Child Entrepreneurs Fuel Revolution

or Child Terrorists Threaten Middle-East Peace, as Fox News would have it.

Another hope I found in Robert Fisk's February 3 report:

Near the statue of Talaat Harb, a boy sold agwa – a peculiarly Egyptian date-bread delicacy – at 4 pence each – while on the other side of the road, two figures stood, a girl and a boy, holding identical cardboard trays in front of them. The girl's tray was filled with cigarette packets. The boy's tray was filled with stones.

A free market capitalism is alive and well, amid chaos and violence.

Tweet

Thanksgiving Thoughts: Pilgrims Were Forced to Be Socialists By a Group of Wealthy English Investors!

That's a bit of info I picked up on the Thanksgiving Day this year.

I was going to re-post the last year's Thanksgiving Day post, about how the Pilgrims finally ditched "socialism" and embraced capitalism, to the benefit of all. The article cited in that post, "Great Thanksgiving Hoax", was from Ludwig von Mises Institute, and was written by Richard J. Maybury in 1985.

And no, Ms. Kate Zernike of New York Times, it is not the tea party propaganda. But she seems to like to reduce everything down to a right-wing propaganda or left-wing propaganda, a very cynical approach befitting certain Gen-Xer writers. (For more about her, here's what Andrew Breitbart had to say about her back in February this year.)

The Pilgrims became "socialists" not by choice but under the contract with big investors.

From Politizoid:

You might be surprised to know that the Pilgrims attempted to implement socialism. Of all the people in the world, it should have worked with them. They were a small, close-knit community united by a common religious and philosophical foundation as evidence by the Mayflower Compact, and yet their “communal service” experiment failed as all forms of socialism have done throughout history.

To be fair to the Pilgrims, it was not exactly their plan. Funded by a group of investors, they were contractually obligated to follow their benefactors’ blueprint for the settlement which included holding all things in common and sharing equally in the proceeds of their labor.

William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony, describes this economic plan as a complete disaster in his History of the Plymouth Settlement. All produce was taken into a common storehouse where food rations were based on what people truly needed. At the same time, everyone was expected to work hard.

One minor problem, there was no motivation to work.

... The harvest of 1621 produced enough food to host the first Thanksgiving, but food soon became scare again. The 1622 harvest was even more disappointing, and starvation became the norm.

After three years of failure, they were forced to abandon their investors’ communal plan. It was a matter of life and death. There simply was not enough food to survive. The colony leaders finally decided to assign each family a plot of land and allowed every man to plant corn for his own household. ...

And America never looked back. Soon, the harvest was so plentiful that they started to export. No one went hungry.

Here's the link to my 2009 Thanksgiving post.

Happy Thanksgiving, and please remember never to follow, ever, the direction given by the big business or the big government. The pilgrims tried to adhere to their contractual obligations almost to their ruin and death. They finally realized enough was enough, and ditched the contract. Don't believe people in power who claim to know what's good for the rest of us.

(Hmmm. It sounds familiar... Underwater homeowners trying to keep paying the mortgages to the banks who ripped them off by inflating the property value and snared them with loose underwriting and then allegedly sold the mortgages to tax-shelter trusts to issue mortgage-backed securities to dupe investors like pension funds, although more evidence has begun to surface that these mortgage-backed securities have no mortgages that back them, because the banks didn't actually transferred the mortgages to the trust. The homeowners act like a responsible citizen who feels bound by the contract, while the banks have no problem ignoring the contract. When will be the "enough is enough" moment? Ever?)

Tweet

Czech President to UN: Stay out of Economics and Science

Czech President Vaclav Klaus, speaking like an Austrian (economist, that is). I would go one step further and not leave the solutions to the member governments either; the solutions are to be found in free market capitalism. But I'm sure Professor Klaus knows that, as he is after all a follower of Friedrich Hayek.

From Reuters:

"UNITED NATIONS, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Saturday criticized U.N. calls for increased "global governance" of the world's economy, saying the world body should leave that role to national governments.

"The solution to dealing with the global economic crisis, Klaus told the U.N. General Assembly, did not lie in "creating new governmental and supranational agencies, or in aiming at global governance of the world economy."

""On the contrary, this is the time for international organizations, including the United Nations, to reduce their expenditures, make their administrations thinner, and leave the solutions to the governments of member states," he said.

""The anti-crisis measures that have been proposed and already partly implemented follow from the assumption that the crisis was a failure of markets and that the right way out is more regulation of markets," he said.

"Klaus said that was a "mistaken assumption" and it was impossible to prevent future crises through regulatory interventions and similar actions by governments.

"That will only "destroy the markets and together with them the chances for economic growth and prosperity in both developed and developing countries," he said.

"The Czech president, a vocal skeptic of global warming, said the United Nations should also keep out of science, including climate change. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made fighting climate change one of his top priorities."

Tweet

Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis

A 46-minute documentary produced by a team of filmmakers led by prominent Swedish libertarians Jonah Norberg and Martin Borgs.

The film has been broadcast in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Australia - and won the prestigious 'Best Feature Documentary' award at the San Francisco Frozen Film Festival.

To dispel the myth that capitalism caused the crisis, the producers have decided to make the 45-minute film free to watch online, in full, for a limited time. (Note from Peter Schiff's Euro Pacific Capital)

Or watch it at YouTube here.

Tweet

Free-Market Capitalism at Work in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a poster child for hyperinflation (the other one being Weimar Republic), always cited by inflationists as a warning of what could happen if the fiat money printing doesn't stop. But while the rest of the world keeps focusing on that aspect, the country has clearly moved on, to a debt-free, central-bank-free, free-market capitalism that provide jobs, feeds and clothes its citizens much better than the system they had had.

Zimbabwe gold production up 35% (1/11/2010 AFP)

"HARARE (AFP) – Zimbabwe's gold production surged 35 percent to 4.2 tonnes last year in a "remarkable recovery" for the mining sector despite erratic power supply, the Chamber of Mines said Monday.

"The 2009 figure was up from 3.1 tonnes the previous year, it said.

"It was a remarkable recovery for the gold and mining sector in general," Chamber of Mines chief economist David Matyanga told AFP.

""However the recovery process within the gold and mining sector in general was affected by the erratic power supply and the critical shortage of working capital," he said.

""The operating environment last year greatly improved when compared to the previous year," said a manager at foreign-owned mine who did not want to be identified.

""Last year we got a loan to revive some of our operations and expand operations which was something that could not be heard of in 2008 or 2007," the manager said." (The article continues.)

This encouraging story is made possible by the demise of the central bank in Zimbabwe.

The central bank effectively ceased to exist. No more lender of last resort. No more printing money at the behest of politicians. Zimbabwe allowed multiple currencies (U.S. dollar, Euro, British Pound, South African Rand) to circulate freely. Now, prices of money and goods are set by a free market. Price control and forex control are gone. Money flows freely into and out of the country. Shelves at markets are full again, people can feed and clothe themselves again. Zimbabweans who fled to neighboring countries to escape poverty and famine caused by astronomical inflation are returning.

Best of all, the country is debt-free, probably the one and only in the whole world. Government and private debt in old Zimbabwean dollar was repudiated. President Mugabe is still there, but it is hoped that he won't last very much longer (he is 85).

I read about the amazing transformation of Zimbabwe in this article posted at Kitco.com back in November last year:

Zimbabwe: A Fresh Start (Alf Field, 11/11/2009 Kitco.com)

Now the once-mighty gold mining industry in Zimbabwe is coming back, despite power shortage and shortage of working capital. All thanks to the death of their central bank, and return of a free-market capitalism.

Tweet