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Policy

Japan-Prime-Minister-Sinzo-Abe-Peace-Memorial-Park-8-6-15

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe walks as he attends a ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, western Japan, August 6, 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bombing of the city. (REUTERS/TORU HANAI)

Remember the scene in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, when the Knights of the Round Table have to answer three questions before they can cross the Bridge of Death? Sir Galahad is cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril because he changes his mind when asked his favorite color.

I can sympathize because I would hate to be asked for a one-word description of government. My first instinct would be say “stupid,” but that might not be the most mature response. So I’d probably say “wasteful.” But then I’d change my mind and say “corrupt.” As the bridge keeper was about to cast me to my death, I’d say “thuggish.” And my final choice as I fell into the gorge might be “incompetent.”

And I’d have lots of examples in mind for that final version, such as the time the Italian government appointed the wrong person to a job that shouldn’t even exist. Or how about the British government being so incompetent that it created a new handout that was so poorly designed that nobody signed up.

I guess Japan’s government was inspired by the British counterparts, because Bloomberg reports that the Japanese government also is too incompetent to give away money.

Not a single Japanese company has applied for a government subsidy to encourage firms to promote women in the 17 months since the plan started. Under a labor ministry plan unveiled in April 2014, small and medium-sized companies that promote women are eligible to apply for a 300,000 yen ($2,500) payment per company, while larger firms can get 150,000 yen each. The ministry had budgeted 120 million yen to be distributed to about 400 companies.

So why didn’t companies want these handouts? Probably because the government wanted them to waste a lot of time and energy and it simply wasn’t worthwhile.

The program requires companies to set their own numerical targets and achieve the goals within six months. Firms also need to offer at least 30 hours of training to educate their workforce about equal opportunity rights, according to the health ministry’s Megumi Kondo.

Needless to say, the right lesson to learn is that the government shouldn’t be trying to steer the market. The profit motive and human preferences should determine how many women fill various positions in companies, not the arbitrary diktats of the political class.

Moreover, you would think Japan’s policy community would have more important things to worry about, such as the fact that  the IMF, BIS, and OECD all show the country on track for Greek-style fiscal chaos. Or the fact that higher taxes are keeping Japan’s economy stagnant. But I guess it doesn’t make sense to assume smart decisions by Japanese politicians. After all, they’re probably just as venal and short sighted as their American counterparts.

P.S. If I had to pick the most inane regulation on the planet, I’d probably select the Greek rule on stool samples. But, depending on my mood, the Japanese reg on coffee enemas might win the prize.

The Japanese government is so incompetent they

World

Two Women Were Raped in Front of an Onlooking Crowd Before Being Beheaded

isis-iraq-war-crimes

Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq releases snuff film showing slaughter of hundreds of Iraqi men and boys gunned down like animals in ditches. (Photo: Walid Shoebat)

A 12-year old Christian boy was among 12 people executed by the Islamic State (ISIS) during a horrific event that took place on August 28 outside Aleppo, Syria. The young Christian boy was later crucified alongside his father, a Syrian ministry team leader reportedly responsible for starting up 9 churches in the area. They , as well as ten others, were executed for refusing to renounce the name of Jesus Christ and embrace Islam, according to multiple reports.

“In front of the team leader and relatives in the crowd, the Islamic extremists cut off the fingertips of the boy and severely beat him, telling his father they would stop the torture only if he, the father, returned to Islam,” said Christian Aid Mission, a humanitarian group which assists indigenous Christian workers in their native countries. “When the team leader refused, relatives said, the ISIS militants also tortured and beat him and the two other ministry workers. The three men and the boy then met their deaths in crucifixion.”

Eight aid workers, including two women ages 29 and 33, were taken to a separate site in the village and asked to renounced Jesus Christ and convert to Islam. When they refused, they were raped before a gathered crowd and beheaded. Witnesses say the women were faithful to the very end, praying as they knelt in acceptance of their fate before the Islamist militants.

“Villagers said some were praying in the name of Jesus, others said some were praying the Lord’s Prayer, and others said some of them lifted their heads to commend their spirits to Jesus,” Christian Aid told Morning Star News. “One of the women looked up and seemed to be almost smiling as she said, ‘Jesus!'”

The execution is just one of the latest acts in a greater Christian genocide occurring right now in the Middle East. According to the Gospel Herald, in Syria alone, the Christian population has plunged by nearly two-thirds since the country’s civil war started in 2011. In 2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Christian population was around 1.5 million. Since the U.S. abandoned its presence and the Islamic State was able to cut out large swathes of territory in both countries, the number of Christians in country has plummetted to well below 200,000.

“It is like going back 1,000 years seeing the barbarity that Christians are having to live under. I think we are dealing with a group which makes Nazism pale in comparison and I think they have lost all respect for human life,” said Patrick Sookhdeo, the founder of Barnabas Fund, a charity that provides aide to Syrian Christians. “Crucifying these people is sending a message and they are using forms of killing which they believe have been sanctioned by Sharia law.”

“For them what they are doing is perfectly normal and they don’t see a problem with it. It is that religious justification which is so appalling.”

A 12-year old Christian boy was among

Opinion

North-Korean-Leader-Kim-Jong-Un

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends an emergency meeting on Thursday. (Photo: AFP – Getty Images)

North Korea is called the “worst place on earth” for good reason. Thousands of people are tortured. Some North Koreans eat rodents to try to survive, and many starve anyway. In winter, they freeze. No one but the dictator has any true freedom, and no one is allowed to leave.

One person who understands that is Yeonmi Park. Now she’s 22. But for 16 years, she did amazing things “In Order to Live.” That is the title of her new book.

“We didn’t have enough food. I had to see dead bodies in the streets,” she says. Still, she and other North Koreans worshipped the late “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, and his son, current leader and “Brilliant Comrade,” Kim Jong Un. Yeonmi told my TV studio audience that she believed Kim “could read my mind.”

When she was allowed to attend school, Yeonmi was taught to hate Americans. “We have to call all Americans ‘bastards’. My math problem was ‘you had four American bastards and you could choke two, how many American bastards are left to kill’? North Korea educates people that our suffering is because of these bad American bastards. Because of them, we are starving.”

But tiny bits of freedom can undermine a regime’s monopoly on thought. For Yeonmi, a black-market DVD of a Western film made a difference.

“I watched the movie ‘Titanic’ and I was shocked. Like, how could this kind of ridiculous film exist? I’d never seen people dying for love, except dying for the regime and the party.”

When Yeonmi was thirteen, she and her mother escaped into China, where they were kidnapped and sold into slavery: “Chinese government, if they catch us, will sell us back to North Korea, so we are very vulnerable in China. Chinese people, they know that.”

Sex traffickers took advantage of that vulnerability. “That’s what happened to both of us, my mother and me.” At the time, she didn’t know what sex was. “I didn’t even know what kissing was.”

For two years, she was an abused captive. Then a Protestant mission helped her escape to South Korea by walking across the Gobi Desert.

South Korea “was another shock,” because she realized that freedom meant more than just having food — it meant making her own decisions.

“I thought freedom meant wearing jeans or watching movies without worrying about getting arrested or executed,” says Yeonmi, “but what freedom meant in South Korea was you’ve got to think for yourself. They were asking me, ‘What do you think about this? What do you want to do with your life? What do you like to eat?’ I was so upset, like, ‘Tell me what to do, tell me what to wear!'”

South Koreans sneered at North Korean escapees. “Everybody told me I was a loser, because I am from communism country. I don’t have any knowledge of Western culture.”

Books became the next step in her journey. “I devoured books,” she says. “One day, I picked up a book called ‘Animal Farm.’ That changed my life. In that book, I saw myself. I saw my grandmother.”

The George Orwell allegory about how noble-sounding revolutions can turn into tyranny resonated with Yeonmi. “I could understand what really had happened to me and what really had happened to North Korea.”

Today she fears for family members who have been unable to escape: “My relatives, they’re back in North Korea, and now Kim Jung Un, that fat guy doesn’t like me, so he’s using my relatives and denouncing me as a human rights propaganda puppet of the CIA. I’m hoping for the best — that they are safe and one day I can see them again.”

Since today so many Americans call themselves “victims,” I asked Yeomni if she was a victim.

She said absolutely not. “I am not a victim. I am grateful I was born in North Korea and escaped … I would go through the same journey to be free.”

I pushed back, asking, “Starving and being sold into sex slavery, you would do it again?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I would do that again to be free.”

Yeonmi Park, 22, spent 16 years in

Opinion

Barack-Obama-Elizabeth-Warren

President Barack Obama leans in to kiss Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren after she introduced Obama before he addresses supporters during a June campaign fundraiser at Symphony Hall in Boston. (Photo: Stephan Savoia/AP)

One of the secrets of successful magicians on stage is directing the audience’s attention to something that is attractive or distracting, but irrelevant to what is actually being done. That is also the secret of successful political charlatans.

Consider the message directed at business owners by Senator Elizabeth Warren and President Barack Obama — “You didn’t build that!”

Assuming for the sake of argument that a man who owns a business simply inherited it from his father, what follows? That politicians can use the inherited resources better than the heir? Such a sweeping assumption has neither logic nor evidence behind it — but rhetoric doesn’t have to have logic or evidence to be politically effective.

The conclusion is insinuated, rather than spelled out, so it is less likely to be scrutinized. Moreover, attention is directed toward the undeserved good fortune of the heir, and away from the crucial question as to whether society will in fact be better off if politicians take over more of either the management or the earnings of the business.

The question of politicians’ track record in managing economic activities vanishes into thin air, just as other things vanish into thin air by a magician’s sleight of hand on stage.

Another of the magic feats of political rhetoric in our time is to blame “a legacy of slavery” for problems in the black community today. The repulsiveness of slavery immediately seizes our attention, just as effectively as the attractiveness of a magician’s scantily clad female assistant or the distraction of a flash of light or a loud noise on stage.

Here again, rhetoric distracts attention from questions about logic or evidence. The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just a convenient excuse for bad behavior, it allows politicians to escape responsibility for the consequences of the government policies they imposed.

Although the left likes to argue as if there was a stagnant world to which they added the magic ingredient of “change” in the 1960s, in reality there were many positive trends in the 1950s, which reversed and became negative trends in the 1960s.

Not only was the poverty rate going down, so was the rate of dependence on government to stay out of poverty. Teenage pregnancy rates were falling, and so were rates of venereal diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. Homicide rates among non-white males fell 22 percent in the 1950s.

In the wake of the massive expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s “war on poverty” program — with the repeatedly announced goal of enabling people to become self-supporting and end their dependence on government — in fact dependence on government increased and is today far higher than when the 1960s began.

The declining rates of teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases in the 1950s both reversed and rose sharply in the wake of the 1960s “sexual revolution” ideas, introduced into schools under the guise of “sex education,” which claimed to be able to reduce teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases.

Black labor force participation rates, which had been higher than white labor force participation rates in every census from 1890 to 1960, fell below white labor force participation rates by 1972 and the gap has widened since then. Homicide rates among non-white males reversed their decline in the 1950s and soared by 75 percent during the 1960s.

None of this was a “legacy of slavery,” which ended a century earlier. But slavery became the rhetorical distraction for the political magicians’ trick of making their own responsibility for social degeneration vanish into thin air by sleight of hand.

Political charlatans are not the whole story of our social degeneracy on many fronts. “We the people” must accept our own share of the blame because we voted these charlatans into office, and went along with their ever-increasing power over our lives.

When it came to charlatans taking ever larger amounts of our own money to finance ever more big government programs, we stood still like sheep waiting to be sheared. We remained as meek as sheep when they turned schools into places to propagandize our children to grow up accepting more of the same.

All the while we had the power to vote them out. But we couldn’t be bothered to look beyond their magic words. Even now, many are too absorbed in their electronic devices to know or care.

Like magicians on stage directing the audience's

Opinion

radical-environmentalist

A radical environmentalist protests outside of the U.S. Supreme Court during oral arguments in a case that resulted in a landmark rejection of EPA carbon emission rules.

Since it’s basically a way of protecting property rights, environmental protection is a legitimate function of government. That’s the easy part. It gets a lot harder when calculating costs and benefits.

Everyone surely agrees that a chemical company shouldn’t be able to dump toxic waste in a town’s reservoir because the costs would out-weigh the benefits. And presumably everyone also would concur that banning private automobiles would be crazy because this would be another example of costs being greater than benefits.

But there’s a lot of stuff in between those extreme examples where agreement is elusive. And I’ll admit my bias. I don’t trust the modern environmental movement, particularly the climate alarmists. There are just too many cases where green advocates act like their real goal is statism.

Moreover, the hypocrisy of some environmental dilettantes is downright staggering. And they also seem to be waging a regulatory war on modern life. I’m giving all this background to create context for an article I want to discuss. John Tierney, a columnist for The New York Times. has a piece that debunks recycling. He starts by looking back 20 years.

As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time? In 1996, …I presented plenty of evidence that recycling was costly and ineffectual, but its defenders said that…the modern recycling movement had really just begun just a few years earlier, they predicted it would flourish as the industry matured and the public learned how to recycle properly.

So what’s happened over the years? Has recycling become more feasible and rational? Not exactly. From a cost-benefit perspective, it’s a scam. It simply doesn’t make sense.

…when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all. Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. …the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. …The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. …“Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected…”

Tierney specifically addresses the issue of greenhouse gasses.

…well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits. …Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. …if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.

A traditional argument for mandated recycling is that landfill space is vanishing. But that’s always been bunk.

One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland… Though most cities shun landfills, they have been welcomed in rural communities that reap large economic benefits (and have plenty of greenery to buffer residents from the sights and smells).

Moreover, incinerators are another practical option.

Modern incinerators, while politically unpopular in the United States, release so few pollutants that they’ve been widely accepted in the eco-conscious countries of Northern Europe and Japan for generating clean energy.

The bottom line is that recycling is an expensive feel-good gesture by guilt-ridden rich people.

In New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is now $300 more than it would cost to bury the trash instead. That adds up to millions of extra dollars per year — about half the budget of the parks department — that New Yorkers are spending for the privilege of recycling. That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions. …why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint.

I don’t have a strong opinion on whether rich people should feel guilty about their resource consumption. But I definitely get agitated when they try to atone for their guilt by foisting costly and ineffective policies on other people.

P.S. That’s why I consider myself to be pro-environment while also being a skeptic of environmentalists. Simply stated, too many of these people are nuts.

P.P.S. Some environmental policies lead to disgusting examples of government thuggery (some of which, fortunately, are not successful).

Recycling is an expensive gesture by guilt-ridden

Politics

Says “Try-Nothing” Congress Needs to Get to Work Like the Rest of America

Boehner Swears In David Jolly Of Florida At US Capitol

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 13: U.S. Representative-elect David Jolly (R-FL) participates in a ceremonial swearing-in photo opportunity March 13, 2014 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Jolly succeed his boss, the late Rep. Bill Young (R-FL), after he defeated Democrat Alex Sink in a special election for Florida’s 13th District on Tuesday. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Seminole, FL – We’ve all heard the cry of “kick the bums out,” but Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., is leading the push to put lawmakers to work in a 40-hour work week. Jolly, a 2016 Republican Senate candidates who represents Florida’s 13th Congressional District, has introduced legislation (H.Res.457) to permanently change the rules of the House of Representatives to require the House to be in session a minimum of 40-hours a week while in Washington. Jolly said the current congressional calendar is clearly not producing results and the American people rightfully expect their elected officials to work around the clock to tackle the nation’s problems.

“This ‘try-nothing’ Congress needs a reality check,” Jolly said. “A work week in Washington should be no different than a work week in every other town across the nation.

Over the last 20 years, the U.S. House has been in session on average just 137 days each year, yet both lawmakers in the House and Senate enjoy a cool $174,000 annual salary. That doesn’t count leadership, as the speaker earns an annual salary of $223,500 while both House majority and minority leaders earn $193,400. By comparison, American workers on average putting in a 40-hour, 5-day workweek at their job do so 241 days each year. This means House members are at work in Washington 100 fewer days each year than the average American worker and take home far more–forget about perks, medical and retirement benefits.

This isn’t the first time Rep. Jolly took this issue on. Last year, he wrote a letter to the House Rules Committee urging leaders to expand the congressional calendar, stating the “extent of the national and global issues we face today, more than ever before, require great deliberation, robust debate, moments of conviction, and decisive action on our part. The ‘People’s House’ simply cannot address the many priorities of the nation if we are not in session more days.”

“Americans are sick and tired of Washington inaction. They expect their leaders to govern,” Jolly said in an email to PPD. “Look at all the bills gathering dust while Congress braces for the next self-made calamity. Let’s give voice to the people on issues like border security, transportation, a budget that finally balances. The frustration is not that we haven’t achieved these things, it’s that we haven’t even engaged in a legislative fight to begin to advance the agenda that is right for the American people.”

Jolly, who is viewed as the main competition for Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., on the PPD 2016 Senate Election Projection Model, took to the House floor and ripped Congress for he said was a failure to honor its constitutional responsibility and engage in a debate on our current national security strategy to combat ISIS.

“We don’t get to choose the threats that come our way,” Jolly said on the House floor. “We only choose our response and one year later we have no response. We are elected to be custodians of the public trust and we fail that public trust every day we fail to consider the issues that are of most significance to the American people.”

Rep. Jolly defeated Alex Sink, D-Fla., in a special election to replace the late Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., in the Tampa-area swing House district back in March 2014. In what was seen as one of the first warnings of the 2014 midterm elections, Jolly bested Sink by just over 2 points in a race widely viewed by election forecasters (save for PPD) as Leans Democrat. Both Democrats and Republicans spent millions of dollars testing out national strategies for the rest of the year. Sink opted out of another shot to run for the seat in 2014 and Jolly was easily re-elected.

Seminole, FL – We've all heard the

Video

[brid video=”17417″ player=”1929″ title=”Obama “Not Welcome” in Oregon to “Stand on Corpses of Our Loved Ones””]

David Jaques, publisher of the Roseburg Beacon, told Bill O’Reilly on Monday night that President Obama is “not welcome” in Roseburg because people don’t want him there to “grandstand for political purposes.”

“He wants to come to our community,” Jaques said, “and stand on the corpses of our loved ones and make some kind of political point.”

President Obama is rumored to visit the Oregon town to politicize the victims of last week’s mass murder at Umpqua Community College. In his statements about the shooting, the president said mass killings are becoming a “political choice,” and flat-out stated the issue should be politicized.

Mr. Jaques isn’t the only voice speaking up and advocating rolling up–not out–the red carpet on Friday. A Defend Roseburg Facebook page is garnering attention for their serious attempt to cancel the president’s visit. The Facebook page reads”:

The anointed one his majesty king 0bama and the White House have announced a Friday arrival in Roseburg, Oregon in the wake of Oct 1st’s horrific tragedy at UCC.

Polarizing as usual, Mr 0bama has insisted on politicizing the event as a conduit for increased executive orders on gun control via means of his pen, and his phone.

This blatant disrespect of the victims families, the community and the town of Roseburg, Mr 0bama’s administration is flying not just the 747 that is airforce one to Oregon, but a three helicopter team of Sikorsky’s that make up HMX-1, known as Marine one to travel to Roseburg at the taxpayers expense.

We need a lot of people. Please come show your support for Roseburg, not the little man who has no respect for the constitution.

David Jaques, publisher of the Roseburg Beacon,

Video

In his Talking Points on Monday, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said on “The O’Reilly Factor” that liberals who want more gun control are acting “irrational.” He pointed to Mark Kelly, husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., herself a victim of a mass shooting, who could not point to a single gun law that would’ve prevented any of the recent shootings across the country.

In his Talking Points on Monday, Fox

Policy

(Source: ECLA-UN/www.josepinera.com)

(Source: ECLA-UN/www.josepinera.com)

Chile is one of the world’s economic success stories. Reforms in the 1980s and 1990s liberalized the nation’s economy and resulted in rapid increases in economic growth and big reductions in poverty.

Unfortunately, the current government is pushing policy in the wrong direction. This drift toward statism has been unfortunate, featuring higher tax burdens, more spending, and increased intervention. But I’ve always assumed that Chile’s private pension system would be safe from attack. After all, as noted in a new column for Investor’s Business Daily by Monica Showalter, it’s been a huge success.

Chile’s 35-year old private pension program…is working spectacularly well. …savings, ownership, control, responsibility and wealth building…are the pillars of the Chilean Model — and have as their ultimate reward a comfortable retirement, which Chileans now do.

But Monica warns that an ongoing education campaign is necessary to make sure that workers realize the benefits of the system.

And that’s been lacking.

…successive socialist governments in Chile have pretty well limited their recognition of the Chilean Model to criticism of it, many of them still unhappy that it’s not a state model that’s providing such high returns. …All the issues that had been called problems were largely the result of widespread public ignorance of economics…the people who should know better aren’t educating the public.

Given that Chile has enjoyed such strong growth in recent decades, you would think ordinary people would be happy, even if they’re not aware of the relationship between pro-market reforms and rising living standards.

chile-argentina-venezuela

And since Chile has grown far faster than other nations in Latin America, you would think that the political elite actually would understand that there is a strong relationship between economic freedom and national prosperity. But that’s not the case, and the current left-leaning government is an obvious example. It even created a commission to review Chile’s pension system, and that decision was perceived as an effort – at least in part – to undermine support for the private system.

Fortunately, it’s very difficult to look closely at the Chilean system and conclude that personal retirement accounts have been unsuccessful. Professor Olivia Mitchell of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania served on the Commission and wrote a column based on that experience forForbes.

She starts by acknowledging Chile’s personal retirement accounts are a gold standard for reform and then asks why there’s a desire to change something that works.

Chile’s retirement system has been hailed as “best in class” by pension experts near and far. The country’s fabled individual and privately-managed accounts include around 10 million affiliates, hold $160 billion in investments, and pay retirement benefits to over a million retirees. So why did President Michelle Bachelet establish a Pension Reform Commission that just delivered to her 58 specific reforms and three comprehensive proposals to overhaul remodel Chile’s retirement system?

A benign explanation for the Commission is that it’s a helpful way of helping people learn about the system.

Ms. Mitchell (no relation, by the way) points out that workers in Chile suffer from genuine and widespread ignorance.

…only a handful (19% of men, 11% of women) know how much they contribute to the accounts: 10% of pay. This underscores my own research showing that most Chileans had no idea how much they paid in commissions, how their money was invested, or how their benefits would be determined at retirement. Only one-fifth of the participants had the faintest idea about how much money they held in their accounts (even within plus or minus 20%!).

But if those people paid close attention, they’d learn that the private system – particularly when combined with the government’s safety net – does a very good job of protecting the less fortunate.

Chile’s retirement system actually does a rather remarkable job of protecting against old age financial destitution. …Adding the means-tested to the self-financed pension generates replacement rates of about 64%, levels even above what retirees in the US get from social security.

Nonetheless, some of the Commissioners want to weaken the current system and give government a bigger role.

Prof. Mitchell is not impressed by their thinking.

…reforms offered by others on the panel have a major flaw: these would – slowly or rapidly – eat into the money so painstakingly built up in the private accounts over time. My view, along with the majority of the Commissioners, was that wrecking Chile’s funded pension system is not the answer. Instead, this would destroy decades of national saving and economic growth, not to mention the well-being of future generations. This is an especially critical concern in view of Chile’s rapid aging: this nation is set to become the oldest country in South America within 15 years. …Chile needs a resilient retirement system that encourages continued work, incentivizes saving, and offers credible pension promises that can actually be paid when the time comes. It would be unfortunate to see Chile dismantle the system that has done so well for so many, over the past 35 years.

The good news, as you can see from the column, is that most Commissioners don’t want radical changes to Chile’s private pension system. This is a positive outcome. Assuming, of course, that the current left-wing government follows their recommendations. What we don’t know, though, is whether other governments learn any lessons from all this analysis.

SS-Cumulative-Deficit

America’s Social Security system has gigantic unfunded liabilities, for instance, and many other nations also have big fiscal shortfalls in their tax-and-transfer systems operated by their governments. The right answer is a transition to personal retirement accounts. That’s what will happen if policy makers from elsewhere in the world learn from Chile’s success.

P.S. This comparison of Chile and Cuba tells you all you need to know about markets vs statism.

P.P.S. Here’s a comparison of real savings in Australia’s system of private accounts compared to the growing debts of America’s pay-as-you-go government-run system.

P.P.P.S. If you want to see a strong case for personal retirement accounts, click here for an explanation from the man most responsible for Chile’s remarkable reforms.

Reforms in the 1980s and 1990s liberalized

Opinion

Obama-UCC-Statement

President Barack Obama gives a press conference in response to the shootings. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/EPA)

In his speech on the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon last week, President Obama sounded more upset about America’s gun laws than about the horrific massacre. We barely had the preliminary facts about the shooting, the shooter and the victims, and he was already lecturing the nation again on gun control.

Instead of calling the nation to prayer, he said we would learn about the victims in the coming days and then “wrap everyone who’s grieving with our prayers and our love.” Those words out of the way, he immediately pivoted to complaining that “our thoughts and prayers are not enough. It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel (or) prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America — next week or a couple of months from now.”

We didn’t hear much “heartache and grief” in his speech, but his anger was palpable. It wasn’t anger at the shooter, and it wasn’t sympathy for the victims. It was outrage — or apparent outrage — at America’s Second Amendment advocates.

“We are the only advanced country on earth,” said Obama, “that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months. … The United States … is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws — even in the face of repeated mass killings.” He said these events happen so often that they’ve “become routine. … We’ve become numb to this.”

He may speak for himself, of course, but I don’t know too many people, especially gun rights advocates, who are numb to such savagery. Many of us believe our society would be safer against gun violence if there weren’t so many “gun-free” zones and if we had more armed guards.

As he has so often done before the powder is dry after similar incidents, he used his bully pulpit (emphasis on “bully”) to misstate statistics as if he were trying for a record number of Pinocchios from fact-checkers.

He said: “We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work — or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens, and criminals will still get their guns — is not borne out by the evidence.”

What he conveniently omitted is that Oregon had recently strengthened its laws on gun sales and is above average among the states on gun regulation. It is one of only 18 states that require universal background checks before the sale of any firearm.

Being a proud Chicagoan, Obama is surely aware that his beloved city, which has distinguished itself in recent years for epic gun violence and death, is in a state that has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. How, then, can he claim that gun laws work? And how would implementing his idea of “common-sense gun-safety laws” make sense?

Though the United States has a high actual number of fatalities from mass shootings given its larger population, Obama ignores that other nations — such as Norway, Finland, Slovakia, Israel and Switzerland, which all have restrictive gun laws — have higher ratios of such shootings per capita.

The president also fails to acknowledge author John Lott’s findings as of 2010 that all the multiple-victim public shootings (where three or more were killed) in Western Europe and in the United States occurred where civilians were not allowed to carry guns.

Charles C.W. Cooke, in his “The Conservatarian Manifesto,” urges that we regularly debunk “the claim that America is in the midst of a gun-violence ‘epidemic’. … Two reports, both released in May 2013, revealed a striking drop in gun crime over the past twenty years.” Cooke writes that “during the very period that gun laws have been dramatically liberalized across the whole country, gun crime has dropped substantially.”

In his rant, Obama didn’t just distort the evidence. He effectively accused the Republican Congress of allowing these deaths by opposing gun control laws for political reasons, proving that projection is still an important weapon in his partisan arsenal. At a time when he should be using his office and his influence to urge healing and unity, Obama uses them for strident community organizing to advance his agenda.

It is instructive that Obama rages at conservatives and scapegoats the weapons themselves rather than the criminals involved or the state of the human condition that underlies their actions.

It is remarkable that he demands an unconstitutional and meaningless change in the laws purportedly to save innocent lives but vigorously opposes all laws that would protect innocent babies in the womb.

And it is disgraceful that he seeks to inflame our emotions to seduce us into ignoring the facts and suspending our critical faculties long enough to surrender our vital Second Amendment rights.

We barely had the preliminary facts about

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