www.spectator.co.uk Mark Steyn says that the high-minded, pacifist tax-and-spend ideology of ‘Eurabia’ means the future is American (but not Canadian) New Hampshire In 1898, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, prime minister of Queen Victoria’s great white north, declared that just ‘as the 19th century was the century of the United States, so shall the 20th century belong to Canada.’ The line caught on. ‘The 19th century was the century of the United States,’ James Longley, attorney-general of Nova Scotia, informed a Boston audience in 1902. ‘The 20th century is Canada’s century.’ The voice of America‘The day is coming,’ predicted another prime minister, Sir Charles Tupper, ‘when Canada, which has become the right arm of the British empire, will dominate the American continent.’ Now, if you’ll quit laughing and wipe the tears from your eyes, I’ll get to the point. Tupper was talking to the historian John Boyd, who fleshed out the soundbite: ‘Canada,’ he explained, ‘shall dominate the American continent, not in aggression or materialism, but in the arts of peace, in the greatness of its institutions, in the broadness of its culture, and in the lofty moral character of its people.’ Does that sound familiar? It’s the European argument today: just as the 20th century belonged to America, so the 21st will belong to Europe, a Europe that cannot — and, indeed, disdains to — compete with the Yanks in ‘aggression’ (military capability) or ‘materialism’ (capitalism red in tooth and claw), and so has devised a better way. We’ve all had a grand old time these last few weeks watching M. Chirac demonstrate his mastery of ‘the arts of peace’ and his ‘lofty moral character’, but it would perhaps be fairer to choose a more representative Euro-grandee to articulate the EUtopian vision. Step forward, Finnish Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, who said in London last year that ‘the EU must not develop into a military superpower but must become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests.’ No doubt it sounds better in Finnish. Nonetheless, like the Canadians a century ago, the Europeans are claiming that the old rules no longer apply, that they’ve been supplanted by new measures of power, not least the ‘greatness of institutions’ (EU, UN, ICC, etc.). And, like the Canadians, the Europeans are doomed to disappointment. Just for the record, if you’re reading this in an obscure corner of the jungle, not only did the 20th century not belong to Canada; the decayed Dominion will be very lucky to make it through the 21st at all: I doubt it’ll get past 2025 with its present borders intact. But that’s by the by. What the world — or, at any rate, ‘old Europe’ — wants to know is: what will it take to nobble the Yanks? Or, to be more accurate, what will it take for the Yanks to nobble themselves? The corollary to the Euro-Canadian redefinition of ‘great power’ is that a lone cowboy who sticks to tired concepts like guns’n’ammo is bound to come a cropper. As Matthew Parris put it last week, ‘We should ask whether America does have the armies, the weaponry, the funds, the economic clout and the democratic staying power to carry all before her in the century ahead. How many wars on how many fronts could she sustain at once? How much fighting can she fund? How much does she need to export? Is she really unchallenged by any other economic bloc?’ My colleague is falling prey to theories of ‘imperial overstretch’. But, if you’re not imperial, it’s quite difficult to get overstretched. By comparison with 19th-century empires, the Americans travel light. More to the point, their most obvious ‘overstretch’ is in their historically unprecedented generosity to putative rivals: unlike traditional imperialists, they garrison not remote ramshackle colonies but their wealthiest allies. The US picks up the defence tab for Europe, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, among others. As Americans have learned in the last 18 months, absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain their own armies does not pay off in the long run. This overstretch is over. If Bush wins a second term, the boys will be coming home from South Korea and Germany, and maybe Japan, too. So the EU will begin the second decade of the century with an excellent opportunity to test Mr Lipponen’s theory: it can either will the means to maintain a credible defence, or it can try to live as the first ‘superpower’ with no means of defence. In other words, the first victim of American overstretch will not be America but Europe. I doubt the Continentals of a decade hence will be in any mood to increase defence spending. For all M. de Villepin’s dreams of Napoleonic glory, his generation of French politicians will spend the rest of their lives managing decline. By 2050, there will be 100 million more Americans, 100 million fewer Europeans. The US fertility rate is 2.1 children per couple; in Europe it’s 1.4. Demography is not necessarily destiny, and certainly not inevitable disaster. But it will be for Europe, because the 20th-century Continental welfare state was built on a careless model that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it. In hard-hearted New Hampshire, we don’t have that problem. According to a UN report from last year, for the EU to keep its working population stable till 2050 it would need another 1.58 million immigrants every year. To keep the ratio of workers to retirees at the present level, you’d need 13.5 million immigrants per year. Personally, I’ve never seen what’s so liberal and enlightened about denuding the developing world of their best and brightest. But, even if you can live with it, it won’t be an option much longer. The UN’s most recent population report has revised the global fertility rate down from 2.1 — i.e., replacement rate — to 1.85 — i.e., eventual population decline. It will peak in about 2050, and then fall off in a geometric progression. What this means for the Continent is that the fall-back position — use the Third World as your nursery — is also dead. The developing world’s fertility rate is 2.9 and falling. The Third Worlders being born now in all but the most psychotic jurisdictions will reach adulthood with a range of options, of which Europe will be the least attractive. If that ratio of workers to retirees keeps heading in the same direction, the EU will have the highest taxes not just in the Western world, but in most of the rest. A middle-class Indian or Singaporean or Chilean already has little incentive to come to the Continent. If the insane Bush–Steyn plan to remake the Middle East comes off, even your wacky Arabs may stay home. If it doesn’t, the transformation of Europe into ‘Eurabia’, as the droller Western Muslims already call their new colony, will continue. So for Europe this is the perfect storm, with Jacques Chirac in the George Clooney role. Best case scenario: you wind up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates. Don’t get me wrong, I love Vienna. I especially like the way you can stroll down their streets and never hear any ghastly rockers and rappers caterwauling. When you go into a record store, the pop category’s a couple of bins at the back and there are two floors of operetta. All very pleasant, though not if you’re into surfing the cutting edge of the zeitgeist. I quite like Stockholm, too. Well, I like the babes, but they’re gonna be a lot wrinklier by 2050. And Sweden’s already got a lower standard of living than Mississippi. Its 60 per cent overall tax rate is likely to be the base in the Europe of 2020 and fondly recalled as the good old days by mid-century. Worst case scenario: Sharia, circa 2070. For the Americans, it doesn’t make much difference whether the Austro-Swedish or Eurabian option prevails. This is nothing to do with disagreements over Iraq: you can’t ‘mend bridges’ when the opposite bank is sinking into the river. The death of Europe in its present form is a given. The phase we’ve just begun is an interim one: America’s gone to the store, and is trying various outfits on for size. There is Bush’s wooing of Putin, who has not been so insane as to follow Jacques on his diplomatic suicide-bomber mission. There is the suggestion, floated more and more frequently vis-à-vis the Korean peninsula, that now may be the time for Japan to go nuclear. There are the Atlanticist states of Eastern Europe who declined to be shut up by Chirac. There are the President’s Latino inclinations, soon to be given expression in the Free Trade Area of the Americas. From the American point of view, the FTAA brings their principal foreign energy suppliers — Alberta and Venezuela — in-house and, in the broader sense, Catholic Latin America is more culturally compatible with the US than post-Christian Europe is. And then there’s the conservatives’ favourite: National Review’s current cover shows Bush, Blair and John Howard above the headline ‘Three Amigos’. Five years ago, when Bill Clinton launched his non-Chirac-sanctioned mini-war on Baghdad with the assistance of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I noted that what those countries had in common was a perverse determination to recoil from the notion that they had anything in common. For a generation, these countries’ elites have worked tirelessly to deny the reality of language, culture and history. Much of the territory Anglospherists claim is already lost — Canada and New Zealand, for starters — and anyone who wants to make it a going concern had better step on it, because it will be a lot harder to do in another generation. Where Britain will lie depends on how serious Mr Blair is about going down with the Franco–Belgo–German ship. All these arrangements in embryo, however, have one thing in common: the intention is that America’s partners should be both economically and militarily credible — or, in that Canadian historian’s terms, they’re being evaluated in terms of ‘aggression and materialism’. Australia will never be as powerful as America, but it doesn’t, as Mr Lipponen does, trumpet its arthritic defects as a virtue and demand that these should be accepted as the new global norm. Indeed, once you stick a black void in the centre of the map where Western Europe is, it’s amazing how the global outlook improves. I should add that by ‘Europe’ I’m using the Chiraquist shorthand for a European Union run on sclerotic Franco–German lines. What we’ve seen in the last few weeks is that for Europeans the real clash of civilisations is not between Islam and the West but between what the French call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism and Eurostatism. I was amused by the sheer snobbery of Martin Amis’s analysis in the Guardian last week: the condescension to Bush’s faith, the parallels between Texas and Saudi Arabia, both mired in a dusty religiosity. America’s religiosity, now unique in the Western world, is at least part of the reason it reproduces at replacement rate, also uniquely in the Western world. Besides, for all Amis’s cracks, Texas doesn’t seem as fundamentalist as the radical secularism of post-Christian Europe. Why would anyone think a disinclination to breed or to defend oneself is the recipe for success? Just because there’ll always be an England? As Bernard Shaw wrote almost 90 years ago in Heartbreak House, of a Europe too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming, ‘Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?’

www.vheadline.com Posted: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 By: Hector Dauphin-Gloire

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 23:31:53 -0500 From: Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com To: editor@vheadline.com Subject: Before the lion can lie down with the lamb...

Dear Editor: I write to express support for the rural defense force that President Chavez is now creating. What has been happening in the countryside, for some reason, is never mentioned by the Venezuelan opposition. In fact, it's very clear why ... because the rural arena has been the scene of the same kind of landlord thuggery as countries like Brazil.

When Chavez first came to power, one of his fundamental promises was Land Reform ... and he soon proved he was serious about this by not calling out the army, as was the customary response from Presidents, when impoverished people occupied public lands; instead he settled the matter through dialogue.

I recall a commentator of the time being incredulous that a President would actually respect the squatters enough to talk to them, instead of brutally forcing them out as the previous regimes would have done.

In 2000, he followed this up by passing a Land Reform Law. This law was by the standards of Latin American history quite moderate. The cut-off for the size of estate you were allowed to keep was quite large ... there was compensation for expropriated land, and only land that was not being productively used was liable to seizure.

But the Venezuelan oligarchy opposed it ... just as the oligarchy in any country will oppose whatever they have the strength to oppose ... measures that would have been considered moderate twenty years ago are today called "Communist" and "foolish."

Within a few months, several rural activists supportive of the Chavez program had been assassinated ... no different than what happens in Brazil all the time. My source for this evidence is not any radical publication, but rather the Associated Press. Whenever the opposition says that they have not been violent towards the government side, I feel like saying "what about the landlord violence in the countryside?"

It's time, at last, to ensure that the poor in the countryside are armed to defend the land that is rightfully theirs ... and no oligarchy should be able to take away from them.

Only with an armed peasantry will this kind of violence stop.

And only when the lion gives up its rapacious habits can we imagine a future where "the lion will lie down with the lamb" as it has been said.

Sincerely, Hector Dauphin-Gloire montonero22@hotmail.com Environmental Technician

www.vheadline.com Posted: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 By: Robert Rudnicki

The government has decided to lift the maximum price controls imposed several weeks ago on some basic goods as shortages have resulted from the policy as reduced profit margins have made producing the goods unprofitable for many manufacturers.

Following the decision prices of some basic goods have been increased by as much as 40%, including imported goods like pastas and cheeses.

The change in the government's position sees 34 goods removed from the previous list of 169, and now only 135 products remain subject to maximum price controls.

The decision was apparently taken following talks between manufacturing sector representatives and government officials.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 10, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Bolivarian Workers Force (FBT) leader Jose Khan has led a commission to the International Labor Organization (ILO) HQ in Geneva to defend the government’s policy of dismissing thousands of rebel Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) workers during and after the failed national stoppage.

National Assembly (AN) deputy Khan says he will present “proof of the consequences the national stoppage had on workers and the economy.”

The government-sponsored trip comes as PDVSA executives and managers backed by the Confederation of Trade Unions (CTV) take their case to the ILO. Khan says the delegation will show that there is no political persecution in Venezuela … “the CTV and Federation of Chambers of Industry & Commerce (Fedecamaras) and 'Gente de Petroleo' called the stoppage committing a series of crimes and violating people’s right to education and the basic foodstuffs … gas had to rationed and domestic gas was scarce commodity … they also called on people not to pay taxes.”

www.vheadline.com Posted: Monday, March 10, 2003 By: Daniel Burnett

Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2003 05:27:08 -0500 From: Daniel Burnett dburnett1@nyc.rr.com To: Editor@vheadline.com Subject: The real problem facing Venezuela

Dear Editor: There is no shortage of commentary, discussion and heated debate on VHeadline.com and many other websites regarding the current political situation in Venezuela. This makes sense given how much the political crisis in Venezuela is dominating the news. However, this is unfortunate as it masks the real problems facing Venezuela -- namely the poor state of its economy ... and by this I'm not referring to whether the economy is increasing by X% or decreasing by Y% percent this year -- in the grand scheme of things that is insignificant.

• What I mean, when I refer to Venezuela’s economic problems, is the generalized poverty that it has endured for its entire existence, including during its oil boom.

Venezuela’s economy is grossly under-developed and is not in any way capable of giving the majority of its citizens a decent standard of living.

Even with its abundant natural resources, the per capita income of Venezuela pales when compared even with recently developed countries such as South Korea or Taiwan.

I am confident that, however, much we may disagree on the causes of the current crises we all agree that we would like to see the people of Venezuela be much more prosperous and have the increased quality of life that implies.

It is therefore ironic ... and very unfortunate ... that there is almost no discussion of how Venezuela’s poor economic situation could be changed. It is that discussion that I would like to begin by this letter.

It is an axiom of economics that in order to consume one must first produce. That is, to increase the Venezuelan standard of living (i.e. how much Venezuelans consume) we must first increase the productive capacity of Venezuela’s economy.

Given its small size, Venezuela must import most of the things that it consumes and virtually all of its technology. To be able to purchase things abroad, it must have money and the only way to get this money is to export things of value onto the world market.

Of course, it could also just borrow the money, but Venezuela has already taken that about as far as it can go as seen by the enormous size of its foreign debt.

Worse still, when one borrows money, one must pay it back with interest.

So, in reality, Venezuela is going to find its purchasing power of foreign goods ... and hence its standard of living ... limited to what it can produce and sell abroad. And herein lies the problem ... Venezuela doesn’t produce much of anything.

Of course, people are going to protest this statement by saying that Venezuela does produce something -- principally oil.

First of all, oil isn’t really "produced" ... it is just a natural resource that is extracted from the ground. True, it is at times a valuable resource. But it just doesn’t add up to enough to give Venezuelan’s a decent standard of living. Venezuela exports about $23 billion worth of it in a good year with high oil prices. Dividing the Venezuelan population 23.4 million by 23 billion comes to a little less than $1,000 per person per year. Obviously, the average Venezuelan is not going to live well off of oil.

Worse still, Venezuela’s non-oil exports total only about 6 billion dollars, which is pathetically, low, to say the least ... and even most of those are other natural resources.  So from this you really can see that Venezuela doesn’t produce anything.

• In one of his editorials a few weeks back, Mr. Coronel, accused President Chavez of having alienated the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society.

Now, I know what Mr. Coronel was referring to when he spoke of the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society -- he was referring to the business community, the professional class, and skilled workers.

Unfortunately, though, those segments of Venezuelan society are not very productive.

What I mean by that is that they do not create any wealth for Venezuela. Rather they consume the intrinsic wealth that Venezuela has. At the end of the day they do what everyone else in Venezuela does ... they live off the wealth that Venezuela derives from its natural resources.

This can be shown clearly just from statistics: Venezuela’s exports total 29 billion dollars. Oil accounts for about 23 billion of that and other natural resources (gold, iron ore, bauxite, etc.) and the public industries of the Guayana region account for much of the rest.

Venezuelan private industry ... presumably the “productive” segment of society that Mr. Coronel is referring to ... accounts for only a very small portion of Venezuela’s exports. And even most of the exports by the private sector consist of exports by foreign companies such as oil companies and the privatized SIDOR, not by Venezuelan companies.

So exports by private sector Venezuelan companies come to less than $1 billion per year. By way of comparison, Ecuador (which is half the size of Venezuela and itself quite poor) has a shrimp-farming industry that exports a billion dollars worth of shrimp each year. So the entire “productive” sector of Venezuelan society is being beaten by a bunch of Ecuadorian shrimp farmers.

(As an aside, the Ecuadorian private sector exports total about $4 billion a year or four times Venezuela’s private sector exports and 8 times greater on a per capita basis).

Venezuelans should be glad they don’t depend solely on the “productive” segment of Venezuelan society to support themselves ... if they did, they’d have long since starved to death.

Perhaps a better way to illustrate this point is by specific examples: Much has been made in the Venezuelan press of what a great businessman Carlos Fernandez is, and how fortunate Venezuela is to have someone like him ... someone who emigrated from Spain with very little and built a large, successful trucking company in Venezuela.

So has Carlos Fernandez’ undoubted business acumen contributed to the betterment of Venezuela and its economy? The answer is no.

The reason for this is very simple ... his trucking company brings no wealth into Venezuela ... it simply performs a service that would be performed more or less equally well by someone else if it didn’t exist (now if his company was manufacturing trucks or truck components and profitably exporting them, that would be another matter, but that is not what his company does). If his company ceased to exist tomorrow, it would simply be replaced by other trucking companies with no net loss for Venezuela.

The same holds true for virtually all Venezuelan industries. Much is made of what a tragedy the alleged degradation of PDVSA is for Venezuela. But in reality, who cares?

There is nothing that PDVSA does that any one of dozens of other oil companies couldn’t do. So you can fire all the PDVSA employees and have them replaced by other Venezuelans or foreign companies such as Shell, or Exxon, or British Petroleum or Texaco and the oil wealth that will accrue to Venezuela will remain the same.

Why? Because the workers of PDVSA ... as capable as they may have been ... never created any wealth, they just extracted wealth from the ground that was always there to begin with. And if they don’t do it someone else will.

This goes for companies on down the line: Coke leaves. Fine, Pepsi, RC Cola or some one else will replace them, because there is a profit to be made by providing this product to the Venezuelan market. The examples are endless.

This can be still further illustrated by juxtaposing it with countries that do have companies that produce wealth for them.

Take Nokia, the world’s largest manufacturer of cell phones, located in Finland. Does Nokia contribute to Finland’s well being? Considering that it has 22,000 well-paid employees in Finland and exports more than 10 billion dollars worth of goods from Finland to the rest of the world I would say that it does. It contributes to the Finns high standard of living in a myriad of other ways too ... the payment of billions of dollars in taxes, the large investment in the continued education of its employees and significant charitable contributions are but a few examples.

If Nokia didn’t exist would there be some other company in Finland that would take its place? Possibly, but almost certainly not. The reason for this is that, unlike the example of PDVSA, Nokia isn’t exploiting some unique characteristic of Finland or its natural resources. Rather Nokia owes its existence purely to the talent, hard work, and capital of the people who founded it. If Nokia disappeared tomorrow, it would almost certainly be replaced not by a Finnish company but by an American, British or Japanese one ... and Finland would find itself that much poorer.

All industrialized countries posses many wealth generating companies such as Nokia. Venezuela possesses no such companies. It is for precisely that reason that the standard of living of Venezuelans is so low. It simply doesn’t have a productive sector that generates sufficient wealth to give most Venezuelan’s a decent standard of living. That is also why any public welfare or other redistributionist projects that Chavez implements ... no matter how well intentioned ... will lead nowhere. Social welfare programs only work in countries that are already affluent. In Venezuela, there is simply not much to redistribute, save poverty.

That is the real problem facing Venezuela.

What Venezuela clearly needs to do to solve this problem is create companies that can develop and manufacture products that can be profitably sold on the international market.

It also needs a highly-educated and skilled workforce that can create and staff these companies.

So maybe instead of sitting here and bickering over which Venezuelan called the other a bad name first ... or who is more of a dictator than whom ... maybe we should try to figure out how to accomplish the aforementioned tasks.

Daniel Burnett dburnett1@nyc.rr.com New York, USA