Home grown terrorists

My image of suicide bombers used to be desperate people, perhaps born into a world where all they know is the honor of martyrdom, people who feel that the only way to speak out is to cause horrific violence for their cause. In Palestine where families hold parties for their children before they cross the border into Israel to blow innocent people apart, in Iraq where insurgent forces’ most effective weapon is random violence inflicted again on innocent people.

That view has now been all but shattered, the lives of the British suicide bombers who attacked the London transport system appear to be very normal, among then, a teaching assistant who was well liked by his pupils, a couple of teenagers finding it hard to fit in, but not unusual these days, and a young parent, married at 19 with two children. Two of them did have a mildly violent past, but nothing more than scraps in the schoolyard.

While we must pursue the terror network that allowed these people to attack London in such a horrific way, we must also start to understand why these people, some with young families and all with comfortable lives felt it necessary to commit this atrocity, only then will we stand a chance of defeating the threat.

Anti trust

Ok, here I am sat down in front of my computer at home with a glass of the finest Lindisfarne mead just about to head off to the pub to get some of those southern comfort and coke's. But first I though I would vent some rage. It amazes me how people can look at the persecution of a minority group and radiate with joy at the fact. The anti trust laws both in the states and in Europe are designed to persecute business people, they contain no objectivity and can act retroactivly, When the ALCOA exacutives were sentenced to jail under the antitrust laws in the States the lerned Judge Hand said:

"It was not inevitable that it should always anticipate increases in the demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling its capacity before others entred the field. It insists that it never excluded competitors; but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressivly to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organisation, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel."

In other words, the ALCOA executives were being prosecuted for running a competitive business, and by supplying a product in the most efficient way possible, now I ask, what harm could they possibly have been doing? Agreed, that was not a recent case, but the same thing is going on today, Bill Gates being a typical case, and there are many more cases not quite so high profile. Burocrats should not wield power as Hitler and Stalin did, it goes against our most basic right to freedom as individuals.

London attacks

Yesterday’s attacks on London are a terrible remainder of the determination of a minority who are bent on destroying the values that we hold dear. The victims of the attacks were innocent people, and we can never forget that the true horror is the human tragedy that faces the victims and the relatives of those who have died. I hope that this murderous act is not used as a political toy; I for one will refrain from using it as such.

African Poverty

Why is the continent of Africa so poor? Historically, the continent did not contain land as fertile as that found in more temperate regions of the globe, this meant that subsistence farming carried on, and still continues today, while other continents were able to develop farming which freed people from producing food to allow them to produce other things. Today though, there is more than enough food in the world markets, and farming technology is such that even in Africa it is possible to produce more food than one needs to satisfy only oneself. Some people have blamed the problem on colonialism, the Europeans enslaving the local population and setting them back, however, if this is the case, how does one explain that South Africa, once a colonial power is far richer than Ethiopia, which was never under colonial rule. Maybe the rich countries are exploiting the resources of the world and consuming too much, not leaving enough for the third world, this too is wrong. We do not take food from Africa, on the contrary, we produce too much food ourselves, and we also have a huge capacity to produce everything we need for a comfortable life, far beyond the amount we consume.

There is a problem which might be setting Africa back though, our food overproduction is due to an economic anomaly, the price of grain is subject to the same price system as anything else, supply and demand determine the price. The current price of farm products is too high however, this sends a price signal to farmers to produce more, as there is a profit in it, the reason the price is higher than it should be given the current demand is because of subsidies. The extra produce is then sold on the world market at below market prices, this means that other countries cannot sell at a competitive price. This of course benefits the farmers in the West, but nobody else, it does not benefit the people in the west, as we pay higher prices for our food than we should do, and those outside the subsidized areas are hurt from unfair competition. This alone though would not push the entire continent of Africa into poverty; it would simply reduce the number of farmers in these countries down relative to other workers. So while it is a grave injustice it is not the sole reason for poverty. For the true reason for poverty we need to look at what is missing from Africa that allowed most of the rest of the world to prosper.

The greatest period of economic expansion in Britain was the industrial revolution, a period when the whimsical rule of the monarchy was reduced to virtually nothing and people were largely left free to pursue their own ends, they had property rights and the rule of law. The same was true in America during its own economic expansion; Hong Kong has grown into an economic superpower despite the fact that it is a small land mass and has nothing in the way of natural resources, simply from the rule of law, property rights and freedom that its citizens enjoy. When we look at the majority of African countries we see a different picture. Dictators rule over their people with absolute authority, life is often cheap and it is certainly not uncommon to hear of government soldiers burning down villages and killing its inhabitants. Rwanda is a shocking example of this; Darfur in Sudan is another and is still happening today, Somalia, Niger etc. Without confidence in property rights, there is no incentive to obtain property, without the rule of law, a person is unable to know whether they will be prosecuted for their actions or not, regardless of what those actions are. This is not an environment where Adam Smiths invisible hand can operate, until the dictators of Africa are removed, the poverty will remain, regardless of aid and debt relief, and even if subsidies are removed, the continent needs to be free.