowns competing for the commander-in-chief’s crown, it’s really much worse than that.

The nation’s treasury is empty. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the three musketeers plan on a whole lot of deficit spending. To keep running-up debt on an account that is not yours is fraud by any other name. It’s manifestly clear how close on the unconstitutional continuum Hillary, Hussein and McCain stand.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), in his treatise on the Principles of Politics, defined liberty as the people’s right to “enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights.”

This writer holds that the sole role of a legitimate government is to protect only the inalienable rights to life, liberty and property, and the pursuit of happiness. Why life, liberty, and property, and not housing, food, education, health care, child benefits, emotional well-being, enriching employment, adequate vacations, ad infinitum, as promised variously by the remaining (viable) presidential contenders? Because the former impose no obligations on other free individuals; the latter enslave some in the service of others.

The Constitution is with Constant (and Mercer), with some variations. All the “giving” Hussein and Hillary plan to do is extraconstitutional. Obama’s Manna From Heaven Healthcare Plan, and Hillary’s Cuba Care—these are not inalienable rights.

The welfare clause, “and Congress will have the power…to provide for the general welfare”—Article I, Section 8—our overlords have taken to mean that government can pick The People’s pocketbooks for any possible project, even though the general clause is followed by a detailed enumeration of the limited powers so delegated.

Asks historian Thomas E. Woods Jr.: “What point would there be in specifically listing the federal government’s powers if the general welfare clause had already provided the government with an essentially boundless authority to enact whatever it thought would contribute to people’s well-being?” Woods evokes no less an authority than the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison: “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.” 

Yet Professor Obama, that “brilliant” constitutional scholar, vows to “make available a new national health plan to all Americans … to buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.” This is but a tiny facet in his Manna From Heaven Healthcare windfall, which is not dissimilar to Hillary’s exhumed health plan, with varying degrees of coercion.

First of all, it’s not Obama who is funding Cures for Congress; it’s Yo Mama. Taxpayers fund the health care of Congress members and federal employees. Obama’s pious, but specious, prattle, and Hillary’s honeyed words mean one thing: In addition to Congress, the taxpayer will now carry the entire country. Added to the existing deadwood will be many more bureaucrats demanding to be kept in the lap of luxury—pensions and perks in perpetuity.

Second, the multiplying government “projects” the Obama (and Hillary) cult calls for under the guise of “change,” involve unethical takings. But since a bit of stealing between friends is no cause for complaint, let us also point out—as do the better economists; the ones politicians don’t hire—that government projects are unsuccessful.

The inverted and perverse incentive structure that characterizes these endeavors guarantees failure. Unlike the private sector, which must constantly cleanse itself if it is to survive and thrive, wrongdoing and incompetence in government sectors are seldom punished. They are, rather, rewarded with budgetary increases. A government department accretes through inefficiency. Failure translates into ever-growing budgets and powers and a further collectivization of accountability.

Last, but not least, on the scale of destruction: McCain. The Senator recently absented himself from a vote on that obscene Stimulus Package. Nary a murmur did he emit about Bush’s $3.1 trillion budget. And he has promised a monstrous “Marshall Plan” for Iraq. What cuts to welfare he will deliver stateside, McCain will divert to Iraq in the form of massive government make-work schemes.

It’s all in the McCain manifesto. The global wa
rmonger is also a global-warming wing nut, another unconstitutional mega expense account the three scofflaws intend on maxing out.

If only the high-minded Framers had written the Constitution with crooks in mind. But as Joe Sobran once quipped, “the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.” It certainly doesn’t intimidate the Hillary, Hussein and McCain axis of evil.

©2008 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

    February 15

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In foreign affairs, Hillary Clinton is a busybody, just like Bush. If in doubt, consider her reaction to Benazir Bhutto’s predictable assassination and the deepening downturn in Pakistan.

Speaking to a frightened Wolf Blitzer—Hillary is more harridan than presidential—she demanded that the unrest in Pakistan be internationalized, and called on the U.N. to step in and solve the apparent mystery of Bhutto’s death.

When Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi last month, she had been bobbing up and down from the sunroof of an under-protected, rickety vehicle. This, after an attempt on her life in Karachi back in October. The last attack, like the first, saw scores of people killed. Maybe Musharraf should have kept Bhutto under house arrest for her own good—and for the sake of the many bystanders.

Hillary also recommended that more pressure to deliver democracy be applied to the already besieged President Pervez Musharraf. “Free and fair elections” in Pakistan is how she put it—as though Pervez alone is what prevents the 130 million, mostly tribal and illiterate, people of Pakistan from forming democratic institutions and following the rule of law.

In the tradition of the meddlesome Bush, Hillary is also convinced that the U.S. is obligated to shore-up civil society in Pakistan and address the “root causes” of the seething Muslim Street in that country. By “root-causes” Hillary does not mean Islam, but the three “Ps”: patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness.

To quote Clinton: “I’ve talked to President Musharraf about the necessity for us to raise the literacy rate, to reach out with healthcare and education that would help the Pakistani people to really concentrate on civil society.” Can you say Nation Building?!

Hillary’s reaction to the slaying of Bhutto confirms how deeply silly she truly is—from the adventure in Iraq she has learned nothing at all about the futility of central planning. Societies are built from the soil up, not from the sky down. And by the people, not the pols, silly.

Forcing democracy down Iraqi gullets—now, that didn’t workout too well, did it? How about in the Palestinian Authority? At our insistence, democratic elections were held in the PA, and voila! The freedom-loving Palestinians voted for Hamas, which the US thereupon boycotted.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will likely gain a parliamentary majority once American democrats get the better of Mubarak and muscle him into legalizing the Brotherhood and democratizing the political process.

Be careful what you wish for in Pakistan, Hillary! A new “Pew Global Attitudes Project” reveals that rising resistance to terrorism among Pakistanis has not coincided with positive attitudes toward the US and its “war on terror.” Although down, Pakistani confidence in bin Laden still stands at 38 percent, while only 13 percent back America’s “war on terror.”

“More than 72 percent are [also] very or somewhat worried that the U.S. could become a military threat to their country. And 64 percent name the U.S. as one of the countries posing the greatest potential threat to Pakistan.” Pugnacious posturing from Clinton, Barak Obama, Bill Richardson—and other presidential candidates with “experience” in foreign affairs—does nothing to allay these perceptions among Pakistanis.

American media sentimentalize the reality on the Pakistani ground. The truth is that Musharraf is caught between Scylla and Charybdis. There is indeed a faction of liberals that wants democratic reforms in Pakistan. But among the demonstrators forever punching the air over there are also “Islamists, who resent the military crackdown on extremists.”

There are also ample al Qaida and Taliban sympathizers in the tribal regions and among the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence. By strong-arming Musharraf, Mrs. Clinton is, if anything, gratifying Bhutto’s likely killers: the al Qaida/Taliban network.

Oddly enough, this was Bhutto’s last wish. In the event of her death, she requested that Musharraf be blamed. In addition to siccing the mobs and the mindless media on Musharraf, Bhutto, whom the same people summarily canonized, bequeathed a messy legacy: During her disastrous two terms in office, she too had cultivated ties with the Taliban in the service of her own regional ambitions. Back then, Bhutto was certainly no democrat, and was mired in scandal, corruption, and perhaps worse. She may have had a hand in the assassination of a brother, who opposed her politics and vied for leadership of the Bhutto-owned Pakistan’s People’s Party.

Put it this way: The PPP has never held a caucus for the peons! In line with the dynastic “democracy” Bhutto practiced, her 19-year-old son is set to succeed her as leader of the party. As the Ottawa Citizen’s David Warren has observed, “she, like every other woman who has risen to power in the region, including a prime minister of India, two in Bangladesh, and now two in Sri Lanka—inherited dynasties founded by powerful men.”

A description that may well apply to Hillary.

© 2008 By Ilana Mercer

    WorldNetDaily.com

    January 4

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