Hugo

What I can prove to you is that protectionism drives consumer prices up, which makes real income lower and makes everybody poorer. Take an example. George W Bush recently caved to pressure from the US steel industry and moved to protect it. Now, steel has to come from more expensive domestic sources. What does this mean? Everything that involves steel in its manufacture at some point will cost more! Cars, household appliances, tools, furniture, you name it. Now everybody will have to pay more for those goods. You still earn the same as you did before, but now your money buys less. Your real income has dropped. This even applies to those in the steel industry. Their incomes have been protected but they still have to pay more like everybody else. So in this instance, protectionism will make steelworkers slightly poorer and everybody else considerably poorer. Not to mention the fact that as the USA places protective tarriffs on imports, so will other nations in retaliation as they did in 1929. The USA exports a lot to the countries where cheap manufactured goods come from. Factories in India and China may make the cheap consumer goods, but their factories, machine tools, electronics, air conditioners, even the vending machines were all made in the USA and are sold by American corporations. That trade will all be curtailed too. So, we protect the steel industry, but the construction, machinist, electronics, vending industries all take a hit. You can protect 3,000 steelworker jobs at the expense of 30,000 jobs in other industries. Does that make it clearer? Protecting domestic industry will lose domestic jobs and make us poorer. Simple.

A company's value is not always tangible, and cannot be measured purely in terms of assets, personnel etc. For instance, Amazon.com has never made a profit. Why is it still in business? Easy: it has market share. It's easily the biggest e-tailer today and that makes it very valuable. The reason the stock market does not seem to represent "real value" as you put it is because it measures intangible ideas such as market share, growth prospects and even the future of the industry in question. That's why events such as war are able to impact the stock market. The study of economics is the study of best allocating scarce resources. The free market is the best system for doing that because it is the most equitable and the most flexible. Yes, I said equitable. I don't see any problem with rewarding a person proportionately to the value of the work that they do.

Now you're just playing moral relativism, which is a very silly little game. I think we all know that the West is in a very good position regarding social, economic and governmental problems compared to the rest of the world. I'm not saying the West ain't broke so don't fix it, I'm saying the rest of the world is broke far, far worse so a so-called international organisation should fix it first.

Socialist policies caused the depression. Protectionism led to a slump in global trade which provoked the recession. FDR's inept socialist policies aimed at recovery actually prolonged it. These were socialist ideas such as agricultural price fixing (leading to agricultural underproduction and food shortages), and a minimum wage which increased unemployment massively at a point when recovery looked imminent and plunged the USA back into the depths of recession again. Please, go and read up on this subject before you post again. Just looking at modern examples, since China moved away from socialism and joined the world market the average income of the Chinese has nearly quadrupled. Could you explain that in a way that justifies your wrongheaded ideas? The fact of the matter is that for the welfare of the common man, socialism has been proven inferior time and time again. Not a single example exists of socialism having improved the existence of the average citizen. Worse, socialism has become a tool for tyranny, murder and human rights abuse because of the grotesque concentration of power that accompanies it. Mixed economies do not work as well. Sweden, Norway and Canada have all encountered economic problems. Sweden and Norway, whose public sectors were larger, had more severe problems leading to the dismissal of a socialist government and the introduction of a committee of non-socialist economists to specifically study the problem of fixing the damage done by socialist policy. All three have substantially larger portions of their populations below the poverty line than the USA. All those portions are rising, compared to the American poor, which is shrinking. Over a quarter of Norwegians do not earn a living wage. Only if you actually studied economics.

I expect that the UN could stop taking my money, awarding themselves wage increases, bloating their departments and doing very little of real worth. That would be a start. Why are UN peacekeepers not used to keep the peace? Why is it left to unilateral action to deal with international criminals like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein? Why has the UN done nothing about Castro, Chinese Communism, Pol Pot, et al? The UN should have done something about these thugs years ago, but instead they look the other way while their member states strike lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein and abuse oil-for-food accords. Then, to add insult to injury, Kofi Annan goes on public record stating that he likes Saddam Hussein and finds him courageous and creative. I think the UN would do a lot better without an unelected, unaccountable, amoral half-wit like Annan running the show. That'd be a good start too. As to these other organisations, they are really a side-issue. We were talking about the UN and international law, and last time I looked, Amnesty International was not international law (sadly). They do a lot of good works, this is true, which I applaud. If there's one thing I would some international rights groups to do, it would be to stop complaining about abortion rights, homosexual rights, wage gaps and so on in the West while there are far greater problems. Nobody is being prevented from getting an abortion, homosexuals are well protected in law and being poor in the USA means you can't afford cable TV, not that you can't eat and live in a tin-roofed shack. To be fair, I don't think Amnesty International or the Red Cross are really concerned with that. However, I don't think the UN should give time, backing or funding to groups who have this wrongheaded outlook, but unfortunately they do. I object to my tax money being used to fund such nonsensical pursuits.

History tells you that the exact opposite will happen. Socialist policies result in higher unemployment and lower wages, the free market gets us closer to full employment and higher wages. No examples are needed, just go and read about the history of the Western world from the industrial revolution onward.

It remains a fact that all of these are treating the US as their top priority right now, when the fact is that the worst of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib is a positive holiday camp compared to some of what is going on right now. If they are following topical problems as you suggest, what's their use? Surely they should be trying to draw attention to the unsung atrocities, not playing the flavour-of-the-month game? I feel that all of these organisations are being sensationalist and irresponsible, and I've seen nothing that contradicts that. Further to my original point, I don't see the UN trying to address these other problems at all. In that respect I have to reiterate that the UN is a complete failure.

I asked you some time back if you had any good examples where UN involvement brought lasting success. Did you find any yet? This looks like ridiculous political grandstanding to me. In all of these sites, US "atrocities" are top of the list. While these people continue to whine about one man sodomised with a broomstick they seem completely ignorant of the thousands of Tibetan Buddhists languishing in jail, the death camps in North Korea, and so on. If they are demanding justice for the people abused in Abu Ghraib I don't understand why they are not demanding justice for the tens of thousands of men, women and children murdered on the orders of Fidel Castro. I don't know why they aren't demanding that the Vietnamese government apologise for the 1,300,000 innocent civilians it butchered, nor do I know why it is fine to let the killing fields in Cambodia go undisturbed and uninvestigated. Maybe there is something about these crimes on these sites, buried nice and deep so that in 10 minutes of reviewing each one I was unable to find it. Regardless, you couldn't miss the anti-US dogma splashed on the homepage of each, and of all the problems of the world right now that has to be Priority #500 or so. Not to say that abusing prisoners is a good thing, but as I said, this is just another example of how stupid and myopic UN-backed organisations can be. It's a matter of priorities. Let's say I own two cars. One makes a slight rattling noise when driven above 80. The other one has a blown head gasket, inoperable transmission, cracked engine block, leaking oil pan, dead shocks, you name it, it's broken. All other things being equal, which should I concentrate on repairing?

Certainly, however, when addressing problems of human rights and standards of living should the UN focus more on the West or upon the Third World? That was an example. The point was that no occupied nation submits absolutely. Germany was helped by the fact that all the leaders were dead or had surrendered, whereas most Iraqi leaders have gone to ground. In much the same way, Japanese occupation was facilitated by the surrender of the Emperor. It should also be noted that warfare is really endemic in this region, and that Arabs don't have a monolithic power hierarchy as the Germans or Japanese did. The Arabs have spent their entire cultural existence fighting each other and fighting foreigners, whether it be fighting against British or Soviet occupation, the sack of Constantinople or the siege of Vienna. It was to be expected that there would be resistance. I don't see why not. Perhaps we should take a leaf from Woodrow Wilson's book and try national/ethnic self-determination and attempt to give each different people an actual homeland. This could be a far better deal for groups such as the Kurds or Marsh Arabs which Saddam spent so long oppressing.

North-West. Close to Ayn Rand and Drew Carey.

Actually, I did go through the websites of a few UN-backed human-rights organisations and find that that was exactly what they were concerned with: encouraging Western nations to pass laws like Bill C-250 and getting more abortions available (in the West and the Third World) without even mentioning Islamic executions of homosexuals and forced Chinese abortions. If you know of any projects where UN involvement has directly produced lasting and tangible success, speak up. But I think the failures are legion. It's interesting to note that the state has existed for perhaps 5000 years, and only for the last 80 or so have we actually achieved anything close to an acceptably democratic and just state (after all, until universal suffrage no women were self-governed). It's not unreasonable to expect that building a democratic and just international community and law would be a similarly long and difficult process. I think it infinitely preferable to giving the tinpot dictators the keys to the system. There were the Werewolf SS units for a start. As late as 1946 they were responsible for the murders of three American civilians in Passau. They were nowhere near as effective as French or Dutch resistance to the Nazis, but still, your statement is wrong. The problem is that in Africa and the Middle East, national divisions do not follow tribal lines but colonial lines. Often several tribes with long-running hatreds are confined within the same borders which leads to most of the civil wars and genocides in Africa, as well as events such as Saddam's persecution of the Kurds. What is the solution? Redraw the maps? Like you say, a complex problem.

As it stands, I would say there is every reason to scrap the entire UN. It is corrupt and self-serving, too corrupt to reform itself because its ranks are filled with tinpot dictators and corrupt bureaucrats whose primary concern is their own continued prosperity, rather than international law and justice. Most UN inverventions seem to result in expensive failures (like Somalia) or ineffectual pretentiousness (Kosovo). UN "human rights" bodies seem more concerned with getting more abortions for American women and making sure that nobody says anything about Western homosexuals, than trying to ensure that Chinese women stop being marched into abortion clinics at gunpoint and that Islamic nations stop executing homosexuals. It's a farce, as surely as the belief that the US is the #1 concern for world peace when North Korea is busy building nukes, Iran is giving money, support and safe haven to any terrorist who asks, and India and Pakistan are constantly locking nuclear-tipped horns over Jammu Kashmir. I would like to see a new international coalition whose members are entirely democratic. No dictatorships allowed, and no power of veto, as you suggest, since this really detracts from any idea of democracy if certain members have trump cards. The power of veto leads to greedy leaders like Chirac, Schroeder, Putin and Chretien abusing their power to maintain their lucrative contracts with evil dictators like Saddam despite the fact that Saddam is a known and self-confessed sponsor of terrorism and a violator of human rights on a biblical scale. And yes, the US has been and still is guilty of this kind of behaviour and that should stop too. "No deal with evil" should be somebody's slogan. The military victory itself was won speedily. Guerrilla resistance is usual, as it was in post-war Germany, or in South Vietnam and so on. Those who were devious and twisted enough to profit from an evil regime are unlikely to merely shrug their shoulders and say, "oh well, I suppose I'll just go quietly and open a grocery store or something." The problem is not insurgency, as the US has the military power to stamp it out tomorrow if it wanted. The trouble, as in Vietnam, is the reaction back home. Saddam knew this even before the war, and that is why he did not use any WMD he may have had - he knew his only hope was to play innocent victim that the American people and other UN nations might have forced a withdrawal. He even counted on this in Gulf I, his prediction was that Coalition bombing would cause unacceptable civilian casualties and world opinion would force a withdrawal. He tried to exacerbate this effect with his policy of human shields, but due to the pinpoint accuracy of Coalition bombing it came to nothing - civilian casualties were very low. Well, as I've said, our libertarian society and culture depends on three key and separate elements: politics, economics, and ethics. When the first two trump the third, as they increasingly are, you have a problem.

Quite frankly, I have to say that international law is broken. Hussein was about to chair the international committee on disarmament, and that same body of international law has awarded Muammar Ghadaffi the chair on human rights. Israel has had countless resolutions passed against it, China, not a single one, despite their far more egregious and constant human rights violations. This same international law has given us nothing but a facade behind which these disgusting excuses for human beings such as Hussein, Ghaddafi, or Castro can hide. You can imagine that, had the UN existed and had the same values as it does today, it would have sheltered Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo in the same way. Oh, I agree. Had I been George W, I would have taken on Iran first. The Iranian regime is every bit as evil as Saddam's, but Iran is a clearly greater threat to world peace and a big sponsor of international terrorism. Or, as you say, perhaps democratic reform could have been achieved in friendly countries such as Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. The advantage of a military victory, I suppose, is that it is a show of strength for the other dictators of the world ("look how fast we tumbled Saddam - tomorrow it could be you") and, to the violent and militaristic Islamic world, it's a message couched in terms they understand. I think democracy and compassion are viewed as weaknesses by them, but military force is not. Perhaps Saddam was not the best start but I think we can agree that, on a list of the world's most evil regimes, his was definitely somewhere in the Top 10. Yes, this is a problem, much like the sale of things like stun batons to China - what do they think these are going to be used for? As the majority of the US economy is conducted internally, and the majority of foreign trade is with other democratic countries, and the Cold War is no longer being waged, I would definitely like to see a concerted effort to smoke out the world's dictators by economic, diplomatic and, if necessary, military means. I would like to think that ousting Saddam was a good start, however, given the growing negative feelings towards that campaign I'm sure that this progress will now sputter to a halt and the rest of the world's dictators will breathe a sigh of relief and get back to the business of torturing innocents and giving cash to terrorists.

Stalin reigned until his death and the USSR did not collapse after he died. He was succeeded by Kruschev and Brezhnev, who, while more moderate, still had no problem shooting people on occasion. Mao Zedong also ruled until his death and was succeeded by Deng Xiaoping, who was more moderate, but still ordered the massacre of dissenting Chinese students in Tiananmen Square. Kim Il-Sung was replaced by Kim Jong-Il. Ho Chi Minh was replaced by Ton Duc Thang. Hitler's reign was only ended by military force, had it not been, he would have almost certainly have ruled until his natural death and then been succeeded by Herman Goering, whose signature lies upon the orders for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." History is replete with these examples. Perhaps Saddam would have been overthrown. It is more likely that he would not have been. Revolutions of this kind generally occur when the rulers are disinterested and detached (Louis XVI or Nicholas II), or when they are too liberal and fail to use sufficient brutal coersion to guarantee their rule (Gorbachev and contempary Communist leaders). Saddam was neither of these things. Had the US not intervened, it is almost certain that his regime would have survived until his death at which point his sons would have succeeded him. How many thousands or millions of Iraqis would have died waiting for this dynasty to end?

Economic left/right: 8.62 Social libertarian/authoritarian: -1.95 Near absolutely nobody. I suppose it means I'm an economic far-right-winger and somewhat libertarian socially.

I have never been to school in the USA. I'm a product of the British education system, back when it was good. Regardless, the 110,000,000 figure comes from years of research and examination of sources. You tell me it's wrong, but there is no logic, reasoning or evidence behind that. So we're going with 110,000,000 by default. Incidentally, those same sources show that it's not unrealistic to suppose that figure could be tripled. While their cosmonauts died because of inadequate or absent safety measures. The Americans were second in space but they killed a great many fewer people getting there. A friend of mine was imprisoned by the Czech government between 1976 and 1989 (the velvet revolution), for the crime of distributing pamphlets on economic freedom and publicly proposing democratic reform. He's quite soured on communism. Conversely, I have quite a few Marxist friends in the West and none of them have been jailed for their beliefs.

Now that Communism, spearheaded by the Bolsheviks, has been responsible for well over a hundred million murders and countless more tortures, rapes, deportations, forced labours and more? That's quite a horrific point. Communism has been responsible for more terror, death and needless suffering than any other movement or calamity in the history of humanity. Even had the Soviet modernization efforts been completely successful (which they were not), it would not have been worth it. What's the point in bringing electricity when the people you are bringing it to are all dead? The devil, more like. It would be difficult to find a more inhuman and evil man, even on the world stage that includes men like Hitler or Stalin. Lenin stands as a great example of what happens when you allow yourself to be overcome by hate and rage.

An opinion completely rubbished by the facts. I'll reference one of my favourite authors again, Prof. R. J. Rummel, who has spent his academic career studying the practice and statistics of state-sanctioned killing. These are his conservative estimates: Victims of Hitler: 11,000,000 Victims of Stalin: 40,000,000 Victims of Mao Zedong: 35,000,000 Victims of the USA (all governments since independence): 300,000 Note that 298,000 of those were foreigners. Since American independence, about 2,000 American citizens have been killed politically, for instance, lynching of blacks and so on. That's 2,000 people. Hitler killed 5,500 times as many people in his 12 years as the USA did in over 200. Stalin killed 20,000 times as many. In short, stop talking crap. You are basically shooting your mouth off on matters you are too lazy or stupid to research properly. I have no patience for this idiocy.

Well said, Odie. I think that it is very telling that Canadian culture is mostly defined in terms of what it is not rather than what it is. When talking about Canadian culture, the conversation will inevitably be about the differences between Canada and America, but despite all this (and I say this as a foreigner) the rest of the world cannot tell the difference between Canadians and Americans. What does that say, I wonder?

Did you actually read about that, or did you just hear it? I'm guessing the latter, because if you did know about it you wouldn't talk such nonsense.

This is really just a collection of isolated incidents. There is nothing here pointing to any kind of conspiracy from on high, certainly nothing like the death warrants and mass deportation orders signed by high Soviet officials and so on. In any country, including Canada, you could turn up a million such incidents, especially if you include Immigration. Given that millions of people in the US are in similar situations every day (in court, entering the US at border crossings and airports, reading or writing anti-US and anti-Bush books) with nothing of this kind happening to them, I see no reason to make any fatuous comparisons to "Ceausescu's Romania".

Firstly, the US was never coercive towards the nations of the Far East or Western Europe that it helped. Both Italy and France have elected socialist governments and have have held quite anti-US policies at one time or another. There was even talk at one time that France would not honour her NATO obligations in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack. The US did not attempt to use force or embargo to dissuade these policies. Secondly, had the US not fought the Cold War as hard as it did, you would really know the meaning of coercion. As in being crushed to pulp beneath the treads of a Soviet T-72, or kneeling on a stone floor waiting for a bullet in the back of the head for daring to suggest that Lenin was anything but a living god. Oh, and welcome to the forum.

There are quite a few companies who will convert your car to run on LPG, for a small fee. A lot of fleet vehicles (taxis, vans) already run on it. Ford and GM offer it as a factory option on new fleet vehicles. If you're a good mechanic you can do it yourself, see here. The exhaust of an LPG vehicle is virtually all carbon dioxide, which isn't toxic and is present in large amounts in our atmosphere anyway. LPG vehicles also use less oil and lubricants and need less maintenance. You can also modify your car, or have someone else do it, to run on alcohol. This is a popular option with farmers for their farm vehicles and equipment, because any farm can produce virtually limitless quantities of fuel-grade ethanol. Essentially, a farmer can fuel his vehicles for free. The main reason gasoline is the primary fuel for cars is that it contains the most energy per unit of volume of all similar fuels. Henry Ford's original engines were designed to run on either gasoline or ethanol, but since then designers found that gasoline engines made considerably more power and went down that route. The Bush administration in the US is actually launching and funding initiatives to increase the availability of LPG as a fuel and promoting it. I think similar plans are underway in Canada.

Quick! Arrest John Kerry, Ralph Nader and Tom Daschle! Arrest Michael Moore, Martin Sheen and Alec Baldwin! What a load of rubbish. Your examples are not even valid, you cite no sources so we cannot be certain that any of them actually happened, and we cannot examine the cases to see why anybody was accused of being a terrorist or refused entry to the US.

I know, but this is the second time that you have failed to explain how population and population growth correlate to world power. Holland in the Renaissance, or modern-day Singapore and Hong Kong prove that point wrong. Again, that point makes absolutely no sense. Destroying an economy makes it stronger when rebuilt? If the energy and money that went into rebuilding could have been used on growth, rather than getting back to the starting grid, would that not make an even stronger economy? Is that not why Germany went from being the greatest world power in 1914 to an also-ran ever since? Perhaps you have heard of the Marshall Plan? Are you aware that of all the countries the USA made war loans to, only one ever paid them back? The EU is also not a coherent economic or political body, as events keep demonstrating to those who dream of a European super-state. You might as well talk about the power of Africa.