Yemen Article Index : Current 2010 2011 2012 2013
 Latest
 News 		  Most
 Read 		  Most
 Commented		  Hot
 Topics
Phony Revolution Versus Real Terrorism
   Next Article → NIGERIA: Islamic Violence Growing
February 8, 2011; Despite pledges from oil-rich neighbors to invest, nearly as much money is moved out of the country as is moving in. Experts see Yemen as more unstable and inhospitable to new investments. The core problem is, and long has, been the tribal divisions. National unity has always been weak, and often imaginary. President Saleh pledging to not run for reelection in two years is mostly theater. What dissipated the anti-Saleh crowds in the capital calling for change, were the tribal divisions prevented the massive number of unemployed young men to unite in protest. The anti-government demonstrations, inspired by Tunisia and Egypt, sputtered out, in part because the government coalition was based on tribe, not just family, or personal interests, so a lot of the payoffs were reaching the street, at least if you belonged to a pro-government tribe. Still,  Saleh is under pressure to back off on manipulating the 2013 elections, giving other coalitions a chance to take over. The smart money is on Saleh.

The government received four U.S. Huey II (UH-1) helicopters, which increases the ability to track the activities of rebels and terrorists, and carry out arrests. The army and police continue hunting for Islamic terrorists, and training to acquire better skills for fining and combating the Islamic radicals. But hundreds of al Qaeda have the protection of southern tribes, and foreign intel agencies continue to pick up news of new recruits being trained in terrorist camps "somewhere in Yemen."

February 5, 2011: In the south, two gunmen tried to kill an intelligence officer, but failed.

February 4, 2011:  The ruling party flooded the capital with its own supporters, disrupting anti-government efforts to continue demonstrating.

February 3, 2011: Over 10,000 demonstrators turned out in the capital, calling for president Saleh to resign.

February 2, 2011: President Saleh, sensing a unification of many Yemenis who are poor, unemployed or frustrated at the lack of economic opportunities, announced a bunch of tax cuts, employment programs and pay raises for government employees. This made a lot of potential protestors less angry, or even more pro-Saleh. But some remembered the Saleh had promised not to run again in 2005, but then changed his mind when the popular anger abated.

 

 Next Article → NIGERIA: Islamic Violence Growing
  
Show Only Poster Name and Title     Newest to Oldest
Tucci78    Governments ''invest''?    2/8/2011 7:14:32 AM
You gotta be kidding.
 
One of the unfortunate tendencies in Strategypage.com is the acceptance of the idiot notion that "Governments Are Wise."  
 
There's a confusion here.  When the "body politic" analogy is raised, the presumption is that government - as a component of that corpus - is properly the "brains" of civil society. 
 
Nonsense.  In the century preceding the American Revolution, the political philosophers of the Enlightenment spent a lot of ink (and some of them got executed for spreading that ink around) working out the distinction between "government" and "society," after which they determined - reasonably, philosophically, and very effectively - that the proper role of government in the "organic" operation of human society is exclusively analogous to what we call today the immune system.  
 
We find this implicit in the antique and charming oaths administered to elected officials and military officers, in the part that goes "...to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." 
 
That's an "immune system" function.  It has nothing to do with guiding or commanding the rest of society in economic functions.
 
So what the hell gives with this constant reiteration off the "government must invest" bullpuckey, anyway?  Government is the single least qualified component of civil society to make decisions about investing resources for increased gain and the viable creation of wealth.  Government officials consume; they do not "invest."  Spend on an airbase in a militarily advantageous place, to milspec standards, with wonderful ammunition bunkerage and zones of fire all around, and there is only the most vanishingly small chance that any of that "investment" is going to be useful in the civilian sector. 
 
The resources put into that airbase - money, materials, land, labor - might as well have been flung into the ocean.  Whatever minor pseudoeconomic "boom" might result in the locality, or among select contractors, is dissipated quickly, and what is not noted in all this "invest" frenzy is that those resources - land, labor, capital - have been ripped away from other activities which really would have created sustainable economic value.  
 
Governments - of whatever kind, elected or hereditary or tribal or dictatorial - cannot "invest."  At best, they can spend effectively to accomplish the proper purposes of government, which reduce to breaking things and killing people.  But anybody looking for real economic value over the short term or the long haul has to keep spending power and other resources out of the hands of government thugs. 
 
Jeez, you'd think about people who advertise themselves as making special effort to "report news as history" would lock in some kind of focus on the most basic principles of political economics.
 
Quote    Reply

heavy    ahem   2/8/2011 10:37:27 AM
Arpanet.

You were saying? 
 
Quote    Reply

DavidE    ahem 2   2/8/2011 5:07:23 PM
Roads, bridges, universities, airports, subways, train stations, 
water, sewage, etc.

All are investments that enhance economic productivity.  Some
can also be done by the private sector, but these don't usually
cover the full spectrum of needed services.  

You are right that, when governments try to pick winning 
economic sectors, they usually fail (also true of magazines -- when an industry
or company appears on the cover of Time magazine, SELL).  
But in doing things to improve the general business climate, governments
can be effective if they know what to stay out of.
 
Quote    Reply

Tucci78    So gargle.    2/8/2011 7:02:34 PM
One commentator mentions "Arpanet," and another writes:
Roads, bridges, universities, airports, subways, train stations, water, sewage, etc.

All are investments that enhance economic productivity.  Some can also be done by the private sector, but these don't usually cover the full spectrum of needed services.  

You are right that, when governments try to pick winning economic sectors, they usually fail (also true of magazines -- when an industry or company appears on the cover of Time magazine, SELL).  

But in doing things to improve the general business climate, governments can be effective if they know what to stay out of.

Nonsense.  These arguments are perfect examples of what honest (as opposed to government) economists have called the "broken window fallacy." That which is seen in most of those cases is an example of inadvertent benefits as a result of actors in the private sector turning to profitable use certain tools developed by government for other purposes.
 
What is not seen - what is in many cases deliberately overlooked and even concealed - are the great "bridge to nowhere" military and other governmental expenditures which result in neither their intended effects nor secondary diversion to purposes of economic value.  

I have to say "most" because metropolitan subways, all train stations, most municipal water supply systems, and a lot of sewage collection and treatment systems were started by way of private investment as profit-seeking enterprises, and those which came into government (mis)management did so only by way of political co-option. 
 
Ask any American civil engineer about dealings with municipal utilities authorities.  These have grown into a loose network of the wasteful and corrupt predatory agencies afflicting the people of this nation, rife with nepotism, kickbacks, "no-show" jobs, and every other kind of thievery imaginable. They are hellacious cash cows for permanently incumbent political machines.

A military highway system - a la the Nazi Autobahn Eisenhower so much admired, and which he and his "Rotarian Socialist" post-New Deal Republicans extolled to bleed the public for the Interstate Highway System - has had obvious secondary uses, particularly in turning formerly rural areas into bedroom community commuter suburbs, but its intention was to facilitate the road movement of mechanized and motorized forces.
 
The subsidization of college education which has resulted in a burgeoning of the university industry (and it most emphatically is an industry) was undertaken after World War II because in all the U.S. military services a premium was placed on college education to create what the high command conceived to be the optimum source of junior officers.  This was an insanity, particularly in military aviation, where even in these United States it has been reluctantly accepted by the various academy mafias that a great many jobs they want reserved for commissioned "gentlemen" can be done quite satisfactorily by warrant officers and NCOs.  
 
And just who the hell is going to argue for the plethora of university graduates we've got right now who cannot find gainful employment in anything resembling the areas of their academic specialization?  Just what kind of "investment" have the government thugs made in "education" such that the national economy is seeing any real material benefit?  The noise that "college graduates earn more in their lifetimes than do people with a high school diploma" is more of a comment on the godawful quality of educations gotten out of government school systems than it is an endorsement of the value of an undergraduate degree. 
 
A secondary "what is not seen" effect of government "investment" in the undergraduate and postgraduate schools in this nation has seen an absolutely astonishing increase in the prices that must be paid for any student's education in these institutions.  The debt load shouldered by people leaving college - particularly those going for postgraduate study even at the Master's degree level - is cumulatively increasing with every year.  Student loan "supports" provided by the federal government have decoupled these coll
 
Quote    Reply

heavy       2/9/2011 3:48:20 PM
What stunning ignorance it takes to dismiss, categorically, every action taken as an opportunity cost, simply because the actor is a representative government built on votes and not, say, a private company built on dollars. Votes and dollars are both perfectly effective vectors for the legitimate expression of aggregate will. They are not mutually exclusive nor inherently right or wrong.

When a government, acting as a representative of its voters, makes targeted investments in pure, academic R&D that result in, yes, incidental benefits such as a nuke-proof chain of command or a globally distributed information exchange, then observers could soundly conclude that such scientific R&D can be incredibly rewarding and deserves to be supported for its own sake. That is in fact the whole point. There is an infinite amount of scientific discovery to be made. I am happy to support that process democratically AND as a consumer. That the ARPANET example and millions like it break a pre-conceived ideological model is an indictment of that model, not an indictment of REALITY.

And that's really what this would boil down to if we pulled enough string on it: an epistemological debate about how we know what reality is. In the end that's the only kind of debate possible with a doctrinaire ideologue. Suffice it to say that I'll be ignoring the next pedestrian rant here in the... Yemen forum.
 
Quote    Reply

Tucci78    Heavy ignorance   2/11/2011 8:15:08 PM

What stunning ignorance it takes to dismiss, categorically, every action taken as an opportunity cost, simply because the actor is a representative government built on votes and not, say, a private company built on dollars. Votes and dollars are both perfectly effective vectors for the legitimate expression of aggregate will. They are not mutually exclusive nor inherently right or wrong.

When a government, acting as a representative of its voters, makes targeted investments in pure, academic R&D that result in, yes, incidental benefits such as a nuke-proof chain of command or a globally distributed information exchange, then observers could soundly conclude that such scientific R&D can be incredibly rewarding and deserves to be supported for its own sake. That is in fact the whole point. There is an infinite amount of scientific discovery to be made. I am happy to support that process democratically AND as a consumer. That the ARPANET example and millions like it break a pre-conceived ideological model is an indictment of that model, not an indictment of REALITY.

And that's really what this would boil down to if we pulled enough string on it: an epistemological debate about how we know what reality is. In the end that's the only kind of debate possible with a doctrinaire ideologue. Suffice it to say that I'll be ignoring the next pedestrian rant here in the... Yemen forum.

The presumption that "a representative government built on votes" can in any way make "targeted investments" with the objective of generating economic advantage is indicative of truly abysmal historical ignorance.  There is a tendency on the part of the megalomaniac fraction to assume that simply because the officers of civil government can get something done by theft or extortion that these "built on votes" thugs have special abilities to perceive economic necessities or opportunities and then pursue them to beneficial ends.  The supports for this contention in human history are rare, and the only way in which anyone can justify the divergence of assets from the private sector to politically motivated expenditures as "investment" is to willfully ignore the many, many more instances in which these pursuits proved not only worthless but destructive.
 
The preponderance of government expenditures on capital assets tends to be - in portion or entirely - malinvestments undertaken for political rather than economic purposes.  Private enterprises ("built on dollars") are held tightly to the negative feedback mechanisms of the marketplace.  Politicians are not.  Anything "built on votes" can run for at least one full election cycle before any kind of feedback can be effectively invoked, and political inertia has been known to carry obviously wasteful and worthless government programs for the decades-long duration of influential politicians' incumbencies.  Anybody reading here familiar with the career of Robert C. Byrd, Senator-for-Life from West Virgina? On a lesser scale, how about Rep. John Murtha and - as just one example of the damage done in the course of that congresscritter's career - the multimillion-dollar milspec Johnstown-Cambria County Airport in he'd gotten built in his district.
 
It takes vicious, malevolent, thoroughly contemptible deliberate ignorance for a disputant to continue extolling something like ARPANET as an example of "scientific R&D [that] can be incredibly rewarding and deserves to be supported for its own sake" in the knowledge that the ARPANET research and development was purposed for nothing remotely resembling the tasks to which the Internet came to be put.  Anyone who tries to peddle the idea that ARPANET research - or any other government-funded research - had been undertaken "for its own sake" is lying through his teeth.  Worse, he's expecting other people to fall for that lie.  ARPANET was simply an inadvertency, an "unintended consequence" which the officers of the federal government then responsible for its funding and implementation would almost certainly have avoided had they known the ways in which it would be used. 
 
I would have to sa
 
Quote    Reply

Reactive       2/11/2011 10:16:52 PM
Suffice it to say that I'll be ignoring the next pedestrian rant here in the... Yemen forum.
 
 
Yeah I hear you there - far better to waste no time on the pretentious and attention-seeking spiel above. He reminds me of another basement-idealogue I often waste my time trying to rationally debate with.
 
R

 
 
Quote    Reply

heavy    ...   2/11/2011 10:36:42 PM
LOL 
 
Quote    Reply