Category Archives: International issues

Bryan Caplan on Spain

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Caplan writes,

Why is Spain so much richer now than almost any country in Spanish America? Before you answer with great confidence, ponder this: According to Angus Maddison’s data on per-capita GDP in 1950, Spain was poorer than Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, and roughly equal to Colombia, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Panama. This is 11 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and Spain of course stayed out of World War II.

Suppose that we think of Spain as always having had higher average human capital than countries in Latin America, but that many Latin American companies were more resource-rich than Spain. What we have observed is consistent with the share of world wealth accounted for by human capital going up and the share accounted for by natural resources going down.

Right-wing regimes and exit

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Tyler Cowen writes,

Perhaps the more “right-wing” regimes tolerate different sorts of income inequality. Cuba and the USSR had plenty of inequality, but the main earners, in terms of living standards, are restricted to people within the state apparatus. That means a lot of the talent will want to leave. Many fascist regimes, however, are quite willing to cultivate multi-millionaires and then try to co-opt them into supporting the state. Since you can still earn a lot in the private sector, exit restrictions are less needed.

What would be other hypotheses?

The goal is to explain why right-wing authoritarian regimes allow people to leave, but Communist regimes don’t.

The term “right-wing authoritarian” is poorly chosen. It should be called “natural state” (North, Weingast, and Wallace) or “gangster government.” The goal is to remain in power and extract benefits from being in power. The ruler distributes privileges to those who might otherwise threaten the ruler. As a leader, you do not want to drive people away, but if people are unhappy, you would rather they leave than stick around and cause trouble.

Communist regimes do not operate on the basis of distributing privileges to others. Instead, they seek control through totalitarian methods. Their rule is based on intimidation and creating a climate of fear. But if people know that they can leave freely, why should they fear you? They can foment dissent and, if you turn up the heat, they just emigrate. You can’t really run an effective totalitarian state if you allow people to leave. You need to make sure that dissenters suffer, to set a clear example for other potential dissenters.

Cuba and hipsters

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Chris Vazquez writes,

Cuba is a beautiful place filled with amazingly incredible people, my people. But these people deserve so much more. Cuba was the pearl of the Antilles, the preferred island for the Spanish, and the envy of Latin America. Havana was beautiful the way San Francisco and Barcelona are today, not the way ancient Aztec temples or Egyptian pyramids are; but what was once the vibrant home of my abuelos and their contemporaries is now a pretty, boho chic relic for American visitors.

I have friends on the left who eagerly visited Cuba and came back saying how wonderful it is. Socialism is that hip.

Peter Zeihan on Venezuela

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He writes,

This isn’t socialism, or even mismanagement—this is kleptocracy. (Yes yes yes there’s an argument to be made that most socialism-flavored governments concentrate so much decision-making into government hands that such cronyism is a constant danger, but that’s a debate for another time.) Suffice to say, since roughly the middle of the Chavez era in the late 2000s, the only thing socialist about the Venezuelan system has been the propaganda.

But maybe propaganda is, in fact, the true essence of socialism.

Zeihan warns,

That is what decivilizational means: a cascade of reinforcing breakdowns that do not simply damage, but destroy, the bedrock of what makes the modern world work. And that’s just one example in one sector.

What is going on in Venezuela is horrible by any measure, and in a world of Order Venezuela is the very definition of outlier. But a world of Order is not the natural state of things. Pay attention: Some shade of what the Venezuelans are going through is what many of us will need to deal with. Soon, the only thing that will truly make Venezuela stand apart is that its pain is self-inflicted.

He expresses his views effectively. I’m not saying you should accept them. But he is worth following. Check out zeihan.com, or listen to this podcast from last month. At the end of the podcast, he makes the interesting point that the number of reliable news sources has shriveled in recent years. Instead of on-the-spot reporting grounded in local knowledge, we get a deluge of opinion from talking heads and twits.

Getting to Denmark?

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A commenter wrote,

In Denmark you get your free day care so you can become a 2 income family, double income outs you very quickly into the top marginal tax rate of around 60%. Average income tax rates are 45% there, plus a non deductible 25% VAT, plus a 45% top marginal rate for capital gains in case you were trying to save for retirement, plus a 1-3% land tax.

Are these taxes creating ‘equality’? Nope, Denmark has a widening gap in wealth and income, they have started from a very narrow distribution, but have steadily worked to hollow out the middle class. It makes no sense to earn in the middle of their income distribution, you either need to drop into the range where you receive net benefits or jump way into the top of the income range to afford what amounts to top rates of 70-80%.

I have suggested that in the U.S. we have done this also. A household below the median income pays payroll taxes, sales taxes, and possibly property taxes. It loses benefits at a steep rate, and when you factor that in it faces a high tax rate. This impedes upward mobility, as I argued in my essay on the Universal Basic Income.

What I’m reading

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Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945-1957, by Derek Leebaert. He writes,

Today it’s said habitually that “with the destruction at home in 1947, the British gave up trying to maintain a global empire” and that “a global political vacuum created by the collapse of the British empire” followed. . .people came to believe that some enormous transition had occurred years earlier, in 1947. It hadn’t. The events that transpired during these weeks, which surrounded the Truman Doctrine as well as the Marshall Plan, are very different from what historians believe.

His thesis seems to be that the diminution of Britain’s global role was less rapid and inevitable than we now take it to be. At the time, Britain still seemed formidable.

I think that I am well read on World War II and Vietnam. But this “in between” era is one with which I am less familiar. I believe that I am learning a lot.

My favorite elements of the book are his sketches of key officials, some well known and others less so. The story of Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, a left-wing politician who nonetheless valued Britain’s imperial prestige and came to loathe Stalin’s aggression, is new and interesting to me.

President Eisenhower made a decision not to send its forces into Vietnam (then known as Indochina) in 1954. Leebaert’s account of this decision differs somewhat from that of David Halberstam. Halberstam has Eisenhower shrewdly accessing the opinion of anti-interventionists, including Congressional leaders and General Matt Ridgway. Leebaert has Eisenhower wanting to intervene, but finding little Congressional support (one crucial opponent was Senator Lyndon Johnson!) without any help from the British. The Eisenhower Administration ardently sought British help, but the Brits declined.

There was in interesting tie-in between Vietnam and Suez. Both the Americans and the British entertained the idea of the Brits helping America in Vietnam in exchange for the Americans taking sides with the British on Suez. Had that deal materialized, events would have played out differently in both places. But in the end, neither the Americans nor the British were willing to sacrifice what it saw as its interests in one area in order to get support from the other side elsewhere.

Yoram Hazony receives pushback

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1. From Yuval Noah Harari. Without referring to Hazony, Harari writes,

All attempts to divide the world into clear-cut nations have so far resulted in war and genocide. When the heirs of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Mickiewicz managed to overthrow the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, it proved impossible to find a clear line dividing Italians from Slovenes or Poles from Ukrainians.

This had set the stage for the second world war. The key problem with the network of fortresses is that each national fortress wants a bit more land, security and prosperity for itself at the expense of the neighbors, and without the help of universal values and global organisations, rival fortresses cannot agree on any common rules. Walled fortresses are seldom friendly.

Good point. But then he writes this:

Creating a mass global identity need not prove to be an impossible mission. After all, feeling loyal to humankind and to planet Earth is not inherently more difficult than feeling loyal to a nation comprising millions of strangers I have never met and numerous provinces I have never visited. Contrary to common wisdom, there is nothing natural about nationalism.

Harari recognizes that in order to scale up our tribal instincts we seem to require a common enemy. But he thinks that such an enemy could be something impersonal, such as climate change. Uniting all of humanity against impersonal enemies strikes me as a hope with little basis in experience.

2. From Alberto Mingardi, who writes,

One can agree with Hazony that it is naive to assume that “political life is governed largely or exclusively on the basis of the calculations of consenting individuals.” But to assume that governments are just bigger families is the oldest trick of the apologists for interventionism. “Paternalism” never goes with limited government.

Did you two visit the same country?

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First, I read Anne Applebaum.

Hungary’s ruling party respects no restraints of any kind. It has gone much further than Law and Justice in politicizing the state media and destroying the private media, achieving the latter by issuing threats and blocking access to advertising.

Then I read David P. Goldman.

And then we have Viktor Orban, who has governed Hungary for eight years, long enough for the voters to get to know him, with an enormous popular majority. . . . Mr. Orban’s opponents claim that he has put his thumb on the scales by using state institutions to build media support for the government, but no one says that he has falsified votes or intimidated opponents. Opposition politics in Hungary is open and uninhibited.

The Hazony Question, of nationalism vs. transnationalism, is salient in both pieces. Applebaum’s piece speaks to the dangers of nationalism, with one group using the power of the state to deny status to other groups. Goldman’s piece speaks to the dangers of transnationalism, with unelected officials injecting themselves into internal affairs.

Alberto Mingardi on Hazony

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Mingardi offers more criticism of The Virtue of Nationalism.

I find Hazony’s view of European history troublesome. For one thing, saying that Hitler wasn’t a “nationalist” is, to use a euphemism, a far more controversial claim than he acknowledges. Let’s put it in this way: can you picture national socialism raising to power without Herder, Fitche, and all the other prophets of nationalism? I doubt it.

Indeed, one reading of Hitler’s vision is that he wanted to see Germany and Great Britain as cooperative hegemonic powers in a nationalist world order. It was Churchill who was the imperialist, in two senses of the term. First, he wanted to preserve the British empire. Second, Hazony uses the term imperialist to describe any philosophy that is based on a universalist ideology. For Churchill, that ideology was individual freedom and the values of Western Civilization.

What World War II does illustrate is that transnational institutions are not a solution to the problem of war. The League of Nations was helpless in the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, all of which took place in the run-up to the larger conflagration.

Since 1945, there have been numerous wars, in spite of (and in a few cases sanctioned by) the United Nations. Perhaps there are those who are willing to defend the UN by saying that things would have been worse without it. I do not claim the expertise to adjudicate that one.

Suppose we were to describe nationalism in terms of “negative liberty” or “the non-aggression principle” for national governments. Do whatever you want internally, as long as you don’t infringe on people outside your borders. This might be more reliably libertarian than a project of world government, even though it would leave some people imprisoned by their regimes.

Measuring violence

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John Arquilla writes,

I chose to search for what I call “big-kill” wars, during which a million or more die — soldiers and civilians. From 1800-1850, only the Napoleonic Wars surpassed the million-death mark.

. . .The troubling rise in big-kill wars in the first half of the 20th century was followed by an even more disturbing pattern in the second half: they doubled once again. There was nothing of the magnitude of World War II in sheer numbers of dead, but the million-mark in war deaths was steadily surmounted, mostly in societies in which such losses had staggering effects.

Pointer from Charles Chu (email newsletter). Steven Pinker can show a decline in violence by looking at the ratio of war deaths to total population. But is the increase in the denominator, not a decrease in the numerator, that is holding down that ratio.