A Second Hand Conjecture

Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni (of Rogue Economics fame), blames the lingering financial crisis in part on the American War on Terrorism, which inaugurated an allegedly “suspicious attitude…toward Muslim investors.” She goes further though, and argues that the only solution to the turmoil lies in embracing the financial rules mandated by the doctrines of medieval Islamic Sharia:

Islamic finance is a system based in shariah law. Central principals include a prohibition against charging interest and a code of ethics for investments – for example, barring investments in prostitution. Napoleoni said these principals are actually quite similar to the principles of classical economics.

“A bank should be a profit organization, but the moment in which the social role is forgotten and the profit role takes over, then a bank is actually working against the people who are putting their money into the bank, the clients. Now that, of course, in Islamic finance could not happen, because there is this partnership between the client and the banks. There is a social commitment within finance which we had before, but we lost it.”
(UNM)

Makes sense. When you’re looking for lessons in the administration of an advanced, adaptive, and sophisticated modern financial system, clearly we have a lot to learn from economic titans like Yemen. Lately financial sharia in that country has produced a permanently premodern economy with 40 times the population of Vermont, subsisting on about 80% of Vermont’s annual GSP. Sounds like a good deal to me.

(more…)

2 Comments »

Jordan Page (who is a kind of Ronpaulist Joan Baez) reflects on the “Revolution March,” a July 12th Ron Paul protest rally in Washington DC, in part organized by Adam Kokesh (who of late believes the Washington police are involved in a clandestine conspiracy against him).

Now, I grew up in the libertarian movement such as it was. Although I no longer consider myself a libertarian out of respect for the philosophy, I think I knew it well. My libertarianism was of the rightish sort, but fundamentally a movement for liberty through reason. A movement of the great economists and political philosophers of the Austrian School and the University of Chicago. The movement of Mises and Friedman. But this paranoid, revolutionary rubbish presented by Page as libertarianism, is utterly unrecognizable to me.

(more…)

24 Comments »

The tomb of Jonas Savimbi in Moxico has been looted by graverobbers. A number of items were stolen including his bronze epitaph. A bit of a sad addendum for the former US ally and UNITA leader who had battled the Soviet and Cuban backed MPLA for decades in the Angolan Civil War, but in the end was unable to stop his own ferocious impulse for the permanent war he’d know for most of life. Even when offered the Vice Presidency of the country for peace in 1998.

No Comments »