Reflections  

First things whenever — Too bad we are so busy x-raying luggage on planes that we don't have time to x-ray rivets on bridges. — Paul Rako

Up from councillorship — Word from New York is that, following their successful effort to completely expunge the word "nigger" from the vocabularies of the citizenry, the New York City Council has now moved to strike "bitch" and "ho" as well.

May I suggest that, as long as they're banning offensive and derogatory labels for human beings, the august members should next ban "New York City Councilperson"? — Andrew Ferguson

Late and soon — The Federal Reserve now finds itself in the position of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen. For years - according to The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 8) - Alan Greenspan's "alleged predisposition to cut [interest] rates whenever markets got in trouble" induced lenders to risk providing funds to subprime and lower-quality borrowers. And now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Should the Fed raise interest rates, making borrowing more costly in the hope of keeping prices from rising still more? Or should it do nothing and force holders of loans to subprime and lower-quality borrowers into bankruptcy when their loans cannot be repaid?

Some years ago Ludwig von Mises was asked a somewhat similar question in his NYU seminar. He answered it. The student was aghast: "Do you mean to say that if prices are going down, borrowers cannot repay their loans to the banks, and there is widespread unemployment, you would do nothing?"

Mises answered, "Yes. But I would start doing nothing much sooner!" — Bettina Bien Greaves

It needed only this — The headline on Aug. 11 was, "Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look."

After looting the treasury, abjectly failing to control our borders, attacking the Republican base as traitors to America for objecting to illegal immigration, expanding federal control over education and everything else within reach, and bogging us down in a war between gangs of religious bigots in Mesopotamia, the Bush administration now threatens to enslave the nation's young men.

The adviser in question, General Douglas Lute, made the suggestion in his first interview after being confirmed for his job. He maundered on as follows: "And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another." Pardon his grammar. What he's saying, in other words, is that there's no principle involved, whether conservative or libertarian, or just plain American. If we need the bodies, well, we'll just send the slave-catchers out to git 'em.

Bush's flak-catchers tried to mute the implications of his adviser's remarks. Right now, they said, Bush himself isn't talking about a draft . . . But Peggy Noonan was right. It's time for traditional Republicans to abandon ship. — Stephen Cox

The last hyperidiot? — Governments cause high inflation: their thieving and redistribution get out of whack, so they print too much money.

High inflation is bad; it brings all sorts of discomforts: you can't use money to store wealth; credit is all but impossible to give or get; fears of financial insecurity cause popular upheavals.

But the governments that cause inflation can, and usually do, make it worse. They try to impose price controls and currency controls. When they do, goods flee the country and the markets go empty. It happens fast, and I'm going to tell you exactly how.

In 1983, Benin in West Africa had high inflation, price controls, and currency controls. I lived next door in Togo. It had the same currency but no price controls, and it had an unregulated black market for money changing. In the "street of banks," the money changers walked around with fat rolls of banknotes and were proud to call Togo "Africa's Little Switzerland."

The markets of Togo's big, coastal city, Lomé, were overflowing - meat; fish; vegetables; a little girl selling only shoestrings, another selling only chocolate bars; eggs; live animals; pharmaceuticals sold on a platter in the open air next to hand axes and coconuts; secondhand clothes from Europe and the United States that the locals called "dead yovo clothes," because they couldn't imagine live white people giving such precious things away; batteries; bolts of cloth; furniture; spices; palm butter; Chinese mosquito repellent; electric fans; and charcoal. You could buy anything, really.

I visited Cotonou in the neighboring Marxist El Dorado of Benin (formerly the Kingdom of Dahomey). Benin should be the same as Togo. It has the same tribes, languages, colonial history, geography (including approximate size and topography), and weather. But in Cotonou, the market was pitifully empty. There was just nothing to buy. I, being used to Togo, assumed that there was a holiday, or a coup d'état, or a plague that emptied the market. I began to ask questions of the bereft market people and ended up conducting a little investigation on both sides of the border between Togo and Benin.

I learned about the Marxist government in Benin and the inflation and weak currency and price controls. But why would that empty the markets?

The market people knew why. The key to prosperity and wealth (until everything ran out and the government abandoned Marxism in the late '80s) was to buy goods in Benin at the official prices and smuggle them out of the country. If you bought goods, you smuggled them to Togo to sell at market rates. Then you went back to Benin where you might buy more goods at the official prices to smuggle out of the country and, if you were well-connected, you might change the West African currency (CFA) for U.S. dollars or French francs at the official rate. And back to Togo you went with goods for the market and hard currency for the street of banks.

Some people got rich this way. Eventually they had to risk their skins to do it, after the government of Benin closed the borders. But not before there was almost no more hard currency or goods in Benin.

Variants of this story have played out all over the world at various times, famously in Germany and Brazil. Now in Zimbabwe, where inflation is "illegal," the government is printing Z$200,000 notes, and the people are suffering severe shortages of food, fuel, and medicine.

Let's hope (against hope) that Zimbabwe's President Mugabe is the last hyperidiot of hyperinflation. — Michael Christian

Going Dutch with Mexico — I have a gentleman come by my house several times a week. He vacuums, he launders, he cleans the pool, he is helpful in many, many ways. And not terribly expensive. His name is Francisco. I have not asked his nationality, his citizenship, or his legal status. It is not necessary. I don't employ him. He does all this for free. Admittedly, every Friday an amount of cash I leave lying around disappears. So far, I have not troubled the police about this.

Francisco came to me last week and indicated he would be taking two months off to visit relatives in Mexico. I asked if he anticipated any difficulty in returning to my employ. "I've done it four times in the past, so probably not," he replied. "Have you ever run into INS patrols?" I asked. "Once," he said, "but I have an advantage. I speak English. When I was picked up, they simply sent me back the other way, but I asked, and the officer told me I'd have better luck trying again at the same place the next day."

Get it? Just like a growing number of cops on the beat "fighting" the war on drugs, the actual grunts doing the work of rounding up people who threaten this country by offering to do menial work for small amounts of money know they cannot succeed. They don't kill themselves to round up people who they know will just try again tomorrow. Instead, they play the game, build up their quota, and - while politicians in Washington raise funds by throwing red meat to red states - tell the illegals, "Try again tomorrow; you'll have a better chance then." What else do you really need to know about this farcical opposition to "illegal" immigration, of this mercantilist throwback effort to stop the law of supply and demand from crossing a line in the Sonoran desert.

The little Dutch boy could more easily stop the sea. — Ross Levatter

Mad dogs and Americans — I need to call Mayor Bloomberg. There's a way to make New York's air pure, its traffic problems negligible, its sidewalks uncrowded and uncluttered. Manhattan can be instantly transformed into the orderly, sedate, regulated, franchised, homogenized, and rather dull place the mayor and his corporate allies so desperately want it to be. Visit Bangkok.

I was there while bouncing around Asia last summer. By comparison, New York in August is a country picnic. To be in Bangkok is to experience life deeply as obstacle course combined with oven. Breathing in the fresh fumes, you contemplate the sea - the vast sea of trucks, buses, taxis, cars, and 5 million motorbikes, which you hope will by some biblical miracle part just long enough for you to get to the other side of the road. Sweating freely in the dense, spongelike humid air, you navigate the narrow sidewalks, which are disputed territory. Throngs of slow-moving pedestrians compete with booths selling everything under the relentless sun, hawkers of dubious DVDs, demure hookers, a few Arabs with retinues of burqa-clad women, clusters of youths straddling their motorbikes, emaciated stray dogs, and sidewalk restaurants that are more sidewalk than restaurant. A pot or grill for cooking, a pot for washing, a rickety table or two lined at all hours with hungry patrons. The street food is actually delicious, if sometimes mysterious. You might wonder what's cooking, and what happens to all those stray dogs.

Solicitous Thais constantly express their willingness to relieve you of any excess bahts you might be burdened with (30 bahts = one dollar). Touts ("Yes hello sir what you looking for?"), tuk-tuk (three-wheeled motorcycle taxi) drivers ready to take you anywhere you don't want to go, tailors who practically start measuring you as you walk by their shops, beggars (but fewer than you might expect), and the female health-care professionals sitting in front of their therapeutic establishments ("Massaaage sir massage . . . Welcome sir massage!"). You can take long, thoughtful walks in Bangkok. But your thoughts are all going to be along the lines of "How do I dodge this without getting flattened by that?"

I liked it. It's chaos, but it's self-regulating chaos, Thai chaos, spicy curried chaos. They manage it better over there. Despite all the crowding and jostling, Thais are good at avoiding confrontations and almost never raise their voices (it's very bad form to talk loudly, let alone shout). The irreducible chaotic element in New York and other American cities is nasty, brutish, and short-tempered. In Bangkok you get polite and eerily calm anarchy. The traffic is hopelessly snarled, but no one is snarling or honking or exchanging gunfire. Once you give up your daft Western notions of going at things in a straight line and in a hurry, once you begin to develop a self-image more closely resembling that of a cork borne along on a slow-moving stream, you can enjoy it, especially when you know that there's always a shower and air-conditioning and a cold Singha beer in your immediate future. Thais aren't theatrical (or stark raving mad) like New Yorkers, but the motley, cosmopolitan street life is very watchable, the entrepreneurial anarchy supplies a sense of breathtaking adventure akin to high-stakes gambling, the seafood is excellent, the cheap fresh fruit purchased on the street has flavor and texture, unlike our own factory-farmed wax fruit, there's gracious architecture hidden behind the choked roads and prevalent modernized mediocrity, there are strange temples and even stranger nightclubs, and Thai women are often fetching, almost never fat, and tend to have a quick-witted, playful sense of humor.

Maybe it has something to do with the ubiquitous yet unobtrusive and tolerant Buddhism, but Thais seem to be good at balancing outward accommodation and inward calm. Or inward something - it's hard to know what they're really thinking, and they will often tell you what they assume you want to hear. The leading manufacturing industry seems to be appearances, keeping them up, saving face (this includes all the heavily advertised skin-whitening lotions - there's a traditional Thai prejudice, long preceding Western influence, in favor of relatively pale skin). Thais themselves can speak of their country as a land of illusions. But at a time when Americans have spent six-plus years consuming (and now upchucking) the illusions churned out by the Washington fantasy factories known as thinktanks and cabinet departments and the Office of the Vice President, there's no urgent need to congratulate ourselves on our own clear-eyed view of things.

In fact a lot of farangs (as Thais call all foreigners of Western provenance) are in Thailand to pursue their own phantoms. Shopping bargains that look too good to be true, and are, women who are imagined to be as complaisant and sensual and innocent and submissive as any feverish Western wet dream could wish, and aren't (they're quite independent and tough-minded), a country sometimes pictured as a tolerant tropical paradise where anything goes, which anything doesn't (as some drug-carrying Americans and Brits and Australians festering for eight to ten years in the notorious "Bangkok Hilton," or Bang Kwang prison, have found out).

Noel Coward's well-known line about mad dogs and Englishmen was written with Bangkok in mind. The full couplet goes: "In Bangkok at twelve o'clock they foam at the mouth and they run, / But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun." All the Bangkok dogs I saw were admirably sane. They spend the middle of the day motionless, usually asleep, in the shade. When they open their eyes for a moment, they probably wonder what stick or bone could be so important that all those foaming and running farangs are out in the sadistic sun chasing it. — Eric Kenning

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