All you businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors, the lot of you, can just blow off to Fiji for the rest of the year. The Prime Minister will be deciding which industries are winners
from now on, and she doesn't need any advice from the likes of you. And the new winner is....ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING. Aren't we surprised?
Read the article. Lots of talk of plans, programmes, policies, strategies, task forces, but not a word about making money. That isn't thought to be necessary and presumably will come from taxing Mr. and Mrs. Kiwi a bit more and then a bit more on top of that. I love it. Even the Chinese don't try and pick "winning industries" anymore. Helen says she's off to India as well, but she likely has more in common with Fidel Castro.
At some point, probably just about 24 hours after the US and the Eurozone start raising interest rates, money will flow out of this country like a rip tide and Labour's economic folly will stand revealed in all its Muldoonian glory. Of course by then, it will take a generation to undo the damage.
19 January 2004
15 January 2004
Prisoners and Prisoners of War
On Cold Mountain we support the war seeing it as we do as a battle for the survival of western civilisation, the current bulwark of which is the United States. We're also constitutionalists though and this storycertainly made us stop mid-ale and ponder. Should enemy alien prisoners, as distinct from prisoners of war, be denied habeas corpus. This is an important question because, if the answer is yea, then is there any class of non-citizens who cannot be declared enemies and treated similarly? If the answer is nay, the how does the United States, or any country, protect it's citizens from a determined, yet non-military, lethal threat?
The United States has long and rightly refused to subject its citizens to the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, fearing political prosecutions. Is what's happening at Guantanamo really any different from Belgian judges going around issuing arrest orders for whatever foreigner offends those refined Euro-sensibilities? Well, no. Not logically anyway.
We have thought from the outset that Bush should have asked Congress for a proper declaration of war, and not just some fuzzy authorisation. That would have nicely clarified the status of all concerned: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, combatants and Americans who choose to take up arms against their country.
As it is, we now think that a distinction should be made between those captured as combatants, on or off the battlefield, and those arrested as part of the terror infrastructure. The former are POW's, and international law and practice are well established on the rights of the prisoners and on the rights and obligations of the detaining power.
Captured terrorists off the battlefield should be held where they're captured until such information as they have is surrendered at which point they can either be tried by the courts where they're captured (fancy your chances before an Iraqi court these days?) or in the United States, where, like it or not, they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution.
The United States has long and rightly refused to subject its citizens to the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Court, fearing political prosecutions. Is what's happening at Guantanamo really any different from Belgian judges going around issuing arrest orders for whatever foreigner offends those refined Euro-sensibilities? Well, no. Not logically anyway.
We have thought from the outset that Bush should have asked Congress for a proper declaration of war, and not just some fuzzy authorisation. That would have nicely clarified the status of all concerned: prisoners of war, enemy aliens, combatants and Americans who choose to take up arms against their country.
As it is, we now think that a distinction should be made between those captured as combatants, on or off the battlefield, and those arrested as part of the terror infrastructure. The former are POW's, and international law and practice are well established on the rights of the prisoners and on the rights and obligations of the detaining power.
Captured terrorists off the battlefield should be held where they're captured until such information as they have is surrendered at which point they can either be tried by the courts where they're captured (fancy your chances before an Iraqi court these days?) or in the United States, where, like it or not, they are entitled to the protection of the Constitution.
13 January 2004
Goodbye Pappy.
Pappy went to meet his Maker on Thursday in his sleep and with nothing to fear from that encounter. May it be so for me.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day
You read it here first, see our October 28 post.
I'm a dyed in the wool free trader, and I almost never agree with Rod Donald about anything, but he's right about this. An economy as small as New Zealand's would quickly be drowned by an FTA with China. When Ricardo talked about comparative advantage, he saw large wealthy economies and small poor ones, not vice versa. China's comparative advantage is poverty, I don't think we can match that with clean and green.
I'm a dyed in the wool free trader, and I almost never agree with Rod Donald about anything, but he's right about this. An economy as small as New Zealand's would quickly be drowned by an FTA with China. When Ricardo talked about comparative advantage, he saw large wealthy economies and small poor ones, not vice versa. China's comparative advantage is poverty, I don't think we can match that with clean and green.
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