Islamophobia in Europe

BY TALHA ZAHEER 

A few months ago, I came across a (now infamous) YouTube video about changing demographics of the Muslim population in Europe. The tone was ominous as it warned of the dawning of an Islamicised Europe. In 39 years, the video claimed, France will be an Islamic republic. In 15 years, half the population of the Netherlands will be Muslim. In 2050, Germany, too, will be a Muslim state.

Although I was a bit skeptical about the authenticity of the statistics presented, I basically bought into the video’s premise – that a higher birth rate among Muslim immigrants would cause a marked shift in Europe’s demographics, making it predominantly Muslim. I’ll even admit a part of me swelled with pride at the prospect.

Even though I was aware that a Christian group had produced the video, I do not recall being offended by that initial viewing. But then the rebuttals and clarifications began. A new YouTube video put out by BBC’s Radio 4 titled ‘Muslim Demographics: The Truth’ exposed the alarmist agenda of the first clip by pointing out its liberal use of inaccurate data. And when the BBC news service evaluated the inauthenticity of the statistics, my eyes were fully opened to the strong Islamophobic message of the original video.

The growing problem of Islamophobia in the West is being increasingly documented. The trend is more pronounced in Europe than across the Atlantic, where it is thought that Muslims assimilate more readily. The demographics video may have been an amateur venture, it has coincided with the release of several bestselling books that implore Europeans to wake up and do something to save their culture and their continent. Interestingly, these pseudo-academic attempts have mostly emanated from American authors, apparently discontent with their own incursions into Muslim territories in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One such attempt by Christopher Caldwell titled Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West has received considerable attention in both the American and British media. It is startling to see how reviews of the book from across the pond could be so divergent. While The New York Times claims it is a balanced, thoughtful effort, the Guardian lambasts its unambiguous racial bias.

The contrast between North American and European perceptions of Islam has several explanations. The Europeans are a lot more sensitive and fidgety about the subject, with sentiments in Britain being especially volatile.  The British National Party (BNP), for example, advocates for a return to the good old pre-1948 whites-only days and only falls short of calling whites a superior race. The party actively promotes alarmist views about the spread of Islam in Europe and calls for the deportation of Muslim subjects to their homelands, regardless of whether those subjects – many of whom have been born in Europe – had ever set foot outside the continent.

Parties like the BNP have started gaining impetus throughout Europe with their lightly veiled hatred towards the ‘other’ seeping into passive locals and manifesting itself towards Muslims, effectively making Muslims the Jews of this century. Antediluvian theories advocating social homogeneity have resurfaced as insecure Europeans are manipulated into thinking they must cling on to the last remnants of their dying culture through propagandist videos and literature that wouldn’t be out of place in Nazi Germany.

BNP-type, far-right groups are openly asking to repeal laws that make equal opportunity mandatory, effectively promoting discrimination. Even more alarming is their popularity. In recent elections, the BNP won three seats for the first time.  With such open hostility towards Muslims, albeit in small segments of the population, what measures are European governments taking to allay fears within the Muslim community? The concept of second-rate citizens, after all, runs counter to fundamental western values of equality.

And while the debate within white-Europe rages, what of Muslim European sentiments? What of those who are being forced to decide between a religious and national identity in secular countries such as France? Nikolas Sarkozy, who claims to be a ‘demanding friend of Muslims,’ has proven to have littley sympathy with the concept of pardah. His latest battle is against body- and head-covering swimming attire for women – God forbid a woman should go for a swim in anything other than a bikini.

These strange reactions to Muslims in Europe make me reminisce about my days in primary school in Wales. Once a girl named Catherine called me a ‘Brownie’ in a conversation to a third person that I wasn’t even privy to. Within minutes, I had my whole class rally around me, giving me their support and completely shunning the girl for being racist. At the time, I myself never realised what the big deal was. But my 12-year-old friends were incensed. And if that’s how youngsters from a remote area where a non-white was an anomaly used to react a decade ago, how has the European landscape come to face such a regressive crisis?

On my recent visit to Manchester, I saw mosques with windows smashed in. Previous riots in Bradford, now popularly called ‘Bradistan’ for its large proportion of desis, may not have merely been racial in nature and may also have been fueled by Islamophobia. If Europe does not address these issues quickly and sensitively, this may well be the beginning of a slippery slope. With persecution, discrimination and racism to deal with, just how long will Muslims remain tolerant? How long before they start to flee? And who’s really to blame if they opt for the radical alternative?

Going over the evidence in search of a holistic perspective, I still fail to see how three per cent of the populace could threaten a whole people by their mere existence in the same geographical space. Let’s not forget, it’s not like Muslims forced their entry into mainland Europe. They came as legal immigrants because Europe needed their labor. Through citizenship, they have earned the right to better treatment.

Toronto-based Talha Zaheer blogs about diaspora-related issues for Dawn.com.
He is also the Toronto FC correspondent for Goal.com.

ON 08 18TH, 2009

Source : http://blog.dawn.com/2009/08/18/islamophobia-in-europe/

News From Bangladesh - July 28

Behind the Niqab Bill -- France’s Religious Intolerance

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui

There was a time in my life when France loomed big in my radar screen of the countries that I needed to visit. In my teenage years, I occasionally met French tourists, mostly college going students. Most of them spoke very little English. And yet that language barrier did not hinder these young French tourists from visiting the new independent state of Bangladesh. They appeared inquisitive and fun-loving. 

Years later when I came for my graduate studies in North America, I had few classmates that had come from France. They were good students, not the kind you see amongst today’s French politicians. At the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, one of the externals for my Ph.D. dissertation committee was a French professor who taught instability phenomena in the aerospace engineering department. He was a brilliant man who later returned to France to care for his ailing mother. I also met many French-speaking North African students who had a love-hate relationship with everything French. While they were bitter about their colonial experience, I could see their eyes shine every time they had the opportunity to speak in French, especially with someone from France or the province of Quebec in Canada. While some of us made fun of such unmistakable mood changes amongst our French-speaking friends, which we viewed as a flaw, they would remind us that ‘civilized people speak French and not English.’ There was definitely that nostalgia about being ‘civilized’, in spite of the memories of a bitter past that their parents had to endure against the French colonizers! 

While the French Republic gave us the notions of liberty, equality and fraternity, the non-European natives – the colonized people – were never included in that formula. They were for conquer, colonization and carnage. And the French colonizers were a tough bunch -- ruthless killers, criminals and marauders -- who fought tooth and nail before ceasing their control of the former colonies. 

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the colonial empire of France was the second largest in the world behind the British Empire. Its influence made French the fourth-most spoken colonial European language, behind English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The French rule of Algeria lasted from 1830 to 1962. Algeria became a destination for hundreds of thousands of European immigrants, known as colons and later, as pieds-noirs (meaning “Black-Foot”). These colonists accounted for ten percent of the population in Algeria, before the country achieved its independence in 1962. In Algeria, the native Muslims were not considered French and did not share the same political or economic benefits as those enjoyed by the pieds-noirs. Politically, the Muslim Algerians had no representation in the Algerian National Assembly and wielded limited influence in local governance. To obtain citizenship, they were required to renounce their Muslim identity, a bigotry-ridden litmus test, whose ramification in terms of certain Muslim-related legislative measures cannot be overlooked or ignored in today’s so-called secular France. Since this renouncement would constitute apostasy, only about 2,500 Algerian Muslims acquired citizenship before 1930. 

Following a French Justice Ministry decree, décret Crémieux, in 1870, all Sephardic Jews -- who had settled in Algeria (and Tunisia and Morocco) after the Spanish Inquisition as a welcome gesture from the Ottoman Empire -- quickly became French citizens and came to be regarded by the natives as the pieds-noirs.

Like in other former colonies, the nationalists in Algeria wanted equality, if not liberty, which were denied to them. During a reform effort in 1947, the French government created a bicameral legislature with one house for the Pieds-Noirs and another for the Algerians but made a European’s vote equal seven times a native’s vote. In response, Algerian paramilitary groups such as the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) appeared which demanded independence from the French rule. This led to the outbreak of a war for independence, the Algerian War, in 1954, in which over the next eight years more than a million Algerians were killed by the colonists and the French government. 

After General Charles de Gaulle assumed leadership in France in 1958, he attempted peace by visiting Algeria within days of his appointment and by organizing a referendum on January 8, 1961 for Algerian self-determination. The referendum, organized in metropolitan France, passed overwhelmingly. Pieds-noirs viewed this referendum as betrayal and formed the Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) and began attacking institutions representing the French state, Algerians, and de Gaulle himself. They terrorized and tortured the Muslim population of Algeria and bombed places of worship, business, schools and housing. The bloodshed culminated in 1961 during a failed Algiers putsch that was led by retired generals to topple de Gaulle. After this failure, on March 18, 1962 de Gaulle and the FLN signed a cease-fire agreement, the Évian Accords, and held a referendum. In June 1962 the French electorate approved the Evian Accords by an overwhelming 91 percent vote. On July 1, 1962, Algerians voted 5,992,115 to 16,534 to become independent from France. De Gaulle pronounced Algeria an independent country on July 3.

As noted earlier, Algerian independence had been bitterly opposed by the pieds-noirs and many members of the French military, and the anti-independence OAS. A "scorched earth" policy was declared by the OAS to deny French-built development to the future FLN government. This policy climaxed June 7, 1962 as the OAS Delta Commando burned Algiers’ Library, with its 60,000 volumes, and blew up Oran’s town hall, the municipal library, and four schools. In addition the OAS was pursuing a terror-bombing campaign that in May 1962 was killing an estimated 10 to 15 people in Oran daily.

The Evian Accords stipulated that Algerians would be permitted to continue freely circulating between their country and France for work, although they would not have equal political rights to French citizens. It is no surprise that many of the Muslim migrants to France are from Algeria. 

After independence of Algeria, many Pieds-Noirs settled in France, while others migrated to New Caledonia, Italy, Spain, Australia, North America, Israel, and South America. As hard-core racists, many of them remain hostile to Muslim migrants in France and elsewhere.

The post-9/11 xenophobia against Muslims in France owes a great deal to racist and bigoted elements within the French society that have not come to terms with their losses in Algeria. They see the Muslims as aliens and unwanted, and would like nothing better than a litmus test, much like the failed attempt in colonial Algeria more than a century ago. To them, the French Muslims must prove their adherence to the French way of life by renouncing their Muslim identity. Interestingly, President Nicolas Sarkozy, a crypto-Jew with roots in Ottoman-ruled Salonika, is at the head of such a xenophobic campaign against Muslims in Europe. 

Last week, on July 13 the French lower house of parliament approved a bill banning wearing garments such as the niqab or burqa, which incorporate a full-face veil (with eyes open), anywhere in public. It envisages fines of 150 euros for women who break the law and 30,000 euros and a one-year jail term for men who force their wives to wear the burqa. While the bill is showcased as a touchstone for the Sarkozy administration’s policy of integration, most Muslim women do not fit the stereotype of marginalized, oppressed women. Many of the 2000 niqab-wearers in France are new converts to Islam. They wear it as a choice, as a sign of their modesty, and not out of forced compulsion from anyone. The French bill is opposed to religious freedom and is highly discriminatory. It proscribes what to wear and what not to wear on the streets. 

In a BBC interview, a French Muslim woman said, “Liberty means freedom of conscience, of expression.” Would Sarkozy and his justice minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who said on the eve of Bastille Day that the vote was a “success” for the Republic, ever have the moral courage to listen to those French Muslims -- why they wear it? Can these French legislators, the closet bigots -- I must point out, answer the following questions: what is it about the invisibility of a woman’s face that is so challenging to French identity? What is so important about the niqab that gives the state the right to intervene? As the Guardian editorial wisely noted, “Users of the metro or underground learn instinctively to avoid looking each other in the eye. It is regarded as an intrusion. And yet no state legislature would think about passing a law that bans the wearing of sunglasses indoors on the grounds that it poses a threat to national security. So what is it about the niqab, worn by so few, that threatens so many? And what values, exactly, are being protected?” (July 15)

The French bill banning niqab and burqa has only shown how weak the French society is. It is rotting from within like Holland and Belgium. Rather than fixing its inner weaknesses, it is trying to pass a law that would terrorize a small minority that proudly dons burqa or niqab as their personal choice. France talks about secularism, religious freedom and liberty but the essence of such messages has never penetrated its soul. Sarkozy and his gang of secular fundamentalists ought to know that they can never expect to be respected for upholding flawed values that promote bigotry, instead of pluralism or multi-culture in a world that is increasingly becoming diverse.

E Mail : saeva@aol.com

Source : http://newsfrombangladesh.net/view.php?hidDate=2010-08-02&hidType=EDT

The Future of Freedom Foundation - Freedom Daily

How a Rich and Proud Nation Went Broke
by Jim Powell, Posted April 16, 2010

Amidst a multitrillion dollar spending spree, President Obama apparently believes it’s inconceivable that a mighty nation such as the United States could go broke.


Yet France, once the most powerful nation in Europe, went broke and was plunged into a revolution that consumed the king and queen. Germany was bankrupted by reparations following World War I as well as the ruinous costs of sustaining money-losing, government-run enterprises (particularly railroads). Chile’s socialist regime was bankrupt during the early 1970s. In recent years, Thailand, Korea, and Hungary were bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. Russia, Ecuador, Pakistan, and Ivory Coast have defaulted on their debts.
Argentina is probably the most intriguing case for Americans now. Argentina is currently broke, and last year President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seized private pension funds in a desperate effort to cover government budget deficits.


Argentina has been in trouble for so long that it’s easy to forget that from about 1880 until World War I it ranked among the world’s wealthiest nations. The most lavish buildings in Buenos Aires date from that era. They include towering, ornately embellished monuments in the classical style, such as Banco de la Nacion (1888), Palacio Municipal (1891), Casa Rosada (1894), Hotel Paris (1895), and the National Congress (1906). Buenos Aires business barons dined at the turn-of-the-century Jockey Club, whose lavish rooms were decorated with tapestries and gilded mirrors. Writing about Buenos Aires in 1914, the American minister G.I. Morrill marveled at its sophistication:


An afternoon walk shows the city very much like Paris in its architecture and fashionable stores. At night it is a big white way with electric lights blazing a trail to the light-hearted cafes and theaters.
James Bryce, the British author who wrote a great deal about the Americas, gave a similarly enthusiastic account in 1916:


All is modern and new; all belongs to the prosperous present and betokens a still more prosperous future.
Argentina prospered thanks to booming exports of beef, wheat, and wool. It was endowed with some of the most fertile land on Earth. Immigrants from Spain, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere powered a dramatic economic expansion. Foreign investors expressed their confidence in Argentina by financing railroads and heavy industries.
But politicians were beginning to disparage Argentina’s remarkable market economy. Radical Civic Union leader Hipólito Yrigoyen, known as “el polido” (the hairy armadillo), talked about government intervention in the economy and won the 1916 presidential elections. He didn’t actually do much, other than keep Argentina out of World War I and enable the country to prosper by exporting its valuable commodities to belligerents. Elected again in 1928, he proved unable to deal with unrest resulting from the Great Depression, and an army coup forced him out of office two years later.


Argentines responded to the Great Depression by raising tariffs that shielded local industries from overseas competition. This was intended to promote industrialization, but competitive companies failed to develop behind tariff walls, and the tariffs forced farmers to pay more for manufactured goods, undermining the natural advantages of Argentine agriculture.


The rise of Juan Perón


In May 1943, a group of military officers, known as Gruipo de Oficiales Unidos, issued a declaration of Argentine nationalism. Among them was Juan Perón, an influential 47-year-old colonel. “Germany is making a titanic effort to unite the European continent,” they wrote. They vowed to make Argentina supreme in South America. The following month, they overthrew the conservative government of President Ramon S. Castillo and selected the tall, charming, and impulsive Perón to be the new government’s labor minister.


A teacher’s son, born in Lobos, October 8, 1895, Perón had launched his career as a teenage army cadet. From 1939 to 1941, he had served with the Argentine embassy in Italy. He admired Mussolini and Hitler for policies that he believed could help promote “social democracy” in Argentina. He recognized that to further his ambitions, he needed a power base. As labor minister, he was able to assert power over unions and manipulate them to help expand his own power. In 1945, he issued a regulation requiring that collective bargaining agreements be approved by the government. He awarded government jobs to union bosses who supported him. He made life difficult for union bosses who opposed him. He publicized everything he did for unions. His lover, Eva (Evita) Maria Duarte, a rancher’s daughter, became a popular radio personality.


Alarmed that Perón was emerging as a political threat, the military arrested him on October 12, 1945. Some 300,000 union members gathered in front of the Casa Rosada, the government’s main office building, to protest his arrest. He negotiated for his release and for a cabinet filled with his supporters. He was freed on October 17, thereafter celebrated as Loyalty Day.


The military agreed to hold presidential elections on February 24, 1946, and Perón won with 52 percent of the vote. His battle cry was economic nationalism. He introduced a Soviet-style five-year plan. He established a government monopoly of the export trade: farmers had to sell their commodities to the government and accept below-market prices, and the government then sold the commodities overseas at higher, market prices. Perón used the profits to subsidize favored industries. He took control of the central bank, the vaults of which were loaded with gold bars. He went on to nationalize the insurance industry and grabbed assets in its portfolios. He nationalized aircraft-construction companies, oil companies, and commercial shipping companies. He nationalized the British-owned railroads and telephone system.


Perón maintained the support of labor union bosses by making sure their members received benefits regardless of their productivity. He ordered employers to pay one month’s wages as a Christmas bonus. He decreed more national holidays. He launched a government-run retirement program like Social Security. He subsidized summer camps and rest homes. At the same time, he insisted on controlling union decisions about strikes and other labor policies.


Consolidation of power


The more power Perón acquired, the more inconvenient the Argentine constitution became. Enacted back in 1853, it specified some limits on what the government could do. Most inconvenient was the one-term limit. Since Perón’s supporters controlled both houses of Congress, he simply rewrote the constitution, and the Argentine congress rubber-stamped it. The new constitution went into effect March 1949 without the pesky term limit. The constitution also enabled Perón to gain arbitrary power during a “state of siege.” Gone was an 1853 provision protecting private property. Perón’s constitution said that “private property has a social function.… It is incumbent on the State to control the distribution and utilization of the land.” The new constitution declared that minerals, petroleum, coal, waterfalls, and other natural resources were “inalienable property of the Nation.”


Perón and Evita, who by this time had become his second wife, encouraged a personality cult to bolster their power. They appealed to the “descamisados” (“shirtless ones”), who were the putative principal beneficiaries of Perón’s policies. He staged vast, orchestrated rallies that promoted his socialist-fascist doctrine, called justicialismo. She established the Eva Perón Foundation to extort contributions from businesses, distribute some proceeds to the poor, and promote their personality cult. Her supporters hailed her as “the Mother of All Argentine Children.”


Journalist Philip Hamburger observed the personality cult first-hand during the mid 1940s. “Everywhere I heard the same stories,” he wrote in The New Yorker.


How Señor Perón is at his desk each morning by 6:30 and does not leave until 7 or 8 at night; how Señora Perón arrives early at her office in the Under Secretariat of Welfare and Labor; how she receives from 10 to 20 delegations of farmers, laborers and sheepherders a day; how she attentively listens to their problems and comforts them with advice or a promise that their demands will be granted; how she has worn herself to the point of anemia by her untiring social work; how, when she travels around the countryside, she is greeted as though she were a saint.


On Loyalty Day, October 17, 1951, Evita declared, “I ask you today, comrades, only one thing — that we will all swear publicly to defend Perón and fight to the death.” She died in 1952 of cervical cancer, and to this day people leave flowers at her family vault in Buenos Aires.


The personality cult, however, couldn’t avoid the economic crises that were a consequence of Perón’s policies. Government spending led to inflation, which disrupted the economy and discouraged long-term business investment. Coddled by subsidies, Argentina’s nationalized industries stagnated. Burdened by taxes to pay for industrial subsidies, agriculture slumped, and Argentines, who before Perón had excelled as world-class producers of wheat and beef, had to endure coarse black bread and a meat shortage. One writer commented,
By 1953, there were fewer paved roads than in 1945, neon lighting was curtailed, and shop window displays were lit up with kerosene, while there were fewer cars per head of the population than in 1929.


Argentina dissolved into chaos. The country was rocked by strikes. Coup attempts spurred Perón to further concentrate power. He kept weapons out of the hands of his supposedly beloved descamisados. He blamed speculators for his troubles. He jailed opponents and padlocked their presses, including La Prensa — among the most influential Argentine newspapers. His supporters burned Catholic churches and such bastions of the aristocracy as the Jockey Club.


“During the dictatorship,” recalled Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, “they sent police to monitor my lectures, fired me from my small library job, and named me poultry inspector.” He added, “I resented Perón making Argentina look ridiculous to the world.”


The economic turmoil caused by Perón’s inflation, price controls, exchange controls, interest-rate controls, trade restrictions, and nationalizations led to political turmoil that weakened his grip on power. In 1955, the Argentine military pulled off a successful coup against him, and he was sidelined for the time being. Union bosses, however, remained powerful, and union members’ pay increased faster than productivity, which caused more economic problems.


Perón’s successors


Meanwhile, a home-grown socialist theoretician mounted an intellectual defense of government intervention that dominated public policy debates in Argentina. The theoretician was Raoul Prebisch, born in Tucoman, Argentina, April 17, 1901. He earned an economics degree at the University of Buenos Aires and was a professor there from 1925 to 1948. Over the years, he held a number of positions at the United Nations. His principal idea was that free trade enabled rich countries to exploit poor countries. He rejected Adam Smith’s observation that peaceful trade was mutually beneficial. Prebisch argued that the “terms of trade” worked against the “Periphery” (agriculturally based poor countries) and in favor of the “Center” (industrialized rich countries). Hence, his claim that by exporting agricultural commodities and importing manufactured goods, the Periphery impoverished itself. He insisted that the only way the Periphery could gain an equal footing with the Center was to develop its own industries behind tariff walls. He viewed foreign exchange restrictions as self-defense against the Center. He urged Center countries to give the Periphery foreign aid as a way of compensating for their supposedly unjust advantages. Third World dictators loved the idea of free money. But Perón had pursued the kinds of policies Prebisch favored. They flopped in his homeland and everywhere else they were tried, as it turned out.


After Perón’s overthrow, there were three military rulers, then politician Arturo Frondizi. He tried to cut the bloated railroad workforce by 75,000, but union bosses had him overthrown in March 1962. His successor, Dr. Arturo Illia, had a go at trying to reduce government intervention in the economy, but soon he too was gone. Lt. Carlos Ongania asserted military control of the government, provoking strikes and riots.


Exasperated military leaders agreed to set elections for March 11, 1973. Perón wasn’t permitted to run for the presidency, but his stand-in, Hector J. Campora, won and helped Perón maneuver his way back into power — with his third wife, María Estela (Isabel) Martínez de Perón, a former cabaret dancer. Perón promised more goodies for unions, and again he shut down publications that opposed him. Mercifully, he died at 78 on July 1, 1974.
Isabel took over, and the public sector went wild. Money-losing nationalized enterprises expanded their payrolls by 340,000 during her presidency. Inflation hit 335 percent in 1975. Violence escalated, claiming more than 1,000 lives. She was overthrown in a military coup on March 24, 1976.

Runaway inflation


It was common knowledge that government control of business converted it into a vast jobs program, and endless wage demands consumed all the capital. Businesses incurred losses that couldn’t be controlled because executives were forbidden to reduce compensation levels or fire any union members. On the contrary, political pressure actually led to more hiring and bigger losses.


The military couldn’t help manage Argentina’s 353 nationalized industries because officers were in the same racket. The Ministry of Defense sat atop a morass of nationalized military industries. The biggest was Fabricaciones Militares, which was involved with iron ore, chemicals, gun powder, tanks, and much more. The air force had aircraft factories. The Navy operated shipyards. Since the military couldn’t control its own nationalized industries, few observers were surprised that it failed to resolve chronic problems of nationalized civilian industries.
Unable to cut government spending, Argentine ministers repeatedly announced anti-inflation plans that consisted of currency devaluation and controls on prices, wages, foreign exchange, and interest rates. But government printing presses churned out bales of paper money, and inflation skyrocketed. By June 1985, it hit 3,000 percent. The old peso was abandoned, and Argentina adopted a new peso, but since government spending remained out of control, the new peso soon became worthless like the old peso. The new peso was replaced by the austral. Various economic controls caused endemic shortages. Capital flight accelerated amidst worsening economic crises.


In the years since then, a succession of Argentine presidents have had some hopeful moments when market reforms were introduced, but invariably these collapsed because of lobbying from interest groups, especially labor unions. Programs once started became politically impossible to stop, regardless how harmful they proved to be.
Politicians seem to promote government intervention in the economy because they imagine they will gain more control; but intervention causes increasingly serious economic problems that ironically lead to political problems and a loss of control.


Comedian Enrique Pinto, who performed in Buenos Aires variety shows, ridiculed Argentina’s humiliating descent from wealth to poverty. He said, “It took real talent and perseverance to bring down such a wealthy country.”
Americans might have a hard time coming up with solid reasons that something like this couldn’t possibly happen to us.


Jim Powell is policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He is the author of FDR’s Folly, Bully Boy, Wilson’s War, Greatest Emancipations, The Triumph of Liberty and other books.


This article originally appeared in the January 2010 edition of Freedom Daily.Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

Source : http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd1001d.asp