La bi?re: H? gouvernement f?d?ral: m?le-toi dans tes affaires!

Aujourd'hui la Gazette a rapport? que la brasserie Moosehead (abonn?s seulement a ach?t? une partie de la brasserie ontarienne Niagra Brewing company

La raison pour cet achat c'est pour contourner la l?gislation provinciale que taxe Moosehead comme un produit '?tranger'. La brasserie nouvelle-brunswikienne a fait un achat semblable avec la brasserie MacAuslin de Montr?al. C'est ab?rrant que c'est beaucoup plus facile ? vendre la bi?re canadienne aux ?tat-Unis qu'entre provinces. Pire, les l?gislations provinciales font en sorte qu'on diminue la comp?tition et le choix parce que Brasserie X doit ach?ter Entrprise H dans la province afin d'?viter les d?savantages fiscaux pour ?tre ?tranger. C,est ridicule!

O? est le f?d?ral dans tout ?a? Le commerce interprovincial est une comp?tence exclusif ? ceci. Ah oui, le f?d?ral s'obs?de ? ing?rer dans les champs provinciaux tel que la sant? mais n?glige les siens. Je me demande pourquoi le f?d?ral a d?montr? un d?sint?r?t total envers le comerce interprovincial. La seule id?e que me vient ? l'espirit c'est parce que c'est un champ bien ordinaire qui ne done pas assez de visibilit? pour un gouvernement qui r?ve d'uniformiser le pays ? travers une centralisation.

Malheureusement, le resultat de cette n?gligence ce sont de barri?res commerciales ill?gales sous la constitution; donc, les consommateurs et les entreprises paient leurs produits et services avec un qualit? moindre et une comp?tition restreinte en raison de celle-l?.

Europe's opposition to the death pentaly and Saddam:points of order

I shook my head when I read Charles' article mocking the Germans and French for their nausea over Saddam's execution. However, I was dismayed to read Christopher's post. To insult the French, Germans and other Europeans for their revulsion against the death penalty is grotesquely unfair.

Indeed, the tone from both posts underscores a growing tone deafnesss by Americans who forget Europe's recent history in order to sneer at their fears. America has been exceptionally fortunate that it's never experience an authoritarian/totalitarian regime with Nacht un nebel policies or death squads or elaborate torture and murder centres doting the country. America is where dissidents can rage whatever bugs them without fear of winding up in a ditch with a bullet in the back of the head or tortured. To dismiss European consternation over execution as yet more proof of their moral cowardice, is slanderous.

Personally, I have no objections to executing Saddam and especially Chemical Ali. Their deaths would serve a salutary example to Mideastern potentates that their impunity is numbered and could very well face a similar fate. However, Europeans fear, with perfectly reasonable experiences, that the death penalty will veer out of control.

I find it so curious that many American bloggers shed tears when reading Burke's accounts of Louis and Antionette's execution and nod their heads in agreement that the Terror unleashed by the French revolution was progressively killing its own progeny...but deny that something remotely similar would occur in Iraq. One country in a region not noted for its moderation with executions.

European fears aren't completely tainted by prior relationships that ensured political and economic influence in the Iraqian ancien regime.

Autopsie de les ?l?ctions canadiennes 2004

Je ne disposais pas beaucoup de temps libre pour opini?trer de les ?lections canadiennes.
Cependant, j'ai lu beaucoup de bloggeurs qui ont publi?s leurs billets sur ce sujet.

Comme les plupart de ceux-ci, je suis ?galement de?u que les Lib?raux ont gagn? ses ?l?ctions-ci. ?a tombe mal car une d?fait aurait ?t? salutaire tant pour le parti que pour le pays. Une d?faite ?lectorale aurait d?clench? les Lib?raux ? se pencher sur leur orientations id?ologique et se r?nouveler par la nouvelle sang aux rangs.

Quant aux Cons?rvateurs, je partage les analyse qui r?prochent les militants d'avoir rest? passifs et en laissant les Lib?raux les leurs d?finir. Ce sont les Ontariens
qui ont pr?f?r? un parti corrompu, stagnant, compl?ment d?pourvu de quelconque nouvelle id?e.Je crois que les experts des ?l?ctions au sien des Conservateurs devront analyser du fond en comble les erreurs et gaffes pour apprendre les le?ons. Apr?s qu'ils auront eu le temps de dig?rer
les ?tudes, ils concevront une campagne d'introduction tant du parti que les plateformes. Ce sont les seuls moyens que les Conservateurs pourront se pr?senter sans les filtres m?diatiques.

Steyn on Latin America: a follow up

Randy wrote a fine post correcting Steyn's historical amnesia and factual errors about Latin American democratization. I do disagree with Randy's view about Arbenz. I think he was an honest reformer who was duped by the communists. Once again, they learnt from their mistakes and almost succeeded in taking most of Central America.

In any case, Randy did a favour to the Anglospherists in reminding them that the Falklands war almost wrecked the special relationship. Indeed, upper American foreign policy establishment gave the distinct impression that they would've preferred an Argentinean victory. One can only imagine the incalculable consequences: a British defeat would've resulted for Regan's determined policy to oppose communist provoked aggression around the world as well as creating a unified front of democratically inclined countries to discredit communism.

Enough speculation. Randy's conclusion that the most effective way to fight communism is to encompass as much opportunity to everyone as opposed to perpetuating corrupt oligarchies that prompted me to follow up with a position I want to elaborate. Let me just quickly add that it's not just communism but any illiberal regime which seeks to substitute the market with something else and to thwart people's natural inclination to provide goods and services with a regimented career formation.

Hernando de Soto's work is so groundbreaking and so fundamental in reforming illiberal societies. His studies analyze how capitalism flourishes and how the practices of an open society are inculcated.

Indeed, my constant reproach of the World Bank, IMF is that their conferences remind me of the early church councils where the bishops clarified Christological doctrine and then declared all deviations heresy. Unfortunately, economic policy isn't theology and it can't claim dogmatic status. I think this conflation explains why the IMF and theWorld bank have adamantly persisted in imparting economic prescriptions that never work because these are treated as irrefutable truth; thus they can never be changed to meet local realities.

The neoliberal economic theoreticians always assume that if they apply electrical current (their prescriptions) to the dormant atoms (i.e. Latin American society) the latter will rise to an excited state (i.e. spiralling levels of prosperity) yet they end up tearing complex networked webs of social relationships. At heart is a collision of 2 fundamentally irreducible worldviews. The First world's economic prescripts originate from an Enlightenment matrix of ideological individualism, atomized social relationships and voluntarism. By contrast, Latin America preserves its Catholic-classical worldism, Renaissance values. Further, Latin societies refute the ideological assertion that society is nothing more than highly atomized individuals who join on purely voluntarist-utilitarian analyses. No affection, affiliation, loyalty or ascription enters in that Enlightenment matrix.

Hence, Hernando's contribution to social sciences. He highlights the ideological preconceptions that neoliberals incorporate into their prescriptions. Once he strips those preconceptions, reformers have a more persuasive case to implement the required changes to better their societies.

Saddam devant un jutge

Aquest demat? baix? al subs?l per mirar la not?cies a la tele per que avui es la festa nacional canadenca doncs cap diari es public?. Papa ja la mirava i em digu? que l'hi ha faltat per alguns minuts l'inculpaci? formal de Saddam.

Eventualment, CNN mostr? el v?deo i realment la seva apar?ncia m'ha sorpresa molt. Havia perdut pes i es veia com un comer?ant jubilat o ?dhuc com un professor ben conegut a trav?s les tert?lies televisades. Durant l'interrogaci?, Saddam desafiava el jutge (qui no es ni menys que Chabali fill)i responia de manera arrogant. Tanmateix es un desesperat per que encara no se'l he entrat el cap encara que el processen per crims contre el poble iraqui i contra l'humanitat.

En tot cas, el procediment de Saddam i els integrants del r?gim bassista promet esdevenir una ocasi? important del segle XXI com el del Nuremburg ho fou pel segle XX.

Styen on Latin American democratization

I came across Steyn's latest article via John Weider's blog. As I read through Steyn's article, he provokes an uncharacteristically anti-Anglophone sentiment. It's this smug complacent belief that only the Anglopshere is congenitally democratic. It's really patronizing to have to read ad nauseum about how the Anglosphere is congenitally democratic and needs no lessons from any one.

Unfortunately for Steyn's a priori assumptions,just because the Iberian world doesn't genuflect to Locke, Smith, Blackstone or the 1688 Bill of rights has never signified that the former don't have their own sources. St Augustine, Justinian's Code, King Alfonso the Wise, St Tomas Aquinas, the Salamanca school are just as sophisticated and just as sound in structuring society and men's relation therein. Sources that the Anglosphere rejected through Henry VIII's coup d'état the British Protestant reformation. I'll add that I've never been impressed by Anglospheric political thought since the 1640s. It lacks a certain astuteness about human biology, a lack of realism with respect to human psychology and a certain shalllowness with respect to personalism.

In any case, the Iberian democratic tradition has been thwarted by a mixture of indigenous elites who wanted to be everyone but themselves, British imperial greed and American exceptionalism. Steyn neglects to inform his readers that the British elite were absolutely terrified during the Napoleonic wars, if the Spanish empire were to succumb to, or join voluntarily, Napoleon's Continental system. If that occured, England would be utterly ruined because it would have no markets.

So when Napoleon finally invaded the Peninsula, the Brits took advantage of the disorder there and in the Spanish American colonies not only to prevent Napoleon from extending his economic hegemony to the New world but to prepare Spain's loss of its colonies. The Portuguese were rewarded for their voluntary exile and thus spared from British interference in their colonial affairs.

After the war, the British adopted a consistent policy: punish the Spanish Bourbons for their foolish abdication in favour of Napeoleon and ensure that neither Spain or France ever threatened English hegemony with a renewed attempt to impose any kind of exclusionary economic system. Thus, the British political elite exported their unemployed soldiery as the British Legion to Bolivar and the other rebel generals. Sound policy, the British got rid of the unemployable while advancing their interests.

Hence, I disdain Paul Johnson's diatribe against Napoleon as cant by the winners who get to write history. The British imposed their own Continental system based on free trade instead of regulated trade. Yet, the effects weren't any different: instead of France, it was Britian which ruled the world. And we're supposed to applaud the Brits and boo the French.

By the 1850s, Canning- the British Foreign Secretary- cynically recognized the newly independent nations. They'd be a cheap source of raw materials as well as an easy market to sell British goods and services. If these countries misbehaved the dispatch of a gunboat or two along with a credit squeeze would suffice; if not a well-engineered coup would resolve the situation to Britian's advantage. The Napoloenic wars has still left them in turmoil; so why not perpetuate the instability?

America, pretty much had the same policy as the British with one maddening difference: the former's exceptionalism left it with a conflicted attitude that often caused its elites to go off the deep end. Exporting democracy and trying to transform Latin America to be just like another state in the Union was a recurrent American mania; a religious obligation to 'enlighten' the South. The Brits also succumbed to a similar temptation but preferred to export just its upper class lifestyle, private schools and the Westminister model.

The Latin Americans eventually wised up and began to con the Anglophones: para inglês ver- for the English to see. The Anglophones would get all teary-eyed at the Promekin village of democratic façades and convince themselves that democracy had finally flourished when it reality it was an oligarchy taking turns in govrning.

Moving on to the contemporary period, why did it take the Falkland's war for Britian to suddenly change its preference for democracy? Personally, I think Thatcher's patronizing school teacher personality might've played a role in the volte-face. Nothing like a bunch of opera buffon generals who had the effontry to puncture Britian's inflated sense of importance in world affairs. In any case, Britian's victory crystallized events that were evolving throughout the region since the coups in the 60-70s but much of the spadework was indigenous.

I agreed with the general principles of Regan's anti-communist policy but found the implementation highly troublesome. Instead of applying a multifaceted approach balancing the military, cultivation of the civil society and fundamental political reform, Reagan preferred instead an exclusive military/spy approach which led to grotesque human right abuses. Mind you, Carter's policy suffered from the opposite error: too much emphasis on civil society and political reforms without allowing a proper military response to violent sedition.

Steyn can write what he wants about the Guatamalean civil war but Rios Montt is an evil man. There was never any legitimate political or military policy to adopt the scorched earth policy or to carry out the Mayan genocide in the 1980s. Rios Montt is finally looking at serious jail time. He might not see a day in a cage but he's no longer impune either.

As for free trade, it's a mixed legacy. The Belle Epoque was certainly a positive moment in Latin American history. However, the Depression and the Second world war completely derailed Latin American development and it's never quite recovered. Also, American demands that the continent implement economic policies, with the force of religious dogma, and the advanced industralized countries' refusal to open their markets has often left Latin Americans with an insoluable fate. Thankfully, the WTO has finally discredited the advanced industrailized countries' rancid hypocricy and enforced them to open their markets. Styen neglects to cite that inconvenient fact as the WTO's raison d'être conflicts with his preference for unregulated free trade as practiced in the 19^th century.

The Iberosphere has always had - and still has- a democratic tradition, the problem, until recently, it was never permitted to flourish let alone take root.