From Paris to Africa: Liberty Struggles to Survive

In January 2015, armed Muslims entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French magazine, and began shooting. They killed eleven people, because they objected to a cartoon which the magazine had published.

As part of this same action, Islam had organized violence thousands of miles away, in Africa. News media carried reports like this:

More than 70 churches were destroyed and 10 people killed after a cartoon agitated Niger’s two largest cities. One week after Islamic terrorists killed 11 staff members of the French publication Charlie Hebdo, the magazine published a “survivor’s issue.”

While the magazine is not a particularly religious one - it is, in fact, probably somewhat anti-religious - it nonetheless stands for religious freedom, and thus makes, to a limited extent, common cause with Jesus followers around the globe.

Its cover featured a cartoon of Muhammad holding a Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”) sign. While the cartoon sparked protests across Africa and the Middle East, the deadliest were in Niger, which ranked worst in a Pew Forum poll of sub-Saharan African Muslims’ support for religious freedom for non-Muslims.

Only a few months later, Paris was again the location of Islamic hostility, as Muslims used bombs and rifles to kill over 100 people. These attacks, on Friday, November 13, 2015, revealed that Islam has no intentions of relaxing its efforts to execute those whom it considers to be ‘infidels.’

As Islamic aggression continues to expand globally, societies based on freedom will be tested, to see if they are willing and able to resist such attacks.

Religious Freedom: a Global Concern

The sincerity of any claim of support for religious liberty is seen in one’s effort to support the freedom to practice a religion which is not one’s own.

In 1998, the United States Congress created an “Office of International Religious Freedom” and a “Commission on International Religious Freedom” not to address the concerns of comfortable majority religions, but to speak on behalf of persecuted minority faiths.

In keeping with the principle of protecting minority interests, an important post has been filled by a representative of Judaism. Estimates calculate that, at most, 1.4% of the U.S. population is Jewish, making it one of the smallest groups in the nation. In March 2015, news media carried reports like this:

For the first time, a non-Christian became America’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom. Rabbi David Saperstein, confirmed in December, fills a position left vacant since October 2013.

The ambassador’s minority status carries both a practical and a symbolic value. Practically, he has experience as a member of a possibly marginalized non-majority group. Symbolically, he represents American habits of protecting minority groups.

Members of small and possibly endangered groups have, over many years, seen the United States as a place of safety for them.

His nomination was widely lauded by Christian advocates, including Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Chris Seiple of the Institute for Global Engagement, and US Rep. Frank Wolf. Wolf authored the International Religious Freedom Act that created the post.

The question of safety for religious minorities has gained attention in recent decades, as Islam has organized the persecution of Jesus followers in countries from Niger to Pakistan.

Because of this trend, religious liberty as a movement has gained attention in the last few years. Worldwide, more people have been killed for speaking about Jesus or for owning a copy of the New Testament than in previous decades.

After 34 years as one of Congress’s leading advocates for international religious freedom and human rights, Wolf retired in January. But he is hardly finished advocating, becoming the first to fill a newly endowed chair in religious freedom at Baylor University.

Whoever occupies the position “ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom,” she or he will have much work to do, as Islamic aggression continues to spread.

A Higher Level of Economic Science

The principles of economics were articulated primarily by Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Ricardo. They formulated the familiar statements about supply, demand, and price levels.

According to this type of ‘classical’ economics, prices rise when demand increases and supply remains steady, or when demand holds steady and supply decreases. Prices drop when supply increases against a steady demand, or when demand decreases against a constant supply.

These familiar axioms are intuitive, and they correspond to actual experience and data. This classical understanding is now the core of economic thought.

But there are some questions for which classical economic reasoning has no good answers.

One question is about the concept of value: food, which is necessary for life, and which everyone desires, often costs little; sapphires and pearls, which serve no practical purpose and meet no need, often cost much. Why?

The demand for food is large, universal, and steady; the demand for jewels is small, limited to a segment of the population, and can soften when competing demands expand. Yet the gems find a higher price than food. Why?

Classical economic understandings were correct as far as they went, but they did not go far enough to answer such questions. The science of economics would have to advance to a new level.

Carl Menger would discover the principles which allowed for new understandings of economic phenomena.

Born in 1840, Menger would do most of his work at the Universität Wien. He died in 1921.

Menger noticed that classical economic thought treated supply and demand as monolithic and irreducible forces, like magnetism or gravity. The original founders of classical economics - Smith, Hume, Ricardo - may have attempted to follow the paradigm of Newtonian physics or Cartesian philosophy, and tried to find a systematic solution based on a few axiomatic concepts.

Instead, Menger analyzed economic demand as being composed of many individual decisions. Different individuals will be purchasing the same product at the same time - but their choices are different.

Consumers may buy the same product, but for different reasons. The value which they place on the product will vary. ‘Value’ is a measure of the strength or intensity of demand - in common language, “how much” and “how bad” the customer wants the product.

Classical economics could not answer these questions: How does a person assign a value to an object? A person decides to pay a certain amount for the object, presumably because the object will fill, or help to fill, certain desires; how does a person make that decision? Why does a person decide to pay some specific amount? Joseph Salerno writes:

Menger brilliantly answered the question by restating it: “Which satisfaction would not be attained if the economizing individual did not have the given unit at his disposal - that is, if he were to have command of a total amount smaller by that one unit?” In light of Menger’s discussion of economizing, the obviously correct answer to this question is “only the least of all the satisfactions assured by the whole available quantity.” In other words, regardless of which particular physical unit of his supply was subtracted, the actor would economize by choosing to reallocate the remaining units so as to continue to satisfy his most important wants and to forego the satisfaction of only the least important want of those previously satisfied by the larger supply. It is, thus, always the least important satisfaction that is dependent on a unit of the actor's supply of a good and, that, therefore, determines the value of each and every unit of the supply. This value-determining satisfaction soon came to be known as the “marginal utility.”

Menger’s discovery was this: goods have values because they serve various purposes, and the importance of these various purposes differ. This is step toward answering the question about why gems are more expensive than food.

Menger argued that it is not the case that the value of goods derives from the value of the labor used to produce them. On the contrary: the value of labor derives from the value of the goods it produces.

Against the idea that financial transactions are always an exchange of equal values - like an algebra equation or a chemical equation - , Menger pointed out that people will give up what they value less in order to gain what they value more. It is this asymmetry which produces wealth: both sides gain from the transaction.

One sees here again the fascination which the founders of classical economics had with the advancements in natural science made by people like Newton and Boyle.

Carl Menger launched a new area of economic investigation, which kept many of the discoveries of ‘classical economics,’ but which also created possibilities for more advanced analyses.

Sentenced to Death for Thinking

In Pakistan, a woman named Asia Bibi was sentenced to death after allegations were made that she was “denigrating the Prophet Muhammad,” according to news media.

The allegations were reported to authorities five years after the ostensible incident, evidence was scant, and the narratives of the purported witnesses were weak and not too consistent.

Such scenarios are not uncommon where Islam prevails. Aged fifty, Asia Bibi is the mother of five, and was sent to

death row for allegedly denigrating the Prophet Muhammad during an argument with a Muslim colleague over a cup of water. Her lawyer argued that lower courts wrongly overlooked the five-day delay between the incident and the police report filed by a local imam, who wasn’t present at the argument.

Pakistan is exemplary of many Islamic republics, which routinely sentence people to death for ‘blasphemy’ - but the definition of that word is stretched very thin. Mere accusations often suffice for conviction. The possession of a New Testament book, or attendance at any non-Muslim religious gathering, can easily be interpreted as ‘blasphemous.’

Jews, Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and others are executed, imprisoned, or beaten for the simple fact that they are not Muslims.

These people are, in effect, punished for thinking.

In the case of Asia Bibi, diplomatic pressure from Europe and North America may yet have an effect. The Pakistani supreme court may hear an appeal of her conviction. Perhaps she will be allowed to live.

Collaborating in the Ukrainian Genocide: Holodomor

In one of the more horrific aspects of Stalin’s mass murders, he discovered that the easiest way to kill millions of people was to simply starve them. Soviet soldiers set fire to fields and barns, slaughtered animals, and then left the area.

The farmers died by painful starvation.

One of the areas in which Stalin applied this technique was in the Ukraine. Some regions of that country expressed hesitation about the Soviet-Communist plan for collectivization.

Ievgen Vorobiov writes about Grigoriy Petrovskiy, a Ukrainian who actually aided Soviets in their mass murder. Far from protesting Stalin’s deadly communism, he carried out Stalin’s killing schemes:

Petrovskiy is notorious for having abetted the Soviet policy of Holodomor: forced requisition of food from Ukrainian peasants that resulted in mass starvation and the deaths of an estimated 3 to 5 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933. Even as a quarter of the Dnipropetrovsk region’s population was wiped out by the artificial famine, Petrovskiy proclaimed triumphantly in September 1933 that “the collective farm system has finally defeated all its enemies.”

Nearly a century after the fact, historians have discovered the full extent of the atrocities, details of which were kept partly secret until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Most Ukrainians (as well as at least 17 countries) recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

The USSR had help, not only from the traitor Petrovskiy who turned against his own people, but also from an American: Walter Duranty.

A reporter for the New York Times, Duranty aided Stalin by suppressing details of the millions of deaths. Instead, Duranty reported that Stalin’s communist collectivist program was a success, and that the ordinary people were benefitting from it.

Why did Duranty lie? Why did he willing aid the century’s most prolific murderer? Either Duranty received payment from Stalin, or he was ideologically sympathetic to Stalin’s cause.

Historic Weather Patterns

The earth’s climate has an effect on social structures: in some ways obviously, but in other cases with a hidden causation.

Historian Geoffrey Parker notes that a collection of political and economic upheavals around the globe in the 1600s correlates with swings in the planet’s climate. Reviewing Parker’s book, J.R. McNeill writes:

The various economic and political crises of the 17th century were not isolated events but connected.

The earth’s climate experienced a several-century-long cold spell. This represents a statistical outlier in measured average temperatures during a period of several millennia.

Climatologists are able to accurately reconstruct past temperatures, even for periods of time prior to the invention of the mercury thermometer. A wide spectrum of evidence, from tree-ring sizes to glacial expansions and contractions, documents hot and cold periods over the centuries.

Human records, while not recording numerically the temperature in degrees, yield observations about snowfall, rainfall, crop yields, and the freezing of rivers and lakes.

McNeill continues:

They all had a component of bad weather behind them. The Little Ice Age, which extended from about 1250 to about 1850, reached its nadir in the 17th century. That is explained partly by a spate of volcanic eruptions, the dust veils of which reduced the amount of sunshine reaching the Earth’s surface, and partly by a slump in the sun’s energy output called the Maunder Minimum. Colder weather, often dryer weather, and more frequent extreme weather became common in many if not all parts of the world. No one disputes this much, although there are debates about just how much colder it was, and how global it was.

This ‘Little Ice Age’ came on the heels of its antipode, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ during the tenth through thirteenth centuries. This ‘warm period’ was also a statistical outlier.

Noteworthy is that these two extremes were non-anthropogenic. They occurred before the mass extraction and consumption of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas. They occurred before the large-scale use of chlorofluorocarbons.

Temperatures during the first few decades of the twenty-first century are not as warm as the Medieval Warm Period, nor as cold as the Little Ice Age. While some excursions in temperature have occurred in the late 1900s and early 2000s, they have not endured as long as these historic eras.

Because global temperatures have not long sustained hot or cold temperatures as extreme as the historic outliers periods, it is dubious to claim that current climatic instability is the result of human activity.

To be convincing or persuasive, any assertion that climate in the early twenty-first century is significantly or measurably impacted by manmade factors would need to rely on evidence which shows both that we are now in the midst of a climate swing which features temperatures at or beyond the historic outlier levels, and that such a swing will last as long or longer than the historic outlier periods.

We lack evidence to make plausible the claim that current climate patterns have been observably impacted by human activity.

War Socialism: the Irresistible Temptation

While the damage which combat inflicts on people is obvious - wounds, deaths, and the destruction of property - , combat is only one part of war. War creates injuries beyond, aside from, and outside of, combat.

For those who may be hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from the physical fighting, war inflicts harm in different ways. Physically, there are shortages of materials, including important nutrients and medicines. Diseases can flourish among civilian populations during wartime.

War can also devastate political liberty. The crisis created by war provides the opportunity for political leaders to argue that urgent and exceptional circumstances necessitate and justify their suspension of the usual civil rights.

The government may contend that during peacetime, citizens have the right to freely discuss and analyze a government - pointing out its flaws - but during wartime, the situation is too important or too critical to allow unrestrained free speech. This is precisely what Woodrow Wilson’s administration did, in 1917 and 1918, when it enforced the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act.

A wartime government can inflict even more detriment on its citizens when it restricts not only their freedom to speak, but their freedom to act: when it regulates various aspects of ordinary life.

Again using war’s urgency as an excuse, governments tell farmers which crops they may grow, and at which prices they may sell them. Governments may tell bakers which type of bread to bake, and at which prices it may be sold.

This violation of an individual’s economic freedom is carried out in the name of the war effort. But such government intervention may destroy the very liberty which the war is allegedly defending.

Historians often call wartime regulations “war socialism.” Many political leaders simply can’t pass up the opportunity to gain more control over the lives of their subjects. After WWI, when Woodrow Wilson left the presidency in 1919, the voters expressed a strong desire for “normalcy.”

But Wilson’s thirst for power extended beyond the borders of the United States, and past the end of the war: not content with intervening in the lives of citizens during the war, Wilson wanted to control global relations after the war.

Redrawing the map of Europe, Wilson inflicted his revenge, largely against the Austrian Empire, for which he harbored a hatred: a hatred which many historicans find difficult to explain. Historian Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:

As an increasingly ideologically motivated conflict, the war quickly degenerated into a total war. Everywhere, the entire national economy was militarized (war socialism), and the time-honored distinction between combatants and non-combatants and military and civilian life fell by the wayside. For this reason, World War I resulted in many more civilian casualties — victims of starvation and disease — than of soldiers killed on the battlefields. Moreover, due to the ideological character of the war, at its end no compromise peace but only total surrender, humiliation, and punishment was possible. Germany had to give up her monarchy, and Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France as before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The new German republic was burdened with heavy long-term reparations. Germany was demilitarized, the German Saarland was occupied by the French, and in the East large territories had to be ceded to Poland (West Prussia and Silesia). However, Germany was not dismembered and destroyed. Wilson had reserved this fate for Austria. With the deposition of the Habsburgs the entire Austrian-Hungarian Empire was dismembered. As the crowning achievement of Wilson's foreign policy, two new and artificial states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were carved out of the former Empire. Austria herself, for centuries one of Europe's great powers, was reduced in size to its small German-speaking heartland; and, as another of Wilson's legacies, tiny Austria was forced to surrender its entirely German province of Southern Tyrolia — extending to the Brenner Pass — to Italy.

Although the logic of Wilson’s foreign policy is obscure, he felt that Habsburg dynasty and the Austro-Hungarian Empire posed a greater danger than the new Soviet Union.

Wilson’s policies seem to stem both from a desire to control and from a mysterious animus. He wanted to control economies, the expression of ideas, and the general shape of society. For unclear reasons, he harbored a deep antipathy against the Austrian monarchy.