‘Gastronomic Xenophobia’ in Italy

From the Guardian:

Italy‘s Northern League is not just anti-immigration. It’s anti-kebab. The agriculture minister, Luca Zaia, a league member, said that Italy must block the arrival of all food that had nothing to do with the country’s rich agricultural heritage. What, like tomatoes, which came from Peru, or pasta, which probably arrived from China? Fired with gastronomic xenophobia, some cities have banned new ethnic food shops from opening on their patch. The town of Lucca set the way in January, followed by Altopascio, where a kebab shop was firebombed. Bergamo, Genoa and Prato all followed suit in what La Stampa, the daily newspaper, called a new Lombard crusade against the Saracens. Lucca councillors are outraged at the suggestion that this is racism, directed primarily against the immigrant owners of foreign food outlets. They claim that all they are doing is to protect their culinary patrimony in a campaign that is as much directed at McDonald’s as it is at kebab restaurants. A fatwa has been declared against the use of French butter in parliament, and illegal Chinese vegetables have been uprooted in Tuscany. (What, by the way, is an illegal Chinese vegetable?) Forced on to the back foot, leading kebab chefs presented all-Italian ingredients for their kebabs at a food convention in Milan last week. Happily, the Northern League is finding it difficult to determine which food is ethnic. French restaurants pass muster, but Sicilian cuisine, heavily influenced by Arab cooking, must also be a cause for grave concern.

Quote of the Day

“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom”

~ Milton Friedman

China turns to Adam Smith

From the Telegraph:

What is more unexpected is that it is China that has an appetite for the father of modern capitalism, while the West is rediscovering Marx.

Smith’s first masterpiece, the Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been translated into Chinese for the first time, and Chris Berry, professor at Glasgow University, where Smith wrote the book, will next week deliver lectures on it at Fudan University in Shanghai.

China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao, has said he often carries the work – which preceded his more famous work The Wealth of Nations – in his suitcase when he goes abroad. Prof Berry said the earlier book emphasised the importance “not only [of] their material prosperity but also their moral welfare”.

Free Markets, Free Muslims

Jon B. Alterman, Director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, reviews Vali Nasr’s new book, Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World:

Vali Nasr’s new book, Forces of Fortune, was written largely in the exuberant phase of Dubai’s story, but it is being published in a more sober time. It reflects some of the old enthusiasm for the notion that “the Dubai model” — a multiethnic, capitalist society insulated from violence and ideology — could save the Middle East from a downward spiral of intolerance and political extremism. Nasr’s overall conclusion — that the triumph of free markets in the Middle East “will pave the way to the decisive defeat of extremism and to social liberalization” — is sympathetic to the Dubai experience. “If that battle is won by private-sector business leaders and the rising middle class tied to them,” Nasr argues, “then progress with political rights will follow.”

This is not merely a book about Dubai, however. It is a book about the enduring promise of Dubai, the struggles of Iran, and the success of Turkey. Bolstering these cases with brief studies on Egypt and Pakistan, Nasr suggests that where capitalism flourishes, so, too, do tolerance and moderation. He also thinks that the resurgence of Islam is promising rather than threatening. Judging that the tide has turned against extremism, he views middle-class religiosity as a path through which Muslim communities can integrate with the rest of the world. In Nasr’s words, “This upwardly mobile class consumes Islam as much as practicing it,” seeking to embrace modernity on Muslim terms rather than rejecting it as a form of corruption. The old populist dogmas that focused on injustice and encouraged resistance are waning. Consequently, resources poured into bolstering liberal ideals in Muslim communities merely feed the culture wars, Nasr cautions. Instead, “The key struggle that will pave the way to the decisive defeat of extremism and to social liberalization will be the battle to free the markets.”

Quote of the Day

“Business, especially big business, is happy with crony capitalism, franchised monopoly, or any other device that will avoid the Darwinism of the free market. Of the billions of dollars now spent lobbying, almost none supports the free market as a concept or an institution.”

~ Luigi Zingales

 

Cubans are finally free – to buy peas and potatoes

The Telegraph reports:

The staples were removed from a list of rationed foods that most Cubans depend on, permitting them to buy as much of the products as they want – at 20 times more than they used to.

The move comes amid efforts by Raul Castro’s government to scale back Cuba’s subsidy-rich, cash-poor economy. Lunches which cost so little they were almost free lunches were eliminated from some state-cafeterias in September. In October, the Communist Party’s Granma newspaper published a full-page editorial saying the time had come to do away with the ration books altogether.

Know Thy Enemy

While I believe Keynesian economics to be both flawed and immoral, John Maynard Keynes gives a very chilling account of how inflation can destroy a capitalist system.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

The Wal-Mart Effect

Foriegn Policy reports:

Wal-Mart’s debut in a country is a bellwether for future growth. Indeed, Wal-Mart has started operations in 15 countries since 1991, and 13 of them have had boom economies, with an average of 4.4 percent annual growth since Wal-Mart arrived. Over the last five years, the economies of Wal-Mart countries outside the United States have grown 40 percent faster than the world average. So what’s going on?

Does the ability to buy giant bags of Froot Loops at cut-rate prices inspire economic growth? More likely, Wal-Mart is simply a smart, cautious investor. “Wal-Mart chooses to go places with a sizable middle class,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian who just published a book on Wal-Mart’s rise. And Wal-Mart’s attention to middle-class growth could pay off for the company in the future.

HT: Carpe Diem

Quote of the Day

“Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”

~ Walter E. Williams

President Obama is Confused

I believe our free market system works best when it rewards hard work.

~ President Barack Obama

This is rather redundant. Capitalism works by rewarding hard work. Self-interest and incentives are at the foundation of any free market system. True, there are times when the market fails to reward hard work – but these instances are, by an overwhelming margin, caused by government intervention in the market. When any one group gains unfair advantages in the marketplace, it is normally because the government has intervened on their behalf. Throughout U.S. history, various groups have gained unfair advantages in our society which they have used to violate the rights of other groups. Corporations have gained coercive monopolies by which they have exploited consumers, workers have possessed unnatural influence over their employers, one race has oppressed another, and so on unto near-infinity. But in all the above-mentioned cases, it has been the hand of government that allowed these various groups to gain their power. It is government that has mandated utility monopolies, allowing companies to operate without competition and to exploit their customers. It is government that has shackled companies with anti-trust laws but allowed unions to engage in the type of collusion that has bankrupted entire industries. It is government that gave whites the authority and the power to enact Jim Crowe laws in the South. When the free market fails to reward hard work, it is not due to an inherent fault in capitalism. It is due to government intervening with force on behalf of a particular group, instead of protecting individual rights and thus protecting the free market and clearing the way for freedom, equity, and prosperity.