It's still true: "The best anti-poverty programme ever invented wasn’t a benefit, it was a job."

"With the help of all ... we can build a new life for the poor, a life of hope, a life of opportunity. And we can do it by remembering that the best anti-poverty programme is a job."

~ Ronald Reagan in his 1986 Radio Address to the Nation on Welfare Reform

"The best measure of our success is not how many people are on welfare, it’s how many people we help to get off of welfare and into a job. Because the best anti-poverty programme is a job."

~ Barack Obama from his 2014 State of the Union Address

"The best anti-poverty programme ever invented wasn’t a benefit, it was a job. Policies should make work easier to access than welfare — not the other way around."

~ Taxpayers Union 2026

20 Years On: "The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable...."

"The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable....
    "[The] account [must begin] with the singular figure of Saddam Hussein. The decision to employ force cannot be understood without taking stock of the dictator’s perverse 'role and agency,' and no amount of revisionism can efface his incessant malice, aggression, and volatility.
    "The regime of absolute control and capricious terror in Baghdad established what the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya called a 'republic of fear, or what the country’s first post-war president, Jalal Talabani, once described as 'a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it.' 

    "Before the arrival of coalition forces, Iraq was an abattoir of repression at home, and a font of menace and violence abroad. Although the rule of the Ba’ath Party has seldom been omitted from retrospective evaluations of the causes of the war, it has generally been given short shrift. It’s therefore not especially surprising that Saddam Hussein is now widely regarded as a phantom threat, and that the war has come to be perceived as the outcome of a conspiracy.
    "[We should not overlook] the moral and strategic challenges posed to American power by Iraq’s ancien régime. Perhaps one anecdote will illuminate the character of the modern totalitarian state the Ba’athists modeled on those of Hitler and Stalin. On July 22nd, 1979, just days after he assumed the presidency of Iraq, Saddam Hussein convened an urgent assembly of the Ba’ath Party leadership. One of his lieutenants opened the meeting by announcing a treasonous plot in which the conspirators were said to be present, and an old party rival bearing the signs of torture was produced to identify the 68 supposed collaborators. As the names were haltingly recited and the accused were detained, panic swept the room. Desperate to assure the new leader of their loyalty, some of the remaining delegates broke into hysterical chants of 'Long live Saddam!' 

 

    "A few days later, 22 of the 68 accused were brought to the courtyard of the same building for execution. The penalty would be meted out by the delegates themselves, to whom Hussein personally handed pistols, thereby ensuring their complicity with the new order.
    "The bloody origins of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were indicative of the means of his rule. For decades, he would pursue forcible domination of the Middle East, and vast quantities of Iraq’s petroleum revenue were devoted to purchasing the instruments of war and genocide. The ambition to lay his hands on weapons of mass destruction persisted even in the face of daunting obstacles. In 1975, four years before he became president, the Iraqi Ba’athists inked a deal with French prime minister Jacques Chirac to acquire a nuclear reactor. The facility was later destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, but not even this brush with foreign power on Iraqi soil caused a rethink of the country’s nuclear aspirations. As Saddam later confessed to his American interrogators, these aspirations never ceased and were judged a necessary insurance policy for a regime dedicated to expansionism. As Saddam himself later put it, 'the boundaries of our aims and ambitions … extend through the whole Arab homeland.'...
    "The unintended consequence [however] of destroying Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny without securing the institutions of free government was to release forces of barbarism straight out of [Conrad's] Heart of Darkness. But whatever may be said of this Rousseauian failure of imagination on the part of the American government, it scarcely undermined the casus belli. In fact, the vicious forces empowered by Saddam Hussein that swarmed into the power vacuum after his fall were part of the case for war to begin with. The evisceration of Iraqi civil society and the increasingly Islamist character of Ba’athist rule prefigured the descent into mayhem after he was swept from power. Had his reign been permitted to continue, the most plausible scenario would have been the eventual implosion of the regime under its own weight, turning a rogue state into a failed state.
    ... Advocates of a more humble foreign policy are always ready to explain the risks of using power, and seldom address the risks of not doing so. In the case of Saddam Hussein, this is a colossal mistake. It is perfectly possible to argue that the manifold blunders involved in the policy of ushering Iraq into a new era pale in comparison to the failure of refusing to confront its insane regime for so long.
    "To put the matter another way: Whatever the costs of the US military engagement in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s nightmarish tyranny was never going to be anything approaching a compliant partner in the international order. In all likelihood, it was going to enlarge its own power at the expense of every decent movement and state in its orbit until it was removed by force or collapsed into mayhem. By 2003, invading forces encountered a country already in an advanced state of disarray. Even more than other autocracies that abound in the Arab world, Ba’athist Iraq had kept society under a lid of oppression, stultifying the social, political, and economic development of the country. In due course, its implosion—whether by internal revolt or fratricide between the despot’s sons—would have unleashed a hideous orgy of violence. Absent the helping hand of international security forces, post-Saddam Iraq would have made the bloodletting of the Lebanese civil war look tame by comparison.
    "The experiment in participatory politics in postwar Iraq has been a messy and sometimes nasty arena of sectarian rivalry and confessional jostling.... The Ba’athist-Bin Ladenist forces arrayed against the new Iraq were eventually routed, but not before inflicting grievous wounds, both in Iraq and on the American psyche. The costs and failures of the war stimulated a remarkable coincidence of view between cynical conservatives and soft-headed progressives across the West that remains largely intact to this day. The public lost faith in the traditional mission of US foreign policy to shore up the international system. Despite America’s robust material support for Ukraine, it’s clear that the cause of American activism has not quite recovered from the war in Iraq.
    "Some two decades after the Iraq War was launched, its hold on America’s imagination has not slipped. But if it’s to be a determining influence over Americans’ view of the world and their role in it, a more sober consideration of its lessons is needed. Greater accuracy in our hindsight will sharpen our foresight. It therefore remains a relevant question whether the world would be better off were Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons still in power in Baghdad. Years after the demise of the Arab awakening, the case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable."

~ Brian Stewart, from his post 'Chronicle of a WAR, 20 Years On'

* * * *

"... most worryingly of all, the West has forgotten how to set up a successful civil government in an occupied area. In the long run this last concern is the most serious, and it might mean that the brutality becomes more visible, and [the conquered country] more bloodstained.
    "And it is serious for another reason. What about the other terrorist-supporting governments that should be in George W. Bush's sights? If terrorism is to be toppled then the governments of Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iran and Iraq must be toppled and replaced - and NOT with the fascist-leaning puppets that the US has supported in the past...
    "If Bush can't set up successful civil governments in these countries, then he may have to call off the War Against Terrorism early, just as his father called off the Gulf War early for the self-same reason.
    "As you may recall, the Gulf War ended in 1991 with the US reluctant to finish the war as they should have - with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. When Bush senior stopped the turkey shoot on the road to Baghdad, it wasn't just a loss of courage - it was also the realisation that they had no end-game, that they wouldn't know what to do when they got there."

~ me, from my 2001 post 'The Roots of Peace'

* * * * 

"[T]he notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
    "Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House 'manipulation' -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
    "In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found 'no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction'....
    "Iraq-Al Qaeda links were 'substantiated by intelligence information.' The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons programme.
    "Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats [and others who] wish to contend they were 'misled' into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA....
    "This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighbouring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the ... lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers."

~ Los Angeles Times, from their 2008 op-ed 'The White House Didn't Lie About Iraq'

* * * * 

"While mistakes were made by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, those mistakes were of different kinds and of different magnitudes in their consequences, though both sets of mistakes are worth thinking about, so that so much tragic waste of blood and treasure does not happen again.

    "Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come. But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military 'surge' that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.
    "The most solid confirmations of the military success in Iraq were the intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq to their leaders in Pakistan that there was no point sending more insurgents, because they now had no chance of prevailing against American forces. This was the situation that Barack Obama inherited — and lost.
    "Going back to square one, what lessons might we learn from the whole experience of the Iraq war? If nothing else, we should never again imagine that we can engage in 'nation-building' in the sweeping sense that term acquired in Iraq — least of all building a democratic Arab nation in a region of the world that has never had such a thing in a history that goes back thousands of years.
    "Human beings are not inert building blocks, and democracy has prerequisites that Western nations took centuries to develop. Perhaps the reshaping of German society and Japanese society under American occupation after World War II made such a project seem doable in Iraq.
    "Had the Bush administration pulled it off, such an achievement in the Middle East could have been a magnificent gift to the entire world, bringing peace to a region that has been the spearhead of war and international terrorism....
    "Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored 'peace,' when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2015 post 'Who Lost Iraq?'

"As always there are lessons both to avoid and to emulate from history, and a lesson too from this capitulation: 

• Subduing and modifying Japan and putting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Six years and the destruction of Shintoism as an ethical code.
• Reconstructing Germany and setting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Seven years, and the destruction of Nazism as an ideology.
• Reconstructing Iraq (including hunting down and killing the killers and those who supply them) and setting Iraq on a path to peace and prosperity: Too difficult. 

"Setting both Germany and Japan on the path to peace and prosperity -- making havens of peace and prosperity at the heart of Europe and at the door to Asia, and putting down the twin bacilli of Shinto nationalism and German national socialism -- this was selfishly important to anyone who valued a peaceful world ravaged by decades of strife and war, and was done by people who knew what they were doing. Just as selfishly important now would [have been] a haven of secular peace in the ravaged Middle East.
    "Now I grant you that the knowledge of how to set up a country from the rubble has clearly been lost (just another symptom of the modern-day philosophical collapse), and German and Japanese reconstruction did not have sworn enemies in the country next door supplying arms, money and training to brainwashed killers (that this continues so brazenly is another symptom of the timidity brought to the war against Islamic totalitarianism), but surely there should be recognition that setting up a post-war country ravaged by tribal and religious conflict takes years, not months, and that making a haven in the Middle East for peace and prosperity is of selfish importance to everyone in the west."

~ me, from my 2007 post 'Democrats Vote for Cut and Run'

"In 1945, the knowledge existed to successfully rebuild countries after they'd been liberated from savagery. But by 1991's Gulf War, even the victors had realised that knowledge had gone. Disappeared. Gone with the wind. So they didn't drive to Baghdad, because they knew enough to know they wouldn't know what to do when they got there.

    "They still don't."

~ me from my 2021 post, 'Kabul'

Pointing out the "97% Abusers"

"If you've ever expressed the least bit of skepticism about calls to rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent a 'climate crisis,' you’ve probably heard the smug response: '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused.'
    "This response is inane....
    "The usual purpose of saying '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused' is to make you believe our climate impact is catastrophic—a 'climate crisis.'
    "But neither the statement itself nor the studies it’s based on say our impact is catastrophic....
    "The '97%'... either agree on some unspecified impact or, at most, attribute rising CO2 levels as the leading cause ... of the mild 1°C warming we have experienced to date.
    "But they are abused to claim 97% agreement on catastrophic climate impact.
    "'97% abuser' John Kerry has falsely equated:

“97% of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible.”

With:

“if we continue to go down the same path…the world as we know it will… change dramatically for the worse.”

    "'97% abuser' Barack Obama, in response to a study that said "97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming,” tweeted “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous”—just adding 'dangerous' from nowhere.
    “'97% abuser' Al Gore took a study about papers agreeing with the idea that 'Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities' and misrepresented it to mean 'we’re causing global warming and that it’s a serious problem'—adding 'serious problem' from nowhere....
    "[L]ike many other authors of 'consensus' studies [these 97% Abusers are] clearly motivated by the desire to use insignificant consensus about some climate impact to drive their desired catastrophe narrative and anti-fossil-fuel political outcome....
    "By being coupled with the refrain 'listen to the scientists,' the '97%' claim is designed to make you only look at the climate side-effects of fossil fuels when making policy—ignoring fossil fuels’ benefits....
    "Fossil fuels actually overall make us far safer from climate by providing low-cost energy for the amazing machines that protect us against storms, protect us against extreme temperatures, and alleviate drought. Climate disaster deaths have decreased 98% over the last century... But the '97% consensus' abusers try to avoid the discussion about fossil fuel benefits....
    "Summary: Using '97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human-caused' to argue against fossil fuels is illogical and unscientific. It:

1. Falsely equates some climate impact with catastrophic climate impact
2. Ignores the huge benefits of fossil fuels

    "If someone tries to intimidate you into opposing fossil fuels by saying '97% of climate scientists agree,' trying asking them:

1. What exactly do they agree about—do they agree there’s a 'climate crisis'?
2. Do you agree we should also factor in the benefits of fossil fuels?" 

~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'The myth that "97% of scientists agree' about a climate crisis' [emphases in the original]

Rational Gratitude

[From the Steve Jobs Archive]

"This e-mail by Steve Jobs to himself right before his death [above] ... is NOT an 'I didn’t build that'' message of any kind.... Jobs is expressing rational gratitude to the many achievers upon whose shoulders he was enabled to do the great things he did. Indeed, no one could ever accomplish what Jobs did by any means other than his own initiative, effort, risk-taking, and thinking. We, all of us, inherit the legacies of those who came before us. But everyone doesn’t automatically become Steve Jobs, or anyone, other than what we make of ourselves. Jobs hits on something we should all remember and take to heart....
    "While we all individually DID build that, however great or modest our productive achievements, it is also important to recognise that, while doing our building, we stood on the shoulders of the prior achievements of many many other productive people, both living and long dead--and we should be grateful to them..."

          ~ Mike LaFerrara, from his post 'Steve Jobs' Rational Gratitude'

"The idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialisation and not the many benefits is ahistorical."

"In his brilliant dissection of the climate extremists’ case in his book, 'Unsettled,' Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in President Obama’s Energy Department, notes that climate-related deaths have plummeted in the era of global warming. Citing data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, he notes that 'weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one-hundred years' and are 'about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago.'
    "Why? Almost entirely thanks to improvements in infrastructure and mitigation enabled by rapid industrialisation.
    "[T]he idea that the least developed countries in the world have received only the cost of industrialisation and not the many benefits is ahistorical. The sophists at the United Nations insist that the new fund is a model of 'climate justice,' but it sounds an awful lot like a vehicle for the 'reparations' climate extremists have long demanded from the countries that were first to industrialise for supposedly having inflicted their environmental costs on the world.
    "If we in the West are to pay damages for the Industrial Revolution, shouldn’t we also consider the extraordinary wealth that process has helped spread around the world?"

~ Gerard Baker from his column 'The West Made the World Prosperous. COP27 Will Make Us Pay'

President Obama: “We Don't Look to Be Ruled”

 

A libertarian looks at Obama’s inspiring and much-reported convention speech.
Guest post by Jeffrey Tucker.

Here’s what fascinates me about political rhetoric: when an American politician really seeks to be as compelling as possible — to entice people into moral sympathy with a vision, to elicit trust from the voters, to touch the very core of our aspirations for life and politics — the language of liberty serves the cause best.

It’s not the promises of an iron fist that speak to Americans, but rather the opportunities provided by freedom. It is not the power of politics they emphasise but the power of people on their own.

We’ve seen it often over the decades but rarely more poignantly than in President Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Here we have a president who has spent eight years constructing an apparatus of executive rule, pushing out the boundaries of government imposition as far as possible, in every area of life, most conspicuously in education, surveillance, foreign policy, gun rights, and health care.

And yet, when it comes time to make a case for his party as against the Republican Party, and to make the case for his chosen successor, he gives us these awesome and inspiring words:

We are not a fragile or frightful people. Our power doesn't come from some self-declared savior promising that he alone can restore order. We don't look to be ruled. Our power comes from those immortal declarations first put to paper right here in Philadelphia all those years ago; We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that together, We, the People, can form a more perfect union.
    That's who we are. That's our birthright — the capacity to shape our own destiny…. America has never been about what one person says he'll do for us. It's always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government….
    My grandparents explained that they didn't like show-offs. They didn't admire braggarts or bullies. They didn't respect mean-spiritedness, or folks who were always looking for shortcuts in life. Instead, they valued traits like honesty and hard work. Kindness and courtesy. Humility; responsibility; helping each other out….
    That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end.
    That's America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it, embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.

Exactly: we don’t look to be ruled. Our value as a people comes not from the top down but from within — from character, resilience, decency, all of which emanate from freedom itself.

Now, you can read that as an attack on Donald Trump, which it surely is. But what is the best way to achieve that? Where is Trump most vulnerable? President Obama found it: Trump aspires to be a strongman, and America is not about that. It’s a very effective critique, even if it emanates from the wrong source. For the Democrats to make such a critique is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Are we really supposed to pretend that the top-down imposition of Obamacare never happened? That Common Core didn’t come to dominate American education? That Obama played no role in the vast expansion of digital surveillance? That Obama’s (and Clinton’s) foreign policy did not extend the mindless war-making of his predecessors and did not unleash unholy hell all over the Middle East and Europe, setting off a catastrophic refugee crisis and spreading the terror threat throughout the world?

Yes, we are supposed to forget all that. And if we set that aside, there is a wonderful lesson to be learned in the newest iteration of Obama: we don’t look to be ruled. We look to be free of rule.

It has also been generally true that presidents give their best – and most liberty-minded – speeches in the twilight days of their power. Think of George Washington’s Farewell Address and his remark that “the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Consider Eisenhower’s final warning that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Or Reagan’s final speech, reiterating the vision of America as a “Shining City on a Hill,” and proclaiming: “Countries across the globe are turning to free markets and free speech and turning away from the ideologies of the past.”

We might ask ourselves: why do powerful people turn to liberty-oriented themes in the last days of their power? Perhaps it is because, in the course of their rule, each of these people gradually discover that ruling is not all it is cracked up to be.

They arrive in their offices with grand ambitions, the perception of a public mandate, and huge plan for making the world conform. What they face is a vast and implacable bureaucracy, a legacy of centuries of lawmaking, a professional class of managers and fixers at all levels of government, an army of special interests and lobbyists who are ready for war to the knife over the slightest changes in the operations of government, and a populace who just never seem to get with the program.

And there are only so many hours in a day. What presidents must probably discover is not how much power they have, but rather the opposite: how much power the apparatus of government has over them. Between all the meetings with dignitaries, the travels, the speeches and public appearances, the flattering of big shots that swirl in and around the White House at all hours, they are wholly dependent on their advisers, who are in turn dependent on theirs, who are in turn dependent on theirs.

And yet there are moments when presidents do seem to act with genuine authority extending from their own volition. Bush invaded Iraq, and look what that did to the world. Obama threw himself behind Obamacare, with the conviction that a vast array of experts had vetted the system and pronounced it good. The whole thing blew up and wrecked much of what was good in American healthcare. The legacy of his signature legislation is so unpopular that mention of it was reduced to just one oblique reference in his convention speech.

So, yes, the experience of governing can be truly humbling. I can’t imagine the trauma that this is going to cause Trump, whose only experience has been in bossing people around in the private sector in businesses he owns. No one in particular owns government, and the bureaucracy is never more implacable than when faced with someone who purports to be in charge of them.

If presidents were to be honest with themselves, they would have to admit that they were fools to believe that the government, much less the whole nation, could be ruled by their will alone. It’s preposterous to believe that 300 million people — each person with a mind, heart, will, soul all his or her own — can be ruled by anyone.

Someday I hope to read an honest autobiography of a former president:

I arrived flush with anticipation of changing the world. Crowds screamed my name and cried out for me to bring justice, fairness, equality, and happiness to the country. I discovered over time that I personally had very little power at all, and the little I did have was dangerous because the results were nothing like what I had anticipated. I pretended to be important. I kept up appearances. People doted on me constantly.
    And yet I learned, gradually, that I was just one man, and the system swallowed me completely. And that’s probably a good thing too because, in the end, I’m no different from anyone else, no more or less capable, no more or less knowing and brilliant. My main talent was in campaigning and here I excelled. As for governing, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Or as Obama beautifully summed it up: “We don’t looked to be ruled.”

---

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.  Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook. Tweets by @jeffreyatucker.
This post first appeared at FEE.

.

The United States of America and Islam Have Nothing Fundamental In Common

Guest post by Andy Clarkson

Five years ago, President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Cairo, Egypt, whose many errors are still widely embraced today. He declared “civilization's debt to Islam” and sought “common ground” between Islam and the United States, arguing “they overlap, and share common principles”. “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance,” he said, and its culture and its many innovations have “given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation.”
Analysing the speech and its context five years later, this post looks at some of the innovations and contributions and their ultimate source, and examines what is and what is not in common with the Arab world of 1000 years ago and the United States of America.

The post is based on Mr Clarkson’s notes written on that day.*

---

In A History of Knowledge (page 103), Charles van Doren writes:

It was in Alexandria that the Muslim Arabs first came into close contact with Greek culture. They immediately fell under its spell. They soon became noted mathematicians, astronomers, and physicists, and they continued the work begun even before the fall of Rome decoding and interpreting Greek scientific thought.

Note the use of Van Doren's term "Muslim Arabs". While these Arabs were Muslims, they adopted the Greek mind - at least to the degree to which they used Aristotelian logic. They were transformed by the reason of Aristotle. But, no doubt these were men of mixed premises

In A History of Philosophy (page 316), Wilhelm Windelband noted:

(W)e must not...overestimate the independent achievements in individual Arab medicine and natural sciences. Here, too, the science of the Middle Ages is essentially learned tradition. The knowledge which the Arabs were later to deliver to the West had its origin, in the main, in the books of the Greeks.
    Nor did even experimental knowledge experience an essential extension through the Arabs' own work; only in some fields, as, for example chemistry and mineralogy and in some parts of medicine, e.g. physiology, do they appear more independent. In their method, however, in their principles by which they apprehend the universe, and in their entire system of philosophical conceptions, they stand, so far as our information on the subject reaches, entirely under the combined influence of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism...

    The Arabs of that time do deserve praise for their translation of Aristotle's works. As a result of their support for the ideas of Aristotle, the Arab world flourished. The eventual result was that the writings of Aristotle spread to Paris and throughout Europe. This European expansion led to the decline of the mysticism of the Dark Ages, and to the emergence of the reason-based Renaissance and Enlightenment. This led to the science of Galileo and Newton and to Renaissance art. The Enlightenment provided the philosophical and cultural atmosphere for the political formation of the United States of America.

Writes Dr. Leonard Peikoff in his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand:

    ...(T)he United States with its unique system of government could not
    have been founded in any philosophically different period. The new
    nation would have been inconceivable in the seventeenth century, under
    the Puritans, to say nothing of the twelfth -- just as, the power of
    tradition apart, its selfish, absolutist individualism would never survive
    a vote today (which is why a second Constitutional convention would be
    a calamity). America required what the Enlightenment alone offered:
    enlightenment. (The Duel between Plato and Aristotle, Objectivism:
    The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p 453).

*That* is the common ground between the Arab world of a thousand years ago and the United States of America. The common ground is the transfer of Greek thought (reason) taken from idea to action.

And for this, we must admire certain Arabs of that time period. We must especially admire Aristotelian Arab philosophers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd). From Windelband, (p. 317):

    But the most important and independent among Arabian thinkers was
    Averroes. He treated in paraphrases and longer or shorter commentaries,
    which were printed in the older editions of Aristotle, almost all the didactic
    writings of Aristotle, who was esteemed by him as the highest teacher of truth.

So while Greek thought had a great influence upon Arab culture of the Dark Ages, it was not entirely Aristotelian. Burgess Laughlin wrote in the The Aristotle Adventure (p 112):

Aristotle's logic entered the Arabic-Islamic cultural stream beginning c. 850. Conflicts appeared quickly between theologians who disavowed all philosophy, and the theologians who wanted both revelation and reason. The struggle between them continued for centuries.

It was clearly a culture of mixed premises. And today we can see the real impact of Islam on the Arab world. Continues Laughlin (pp 117-119): "For 200 years after the introduction of ancient Greek philosophy into Arabic culture, c. 850, Islamic theologians reacted against it. Their strength grew slowly and steadily like an avalanche of mud.

At the peak of that reaction, Al-Ghazali of Khurasan...began his scholarly career by studying philosophy and logic...To attack philosophy, Al-Ghazali picked three targets. His first target was Aristotle (the master of philosophy)...Al-Ghazali's and other scholars' persistent attacks on philosophy (and on philosophy's tool, logic) weakened support for philosophy in Arabic culture in the east for the next 200 years...For Arabic culture in the east, Islam (that is, submission to God) not philosophy (with logic as its tool), was to be man's guide in this world.

Windelband provides additional evidence of the struggle between Aristotelian and Islamic thinkers. (Page 317):

Avicenna (Ibn Sina)...whose 'Canon' became the fundamental book of mediaeval medicine in the West, as well as in the East, and who also exercised a powerful influence by his extremely numerous philosophical writings, especially his Metaphysics and Logic. His doctrine comes nearer again to pure Aristotelianism, and perhaps the nearest among all the Arabians. But the extension of these philosophical views was regarded with jealous eyes by Mohammedan orthodoxy, and the scientific movement experienced so violent persecutions in the tenth century that it took refuge in the secret league of the "Pure Brothers". Avicenna himself was also persecuted.

Is this "tolerance" Mr. President? "Violent persecutions" by Mohammedan orthodoxy? This is not "peaceful contemplation" Mr. President.

Burgess Laughlin describes the conclusion of Aristotelian influence (that is of reason -- the foundation of medicine, science, mathematics, and everything good) in Arab-Islamic culture on page 124 of The Aristotle Adventure:

    After the two contemporaries, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and
    Ibn Maimun (Maimonides), no significant Arabic
    philosophers (Aristotelian or otherwise) appeared in
    Islamic culture -- ever. In Islamic-Spain, the study of logic
    and philosophy (as parts of 'alien learning') became
    extinct, extinguished by popular and theological hostility to
    non-Islamic culture."

The result of all this is the total absence of progress in the Arab world for the past eight-hundred years!

With the extinction of Aristotelian logic and the rise of Islamic ideology and theocracy, most of the Arab world remains in a primitive state. The only progress in the Arab world since then, which has taken place in the past 50 to 100 years, is due to the Aristotelian logic of Western engineering in the oil fields made productive by American and European corporations.

Those recent achievements, just as the achievements of a thousand years ago, are the result of Greek thought. And all those achievements are possible, not because of, but in spite of Islam. Civilisation owes nothing to Islam. It owes everything to the Greek philosophy that by an accident of history was once incubated in Islamic countries.

In short,

It was Arabs qua Aristotelians and not Arabs qua Islamists who are responsible for the accomplishments of Arab Muslims.

Barack Obama denies the reality of medieval Arab culture by praising Islam itself as a tool of modern progress. To deny the fact that Islam is the consistent killer of human thought and action is a disgrace. It is a disgrace because Obama attacks not only the true instrument of human progress, but because he also attacks the philosophical and historical roots of the country in which he is president. That instrument of human progress and the philosophical root of the US are one and the same -- the faculty of reason.

There are not many larger philosophically fundamental frauds ever committed by an American president than the one committed by President Barack Obama five years ago.

The United States of America is at war, not only on the battlefield, but also in the realm of ideas. We are in an on-going cultural war between reason and faith. This US president sided with the enemy.

RELATED POSTS:

• The Greatest Story Hardly Ever Told – NOT PC, 2010
• “So, How Come You Keep Bashing Religion?” – NOT PC, 2014

---

Andy Clarkson is the convenor of the Facebook Group The Impact of Aristotle Upon Christian, Islamic & Jewish Cultures, where this post first appeared, and which you should join.

* Andy Clarkson would like to thank Boaz Arad-Erder for reclaiming these notes. “The original English version disappeared off the websites where they were published -- nothing sinister, but not worth repeating here. Fortunately, Boaz on that day in 2009 translated them into Hebrew and published on various sites in Israel. This summer he provided me the Hebrew version and using Google Translate, I was able to get most of it back. And then with some tweaking, they are very close to their original version. I hope you enjoy.”

Obama invokes Founders, inaugurates new era of collectivism

If, like me, you woke up to the sound of Obama inaugurating himself into the pantheon of great American presidents by invoking the words of the Founding Fathers to bolster his own arguments for collectivism, then you too might have wondered how he thought he could pull off what, even in that early hour when the brain is still slightly foggy, sounded like a massive logical leap. Maybe it sounded that way too to the folk in the audience, since the applause for his phony rhetoric seemed pretty spartan.

Jon Sanders notes that this is a common trope of Obama’s major speeches, especially this one in which he sought to use the Founders to make the case for collectivism.

first referencing the ideals of the Founders, then after having imitated the soaring rhetoric of past American luminaries, changing the focus to make it sound as if the next step for American liberty is to become a socialized nanny state. (Emphasis added.)

Nice, if you can (or want to) pull off the fraud. Because the man who started his address by extolling the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness being not only self-evident but unalienable—to the individual freedom those Founders were so desperate to protect—finished up by calling for collective action on class warfare, government healthcare, social-welfare programs, climate change, social spending in other countries, gay marriage, women’s pay gap, immigration reform, and gun control.

As Sanders concludes, what we heard today was not at all a ringing exhortation to bring back the America the Founders built,

but a promise of four more years of false rhetoric and real economic pain driven by ideological fervor and demonstrable diffidence.

Time to go

Another picture doing the rounds…

President Zero's "Pretend War"

The “leader of the free world”—that’s what the office of the U.S. President was once popularly called. Remember Ronald Reagan standing up at the Brandenburg Gate, talking directly to the thugs over the wall. Remember the words on behalf of the free world: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

The title “leader of the free world” once had some meaning.

The bombing of Libya shows what that title is now worth.  The foreign policy of the present incumbent is best described by the posture of of one of Britain’s most forgettable (and forgotten) Prime Ministers:

I must follow them.
I am their leader.

That’s the best comparison I can make of a foreign policy committed to following, in the words of President Obama, “the entire international community, almost unanimously”:

"The core principle that has to be upheld here is that when the entire international community, almost unanimously, says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place...we have to take some sort of action." [Hat tip Objective Standard]

“Some sort of action.” “Core principle.”  One could be forgiven for thinking that President Zero’s only “core principle” here is that when dragged kicking and screaming by the domestic press to confront an issue he resolves to take action. Some sort of action. Any action. Paraphrasing Sir Humphrey Appleby:

Some action must be taken.
This is some action, therefore we must take it.

“This” being in this case the no-fly zone over Libya, which Zero was stampeded into agreeing to with UK PM Cameron and French President Sarkozy.

The no-fly zone itself being a “bob each way” kind of action that sees action being taken against dictator Qaddafi without actually taking any action against dictator Qaddafi. Talk about the politics of Alice in Wonderland. Says Michael Hurd about President Zero's "Pretend War":

The British Ministry of Defense, the French government and the American White House all insist: The target of the military attack on Libya is not Qaddafi; it's only military buildings.
    So let me get this straight. We're attacking Libya because the dictator Qaddafi is oppressing his people -- yet we're not attempting to kill Qaddafi.
    I guess this is how liberals fight wars. Just as you cannot call a terrorist a terrorist, you cannot call a war -- a war. This is noteworthy, but should not be a surprise. These are the same people who insist that socialized medicine lowers the cost and increases the quality of health care. These are the same people who believe that increased taxes on wealth producers generates economic growth.
    My question is: Why are we attacking Libya, if not to punish Qaddafi? …
    Obama, although he also opposes Qaddafi, goes after Qaddafi but expects us to believe ... he's not going after Qaddafi.

This is Obama’s “little war.” A pretend war. A war that’s neither one thing nor another. A war whose goal is the opposite of the little war’s stated intention. The result, other words, of the foreign policy of a Zero.

New Article: ‘Obama's Playbook: Why He Keeps Saying Dumb Things’

Guest Post by Jeff Perren

Another of my articles has been published at Pajamas Media -- Obama's Playbook: Why He Keeps Saying Dumb Things.  Here's an excerpt:

The key to everything Obama does is that he truly is a committed, 99-44/100ths pure progressive. That fact explains not only the content of his views but why he keeps stumbling over one controversy after the next. As Jonah Goldberg expressed it in Liberal Fascism, progressivism is “a totalitarian political religion,” and Barack Obama is one of its most faithful acolytes. He’s simply acting in accordance with his personal theology.
    Unlike even semi-rational philosophies, progressivism is built on sheer fantasy. Other doctrines may make errors, some of them very serious, but most are built on at least some foundation of real-world evidence and logical analysis. Progressivism is one of the few that is actually anti-evidence and anti-logic.
    That assertion is not a wild-eyed interpretation by a crazed right-winger. It’s the official view of progressive intellectuals themselves. Merging with its offshoot of postmodernism, progressivism holds that people are unable to grasp evidence first-hand or to be objective about its interpretation.
    Postmodern philosophers from Hegel to Dewey to Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, and Richard Rorty have said so. Their students and followers are just applying what they’ve been taught. Those individuals are the ones who shaped Obama, nurtured his education and careers, and helped get him elected.

Read more.

Your feedback is invited here, there, and at my blog.

Thanks,
Jeff

The New Bad Deal: Is Obama Repeating the Errors That Led to the Great Depression?

Yaron Brook discusses ways in which government economic policy today mirrors the policy that preceded the Great Depression. [Hat tip Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights]

The New Bad Deal: Is Obama Repeating the Errors That Led to the Great Depression?

President Unpopular

In less than two years he’s gone from one of the most popular presidents of all time to being President Zero, and now President Minus 22 Percent.  That’s even less popular than Bill English.

Nile Gardiner gives ten reasons key reasons why the Obama presidency is in meltdown.  The best reason to celebrate? Number 5: “Obama’s Big Government message is falling flat.”

But there might be even more good news. Dislike for the Obama Administration doesn’t guarantee anything better on the horizon. (Just see what’s happened here in NZ!) Robert Tracinski, however, suggests a new political “camp” forming within the Tea Party movement might offer some hope for genuine political change.  It’s called “constitutional conservatism.”

Let's look at precisely what the phrase means, as I have gathered from how it is being used. A "constitutional conservative" is someone who wants to restrain the power of government within the original limits set for it by the US Constitution. Specifically, "constitutional conservatives" want to resurrect the doctrine of enumerated powers, which constrains Congress to stick to the small number of limited powers explicitly described in Article I of the Constitution. …One of the top agenda items of the "constitutional conservatives" [is] a requirement that all legislation proposed in Congress has to "point to where they are enumerated in the Constitution."
    The label "constitutional conservative" is based on the recognition that [the American] system of government, as originally conceived by America's Founding Fathers, would be radically smaller than it is today, that the Founders' vision is fundamentally incompatible with the majority of current government programs and with the vast array of current government controls on the economy.
    It is clear that the rise of this new term is a powerfully good trend. For the first time, there is a strain of "conservatism" that we can actually sign on to—though the use of the term "conservative" is still a misnomer. "Constitutional conservatism" is "conservative" only in the sense that it seeks to "conserve" the original meaning of the Constitution. But in today's context, it is actually a radical and ideological agenda that would require overturning the past one hundred years of political precedent…

It’s early days, but it sounds promising.

The schadenfreude of the postmodern president

"Politician's logic: We must do something. 
This is something.  Therefore, we must do it."
            - from Yes Minister! by Antony Jay & Jonathan

Obama told the American nation last night that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will change politics as much as 9/11 changed foreign affairs.

There is one respect in which that is right.  It has permanently burst the bubble of President Hope-And-Change, the man who boasted that just by his nomination, the oceans would lower and the world would begin to heal. Now, in the words of Tim Minchin (writing at TIA Daily), “he can't even prevent them from carrying the spill of a single oil rig.”

Obama, meet schadenfreude.

The bubble is bursting for him not because he has disappointed real expectations but because he dealt in unreality all along, and his followers are betrayed because the unreal is the unreal and never had any value….
    “Obama…promised a world where the government can control everything. Like [Kevin] Rudd since the failure of [Australian] cap-and-trade, he will not even be able to control his own followers when the truth of his impotence over the Gulf oil spill stands fully revealed.”

Every president has a defining moment.  Washington’s moment was his stepping down after two terms “to head back to the plough,” setting a precedent that every subsequent president (but one) then followed. Lincoln’s moment was signing the Emancipation Proclamation into law, giving  meaning to six years of carnage. And Jimmy Carter’s, of course, was his endless hand-wringing over the Tehran hostages.

The defining moment of Obama’s presidency, the moment when his balloon really began deflating, may well turn out be his tantrum over the oil spill—yelling “Plug the damn hole” as if his anger by itself could create metaphysical change. That was the moment at which the post-modern president confronted the reality that his whole charade was designed to conceal, especially to his supporters and even to himself: that reality doesn’t respond to threats.  That was the inconvenient truth his post-modern presidency hadn’t bargained for, and it deserves to be his epitaph, and that of the Postmodern Left, of which both Kevin Rudd and Obama are (or were) standard-bearers. It’s important to understand why an oil spill is so uniquely damaging to the aura of the Postmodern Left:

Barack Obama and Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd both belong to a new class of leftist leaders: postmodern ones [explains Tim Michin]. This distinguishes them from either the Old Left or the New Left. The Old Left (led by men like Franklin Roosevelt) were class-warfare-focused but claimed to believe in economic progress: they said they wanted a modern world with the government in control of the means of production. The New Left (the hippies and their contemporary descendants, the Greens) witnessed the failure of that socialist/fascist ideal in every country it was tried and, in bitterness, threw economic progress overboard to adopt a policy of living at the mercy of nature.
    “Unsurprisingly, the New Left failed to attract wide support. Its contempt for human survival was too apparent. Thus the postmodern left was born. The Postmodern Left combines a thirst for an ever-growing centralized government power with cunning levels of disguise to appear to be all things to all men. Hostility to science is wrapped in the language of science (global warming theory). The shackling of capitalism is dressed up as saving it (the stimulus packages). Hostility to US predominance is dressed up as a desire for a new world order in which US strength is ‘restraint.’ In fact, under all its disguises, the postmodern left believes in nothing but power for itself and the weakening of the institutions of the West.”

Power.  The Postmodern Left promised power could do all things.  If you ask, “Why is it the president’s job to deal with the oil spill?” then the answer has to be that his own all-encompassing power-lust made it so. His will to power makes his micro-managing of the crisis necessary. But the nature of the crisis reveals his impotency.

You see, power over men is not the same thing as power over nature. What the oil spill and its still unfolding aftermath reveals is that the power the postmodern left seeks for its own sake is well able to issue threats and to throw tantrums, but utterly impotent to effect reality. Threats, however powerfully delivered, just don’t work against a gushing oil well.

The spectacle of watching an actual physical fact of reality playing out before this kind of mindset is both humorous and tragic [explains Doug Reich at the Rational Capitalist]. After all, there is no option in the leftist playbook for dealing with a fact of reality. Can Obama pass a law forbidding the oil to leak? The oil can't be put in prison. Can he expropriate BP's cash or imprison the BP executives? BP needs money to pay for the clean up and he needs the technical know how of the company. Can he convene a panel of experts and central planning apparatchicks? He has appointed an oil cleanup czar which Matthews and Olbermann rightly excoriate as ‘a lot of blue-ribbon talk’ accusing Obama of being a mere ‘Vatican observer’ and threatening to ‘barf’ if he mentions the Nobel prize credentials of his Secretary of Energy again. In other words, they recognize this is all talk and no action.
    "Yet, the oil continues to spill.”

And threats are all they have as a remedy.

So ends the aura of the post-modern president.  Not with a bang, but with a gusher.

Mr Key goes to Washington [updated]

Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President John Nance Garner famously described the job of American Vice President as “not worth a pitcher of warm spit.”  Sadly, that pretty much describes the value of John Key’s meeting earlier this morning with the American Vice President, particularly when that Vice President is Boofhead Biden.

As a meeting it would be as much use, and with as much chance of success, as trying to persuade Sione Lauaki not to pinch your beer.

Key’s real whistle-stop is his lunch with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.  It would be nice to think that John Key explained David Ricardo’s Principle of Comparative Advantage to Mr Vilsack, demonstrating that both US and NZ consumers—and consumers all around the Pacific Rim—would be better off with freer trade through the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. This presumes, of course, that Mr Key understands that principle himself. 

Whether or not that conversation happened, Mr Vilsack will undoubtedly be telling Mr Key that whatever the multiple benefits of free trade, inefficient American farmers can’t afford to allow our cheaper and better produce to appear in American shopping trolleys, and the frank truth is that American senators can’t afford not to have the donations of these inefficient farmers.  He’ll be told quite bluntly, I suspect, that Mr Vilsack and his colleagues would rather please one inefficient American producer (who, to a Senator, is known as a donor), than please several million hard-pressed American consumers (who, to a Senator, are known as prize saps).

So let’s not get too excited about today’s meetings.  These are politicians we’re talking about, not high achievers.

And speaking of high expectations, that pretty much explains Obama’s much-touted nuclear summit—not so much a “beer summit” as one that will have the all-encompassing reek of patchouli, a miasma strong enough to obscure (for a while at least) several hard truths about it that will probably not make the summit communiqués.

Such as the fact that the nuclear genie is long out of the bottle, and no amount of hand-wringing is going to put it back again. (You can wish upon a star all you like, but unless you confront that basic fact you have dreams that will never come true.)

Such as the deal OBambi just signed agreeing that Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev may essentially do whatever they like with 34 tons of surplus weapons-grade plutonium. (Burn it in a breeder reactor.  Bury it out back. Play pinochle with it. Whatever.)

Or the deal that India signed with the US to re-process spent US fuel into weapons-grade plutonium (encouraging erstwhile US ally Pakistan to seek some similar favour from China).

Or the fact that the two who at present loom largest in the world’s ‘most-likely-to-push-the-button’ contest (not to mention their high-ranking in the most-likely-to-give-fissile-material-to-terrorists stakes), North Korea and Iran will both be conspicuous by their absence—conspicuous, at least, to anyone who doesn’t take the communiqués of non-proliferation summits seriously.  And, if we might continue being blunt, even if they were there they would hardly be taking the proceedings any more seriously than France’s Nicholas Sarkozy, who was quoted after leaving the White House recently as calling OBambi “insane,” and “appalled” at Obama’s “vision” of what the World should be under his “guidance” and “amazed” at the American Presidents unwillingness to listen to either “reason” or “logic.”

So we might say in summary of the summit that rather than making the world a safer place, by encouraging those who do constitute genuine threats it’s likely to leave the world less safe. Suggesting the only communiqué that might make sense would be this:

"With all of the preparations and posturing, with all of the media coverage, citizens of the world live in quiet hope that the proliferation of non-proliferation summits has peaked and that time and money can be redirected to more obtainable goals such as a Mars landing."

Everything else is just smile-and-wave.

A tax on medical innovation [updated]

All through the ObamaCare debate I’ve been at pains to point out that the ObamaCare debate effects us here in New Zealand too: most directly because the whole world relies on American medical innovation, and if ObamaCare means anything, it is a deadly tax on medical innovation.

Think about it.  Think about “Moore's Law, which states that computing power tends to double roughly every two years.” Think about the growth of personal computing power as a model for how medical progress can and should and did happen -- and as a warning as to what sorts of progress we could lose in the future.  Consider that one of the greatly under-appreciated effects of ObamaCare
will be how it will stifle medical innovation—leading to a rapid reversal of the very medical progress that have been accelerating in recent years.

How serious is this?  Very serious indeed, says doctor Paul Hsieh. “ObamaCare, he says, “could dramatically slow the pace of medical progress, leading to millions of preventable deaths.”

Read Dr Hsieh’s article, The Deadly Tax on Medical Innovation.

UPDATE: Patent attorney Dale Halling makes a similar point:

    “The only way of reducing the long term cost of health care is through innovation.  In the few areas of medicine that are not controlled by the government and insurance, such as vision enhancement procedures [like laser eye surgery], costs have plummeted due to innovation.    Unfortunately, we have put numerous roadblocks in the way of medical innovation.  For instances, it cost $1 billion dollars and twelve years to introduce a new drug to the market due to FDA rules.  Frivolous lawsuits in our health care system not only increase the costs of health care, but result in decreased innovation due to excessive caution.  Frivolous lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers have stopped innovation in this area of medicine.  Vaccines are inexpensive medical solutions of the sort that we should be encouraging.  President Obama has proposed a seven year patent term for drug patents, down from a twenty year term, and this will reduce innovation in the pharmaceutical industry.  Drugs are much less expensive option than medical procedures.
    “If the goal is to increase the quality of medical care and reduce the long term costs, innovation is the only solution.  Nationalizing [US] health care will cause medical innovation to disappear.”

And it looks like his blog on intellectual property State of Innovation is worth checking out.  Unlike the various thieves at the Mises Institute who justify theft based on little more than ignorance of the role of the mind in production, Mr Halling understands the role of intellectual property in driving innovation and technological progress—that, as someone said, “Patents and copyrights are the legal implementation of the base of all property rights: a man’s right to the product of his mind.”

I’ll be adding his blog to my sidebar forthwith!

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