How capitalism is setting washerwomen free, by Chelsea Follett.

Has anything changed the world more than the internet? South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang thinks so. He would argue that one invention — an engine of liberation — has had a far more powerful effect on daily lives. He means the washing machine, of course, which the late Hans Rosling called the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. It freed women from the chore of laundry — or at least from spending one full day a week every week doing it.

As a result, Americans now lose less than two hours a week to the task, and today a greater proportion of poor US households own washing machines than average American households did back in the 1970s. While washing machines are far from being the only reason that women’s options have multiplied in the West, they have certainly helped. “Without the washing machine,” claims Chang, “the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.” …

Water storage basins with built in washboards that are commonly used for washing both clothing and dishes in Honduras.

One 2013 study estimated that, in 2010, 46.9 per cent of households worldwide owned one. That means the market for washing machines has significant room to grow – and that there is a vast amount of latent human potential still out there, yet to be unleashed. …

In 1981, less than 10 per cent of urban Chinese households had a washing machine … but by 2011, 97.05 per cent did. …

It’s a slightly different story in India, where liberalising economic reforms didn’t begin until 1992, rather later than in China. From 1992 to 2016, India’s economy grew four-fold. Only 11 per cent of Indian households owned a washing machine in 2016. …

Not only has competition and the profit motive incentivised the washing machine’s invention, it is the capitalist drive that is ensuring ongoing marketing to new customers in developing countries. Innovation stagnates under socialist systems, but capitalism has created more life-transforming innovations than any other economic system and sown the greatest rise in living standards in history.

hat-tip Matthew

The Rise of the Generals, by Patrick Buchanan.

Has President Donald Trump outsourced foreign policy to the generals?

So it would seem. Candidate Trump held out his hand to Vladimir Putin. He rejected further U.S. intervention in Syria other than to smash ISIS. He spoke of getting out and staying out of the misbegotten Middle East wars into which Presidents Bush II and Obama had plunged the country.

President Trump’s seeming renunciation of an anti-interventionist foreign policy is the great surprise of the first 100 days, and the most ominous. For any new war could vitiate the Trump mandate and consume his presidency.

Trump no longer calls NATO “obsolete,” but moves U.S. troops toward Russia in the Baltic and eastern Balkans. Rex Tillerson, holder of Russia’s Order of Friendship, now warns that the U.S. will not lift sanctions on Russia until she gets out of Ukraine. If Tillerson is not bluffing, that would rule out any rapprochement in the Trump presidency. For neither Putin, nor any successor, could surrender Crimea and survive.

What happened to the Trump of 2016? …

To get Xi Jinping to help with our Pyongyang problem, Trump has dropped all talk of befriending Taiwan, backed off Tillerson’s warning to Beijing to vacate its fortified reefs in the South China Sea, and held out promises of major concessions to Beijing in future trade deals. “I like [Xi Jinping] and I believe he likes me a lot,” Trump said this week.

One recalls FDR admonishing Churchill, “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than … your Foreign Office … Stalin hates the guts of all your people. He thinks he likes me better.” FDR did not live to see what a fool Stalin had made of him. …

Monday, the USS Mahan fired a flare to warn off an Iranian patrol boat, 1,000 meters away. Supposedly, this was a provocation. But Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif had a point when he tweeted: “Breaking: Our Navy operates in—yes, correct—the Persian Gulf, not the Gulf of Mexico. Question is what US Navy doing 7,500 miles from home.” …

But before President Trump proceeds along the path laid out for him by his generals, brave and patriotic men that they are, he should discover if any of them opposed any of the idiotic wars of the last 15 years, beginning with that greatest of strategic blunders — George Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Australia’s green tape’s 80-fold explosion, costing $176bn a year ($7k per person per year), by Dennis Shanahan.

The number of pages of commonwealth environmental laws has ballooned more than 80-fold since they began in 1971 and are costing the nation $176 billion a year in lost economic opportunity.

$176 billion a year is $7,000 per person per yer — or $35,000 per year for a family of five. Sounds a little large, but there is probably something substantial there.

In 1971, when the McMahon Liberal government introduced the first commonwealth ­environment laws under the new Department of Environment, Aborigines and the Arts, they ­covered just 57 pages of legislation and regulation.

Last year, federal environmental laws stretched to 4669 pages of rules and regulations after peaking at 5004 pages in 2014 just after the Coalition ousted the Rudd-Gillard Labor government. …

The [Institute of Public Affairs] has calculated that red tape, not just so-called green lawfare that activists employ to delay and frustrate large developments, is costing the economy $176bn a year in foregone output.

The study highlighted the plight of the Adani Carmichael mine project in central Queensland, which has been targeted by activists trying to stop the Galilee basin opening to coal mining.

The Adani central mining project application has been running for seven years and faced more than 10 court challenges. It includes a 22,000-page environmental impact statement.

hat-tip Joanne

We’re all victims of the great green swindle: A generation who thought they were doing the right thing by buying diesel and clean energy have been taken for a ride. By Alice Thomson.

Now my family is as green and healthy as possible. We recycle our apple cores, the children play sport every day under the Westway flyover, we bought a second-hand diesel car and then a hybrid and take the train to Devon for holidays.

But the children are probably less healthy than I was 40 years ago. When the youngest started to wheeze I took him to the doctor who said he had doubled the number of inhalers he hands out in the past three years, so many children are becoming asthmatic.

“It’s the diesel, all that nitrogen dioxide and those toxic pollutants,” he explained. “He’ll inhale the particles in the car even with the windows shut, when he’s playing football by a busy road and even from the trains at the station.”

Our obsession with cutting carbon emissions has had terrible consequences. Air pollution contributes to an estimated 40,000 premature deaths a year in Britain, mainly among the young, the frail and the elderly, according to the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Paediatrics and Child Health. It can also hinder brain development, raise the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cancer, and contribute to the onset of Alzheimer’s. …

European governments subsidized diesel cars to slightly reduce carbon emissions, but car companies cheated and their diesel cars are pumping out carcinogens in cities while not reducing carbon emissions:

Our attempts to be altruistic have harmed rather than helped the most vulnerable. Almost as bad, those 11 million people who now own a diesel car are about to be penalised for following government advice a decade ago that the vehicles would help the country cut CO2 emissions. …

Gordon Brown’s budget of 1998 may have said in the small print that the government “recognises the adverse effect that the use of diesel has on local air quality” but first as chancellor and then as prime minister he shifted incentives towards diesel, until more than 35 per cent of cars were running on it, while manufacturers fiddled their engine management systems to cheat the testers.

Japan, meanwhile, steered consumers away from polluting diesel, America stuck to petrol and India began switching buses to compressed natural gas (CNG).

Netanyahu’s bold move against Europe, by Caroline Glick.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted a new strategy for managing Israel’s diplomatic relations with the West. …
If they act in accordance with international diplomatic norms, Israel will respond in a like fashion. If they choose instead to discriminate against Israel and treat it in a manner no other democratic state is treated, Israel will abandon diplomatic convention and treat foreign governments as domestic critics.

On Monday, after his repeated requests for Germany’s visiting Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel to cancel his plans to meet with Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem, Netanyahu gave Gabriel an ultimatum. Gabriel could meet with Netanyahu, or he could meet with them. Gabriel refused to cancel his meeting with Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem. So Netanyahu canceled their meeting.

This has been a long time coming:

Today’s Western democracies are in a furor over the notion that foreign governments would dare to interfere in their domestic affairs. The uproar in the US over Russia and in Europe over Turkish efforts to drum up support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan among Turkish nationals in Europe make clear how roundly democracies decry attempts by foreign governments to influence their internal politics.

This then brings us to Israel, and the unique rules that the West applies in its dealing with the Jewish state.

In the final quarter of the 20th century, European and other Western states abandoned their earlier support for Israel. From 1974 on, Europeans could be depended on to either support condemnations of Israel at the UN and other international forums, or to abstain from votes.

Whereas from 1974 to 2000, European hostility was largely limited to the diplomatic arena, beginning in 2000, the Europeans began to expand their anti-Israel policies to the Israeli domestic political sphere.

After the PLO abandoned the peace process with Israel at the July 2000 Camp David summit and initiated its terrorist war against Israel two months later, the Europeans began massively funding radical leftist groups registered as NGOs in Israel. The collapse of the peace process and the initiation of the Palestinian terrorist war all but dried up domestic support for groups like Peace Now, B’Tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights. But with millions of euros in their pockets and the unconditional diplomatic support of Europe, these groups were able to become players in Israel’s domestic politics and cause massive harm to Israel’s international standing. …

Every time Israeli officials and others protested about their unfair treatment of Israel, the Europeans responded that they were simply restating allegations made by Israelis.

The fact that the Israelis they quoted were only able to speak because Europe paid for their microphones was entirely beside the point, as was the fact that those Israelis reflected the views of next to no one in Israel. …

Germany:

As polls taken between 2011 and 2015 showed, between a third and half of Germans view Israel as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany. The Palestinians, by their telling, are the new Jews.

Likewise, a large majority of Germans is sick of hearing about the Holocaust. And an even larger majority says that Israel is behaving unjustly toward the Palestinians.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific

MILO Announces New Media Venture, by Lucas Nolan.

Former Breitbart Senior Editor MILO has announced the founding of his new $12 million dollar media company, MILO, Inc.

In a Facebook post, MILO outlined his new business plan and the $12 million investment funding that it has received from undisclosed investors. He has reportedly hired a seasoned media executive to lead the new 30-person team that will be based out of Miami, Florida. The new company will manage MILO‘s books, tours, merchandise and radio and TV opportunities.

In a statement, MILO said, “This isn’t some vanity nameplate on a personal blog. This is a fully tooled-up talent factory and management company dedicated to the destruction of political correctness and the progressive left. I will spend every waking moment of the rest of my life making the lives of journalists, professors, politicians, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists and other professional victims a living hell. Free speech is back — and it is fabulous.” …

MILO said, “MILO, Inc. will bring laughter and war to every corner of America in dozens of different formats. I will fight harder and look hotter than anyone else on the political right. And I will do more damage to the political left than anyone else in American culture.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Liberalism’s Failure, by Taylor Lewis.

The new battle lines are drawn: nationalism versus globalism; populism versus technocracy; provincials versus urban dwellers; God-and-country patriotism versus allegiance-less individualism. …

Socially immobile and invisible to the global economy, France’s working class is feeling the squeeze of modernity’s hypercapitalism. “In the shopping malls the cashiers are lined up like cattle for the slaughter,” said a sommelier by the name of Thierry Corona. “And immigrants arrive and they immediately get handouts!” …

The West has been beset with a bad case of liberal fatigue. The open borders, open trade, open society model inspired by the Enlightenment, honed by the U.S. Constitution, and codified by postwar governments and international institutions is beginning to sputter.

Society is as rich as it has ever been, and yet we’re more miserable than ever. What happened? The promises of globalism have all been delivered. Free movement of people and capital has been a boon for hedge fund profits and stock prices. Yet the prosperity hasn’t stopped anxiety from inching upward, or plain people from stupefying themselves with drugs. “Why is neoliberalism failing?” is the great question of the 21st century. …

Globalism brings  the wages of interchangeable workers to the same level everywhere — China, India, Poland, England. There are winners and losers. The elite are those who aren’t interchangeable, so they get good wages themselves, employ others cheaply, and get cheap goods — big winners. But…

Tracing the story of a Cadbury chocolate factory’s move from England to Poland, Meek details the decline of morale that follows the loss of local expectations. For nearly a century, residents of Keynsham knew that their local Cadbury confectionery plant was a source of employment. Then, on Oct. 3, 2007, it all changed. The word went out that the factory was to shut down and move to Skarbimierz, Poland. Just like that, come 2011, one hundred years of history were rubbed out thanks to a closed-boardroom decision. As Meek writes, the factory’s leaving meant the loss of “highly paid, permanent, solidly pensioned jobs…not because [the workers] had done anything wrong, or because their products weren’t selling, or because the factory was unprofitable, but because their Polish replacements could do the same job for less than one fifth of the money.” …

Talk of market temperance is unheard of in the higher echelons of Western society. Those comfortably seated in the high perches of prosperity have made their peace with profit-seeking. Hillary Clinton’s urging of her supporters to focus on racism and not Wall Street bonuses showed just how far today’s liberals are willing to go to keep their enriched positions. …

The stubborn little flame that is the middle class in these countries will only get hotter. It won’t be snuffed out by Walmart shelves stocked full of cheap Chinese trinkets. It won’t be extinguished with gobs of cheap labor imported from afar.

Immigration from the third world pours petrol on this fire.

Le Pen Wins Day Two, and Day Three As Well, by Scott McConnell. The author obviously wants Le Pen to win — and makes a case.

Marine Le Pen can’t possibly win. French friends on Twitter told me this weeks ago. I asked one souveraniste activist the other night; he said she will do well to break 40 percent, and might be held to 35 percent. The entire French political class is aligned against her. And to many people who might be broadly sympathetic, leaving the euro seems like a leap into the dark. …

So, I concede, 11 days before the vote, a Le Pen win would be a huge upset, much more so than Trump or Brexit.

And yet.

She is a really skilled candidate, a wonderful one. Last night she was on TF1, not the main news channel but the somewhat lower-brow government-funded one. The most popular channel in France. She was interviewed for an hour and 15 minutes. She was tag-teamed by two journalists, and then a third was brought in to take her on, from London yet. The grilling was all tasteful — the journalists seemed clearly to enjoy the role they were playing, that of picking apart MLP’s positions, and enjoyed as well her skill in parrying their efforts to trip her up. …

She opposes the view she ascribes (quite justly) to the former banker Macron, that the “market” should be the “big boss” of everything—above everything else, nation, family, identity. That France should be transformed into a giant public marketplace. She talks about Europe with some tact — “I feel myself European” — but proposes a new form of “freely executed” bilateral negotiations between nations, rather than rule from Brussels.

But, as she makes clear later, she is no fan of the deference all French politicians pay to “Madame Merkel,” the way they all seek her benediction. She is of course fine with Madame Merkel when the latter defends the interests of Germany, which she should. Less so when she invites in a million and a half immigrants from who knows where, and no one knows where they are. …

But in terms of being a person who might, in the pollsters phrase, “understand people like me” she is miles ahead of Macron. …

She has really tried to get around to the left of Macron on every issue except immigration, where she of course well to the right. It is a fundamental choice France faces — that of course is the one thing everyone seems to agree upon. …

This morning’s news showed new polls stating that roughly 60 percent of voters thought Le Pen had made a “good start” on her campaign, while less than half thought Macron had begun well. …

I know, I know, she can’t win. Everyone opposes her. But if you just came in from a foreign country and looked at the news, you might think she could.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Why Donald Trump Decided to Back Off Nafta Threat, by Peter Nicholas.

President Donald Trump was prepared to end the North American Free Trade Agreement deal, which had governed trade relations for the past 23 years, with a dramatic announcement Saturday at a Pennsylvania political rally marking his 100th day in office.

As rumors spread of the possible action, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called the president urging him not to pull out of the accord. “Let me think about it,” Mr. Trump said. Within a half hour a call came in from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a similar request.

After the talks, Mr. Trump was convinced “they’re serious about it and I will negotiate rather than terminate,” the president said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Interesting. Does he have a set agenda and is just taking a negotiating position, or is it all very fluid and open to change? Impossible to know, of course.

Far-Left Austrian President: All Women Must Wear Headscarves to Fight Islamophobia, by Ben Kew.

Austria’s far-left president, Alexander Van der Bellen, has suggested that one day all women must wear headscarves to fight Islamophobia.

During a talk to students, Van der Bellen said that whilst be believes a woman should wear “whatever she wants”, should Austria’s “rampant Islamophobia continue, there will come a day when we must ask all women to wear a headscarf – all of them! – out of solidarity towards those who do it for religious reasons”.

I’ll bet you’re looking forward to that day, sisters.

Should the left likewise recommend Sharia law for everyone, “out of solidarity towards those who do it for religious reasons”?

hat-tip Stephen Neil