… and he knows that sweating a joint is not just something you do when the police think there is marijuana in your pocket. Britain is one of the Western countries in the EU welcoming Eastern Europeans. To the surprise of no one on this side of the Atlantic, they are finding that the immigrants are eager to work and to blend into their new home. More on the Polish Plumber.
Europe
Let Them Eat Organic Cake!
Despite the opposition of President Bush to federal subsidies for embryonic stem cell research, the United States isn’t the only jurisdiction that has had problems coming to terms with the implications of the genetic revolution. Ronald Bailey reports on EU intransigence on genetically modified (GM) crops, and how these EU regulations are having dire consequences for the livelihoods of the world’s poor people:
[T]he constituency of anti-biotech environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth is not poor African and Asian farmers and their families, but affluent and easily frightened European consumers. In response to ferocious pressure ginned up by the misleading campaigns of ideological environmentalists, EU politicians and bureaucrats have built an all but impenetrable wall of anti-biotech regulations around themselves. Wielding these onerous crop biotechnology regulations, the EU, on specious safety grounds, has essentially banned the importation of most biotech crops and foods. But these regulations do not only have consequences for European farmer and consumers.
The EU wants to export its regulatory system to the world, and it is offering “capacity building” foreign aid to persuade developing countries to adopt its no-go or go-slow approach to crop biotechnology regulations. Even more tragically, some developing countries are so afraid of the EU’s anti-biotech wrath that they are willing to risk the lives of millions of their hungry by rejecting food aid that contains genetically enhanced crops.
Activists usually blame the inaction of rich countries for killing people in poor countries. However, instead of outrage here, we get Greenpeace geneticist Doreen Stabinsky primly quipping in the Post-Dispatch, “Hunger is not solved by producing more food. We’re the breadbasket of the world, and we have hungry people in the U.S.”
Hunger may not be solved by producing more food, but it sure couldn’t hurt.
There’s a saying, that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; but if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a life time. What the anti-biotech groups’ approach boils down to is a refusal to teach their poorer neighbors to fish. This is unsurprising, as such groups are generally anti-liberal (in that they expect government to provide), and dispensing immediate aid doesn’t require teaching anyone how to be self-sufficient. This is of a piece with the anti-liberal hostility toward individual responsibility. (Do not confuse this with the liberal sympathy for the plight of the poor, as true liberals advocate both giving the man a fish and teaching him to fish.)
Rather odd, given the chidings that Americans are usually subjected to from Europeans dismissing our supposedly parochial attitudes toward technology. You’d think they’d know better. Then again, if their own farmers were at least marginally more efficient, they wouldn’t have to import food and thus run the risk of importing GM foods. Try telling that to someone in Brussels.
[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]
Another Czech President’s Speech
Instapundit notes a Brussels’ Journal article on Vaclav Klaus. who it contends made “‘[t]he most impressive speech during the recent Regional Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. He begins “View from a Post-Communist Country in a Predominantly Post-Democratic Europe” with Hayek’s description of the intellectuals’ role in shaping society.
They, therefore, look for ideas with specific characteristics. They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator. That is not all. According to Hayek “the power of ideas grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness”. Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas. This is also the way of thinking, in which they have comparative advantage. They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem. They are not interested in dealing with the everyday’s affairs of common citizens. Hayek put it clearly: “the intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties.” He is interested in visions and utopias and because “socialist thought owes its appeal largely to its visionary character” (and I would add lack of realism and utopian nature), the intellectual tends to become a socialist.
Czech intellectualism is often countered by Czech pragmatism. And here is Klaus’s optimistic belief that the EU setback may be a chance to to “open the door” to reflections on “what makes our society free, democratic and prosperous.” He concludes with succinct descriptions of political, economic and social systems that are indeed free. These values should also govern relations with other countries. And, underlying all should be “a system of ideas, which will be based on freedom, personal responsibility, individualism, natural caring for others and genuine moral conduct of life.”
An Italian Toynbee
“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, and these words could certainly be Ms. Fallaci’s.” (Tunku Varadarajan)
Arts & Letters links to the WSJ interview of Fallaci:
The impending Fall of the West, as she sees it, now torments Ms. Fallaci. And as much as that Fall, what torments her is the blithe way in which the West is marching toward its precipice of choice.
But she sees hope in a place surprising for a journalist if not for (traditionally) an Italian: “I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.” She is especially moved by “If Europe Hates Itself.”
I had asked Ms. Fallaci whether there was any contemporary leader she admired, and Pope Benedict XVI was evidently a man in whom she reposed some trust. “I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It’s that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion.”
Religion & history intertwine in our desire to understand ourselves. She notes: “Look at the school system of the West today. Students do not know history!” And, reading this, I remember a short while ago a friend scoffed at Texas’ “jingoism” in requiring two semesters of American history survey (with some majors a course in Texas history can be substituted) and one in state & another in federal government. Jingoism is one word for it, perhaps. Respect. A certain humility that we can learn from the past. There is all that. Simply, I argued, how can we know who we are if we don’t know from what we came?
Burma & Cuba – from Havel
Remarks from someone who has been there & done that:
Seemingly unshakable totalitarian monoliths are in fact sometimes as cohesive as proverbial houses of cards, and fall just as quickly. Continuing democratization of the whole region, together with growing dissent inside the country, must eventually have a positive effect. As Aung San Suu Kyi celebrates her 60th birthday, I wish for her that those changes will happen as soon as possible, and that my silly idea — to hand her a rose — becomes a simple and easy thing to do.
I’m not sure just who this reinforces among the threads today, but it does give witness: totalitarian monoliths aren’t all that strong in important ways and a bloodless revolution from within can happen – it just doesn’t very often.
He also returns to Cuba, not allowing the folly he battled to slip away without mention; the EU
recently learned the hard way when it thought — partly out of naivete, partly out of expediency — that a more forthcoming attitude toward Fidel Castro’s regime would lead to a more forthcoming attitude on the part of Castro toward his political prisoners and dissent in general. But Castro made a fool of the E.U.