Nathan’s Musings

I am always amazed at how stupid authoritarian governments are in the way they manage (or try to manage) the images of their miserable countries. I went to see the Borat movie this weekend. Nothing remarkable about that, many others have gone to see this movie. But how did I ever hear about it? One day, several weeks ago, I saw the Kazakhstan ambassador in London being interviewed on the BBC because he had launched some kind of protest with the British government against the movie (insulting to the great country of Kazakhstan etc.). It was never made clear what his government expected the British government to do about the movie, since Britain is a democratic country where the government has no say in such matters. It was easier for the Kazakhs to deal with their Russian friends–the movie has been banned in Russia. But the clumsy attempt to get the movie banned in the West has only resulted in much more publicity than the makers of the movie could ever dream of. I, for one, would never have heard about Borat, had it not been for the Kazakh ambassador to the UK.

In a similar vein, a couple of weeks ago, a Danish “concept artist” Kristian von Hornsleth was attacked by the Ugandan government for a happening he had staged in some village in Uganda. In exchange for a pig or a goat, each inhabitant of the village had to officially change his or her surname to Hornsleth and be photographed showing off their new identity card. Now, I think very little of concept art, and even though I have strong ties to Denmark, I have never heard of von Hornsleth. I would probably have spent the rest of my life in happy ignorance of this “artist” had it not been for the Ugandan government’s clumsy intervention.

At least the Kazakhs have become just a tiny bit smarter. They have stopped their futile protests and have instead launched an advertising campaign on the BBC and CNN, promoting tourism. So if you fancy pictoresque oil refineries or gas pipelines, Kazakhstan is the place to go!

Today is election day here in the Netherlands, a general election of the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch equivalent of the House of Commons. By the standards set by the recent US midterm elections or the typical election in Southern Europe, the campaign here has been decidedly boring: no sex scandals (it would anyway be difficult to define what constitutes a sex scandal in this country), no personal attacks, just lively debates over…issues! On one side is the ruling government, led by the Christian Democrat prime minister Balkenende, who is often compared to Harry Potter, and with a conservative/liberal party VVD as the junior coalition partner. The opposition is led by the Labour Party with a better-looking and more lively leader Wouter Bos. Since the Dutch economy is doing well, it has been difficult for the opposition to criticise the performance of the government. The main theme of the campaign has been Labour’s claim that the centre-right government has allowed inequality to increase, to which the government replies that the best way to help the poor is to reduce unemployment and get the economy growing which is precisely what the current government has done.

The most likely outcome is something close to a 50/50 split, with one of the smaller centrist parties effectively determining the next government through their choice of which big party as coalition partner. Dutch politics is indeed not very exciting, but I suspect that people living in places with more “lively” politics would happily trade their interesting elections for our boring one…

Yesterday, the economics profession lost on of its best practicioners, Milton Friedman. When I started studying economics at Aarhus University in Denmark in 1980, Friedman was a hate figure among many of my leftist fellow students, not only because of his free-market politics but also because of his close involvement with the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile in his role as economic advisor to the military junta.

Clearly, Friedman was a flawed figure in some respects. But his accomplishments are immense. He is one of the few economists who became known among the wider public; most people probably became familiar with the term monetarism, without really understanding what it meant, or at most having some vague notion that it was all about inflation being the root of all evil. In BBC’s obituary, Friedman is described as the “high priest of monetarism” but in fact he was much more than that. And contrary to popular belief, his influence in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were in power in their respective countries had little to do with monetary economics. Reagan certainly was no monetarist, and as for the UK, it is worth noting that it was a Labour government which in the 1990s made the Bank of England independent and gave it a mandate to focus mainly on inflation, one of the central policy prescriptions of monetarism.

No, Friedman’s greatness was his forceful advocacy of the free market, most eloquently in his 1982 (I think) book Free to Choose, which even ended up being made into a TV series–I cannot think of any other economist whose work was as accessible to the general public as Friedman’s. Perhaps Alan Blinder or Paul Krugman from the current generation come close. Whether one agrees with Friedman or not, his writings are undeniably incredibly persuasive in making the case that free-market capitalism is the best way to organise an economy, not only because it is the best way to produce goods and services but also because it is morally superior to the socialist alternative that was so much in vogue back in the 1970s and 80s. This, by the way, does not mean that one cannot have a high level of social safety at the same time. Indeed, the good performance of the Scandinavian countries shows that it is perfectly possible to combine the free market with a generous welfare state.

Friedman won the Nobel Prize in 1976. This too was controversial in some circles because of his perceived right-wing politics and his association with Pinochet. But the Nobel was not for his free-market ideas or even for monetarism; it was a reward for his pioneering work on the macroeconomic consumption function, work which he did largely in the 1950s and which is unknown outside the economics profession.

To illustrate the futility of trying to categorise a man like Friedman in familiar right/left terms, he considered his advocacy of the abolition of the draft after the Vietnam war as one of his greatest accomplishments, and he was also advocating “progressive” causes such as the legalisation of marijuana (whether he actually ever smoked it or inhaled is unknown).

OK, so Rumsfeld was made to fall on his sword the other day. Good, that was about time. But not enough. George Bush needs to be impeached. As the top guy, he is the one responsible for the disaster in Iraq. I am about halfway through the Woodward book at the moment. Woodward is no Bush-basher; many of the top Republicans come off quite favourably in the book. But it is clear that one of two possibilities is true: either Bush has actively lied to the American people in order to justify the war, or he was breathtakingly detached from the whole decision-making process. In the first case we have criminal intent, in the second case we have criminal neglect. Either case justifies removing the boss. Obviously, Bush hopes that by sacrificing Rumsfeld, he will satisfy his critics. Look next for Bolton to go, since he will never be confirmed by the Senate now; maybe Cheney will have some convenient heart trouble and step down. But at the end of the day the top guy is responsible for the decisions on his watch.

I am realistic enough to know that the Democrats will not impeach Bush (even though he deserves it much more than did Nixon). But at least they should make life very difficult for him the next two years. It is touching how much Bush has talked of bi-partisanship since Wednesday, considering how arrogantly he has acted towards the opposition during his first six years in the White House. As a US citizen, I say no to bi-partisanship. The Democrats were not elected in order to support George Bush; they were elected to change policies, both domestic and foreign, and the Democrats should force the president to do so. Otherwise, the whole effort to win this election will have been wasted for the Democrats.

Just got up, turn on the TV to hear the US election results. While the overall news is good, there is bad news from a state where I lived for several years, Florida. Their new governor is unfortunately another Republican (following Jeb Bush, yuck). He was giving his victory speech when I turned on the TV. His list of people to thank started with…God! As if She cares whether the governor of Florida is Republican or Democrat. I think I will go and throw up.

Last week, the Israeli army once again had to go into northern Gaza to pursue terrorists who keep firing rockets into Israel. During the weekend, a group of Hamas “fighters” took refuge in a mosque, which was then surrounded by the Israelis. The gunmen escaped by hiding among a group of misguided women who had gone down to the mosque to form a human shield after an appeal on the local radio station to do so.

As I watched the large group of women milling around the mosque with Israeli tanks in the background, the voice-over on BBC said that the Israeli army “could only stand by and watch.”

What does this episode illustrate? Is the Israeli army really that powerless? No. They could easily have killed all the gunmen in the mosque. They had the firepower right there to wipe out the terrorists and the women protecting them. But they did not fire (except a few gunshots which hit a couple of the women and at least one man). Why not? Obviously because they did not want to mow down hundreds of women. The Israelis are a civilised people who will not knowingly do such things. Their Arab adversaries have no such scruples. Of course, the very essence of Hamas and Hizbollah is to target Israeli civilians. But even when the Arabs are fighting each other, there is little concern for civilians. The massacres on Palestinians in “moderate” Jordan in the 1970s, the slaughter of thousands at Hama in Syria in 1982, the countless crimes of Saddam in Iraq–oh yes, Arab armies know how to shoot at civilians. And the women and children killed in those cases were not collateral damage; they were the targets.

This is the fundamental difference between Israel and its enemies. For all its flaws, Israel is a western democracy fighting for its life, surrounded by medieval barbarism. I wish that more of my progressive friends recognised this simple fact.

The last couple of days have been great to be a Dane, even in exile. Last night, FC Copenhagen beat mighty Manchester United 1-0 in a Champions League game. It may not sound like a big deal, but think about this: one of Man U’s players, Wayne Rooney, earns 3 times as much as the entire FC Copenhagen starting eleven. So in that perspective, this was a monumental achievement.

Earlier in the day, on my way home from work, I heard on the radio of a new opinion poll conducted in Egypt. According to this poll, Denmark is the most hated country by Egyptians after Israel; the UK and US came in 3rd and 4th place. I was proud to hear that Denmark is in such good company. BBC interviewed a Danish MP from one of the governing parties, who reasonably said that he could not accept it as Denmark had been friendly to Egypt all along and has been giving development aid to the country for the past 20 years. In so many words, he implied that this was more Egypt’s problem than Denmark’s if the Egyptians do not understand that Denmark is a liberal democracy where the government does not control the press and where the bounds of freedom of speech are very wide indeed. Well, I am not a politician of the ruling party, so I can speak a bit more freely: Egypt may have been a great country 5000 years ago, but today it is a miserable quasi-dictatorship where people have no idea of what an independent press is and get their marching orders from whoever the local imam is. And if they hate Denmark, let them hate us. Denmark does not need Egypt. It may be a market of many millions, but since most of them are poor, they cannot afford our exports anyway, and since they do not have oil there is nothing interesting to import from Egypt either. If I want to look at pyramides, I can go to Paris and look at the modern glass version in front of the Louvre–much nicer, and there is a bar inside. The Egyptians can keep their sand and their camels. They can keep hating us as instructed by Al Ahram. Just don’t ask me to respect them; I can find nothing to respect about the Egyptian society or culture.