Byron, I have no objections to you raising this stuff, but there are a number of important points that you and/or Lamprecht's article miss.
1. The Zimbabwe and South African governments are not Marxist/Socialist.. They are an African version of the same interventionist, nanny-state government that we see throughout Europe and in Australia. The African component is nepotism, meaning looking after family and friends. That leads to corruption and reluctance to relinquish power. There is no serious intention to socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange in either place. The leaders just want to personally own them.
2. In Zimbabwe, the government could not have succeeded but for the fact that it undermined the High Court and forced the resignation of any judge not prepared to comply with its wishes. Until then, the whites were succeeding in preventing the government from taking their land. This reinforces the point that an independent judicial system is a major barrier to arbitrary government power and a very good reason for opposing things like mandatory sentencing. It's not being soft on criminals, it's because the judiciary must remain independent of government. Zimbabwe is an example of what happens if it's not. If South African courts lose their independence, then the country is really in trouble.
3. Avoidance of government taxes is universal, as is the creativity of those concerned. The American Revolution started because the British imposed new taxes on the American colonies. Lamprecht's concern about capital gains taxes and classification of personal exertion as paid employment is already reality here. They are simply a manifestation of the overall problem of excessive government intervention, facilitated by too much tax revenue. A government kept poor cannot afford to intrude in our lives. The Howard government is the highest taxing governments we have ever had.
4. Government scrutiny and intrusion is high and growing inexorably. The latest manifestation is the Howard government's anti-terrorist bill, which challenges several fundamental rights. Ironically, it is the left that has opposed it when it should be us freedom fighters. In some ways we are no better than the left: they oppose our freedom to have guns, but support certain other political and personal freedoms. We support personal freedom on guns, but oppose left-wing freedom causes (eg drugs, sexual preference). The only truly principled position is libertarian - no intervention unless to correct an injustice, no curtailment of freedom unless to protect the freedom of someone else.
5. The Game Bill is definitely an example of additional government intervention. The new licence requirement, the penalties and inspectors all increase the power of the state over us. That is why some shooters are not very enthusiastic about it. Its justification is the additional freedoms it could bring - hunting on public land and acknowledgement of hunting as a conservation resource.
6. The International Criminal Court is not an example of government intervention. It is an attempt to make the likes of Mugabe and other revolting despots accountable for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It will have no effect on civilised countries like Australia and the US, in spite of the US concern about "political" prosecutions. It basically means there are some things you just cannot get away with, no matter who you are.
regards, Byron.
Byron,
Can you hook me up with this guy? If he actually believes this I have a bridge he might like to buy.
Mugabe and people like him run the numerical majority of the countries in the world. Therefore when it comes to deciding what "Crimes against humanity" are in the UN it will be this group who decides because they have the votes. And if you think that they will turn on each other when there are much bigger and fatter targets then you are out of your mind.
This bunch will define crimes against Humanity as “you have food but we do not now hand over half your grain or we will put you on trial for crimes against humanity.”
Forgive me but your friend is a moron.
a.cricket
The just-released Arab Human Development Report, commissioned by the United Nations and drafted by a group of Middle Eastern intellectuals, utterly confirms the deep pathology gripping the Arab world that Western analysts have long noted. Yet what was truly astounding about the account was less its findings than the honest acknowledgement that Arab problems are largely self-created.Khalaf Hunaidi, who oversaw the economic portion of the analysis, remarked, "It's not outsiders looking at Arab countries. It's Arabs deciding for themselves." And what they decided is sadly ample proof of Arab decline ... [a]nd culture, in thrall to Islamic fundamentalism and closed to the ideas that quicken the intellectual life of the rest of the world, is "lagging behind" advanced nations, Hunaidi says.
Yet this novel panel of Arab intellectuals, remarkably, didn't attribute the dismal condition of Middle Eastern society to the usual causes that Western intellectuals and academics have made so popular: racism and colonialism, multinational exploitation, Western political dominance, and all the other -isms and -ologies that we've grown accustomed to hear about from the Arabists on American university campuses. [bold - mine, F_S]
Instead, the investigators cited the subjugation of women that robs Arab society of millions of brilliant minds. Political autocracy&emdash;either in the service of or in opposition to Islamic fundamentalism&emdash;ensures censorship, stifles creativity, or promotes corruption. Talented scientists and intellectuals are likely to emigrate and then stay put in the West, since there is neither a cultural nor an economic outlet for their talents back home but sure danger if they prove either honest or candid. The Internet remains hardly used. Greece, a country 30 times smaller than the Arab world, translates five times the number of books yearly.
The report didn't give precise reasons for the growing Arab hostility toward the United States, but its findings lend credence to almost everything brave scholars like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes have been saying for years. With exploding populations, and offering little hope for either material security or personal freedom, unelected governments in the Gulf, Egypt, and northern Africa have allowed their press the single "freedom" of venting popular frustration against a very successful Israel and the United States.
Instead of discussing elections in Egypt, debating the Sudanese government's budget, or advocating academic freedom in Syria, state-run newspapers and television stations spin countless conspiracy theories about September 11. They dub the Jews subhuman and worse, promise eternal jihad against the West, and churn out elaborate explanations why a tiny country like Israel is responsible for everything from train wrecks in Cairo to lawlessness in Lebanon.
What can Americans learn from this newly honest Arab self-appraisal? We should put no more credence in the preposterous "postcolonial" theories that ad nauseam argue that Westerners are still to be blamed a half-century after the last Europeans vacated the Middle East. Post-Marxist analyses that claim international conglomerates stifle the Arab world are just as silly. Nor must we believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or our own support for Israel is the problem. Instead, the simple fact is that hundreds of millions of people are going backward in time in an age when global communications hourly remind them of their dismal futures. Frustration, pride, anger, envy, humiliation, spiritual helplessness&emdash;all the classical exegeses for war and conflict&emdash;far better explain the Arab world's hostility toward a prosperous, confident, and free West.
But our own academic Left isn't alone in misjudging the Middle East. The Realpolitik of our own government that allies us with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and other "moderate" Arab states offers little long-term hope for an improved relationship with people of the Middle East. It is no accident that America is more popular in countries whose awful governments hate us&emdash;Iraq and Iran, for example&emdash;than among the public of our so-called allies. Saudis, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, and Egyptians, after all, have been murdering Americans far more frequently than have Iranians, Iraqis, and Syrians.
We have replaced our old legitimate fears of godless Marxism in the Middle East with new understandable worries over fanatical Islamic fundamentalism to justify our own continued support for corrupt dictatorships. Yet the old excuse that there is no middle class in the Arab world, no heritage of politics, and few secular moderates will no longer do. It should be our job to find true democrats, both in and outside of the existing governments, and then promote their interests at the expense of both the fundamentalists and the tribal grandees. Chaos, uncertainty, risk, and unpredictability may ensue, but all that is better than the murderous status quo of the current mess.
The contemporary Arab world is like the old communist domain of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, with its political and intellectual tyranny. We should accept that, and then adopt the same unyielding resolve to oppose governments that lie, oppress, and murder&emdash;until they totter and fall from their very own corrupt weight. There was a silent majority yearning to be free behind the Iron Curtain, and so we must believe that there is also one now, just as captive, in an unfree Middle East.
I am not going to attempt to deal with all of your correspondent's numbered paragraphs in a single reply.
So, in this reply I will address only paragraph 1
1. The Zimbabwe and South African governments are not Marxist/Socialist.. They are an African version of the same interventionist, nanny-state government that we see throughout Europe and in Australia. The African component is nepotism, meaning looking after family and friends. That leads to corruption and reluctance to relinquish power. There is no serious intention to socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange in either place. The leaders just want to personally own them.
Mugabe is a marxist, he has acknowledged himself as such. He calls himself and his cabinet ministers "comrade" and he refers to his cabinet as the "politboro". The behaviour of his government is not anything like the social democrat and liberal governments that the paragraph refers to, correctly, as "nanny-state".
Such governments interfere in the market to provide a social welfare system, often inadvisedly, by direct transfer payments and interference in the pure market system by a great deal of regulation.
Mugabe's interference is of a more direct and violent nature. He dealt with opposition in the early 1980s by what is called the Gukurahundi. That is, he sent the North Korean 5th Brigade into Matebeleland and Masvingo to committ massive massacre on the mainly Ndebele opposition.
(Gukurahundi is a descriptive term applied not by the victims, but by the perpetrators. It is a Shona word meaning "storm that sweeps away chaff".)
He dealt with the only effective opposition party, the Zapu party of which he once was a member led by Joshua Nkomo, by inticing it to join a "government of national unity" and then sidelining the opposition party once it had been co-opted, thereby effectively generating a de-facto single-party state.
He had to give up on his attempts to create a de-jure Marxist single party state in 1991.
Once a new effective opposition party arose in the MDC, he again resorted to fraud, intimidation and campaign violence. When the MDC elected 55 members to the House in the 2000 general election, he scaled up the violence in anticipation of the 2002 presidential election.
The presidential election is marked by massive vote rigging, ballot box stuffing, violence against and kidnapping of opposition campaign workers and spurious arrests on the eve of the polling.
Since the election, the violent revenge against opposition cadre and even those people and villages who are suspected of voting against him has become nakedly blatant. He intends to shut down all opposition of every nature and kind.
Meanwhile, he has confiscated 95 percent of the commercial farms, the only farms producing a surplus of food and a source of foreign exchange. This was done using thuggery and outright theft under color of right.
To the thuggery and fraud, murder has now ben added.
Having wiped out the farm sector, he is now turning again to the industrial sector. Next will be the Indian merchants and then the unfinished business of the Ndebele.
This is no social democrat "nanny-state". It is naked tyranny.
Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old: -
"No law except the Sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled."
-Kipling, "For All We Have And Are"