When Donald Rumsfeld Makes Sense

There is something disturbing about Donald Rumsfeld.

Despite all the execrable decisions that he has taken in his life and the disasters he has caused, he is by no means an idiot. At times he makes a lot of sense.

I have always thought it rather odd that people mocked his “Unknown Unknowns” comment, which actually makes perfect sense if you bother to read it.

Here is another comment he made on the issue of global poverty:

I was involved in the so-called war on poverty here in the United States and I've traveled the globe and seen just terrible poverty. I had a friend once and he was asked to chair a commission, an international committee, and the title of it was What Causes Poverty. He declined. He said “I will do it but on one condition. The condition is that we change the title and I'll chair a committee on What Causes Prosperity.” The reason he said that was, the title What Causes Poverty leaves the impression that the natural state of the world is for people to be prosperous and that for whatever reason there are prosperous people running around making people poor when you say what causes poverty. He looked at the world the other way. He said the natural state of people is to be relatively poor and that there are certain ways and things that can be done that can cause prosperity. They can create an environment that's hospitable to people gaining education and people gaining investments and people finding ways to contribute in a constructive way.

There are big portions of our globe that are so far behind the rest of the world that it is a dangerous thing. It is an unfortunate thing for those people. It's a heartbreaking thing.

The task for the developed world is to see that we do not just salve our consciences by finding ways like Lady Bountiful, we can give some country this or some country that which then is gone and disappears. But to the contrary, that we find ways to
encourage countries to take the kinds of steps that create an environment that's
hospitable to enterprise and to education so that the nation itself can do those things that will begin to ameliorate the kinds of terrible poverty that we see around the globe.

Earlier this week I noted that Colonel Gaddafi was saying the right things. Now Donald Rumsfeld is making sense.

How long before Hugo Chavez and Polly Toynbee start sounding rational.

Maybe it’s been too long since I had a holiday!

Who is the latest convert to the small state and school choice?

Yesterday, I asked you which mysterious world leader or politician it was who it was who had decided to return billions of dollars to the people to take it out of the hands of corrupt Government officials and allow parents to control their own children's education.

The rather surprising answer is Muammar al-Gaddafi, dictatorial ruler of Libya since 1969.

Who would have thought it!

Quote of the Day?

Today’s it’s-easy-if-you-cheat competition for which there is no prize is….

Guess which politician or world leader said the following recently:

"The money that we put in the education budget, I say let the [people] take it…

"Put it in your pockets and teach your kids as you wish. You take responsibility.

"As long as money is administered by a government body, there would be theft and corruption".

Sounds like common sense to me.

What one innocent sentence tells us about Government

Today I was obliged to read a document published by the Cabinet Office. The first line read

The Commission on the Future of Volunteering was set up by the England Volunteering Development Council after the 2005 Year of the Volunteer.

It seemed that so much of what is wrong with Government was encapsulated in that one sentence.

The proliferation of Quangos; the spurious Year of Action; the Government’s belief that society – even civil society in the private realm – can be made better by Government intervention.

Not to mention the endless production of utterly pointless and vacuous reports. The money wasted. The manpower wasted. The unbelievable hubris.

There is just no understanding in Government circles that endless talking shops do not achieve anything useful. Or that civil society emerges from below, as individuals come together spontaneously to work together.

The Swedish Model I: Why the Stockholm underground is so great

During the two years I lived in Sweden I lost count of the number of times ex-pat friends extolled the virtue of Swedish public transport and compared it favourably to its British counterpart.

The Stockholm underground, as every resident and visitor knows, is clean, cool, on time, and runs until 3am on Fridays and Saturdays. What is more, one can get a mobile phone signal deep in the underground stations (not surprisingly, one might think).

My friends were right of course. The Stockholm underground is far superior to London’s and it is about to get even better. The reason for this, however, is probably quite the opposite of what they would have guessed. As Fraser Nelson explains:

Stockholm’s privately-run underground is about to go 24 hours, the latest
innovation from Connex (now renamed Veolia). Privatising the underground is seen
as too right wing for Britain , but not Sweden which is perhaps the most
socialistic country in the world... If London Underground ran all night, I
imagine that night time attacks on women would go down dramatically. Ken
Livingstone jacked up black cab fares in the evening so more drivers now work,
but while there are now more taxis on the street few can afford them. Every
night in London , you can see women ushered into the cars of strangers shouting
‘minicab’. If Boris could get London ’s tube running till 3am, never mind 24
hours, he’d score a great victory for street safety.

Indeed. Perhaps he’d best start by privatising the Tube.

A fantastic metaphor for the economy

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. may be focussing on the US Federal Reserve, but he could just as easily be talking about the UK when he writes

The current economic crisis “stems from… a Fed-driven banking system that turns
credit on and off like a monkey playing with a fire hydrant…”

What does the National Curriculum have to do with a Mao Tunic?

Jerry Kirkpatrick explains that

"The concept of [a] core curriculum is a product of education czars who think they know what is best for everyone. The government today does not run the clothing industry, but if it did, the "core curriculum" in clothing would probably be the Mao tunic. Instead, our free market in clothing performs extremely well in getting our bodies covered and it does so in a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices."

If only we could have "a bountiful assortment of styles, colors, and prices" in education.