Here’s what Tax-news.com reported:

The poll of more than 300 entrepreneurs by business advisors Tenon also found that many more may follow in an attempt to escape the 50% rate of income tax, due to be introduced from next April on annual incomes above GBP150,000, with nearly half of the respondents (48%) still deciding what action to take. …Tenon points out that in the last month, high profile names such as the actor Sir Michael Caine and the artist Tracey Emin have threatened to change their tax residency to countries with more favorable tax rates. Popular locations for redomiciling include Monte Carlo, Guernsey, Liechtenstein, and the Cayman Islands. Andy Raynor, Chief Executive of Tenon Group, noted that entrepreneurs are showing their disapproval of the tax measures by “letting their feet do the talking.”

The mayor of London, meanwhile, is much less restrained regarding the foolishness of Gordon Brown’s class-warfare policy. Here’s what he has to say in the Daily Telegraph:

[T]he 50 [percent] tax rate that is beginning to drive these people away is a disaster for this country, and it is a double disaster that no one seems willing to talk about it. When Margaret Thatcher’s government cut the top rate of tax to 40 per cent in 1988, she was completing a series of reforms — beginning with the removal of exchange controls and followed by the Big Bang — that helped to establish London as the greatest financial centre on earth. Britain had been transformed from a sclerotic militant-ridden basket-case to a dynamic enterprise economy, and the capital became a global talent magnet. …So it is utterly tragic, at the end of the first decade of this century, that we are back in the hands of a government whose mindset seems frozen in the wastes of the 1970s.

By the way, I’m not picking on England. America is soon going to be making the same self-destructive mistake. Here’s my video on the broader subject of class-warfare tax policy.

Some hoped that the timid economic reforms announced by the “younger” Castro brother, when he assumed the official leadership of the geriatric regime, would constitute the opening salvos toward a more open and freer Cuba. However, a few of us spotted cracks in that fairy tale early on.

The recent beatings of Yoani Sánchez and other independent bloggers (described here by my colleague Ian Vásquez) are a clear reminder that, in Cuba, it’s business as usual under the Castro brothers’ rule.

The administration’s “more open than thou” rebuttal is a weak one. As I write in Chapter 9 of my new Cato book, Mad about Trade:

If an Olympics were held for the most open economy, the United States would be out of medal contention. According to the most recent annual Economic Freedom of the World Report, people living in 26 other countries enjoy greater “freedom to trade internationally” than do Americans. The report considers not only tariffs on imports but regulatory barriers, exchange rate and capital controls, and actual levels of trade. Bragging rights for the most open economies belong to, in descending order, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary, Switzerland, the Slovak Republic, and Estonia. The United States lies back in the pack, in 27th place among the 140 ranked nations.

Despite the claims of openness, our government imposes significant barriers against imported clothing, footwear, leather products, glassware, watches, clocks, table and kitchenware, costume jewelry, pens, mechanical pencils, musical instruments, cutlery, hand tools, ball and roller bearings, ceramic wall and floor tile, railway cars, processed fruits and vegetables, rice, cotton, sugar, milk, cheese, butter and canned tuna.

Since the book was printed, a new Economic Freedom of the World Report has been published. The United States has slipped to the 28th “most open market in the world.”

The European Union began decades ago as a small organization for economic cooperation. Over time it expanded to 27 states and took on significant political roles. In 2004 leading Eurocrats drafted a constitution to turn the still loose federation into something closer to a continental nation state. Most notable was the shift of responsibilities, or "competencies," from member governments to Brussels, reduced national vetoes over EU decisions, appointment of a High Representative for Foreign Affairs, creation of a European foreign service, and appointment of a permanent President of the European Council.

But the European establishment pushed one agreement too far. Voters in France and the Netherlands said no, killing the accord. The lesson was clear. Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing opined: "Above all, it is to avoid having referendums." The European governments moved a few commas and made the document even more abstruse, before reissuing it as a treaty that only required parliamentary approval.

But Ireland's constitution mandated a referendum and last June the Irish shocked the Eurocrats by voting no. One British Labor MP called the Irish "extremely arrogant." German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble complained that "a few million Irish cannot decide on behalf of 495 million Europeans," preferring instead that a few thousand Euroelites do the deciding.

After briefly toying with the idea of either kicking out the recalcitrant Celts or confining Ireland to secondary status, the EU establishment insisted that Ireland vote again. The treaty passed the second time in October, primarily due to economic scare-mongering. Judith Crosbie wrote in European Voice: "the vote largely reflected concerns about the Irish economy, with most voters saying 'Yes' to staying close to where the money it," even though Lisbon actually offered no economic benefits.

Then the treaty was held up by Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who refused to sign his nation's ratification. This sparked more than the usual petulance from other European leaders, including demands for his impeachment. In early November Klaus acquiesced, allowing the Eurocrats to get down to important business: divvying up the political spoils.

In theory, Lisbon was about more important issues. Irish Sen. Deirdre de Burca argued: "If I had to name just one compelling reason to support the Lisbon Treaty, however, it is because the treaty will enhance the capacity of the EU to become a more effective actor at an international level." Similarly, claimed Wilfried Martens, a leading Member of the European Parliament, "the EU must be united and able to speak with one voice on the world stage."

Europeans were acutely aware that the continent is still seen as largely as an economic entity. Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, complained: "On many of the world's big security problems, the EU is close to irrelevant. Talk to Russian, Chinese or Indian policy-makers about the EU, and they are often withering. They view it as a trade bloc that had pretensions to power but has failed to realize them because it is divided and badly organized." Similarly, said President Sarkozy, the treaty was necessary since "Europe cannot be a dwarf in terms of defense and a giant in economic matters."

In short, Lisbon was about Europe, not Europeans. There is no evidence that most Europeans worry much about whether people around the world think of Europe as an equal to the U.S., China, and Russia. But Eurocrats worry about it.

Yet while supposedly hoping to use Lisbon to turn Europe into a Weltmacht, leading Europeans now are engaged in an unseemly squabble over offices. The plotting has grown ever more intense with the approach of Thursday's summit, and scheduled decision on the new president and foreign minister.

Despite Lisbon's many claimed benefits, the treaty has not changed Europe. The EU remains an amalgam of nations rather than a single political community. Since the center-right is ascendant, conservative governments claimed the presidency. But the center-left must be mollified, so its representatives expect the foreign ministry — a prescription for divisive inaction. The Poles are demanding a genuine say in the decision, and perhaps even one of the positions, for the Central and Eastern European states. Times columnist Brownen Maddox observed: "The haggling over Europe's new top jobs resembles that old children's card game of mixing up the heads, bellies and feet of different animals, for a deliberately preposterous result."

There's more, however. Some Eurocrats argue that British officials should not be considered because even if they, most notably former Prime Minister Tony Blair and current Foreign Minister David Miliband, personally are Europhiles, the majority of Britons are Euroskeptics. And Blair, of course, was chummy with U.S. President George W. Bush and supported the Iraq war.

Even stranger, after pushing a treaty to strengthen Europe, some of the governments want to select new officers who won't strengthen Europe. For instance, Denmark, Finland, and Ireland issued a joint statement advocating a "chairman not a chief" for the Council presidency. This means, as the Economist puts it, EU leaders talking "to themselves" rather than "to the world." One reason is rivalry between the European Commission (representing the continent) and the European Council (representing governments). Still, someone more attentive to EU governance might be useful in a petty-bureaucratic sense. George Wittman pointed to the need to "bring some order to a bureaucracy at EU headquarters in Brussels that has mutated and proliferated like a bad case of hives." Alas, as Wittman observed, there are few things at which Europe better excels than bureaucratic growth.

However, a chairman won't enhance Europe's international influence. There's a good argument for not claiming that any one person speaks for 500 million Europeans but, as the Wall Street Journal observed, "this is an argument against the Lisbon Treaty itself." The Eurocrats cheerfully told their publics that Lisbon was necessary to promote EU efficiency while telling each other that Lisbon was necessary to promote EU influence. The elite defenestrated concern over accountability and representativeness long ago.

Having decided that the lack of a European polity didn't matter, it would make sense to choose someone who might help the continent fulfill its potential. As a friend of Tony Blair's observed in making the pitch for the former premier's candidacy, "God knows what the Americans would do if we got [a] Belgian as European president. They already can't be bothered with us most of the time."

Yet after going to the trouble of ramming through a treaty that polls indicate was opposed by popular majorities in half of the EU member states, EU leaders apparently plan to reject the most impressive candidates for the top jobs. Blair was the early favorite for president, but has faded. The field is dominated by a gaggle of colorless national politicians.

Current candidates include Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy, Denmark's Jan Peter Balkenende, Ireland's Mary Robinson, Latvia's Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Luxembourg's Jean-Claude Juncker, and Sweden's Fredrik Reinfeldt. All of these people are respectable and accomplished in various ways — Van Rompuy is noted for his haiku writing, for instance — but none will "stop the traffic" in foreign capitals, as Miliband put it. The lack of international gravitas doesn't mean President Barack Obama won't ever call, but he will phone the British prime minister, French president, German chancellor, and perhaps the leaders of Italy, Poland, and Spain first.

Blair could still reemerge in the EU's "time-honored fashion… the cosy back-room stich-up," in the words of the Times of London. One Eastern European diplomat complained: "Trying to work out who is going to be President of the EU Council is not dissimilar to decoding who was in or out in the Kremlin in the 1970s. It seems strange to many of us that 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall we have to dust off our Kremlinology skills here in Brussels."

However, even choosing Tony Blair or a similar figure likely wouldn't matter much to the EU. As the British think tank Open Europe observed: "the idea for a President is mostly about giving the EU a symbolic, political figurehead to help propel its wild dreams about becoming a world superpower." The so-called European Project remains far from completion.

Europe remains deeply divided over international issues, and those differences won't disappear through attempts by another official, even one as charming and talented as Blair, in Brussels to plaster over the cracks. Nor is adding a foreign minister — here, too, there are favorites and underdogs in a constantly changing race — and diplomatic corps enough to create a united foreign policy.

Moreover, as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner observed: "We must bear in mind, the necessity of supporting our diplomatic efforts with a common defense, a European defense…. Without this European defense our diplomacy lacks strength." Yet no one in Europe is interested in spending more on the military, creating forces which are combat capable, or deploying troops in harm's way. Even Great Britain is likely to retrench militarily in the face of a deep and prolonged recession.

Most Europeans live meaningful lives without great concern over how their continent is viewed in Washington or elsewhere. But Europe's political leadership remains burdened by the old Henry Kissinger insult: what's Europe's phone number? The Lisbon Treaty was drafted in part to provide such a phone number.

However, the EU remains a collection of nation states, not a nation state. Despite the forced passage of Lisbon, the differences among EU members remain great. And the addition of a president and foreign minister won't make anyone more willing to die for Brussels. Until Europeans are more loyal to Europe than their home countries, the European project will remain unfinished and unfulfilled. And the Lisbon Treaty will prove to be costly diversion.

Just over a week ago, in an incident that was widely reported in the international press and that reveals the threat to the Cuban regime of the growing Cuban blogger movement, Sanchez was assaulted in Havana by plain-clothed government agents. Though she was forcefully beaten, she and her friends managed to fight back and get away. More than that, they took pictures of their assailants and of the incident for posting on the blog, prompting the government thugs to leave the scene. One photo of an agent features the caption “She is covering her face…Perhaps afraid of the future.” Another photo features Sanchez pursuing her assailants with the caption: “They have watched us for decades. Now we are watching them.” Very smart.

As it happens, last week we posted a beautifully written paper by Sanchez (in Spanish) on Cato’s Spanish-language web page, www.elcato.org. (The paper just won a prize in an essay contest in Mexico organized by TV Azteca at which my Cato colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo was a judge.) Her essay, “Liberty as a Form of Payment,” describes the fraudulent deal that Castro promised when he came to power. In exchange for liberty, Cubans would be better off culturally, economically, and in other ways. Sanchez describes the reality of social control under communist Cuba in which the real exchanges occur as a consequence of the power relationship. Access to housing, jobs, new goods, and the possibility of minor improvements in life, all depend on a well documented support of the revolution through attendance of mass meetings and membership in the communist party, for example.

Or through personal relationships with those in power. Sanchez describes how young women long ago began prostituting themselves to high ministry or military officials in exchange for non-monetary goods or privileges. Such “courtesans of socialism” later turned to traditional prostitution with the arrival of currency convertibility in Cuba. Sanchez also optimistically describes the role that technology, especially the internet, is playing in creating spaces of liberty. In a country where people increasingly feel the regime’s days are numbered, such exercises of personal freedom can be powerful.

The United States achieved its dominant position in East Asia in the aftermath of World War II. Washington defeated Japan and created a network of alliances to both prevent any imperial Japanese renaissance and contain Soviet and, later, Chinese expansion. The Cold War with China, which went unrecognized for three decades, and North Korea, which remains unrecognized after six decades, was very chilly indeed.

But that world has largely disappeared. Japan has recovered and created the world's number two economy. The Soviet Union is gone. Maoist China lives on only in the late dictator's ubiquitous image. Vietnam has joined the global economy. South Korea has raced past the decrepit Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Other countries, ranging from Australia to India, are capable of playing a stabilizing role in the region.

The recent naval clash between South and North Korea demonstrates that the potential of conflict remains. However, without any link to a global hegemonic competitor like the Soviet Union, such regional instability poses little threat to the United States. Indeed, Pyongyang doesn't even pose much of a threat to the Republic of Korea. How else to explain why the ROK has for years failed to further expand its own military while subsidizing its supposed antagonist?

Yet Washington's Cold War alliance structure remains essentially unchanged. The United States maintains one-sided "mutual" defense treaties with Japan and South Korea. American officials routinely resist host nation demands to reduce deployments and close bases. That America must remain both militarily dominant and guarantor of regional peace is taken for granted. In Washington the People's Republic of China's apparent determination to create a military capable of deterring U.S. intervention along its border is treated as a threat to American security.

What has ever been must ever be appears to be the basis of U.S. foreign policy and military deployment.

The Obama administration should pursue a different course, a transformational agenda, emphasizing economic integration while promoting military detachment. America still has a major economic role to play, but should increasingly devolve defense responsibilities on countries in the region.

The most important relationship for the twenty-first century will be that between the existing superpower and the potential superpower. Washington should strengthen economic and trade ties with China. That requires maintaining an open market at home while working through contentious disputes, such as the value of the Yuan. The United States also needs to address its own irresponsible fiscal practices which may discourage Chinese purchase of U.S. government securities and investment in private American companies.

Moreover, Washington must forge a cooperative relationship on difficult regional issues like North Korea. The PRC has much at stake in a stable Korean peninsula; China also has much to gain from taking the lead in promoting diplomatic solutions of regional problems. The president should press hard for a more active PRC policy to support reinvigorated U.S. engagement with the North. In that case, Beijing should be prepared to take forceful measures if Pyongyang rejects a peaceful solution. Successfully defusing the North Korean geopolitical bomb would offer some of the "strategic reassurance" which the administration has talked about.

The United States should speak frankly about the importance of human rights, while recognizing Washington's limited ability to influence the PRC's behavior. An improved bilateral relationship is more likely than isolation to encourage greater respect by Beijing for the liberty of its citizens.

Japan, with a new and untested government in Tokyo, is likely to be another tough test for the president. He should treat Japan as a full partner. In economics, that means proposing a free-trade agreement (FTA). On defense, that means shifting to genuinely mutual security ties.

Rather than merely adjust its controversial Status of Forces Agreement, Washington should withdraw its garrisons from Japanese soil, turning defense responsibility for Japan over to Tokyo. The Japanese people must decide on the foreign policy and military forces which best serve their interests, but they should understand that the United States will no longer step into any resulting security gap.

Washington also should encourage greater cooperation between Japan and its neighbors. Some in East Asia continue to express disquiet at the thought of Tokyo taking on greater security responsibilities, but World War II ended more than six decades ago. The Japanese do not have a double dose of original sin and the Americans should no longer play geopolitical wet-nurse for nations which long ago developed the means to assert their own interests. Washington should engage North Korea over its nuclear program—in fact, bilateral talks are planned later this year.

At the same time, the United States should inform the North that full international integration requires the participation of South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia as well. The president should use this trip to begin a concerted effort to coordinate South Korea, Japanese, and U.S. policies regarding Pyongyang. However, Washington should allow the Republic of Korea (ROK) to lead the nonproliferation campaign. The South, with some forty times the North's GDP and twice its population, is well able to deter North Korean adventurism. Seoul also has the most at stake in maintaining a peaceful peninsula. As the U.S. steps back from its dominant military role, the ROK and its neighbors should step forward.

At the same time, Washington should seek to tighten economic integration. The starting point for that strategy should be an announcement—appropriately made at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum—of a push to ratify the FTA with South Korea and a campaign to promote further trade liberalization in a region that already has 168 FTAs in force, only two of which involve the United States (with Australia and Singapore).

President Obama needs to promote a changed attitude as much as offer specific policies. The new government in Japan appears to be particularly interested in promoting a regional order, called the East Asian Community, apart from the U.S. Washington should embrace rather than resist such an approach—which would represent genuine "change" from today's policy, which is still rooted in a nonexistent Cold War.

America will be most secure if friendly states in East Asia work together to confront sources of instability, promote respect for human rights, and encourage peaceful settlement of disputes. Such a cooperative venture, backed by a willingness to commit real resources to defense, as reflected, for instance, in Australia's defense white paper earlier this year, also would help channel China's rise in peaceful directions.

The United States will remain engaged in East Asia. America's cultural and economic ties to the region are long-lasting and mutually beneficial. But Washington no longer has any need to attempt to preserve regional military hegemony. And at a time of economic crisis the United States is losing its financial ability to do so. It will take time to transform America's military role. But President Obama should begin moving the region into a new era of less security dependence on Washington.

Growth accelerated with tentative reforms in 1980, and shot up to 9% after reforms deepened in the current decade. How much lower would infant mortality, illiteracy and poverty have been had India commenced reform a decade earlier, and enjoyed correspondingly faster growth and human development? I have published estimates in a paper for the Cato Institute (see http://www.cato.org/pubs/dbp/dbp4.pdf). This shows that the delay in reforms led to an additional 14.5 million infant deaths, an additional 261 million illiterates, and an additional 109 million poor people. Indian socialism delivered a monumental tragedy, lacking both growth and social justice.

Economists frequently estimate what would have happened had policies been different. The assumptions on which such estimates are based can always be questioned.

For instance, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has popularized the notion of 100 million missing women on account of gender discrimination in China, South Asia, West Asia and North Africa. These regions have 94 females per 100 males, against 105 females per 100 males in other countries with equal gender treatment. Sen assumed that without gender discrimination, the female:male ratio in the four developing regions would also have been 105:100. On this basis, he estimated that gender discrimination had caused a shortfall of over 100 million females — what he called "missing women".

Sen's model was so simplistic that he did not send his paper to an economic journal: he published these estimates in the New York Review of Books. Various economists complained that he had neglected other causes of gender differences, and some came out with alternative estimates.

Despite these objections, Sen's estimate of 100 million became world famous, and his phrase, "missing women", became standard lexicon in gender debates. What mattered was not the precision of his estimates, but the magnitude of the social disaster he was able to highlight.

In the same spirit (but without implicating Sen), i have sought to estimate the number of missing children, missing literates, and missing non-poor arising from the delay in economic reforms. Had reforms started in 1970 rather than 1980, India would have grown faster. In this fast-growth scenario, i assume that per capita income growth in the 1970s would have been what was actually achieved in the 1980s: growth in the 1980s would have been what was actually achieved in the 1990s: and growth in the 1990s would have been what was achieved in 2001-08.

I calculate the rate of change of infant mortality, literacy and poverty with GDP since 1971. I then apply this rate of change to the fast-growth scenario. This reveals what infant mortality, literacy and poverty would have been with faster growth.

In a fast-growth scenario, infant mortality would have been less every year, and in 2008 would have been 27 deaths per thousand births, against the actual 54 per thousand. The cumulative number of "missing children" turns out to be a massive 14.5 million. This is two-and-a-half times the number of Jews killed by Hitler.

I use trends from the latest surveys to calculate actual literacy and poverty levels in 2008, and compare these with literacy and poverty levels in a fast-growth scenario. With faster growth, literacy would have been virtually 100% by 2008, and 261 million more people would have been literate. Again, faster growth would have reduced the number of poor people in 2008 from 282 million to 174 million. This means we have 109 million "missing non-poor" on account of delayed reform.

Doubtless critics will object, as they did after Sen's exercise, that i have used a simple model that neglects other factors affecting infant mortality, literacy and poverty. Demographer Ansley Coale reworked Sen's calculations to show that the number of missing women was probably 60 million, not 100 million. That did not dent public horror at the social tragedy that Sen unveiled.

I invite critics to produce more sophisticated models on the impact of delayed reform, as Coale did in the case of missing women. If these more sophisticated models conclude that Indian socialism killed only 10 million children and not 14.5 million, i will shrug. My point about the magnitude of the social tragedy will stand.

Communist Party interrogators accused Cheng of being a spy, but her real "crime" was that she was viewed as a "capitalist roader". She had attended the London School of Economics in the 1930s, where she met her husband, Kang-chi Cheng, who later became general manager for Shell in Shanghai.

When he died, in 1957, Nien Cheng became a special adviser to the new general manager. She was the highestranked businesswoman in China at the time. Her skills in dealing with party officials were invaluable and helped Shell stay in China until the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

During her imprisonment, Cheng refused to admit to any wrongdoing. She was tortured and nearly died, but her determination to survive and her deep faith gave her the strength to persevere. She was released from prison on March 27, 1973, only to find the Red Guards had murdered her only child, Meiping, for failing to "confess" and denounce her mother as a "class enemy". Cheng's one hope in life was gone; she left China forever in 1980, and settled in Washington in 1983.

Anyone who knew Cheng could immediately see that she was special – even the doctor at the No 1Detention House said he never met a more "truculent and argumentative" prisoner. When she learned of her imminent release, she refused to leave the prison unless the authorities declared, in writing, that she was "innocent of any crime or political mistake". She insisted that they offer "an apology for wrongful arrest", and called the official statement "a sham and a fraud".

After nearly seven years in prison, she declared: "I shall remain here until a proper conclusion is reached about my case." The authorities refused, and the guards had to drag her out of prison.

It is ironic that Cheng learned about socialism during her studies at the London School of Economics, where she became a leftist. In her essay The Roots of China's Crisis, she wrote: "When I read a book on the Soviet Union by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, I thought, 'How wonderful and idealistic socialism sounds'."

Later, after her husband had served in Australia as a diplomat for the Nationalist government, the Chengs made the fateful decision to return to China in late 1948. They and many of their Western-educated friends were seduced by Mao Zedong's call for democracy, and wanted to help build a new China.

In her essay, Cheng notes that while she had learned about socialist ideals, such as the apparent success of Soviet central planning and state ownership, her professors never talked of "class struggle" or "the realities of communist rule".

What she painfully discovered was that in a society where individuals have no economic freedom, and there is no genuine rule of law, no one is safe from the power of the state. The Communist Party under Mao's iron fist destroyed civil society and traditional culture.

As she wrote in Life and Death in Shanghai, a new China was created after the communists' victory in 1949, but it was not the socialist ideal she had envisioned. Rather, the party created "mindless robots, unburdened by the capacity for independent thinking or a human conscience". Success depended on power, and justice vanished. "The result was a fundamental change in the basic values of Chinese society," she wrote.

Mao's mantra was: "Strike hard against the slightest sign of private property." Cheng's property, including her priceless porcelain collection, was confiscated. Her daughter was murdered and her freedom destroyed by the state.

While in jail, in 1971, the inmates were assembled and an official announced: "Many of you are here precisely because you worshipped the capitalist world of the imperialists and belittled socialist China. You placed your hope in the capitalist world and believed that one day capitalism would again prevail in China."

Today, mainland China is perhaps more capitalist that any other country, but it is "crony capitalism". The nation lacks full-fledged private property rights, especially in land; there is no independent judiciary to protect people and property against the party's monopoly on power; and freedom of religion and expression are sharply curtailed. The battle for justice that Cheng fought has not yet been won.

In her book, Cheng recognised the significance of president Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, and the importance of engaging China. She witnessed the progress the mainland had made since Deng Xiaoping's opening to the outside world in 1978. She understood the critical role of trade and investment in linking China to the West. But she also understood that, "Unless and until a political system rooted in law, rather than personal power, is firmly established in China, the road to the future will always be full of twists and turns."

It is disheartening to see how easily a group of well-intentioned and well-fed activists can decide about new technologies at the expense of those who are starving.

Nestlé has been subject to intense criticism in recent years, primarily over its strategies to sell infant formula in developing countries, but I think Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe is spot-on here.

Penn & Teller made a similar, if  more forcefully put, point in the last few seconds of this excellent video (warning: language may be offensive to some).

Last month, the government submitted a draft act to Parliament that calls for amending the country’s constitution so that it would safeguard various elements of economic freedom. The amendments would put caps on public debt, spending and deficits; and ban any kind of price controls, state ownership of banks and financial institutions and restrictions on currency convertibility, and any kind of control over the movement of capital. New taxes or increases in tax rates would require approval through a national referendum.

With the possible partial exception of Hong Kong’s Basic Law, I’m not aware of any other constitution that explicitly enshrines economic freedom. I’m told by Georgian colleagues that prospects for passage of the law looks good, with the constitution being amended as early as next month.

Concerns over the legitimacy of the U.S.-backed central government were also voiced by Brookings Institution senior fellow Bruce Riedel, who chaired an interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration. Riedel said at a Brookings event in August: "If we don't have a government we can point to that has some basis of legitimacy in the country, the best generals, the best strategy isn't going to help turn it around."

Now in its ninth year in Afghanistan, the United States finds itself in the unenviable position of assisting and sponsoring a corrupt, illegitimate, and slightly autocratic regime, which itself is contributing to the collapse of public confidence and to the resurgence of the Taliban insurgency. Conflicting assessments over what to do in Afghanistan is why President Obama has been "dithering" on a decision. His hesitancy is an implicit recognition that the United States might not succeed in laying a centrally-administered facade onto Afghanistan's preexisting society. As the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated in an August 2009 report:

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is not a reconstruction project—it is a construction project, starting almost from scratch in a country that will probably remain poverty-stricken no matter how much the U.S. and the international community accomplish in the coming years.

The fact that Americans are even discussing the capacity and political will of the government of Afghanistan shows how far we have strayed from our original objectives. The October 2001 invasion was to punish al Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban regime that harbored them. That narrow mission has since morphed into improving governance, fighting corruption, and building infrastructure. Underpinning U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is the belief that remaining will keep America safe, despite evidence to the contrary. For example, a 2004 Pentagon Task Force that reviewed the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts found that the underlying sources of threats to American interests were America's direct intervention in the Muslim world. This was the same task force that reported: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies." Reminder: That was Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

But when some people in Washington hear that nation-building in Afghanistan is not a precondition to making America safer, or that prolonging our presence undermines America's security, the argument for remaining then shifts to preserving the security and human rights of the people of Afghanistan. While I too would endorse preserving the human rights of the Afghan people, this line of reasoning invites certain questions: how many Afghans will be killed to save one Afghan life? How long should America stay until it sees progress? And what if some Afghans do not want the protection of western troops or the central government we keep afloat?

Of course, the same people who argue for preserving the security and human rights of the people of Afghanistan overlook certain contradictions. For instance, America's commitment to maintaining forward basing rights in countries like Uzbekistan puts America in the position of appearing to side with states that repress its own people. And, as my Cato Institute colleague Chris Preble says here on a recent bloggingheads.tv appearance, the rationale for intervening in Afghanistan was not the Taliban's human rights abuses, which we were well aware of in the late 1990s. Rather, the rational was for bringing al Qaeda to justice. Similarly in Iraq, the central rationale was not that Saddam Hussein did horrible things to his people. Only later — after several years of mission creep — did U.S. policymakers shift the goalposts of the mission to include moral considerations.

As we honor our veteran's this week with Armistice Day, we should be asking yet another important question regarding the preservation of human rights abroad: should U.S. soldiers be asked to fight and die for issues not directly related to U.S. national security?

In a recent article that appeared in the Times of London:

'We're lost — that's how I feel. I'm not exactly sure why we're here,' said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose closest friend was shot dead by a renegade Afghan policeman last Friday. 'I need a clear-cut purpose if I'm going to get hurt out here or if I'm going to die.' Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: 'If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don't.' The only soldiers who thought it was going well 'work in an office, not on the ground'. In his opinion 'the whole country is going to s***'.

Over one million U.S. soldiers have fought in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to General George Casey, U.S. Army chief of staff, troops have endured tough rotations of one-year-in, one-year-out for the past five years. Ryan Jaroncyk over at The Humble Libertarian writes that repeated deployments are leading to record suicide rates and an explosive epidemic of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Given the strains on America's all volunteer force, we should not forget that within the first one hundred days of his administration, Obama approved sending an additional 21,000 troops (it was actually more like 30,000 when we include the number needed for logistical and support purposes). These numbers don't include the more than 70,000 private security contractors in the country right now.

Washington has already surged into Afghanistan once this year. The United States should not spend more American blood and more of its ever-diminishing financial resources to prop up Karzai's ineffectual regime.

First, a few words about the author — a Marxist philosopher from Slovenia. Generally ignored or ridiculed in Slovenia, Zizek is considered (by some) to be the new messiah of leftist thought in the West. Why did the NYT chose to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism with Zizek’s call for “socialism with a human face,” rather than an op-ed by someone like Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet political prisoner tormented for years by the communists, is anyone’s guess.

But, it is the substance of Zizek’s article that is so misleading. The article makes absolutely no mention of the economic progress made in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, as the World Bank and even the United Nations tell us, incomes in the region have substantially increased and so has school enrollment. People live longer and healthier lives; environmental quality has much improved.

Zizek mentions communist oppression, but nowhere does he mention that 100 million people have died in the pursuit of communist utopia. Contemporary Marxists either ignore the astonishingly high number of victims of communism or try to minimize it. That is understandable. No matter what the (real or imagined) problems with capitalism are today, no sane person would be willing to embrace an alternative to capitalism that has a habit of resulting in a mountain of corpses.

The second — and equally risible tactic of contemporary communists (as Paul Hollander mentions in his just released Cato study) — is to try to draw a moral equivalence between socialism and market democracy. Zizek attempts to do exactly that by telling a story of a Soviet defector who became an outspoken critic of McCarthyism in the United States. The idea that there is any but the most superficial similarity between Soviet totalitarianism and the United States in the 1950s is preposterous — unless, of course, you are a modern-day leftist trying to salvage whatever remains of your philosophy from the dustbin of history.

Zizek is right to point out that there is growing disenchantment with capitalism and democracy. But, the recently released Pew and BBC polls have surely been influenced by the current (and likely temporary) economic environment, which, we are told, is the worst since the Great Depression. There are other psychological factors at work. Current problems feature more prominently in the minds of today’s Central and Eastern Europeans than shortages of 20 years ago and the old tend to remember their youth fondly — no matter what the actual political and economic circumstances.

Last, but not least, young people in the region know very little about communism. Learning about communism is by-and-large superficial, because the level of collaboration with communist regimes was very high among the general public. A thorough investigation of communist crimes would open too many wounds, it is claimed. Unfortunately, this collective amnesia means that instead of appreciating the great advances that their societies have made over the past 20 years, young people focus on their societies’ shortcomings vis-à-vis the contemporary West.

I have lived under communism. Although I have never personally experienced its true horrors, I had family members who did. The NYT’s choice of a lead op-ed on the day of an almost miraculous deliverance of hundreds of millions of people from communist slavery is shameful and sickening.

At a seminar in Wroclaw, Poland hosted by the Polish Adam Smith Center last month, I was reminded that the Poles correctly view their country as playing a central role in the 20th century drama of totalitarian aggression and eventual liberation. As the title of a book I was given suggests—It All Began In Poland—the country’s invasion by Nazi Germany, which sparked World War II, and the invasion and partial occupation by the Soviet Union almost immediately thereafter signaled what was in store for much of Europe. Similarly, the peaceful revolution of freedom that culminated in the collapse of communism was symbolized and pushed forward early on by Poland’s heroic Solidarity movement.

People from all parts of the former Soviet empire deserve recognition and admiration for their efforts and sacrifices in promoting freedom. As we reflect on this momentous day, let’s remember the special role the Poles played in making the world a better place.

Is it a “tragedy” (Newt Gingrich) that Obama did not go to Berlin to commemorate the fall of the wall?

My response:

There are many ways to characterize President Obama’s failure to appear personally today, on behalf of the American people, to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall.  None does him credit.  Yet to criticize his decision is to invite the derision of his apologists, as we are seeing already here at Politico Arena.  It is as if the Cold War never ended.  And at a fundamental level, it hasn’t.

The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, ranging from the internal contradictions of communism to the moral clarity and courage of communism’s opponents.  Above all, however, the Cold War marked a fundamental clash of ideas.  And nothing symbolized that clash more starkly than the Berlin Wall.  It was erected not to keep West Germans out of the “workers paradise” but to keep East Germans trapped behind the wall, many of whom were mercilessly shot as they tried to flee their brutal captors.  What greater symbol could there be of the difference between freedom and oppression.

Yet for all that time there were apologists and temporizers in the West.  “Detente,” “moral equivalence,” “convergence” — “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism,” President Carter said in 1977, even as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky, Natan Sharansky, and others were documenting the horrors of communism.  And only two years before the wall fell, as the Wall Street Journal notes editorially this morning, we heard CBS’s Dan Rather say, “Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy.”

Which brings us to President Obama.  What does he think?  Where does he stand on this fundamental clash of ideas?  What meaning is to be drawn from his decision to forgo the commemoration in Berlin today?  One can only speculate from what he has said and done, but the record does not inspire.  To be sure, several of his speeches suggest that he is a man of freedom — but his actions contradict those words.  Where has he been on the great human rights issues of our day?  When reformers were being brutalized in Iran, both over the summer and last week, he was slow, at best, to find a voice.  When the Dalai Lama visited last month, Obama declined to see him — the first time, in 10 visits since 1991, that a U.S. president has done so.  He’s had us join the U.N. Human Rights Council, the main mission of which seems to be to criticize the U.S. and Israel while lending credibility to its own oppressive members.  There’s more, but on balance it’s a sorry record.  He’s no Ronald Reagan.

It’s on the domestic front, however, that questions loom especially large.  His every move is that of a government man.  True to his roots as a “community organizer,” he sees government as the solution to our problems.  On autos, he has converted a bailout into ownership, fired the head of GM, and told the auto companies what kinds of cars to build, despite what the market might say.  He has appointed a “pay czar” — among many other “czars,” not to go unnoticed on this day — and empowered him to set executive pay scales.  He is promoting a union organizing scheme that effectively eliminates the secret ballot, environmental policies that fall most heavily on the poor, and tax and spend policies that penalize ambition and thrift while indebting us for generations to come.  And his health care policy will in time make us all dependent on government. Those policies, like so much else on his agenda, will restrict rather than expand our choices.  If enacted, we will all be less free.

It is the siren song of government “beneficence” that Obama seems most to hear, oblivious to the lessons of the 20th century.  The tragedy would be that we ourselves forgot that the fundamental clash of ideas will always be with us, even when the Berlin Wall is a distant memory.

In addition to delivering a major address at an event organized by the US-ASEAN Business Council, Lee also had an opportunity to provide his insights to President Barack Obama during a meeting in the Oval Office. His message to the American audience was unambiguous. It included a warning that America has overcommitted itself in Afghanistan and the rest of the Greater Middle East just as the global and economic power is shifting to the Pacific Rim. But Singapore and other American allies want the U.S. to remain engaged in the Asia-Pacific and counter-balance - not contain! - China, the region's leading economic powerhouse.

This week, as Obama begins his first trip to the Asia-Pacific region since taking office he is probably going to keep Lee's advice in mind, trying to convince his hosts that the U.S. is returning to play a energetic leadership role in the region. Obama should be applauded for enunciating his intentions to re-orient American global priorities towards the Pacific Rim, with the current tour of the region highlighting this change. Washington's commitment to renewed U.S. engagement in Southeast Asia will be demonstrated by Obama's participation in the side gathering of the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) members in Singapore. It was the willingness on the part of the new U.S. administration to engage Burma that made it possible for Obama to attend a meeting of the organization that includes that military regime as a member.

But during the 10-day tour that will include stops in Tokyo (where Obama will deliver one of his "major addresses), Singapore (where he will attend the in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum or APEC leaders' meeting), in Beijing and in Seoul, the president is going to meet officials and to address audiences that have concluded that the U.S. is losing ground in the region and that China will assume its position as an hegemon sooner or later.

Indeed, America has been in the process of retreating from the Asia-Pacific region for most of the eight years of the administration of President George W. Bush. It was not a secret that U.S. economic and security partners in the Asia-Pacific region have been expressing their concern that the preoccupation of Washington with the political-military instability in the Greater Middle East has diverted American attention from East Asia and its dramatic economic transformation, starting with the rise of China.

It was understandable that in the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush Administration would be investing much of its time and energy in leading the global campaign against terrorism. But the fixation with this problem, which led the U.S. into fighting two long and costly wars and launching numerous diplomatic initiatives in the Greater Middle East, created the impression that global trade and investment, issues that remained central to the emerging economies of the Pacific Rim, have been placed on Washington's policy backburner with high U.S. officials spending more time traveling to Cairo and Jerusalem than to Beijing and Jakarta. And in East Asian countries like in the rest of the world, U.S. unilateral approach helped ignite strong anti-American sentiments.

It was not surprising that the elites and publics in the region felt at times that Washington was giving them the cold shoulder, especially after former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had skipped two of the ASEAN's ministerial meetings and instead ended-up doing more diplomatic shuttling in the Middle East. In fact, even the annual APEC meetings, where investment and trade were supposed to dominate the discussions, proved to be one more occasion for President Bush to press his anti-terrorism campaign.

In a way, the American neglect of the Asia-Pacific region and its policy concerns has not only alienated its friends in the region. It also hurt long term U.S. economic and strategic interests. Just as the Americans were being drawn to more messy military and diplomatic quagmires in the Middle East, the Chinese were launching new "charm offensives" in the Asia-Pacific region, expanding their trade and investment and applying their soft power.

The sentiment that China was ascending while American power was receding, became more pervasive among East Asians in aftermath 9/15, the day in which Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy. That event marked the onset of a devastating financial earthquake in Wall Street that ended-up producing the most destructive global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930's. The crisis and its aftershocks seemed threaten the intellectual assumptions of American geo-economic policies of the 1990's, and in a way, the "irrational exuberance" about the American economy and the entire creed of globalization that was so popular among the Pacific Rim economies -- encouraging the spread of American-style free markets, de-regulating of American and global financial markets, liberalizing global trade, and expecting China and other emerging markets to join and support an American-led geo-economic and geo-strategic system.

Instead, while the tenets of American economic policymaking have been challenged at home and abroad, the Chinese economy has emerged as a winner out of the current crisis which explains why officials and executives in the region seem to find the Chinese economic and political model more suitable for their long-term needs. While Obama's charm offensive in the Asia-Pacific is certainly welcomed news for U.S. partners in the region, they also recognize that with protectionism rising as a political force in Washington it is unlikely that the Obama Administration will be launching new free trade initiatives any time soon. Hence the growing expectations in the region that the economies of East Asia could be moving in the direction of forming a regional economic community dominated by China.

So dramatic was the ensuing revolution that it is easy today to forget that communism ever existed -- or at least what it really meant. Decades of totalitarian oppression were swept away in an instant.

What may be the most important liberating moment in human history should give us hope even if we are tempted to despair about the future of our own nation and of Western civilization.

Communism was unmatched in its endless slaughter, killing more than 100 million. It impoverished spiritually as well as economically.

Yet what seems inevitable today was not obviously so in 1989. Liberty had always ended up stillborn in the Soviet empire.

But 1989 proved to be different.

In Poland the communist leadership organized free elections -- which it promptly lost. Hungary tore down its wall with Austria, allowing East Germans to escape their country through Hungary and on to the West. Demonstrations engulfed the so-called German Democratic Republic, forcing the Communist Party to retreat.

On Nov. 9 the regime opened the Wall, never to be closed again. Within a year a regime distinguished mainly by its willingness to shoot desperate people seeking freedom disappeared.

Revolution erupted even in Romania, unseating the monstrous Ceausescus. Eventually even the Soviet Union disappeared.

The collapse of communism remains a fantastic triumph of the human spirit. With minimal bloodshed, average people overthrew a gaggle of tyrannies; the desire for liberty trounced the lust for power.

There were heroes in all of the communist countries. Average people willing to speak out, demonstrate, and demand their rights as human beings.

Some heroes stand out. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet novelist who chronicled the horrors of the gulag. Lech Walesa, the electrician who climbed atop a shipyard wall in Gdansk, Poland, to declare that the time of repression was over. Pope John Paul II, who told his Polish countrymen to fear not.

The playwright Vaclav Havel, who called the Czech regime to account for its crimes. Imre Pozsgay, who broke with his Hungarian Poliburo colleagues to call the 1956 uprising a "popular revolt."

Even more important was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was a reform communist, but he kept the Soviet troops in their barracks, leaving Eastern European apparatchiks to stand alone.

Finally, there was Ronald Reagan. He understood the real nature of communism, that it truly was an "Evil Empire." He also believed that communism could be defeated and tossed into the dustbin of history.

On June 12, 1987, he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Another 29 months would pass, and Ronald Reagan would leave office, but the Brandenburg Gate did open.

Today it is almost as if the Wall never existed. Only a few small sections remain. The structure continually grew more deadly, yet several thousand people made it over, under, or around the Wall and the border fortifications lining the rest of the border between the two Germanys.

Alas, tens of thousands of East Germans were caught and imprisoned for "Republikflucht" -- attempting to flee the workers paradise. Worse, roughly 1,000 people were murdered attempting to escape their national prison.

The first person to die was 58-year-old Ida Siekmann, who jumped from her building to the bordering road in West Berlin on Aug. 22, 1961. Two days later a 24-year-old tailor, Guenter Litfin, became the first to be shot and killed -- while attempting to swim the River Spree.

On Feb. 6, 1989, 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy was the last East German to be murdered while seeking liberty. He was shot 10 times. On March 8, 32-year-old Winfried Freudenberg, an electrical engineer, became the last person to die in an escape attempt, when his home-made balloon crashed.

The fall of the Wall, and the evil system behind it, deserves to be celebrated. Not just on Nov. 9. But every day.

Two decades later much remains to be done by those who love liberty. Abroad tyranny remains. At home liberty also is threatened, though not as dramatically. The expansive welfare rather than the brutal authoritarian state is on the march.

Yet hope remains. Two decades ago what had only seemed to be a faint dream became a reality. The Berlin Wall fell. Communism disappeared. Hundreds of millions of people became free.

The spirit of liberty remains. Sometimes deeply buried. But the spirit of liberty remains.

Start with the locus classicus of American alliances, NATO. Several former heads of state and other policymakers from Central and Eastern European NATO members greeted the Obama administration six months into its term with a hectoring letter demanding Washington pay more attention to their region. The letter argues that these leaders' "ability to sustain public support at home for our contributions to Alliance missions abroad … depends on us being able to show that our own security concerns are being addressed in NATO and close cooperation with the United States."

In other words, these countries have options, and if Uncle Sam would like to continue receiving their contributions in places like Afghanistan, Washington had better pony up. The authors have several suggestions for us, one being to deploy military personnel on their territory. After all, they argue, "at a regional level and vis-à-vis our nations," Russia acts as a revisionist power.

It is easy to understand why these countries, given their experience with Russia, want increased American support. The trouble is that capitals across Central and Eastern Europe have shown precious little interest in carrying their own weight within the NATO alliance.

This past summer, for example, the Czech Defense Ministry announced it was cutting its defense budget by more than 10 percent. Other countries complaining of the looming threat from Russia, such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all spend less than 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense, an anemic figure.

Note that the countries could afford a robust defense against Russia if they chose. In 2008, the combined GDP of the NATO members added after the Cold War was roughly equal to Russia's. Along with wealthier Western European countries, these nations could keep Russia from pushing them around.

The simplest explanation for these countries' low defense spending is that their leaders know that Washington will do the work for them. And why should they pay for a service that will be provided anyway? That was more or less how things went during the Cold War.

U.S. alliances in Asia are almost as perverse. During his recent visit to Japan and South Korea, Defense Secretary Robert Gates faced a plucky new Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama. After imploring Hatoyama to continue Japan's miniscule contribution to the war in Afghanistan and not to reconsider the deal to realign U.S. forces in Japan, Gates was asked whether the U.S. military role in Japan might be scaled back. Offering the obligatory reference to the countries' "shared interest" in regional security, Gates admitted that "the primary purpose of our alliance from a military standpoint is to provide for the security of Japan … It allows Japan to have a defense budget … of roughly 1 percent of GDP."

This is an excellent reason why the Japanese should support the alliance, but it raises the question of why U.S. taxpayers should want to pick up the tab for Japan's security.

The next day, Gates was in South Korea, where he reassured the South Koreans that the United States would continue to provide extended deterrence to Seoul, "including the nuclear umbrella." There is such a thing as too much reassurance, however. Gates' statement likely had two effects: one, to diminish Seoul's concerns about the threat posed by the North, and two, to diminish Chinese apprehension that a nuclear North Korea may ultimately lead to a U.S. departure from Japan and South Korea, possibly causing those countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

Given that Washington's current policy on North Korea would benefit from a greater, not lesser, concern about the future in both Seoul and Beijing, Gates' explicit promise of nuclear extended deterrence to Seoul likely dampened the admittedly low prospects for progress on the North Korean nuclear issue.

America's alliances are no longer considered responses to security challenges. Instead, they have become ends in themselves. In an era of record-breaking budget deficits and serious economic problems at home, the billions of dollars Uncle Sam pays each year to baby-sit Europe and East Asia ought to be coming in for scrutiny, not perpetual affirmation.

In spite of its monumental failure to bring social peace and material abundance, socialism is enjoying something of a renaissance. From Venezuela to Bolivia to South Africa, government ministers espouse the supposed virtues of socialism. Even in the West, some policies are taking government intervention in the economy to levels unseen in decades. Given the renewed interest in alternatives to capitalism, it is perhaps appropriate to recall the last time that socialism was tried with real gusto.

Of course, shops can be filled with goods, roads can be rebuilt, and houses renovated. The psychological scars of communism take much longer to heal. As one traveler to Russia wrote in 1982:

If it is hard to describe the economic wasteland of Russia to someone who hasn't been there, it is even harder to describe what their totalitarian system has done to the human spirit ... It isn't just the drabness and grayness one sees everywhere. Or the rudeness and surliness one encounters so often. It's that you virtually never see people laughing, smiling, or just seeming to enjoy themselves. People seem to walk slightly bent over, their eyes always averting a stranger. There is an overwhelming sense of oppression and depression.

As the Austrian philosopher Friedrich von Hayek explained in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, central planning leads to massive inefficiencies and long queues outside empty shops. A state of perpetual economic crisis then leads to calls for more planning. But economic planning is inimical to freedom. As there can be no agreement on a single plan in a free society, the centralization of economic decision-making has to be accompanied by centralization of political power in the hands of a small elite. When, in the end, the failure of central planning becomes undeniable, totalitarian regimes tend to silence the dissenters—sometimes through mass murder.

Some 100 million people have died in the pursuit of a communist utopia. Eliminating profit and private property was meant to end social ills, such as inequality, racism, and sexism. But the closer a society got to Marxism—whether it was half-hearted attempt as in Hungary or a whole-hearted attempt as in Cambodia—the bloodier the result. Survival in a communist society necessitated lies, theft, and betrayal. Thus, as the former Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote, most people in the former Soviet bloc grew up without a moral compass. These morally compromised survivors of communism find it difficult to reflect on the past and to come to terms with it.

Unlike the Germans after the World War II, the people in ex-communist countries were never forced to face their demons. As a consequence, communist rule has not acquired the moral opprobrium of Nazism. As long as that remains the case, socialist economics will continue to enjoy an aura of plausibility.

So dramatic was the ensuing revolution that it is easy today to forget that communism ever existed — or at least what it really meant. Decades of totalitarianism impoverished people spiritually as well as economically. Those decades of oppression were swept away in an instant. What may be the most important liberating moment in human history should give us hope even as we despair about the future of our own nation and of Western civilization.

Communism's body count dwarfs that of fascism and Nazism. The latter was uniquely monstrous in its attempt to eradicate an entire people. But communism was unmatched in its endless slaughter. The Black Book of Communism, written by several European intellectuals — attacked for their effrontery in criticizing Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and other well-meaning mass murderers — estimated the death toll at more than 100 million. And the killings continue in such communist hell-holes as North Korea.

Today the former communist states range from robustly democratic to unpleasantly authoritarian. However, all have moved light years beyond what President Ronald Reagan so accurately termed the Evil Empire. Freedom now is widely viewed as the normal human condition.

What seems inevitable today was not obviously so in 1989, however. As the year dawned, the Soviet bloc was stirring. In Russia Mikhail Gorbachev had unleashed perestroika and glasnost; several satellite regimes were trembling.

Still, liberty had always seemed to end up stillborn in the Soviet empire. Somewhat less thuggish apparatchiks, not cosmopolitan liberals, replaced brutal murderers in the USSR. The 1953 East German demonstrations, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the 1968 Prague Spring were all summarily crushed. Poland's Solidarity movement was suppressed in the dead of cold night in December 1981.

But 1989 was different.

Hungary led the way. The man who betrayed his colleagues in 1956, Janos Kadar, had been deposed the previous year. The murdered revolutionary leaders, most notably Imre Nagy, were reburied. Plans for multiparty elections were announced. The Communist Party was dissolved.

In Poland the Solidarity union stirred anew and the communist leadership retreated. The regime was foolish enough to hold free elections — which it lost, dramatically.

Hungary tore down its wall with Austria. It didn't matter so much to Hungarians, who already had been allowed to travel. But Budapest's action freed everyone else in Eastern Europe, who had been allowed to vacation within the Soviet bloc. In particular, East Germans began streaming out of their country and then through Hungary. Others fled to the West German embassy in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The human flood destabilized East Germany, the formerly bedrock Soviet satellite that trailed only Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania as Eastern Europe's most rigid and authoritarian regime.

Demonstrations first occurred in the so-called German Democratic Republic during the spring over yet another predictably fraudulent election. By the fall there were weekly marches in Leipzig: The GDR leadership temporized, causing the number of protesters to multiply. Communist Party boss Erich Honecker wanted to shoot them; rather than commit mass murder, the Politburo dumped Honecker. On November 4 a million people gathered in Alexanderplatz in East Berlin to demand the end of communism.

On November 9 the regime opened the Wall. In fact, the desperate communist leadership had decided only to relax travel restrictions, but Politburo member and spokesman Guenter Schabowski misunderstood his colleagues' decision and announced at a press conference that the border was opening at that moment. Tens of thousands of people gathered at still closed checkpoints, causing befuddled border guards to stand aside. The Berlin Wall was open, never to be closed again. Within a year the ugly, brutish regime, which had distinguished itself by shooting desperate people seeking to escape to freedom, disappeared.

The other European communist autocracies fell as well. Bulgaria dumped its ruler of 35 years, Todor Zhivkov. The tottering Czech regime yielded power in the so-called "Velvet Revolution." A mixture of popular demonstrations and military revolt unseated the monstrous Ceausescus in Romania. As revolution erupted they fled by helicopter. Their pilot observed: "They look as if they were fainting. They were white with terror." On Christmas Eve they were executed after a drumhead court martial.

The newly free countries have been bedeviled by problems. Of most concern is Russia's retreat towards authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the collapse of communism remains a fantastic triumph of the human spirit. With minimal bloodshed, average people overthrew a gaggle of tyrannies. What some thought to be impossible became real, as the desire for liberty trounced the desire for power.

There were heroes in all of the communist countries. Average people willing to speak out, demonstrate, and demand their rights as human beings. Average people willing to say no to the apparatchiks who had so long lived off the workers they were supposed to represent.

Some stand out. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet novelist who chronicled the horrors of the gulag and stripped the Soviet regime of any claim to legitimacy. Dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, who was banished internally after protesting Soviet man's inhumanity to man.

Lech Walesa, the electrician who nearly a decade before the Wall's collapse famously hopped over a shipyard fence in Gdansk, Poland, to declare that the time of repression was over. The forces of reaction reasserted themselves martial law in late 1981, but nine years later Walesa was elected president of Poland.

In Czechoslovakia there was Alexander Dubcek, who attempted to give communism a human face. The playwright, and first president, Vaclav Havel, called the regime to account for its crimes. Current President Vaclav Klaus engineered his nation's adoption of market economics as well as peaceful split between the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

More than four decades ago Imre Nagy, Pal Maleter, and thousands of Hungarian revolutionaries demanded freedom and were murdered by the Soviets and their Hungarian stooges. In 1989 Imre Pozsgay broke with his Poliburo colleagues, calling the earlier uprising a "popular revolt." He also pushed to tear down Hungary's wall with Austria.

Even more important was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was, of course, a reform communist, not a Western-style democrat. His crackdown in the Baltic states left blood on his hands.

Nevertheless, he was the necessary transition from communist totalitarianism to everything else. His decision to loosen the repressive bonds in the Soviet Union was heroic: events spun out of his control, but he was willing to pay that price in order to humanize the most murderous political regime in human history.

Equally important was his decision to keep the Soviet troops in their barracks throughout Eastern Europe. Moscow had ruthlessly crushed all previous attempts by subject peoples to lessen, let alone eliminate, communist repression. In 1989, however, Gorbachev let Eastern European communist leaders stand alone. They could not count on the loyalty of their own militaries. Nor could they depend on Soviet aid. In every country but Romania the ruling elites blinked. In the latter they lost anyway.

Finally, there was Ronald Reagan. He understood what communism was about, that it truly was an "Evil Empire." But he also believed that communism could be defeated, that the most ruthless totalitarian system ever created could be tossed into the dustbin of history.

On June 12, 1987 he stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said: "General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Another 29 months would pass, and Ronald Reagan would leave office, but the Brandenburg Gate did open.

Today it is almost as if the Wall never existed. Only a few small sections remain of the massive concrete structure that ran roughly 100 miles around West Berlin, a free island deep within the Evil Empire. Yet it is a testament to man's inhumanity to man which we can ill afford to forget.

The "wall" started out as barbed wire along streets, followed by brick walls. The structure grew more fearsome over time, mixing concrete walls, wire mesh fencing, watch towers, and anti-vehicle trenches. Yet several thousand people made it over, under, or around the Wall and border fortifications lining the rest of the border between the two Germanys. Human ingenuity knows few bounds when people are seeking freedom.

Alas, far more people failed in their attempt to be free. Tens of thousands of East Germans were imprisoned for "Republikflucht," or attempting to flee the East German paradise. Worse, roughly 1,000 people were murdered attempting to escape East Germany, some 200 from Berlin.

The first person to die while attempting to escape was 58-year-old Ida Siekmann, who jumped from her building to the bordering road in West Berlin on August 22, 1961 (the structure was later demolished to create a "death strip"). Two days later a 24-year-old tailor, Guenter Litfin, was shot and killed while attempting to swim the River Spree.

A year later an 18-year-old bricklayer, Peter Fechter, was shot and left to bleed to death in the death strip near Checkpoint Charlie within full view of residents in West Berlin — who could do nothing for him. On February 6, 1989, 20-year-old Chris Gueffroy became the last East German to be murdered while seeking to escape his national prison. He and a friend thought the order to shoot had been lifted; he was hit ten times and died on the spot. His friend was injured but survived — to spend time in prison. On March 8, 32-year-old Winfried Freudenberg, an electrical engineer, became the last person to die in an escape attempt, when his home-made balloon crashed.

The fall of the Wall, and the evil system behind it, deserves to be celebrated. Not just on November 9. But every day.

Two decades later much remains to be done by those who love liberty. Abroad tyranny remains: North Korea's odious dictatorship brutalizes and starves its people, the Castros' dictatorship remains in power a half century after the Cuban revolution, and China has reformed its economy, not its political system. Russia is retrogressing, while in some Eastern European states economic reforms have stalled, political systems have deadlocked, and communist crimes remain unpunished.

At home liberty is threatened, though not as dramatically. The expansive welfare state rather than the brutal authoritarian state is on the march, threatening to consume the health care system. While spending wildly on bailouts, pork, and everything in between, Congress is considering a massive energy tax, which would devastate the private economy. Our society seems set to become both less free and less prosperous.

Yet hope remains. Two decades ago what had only seemed to be a faint dream became a reality. The Berlin Wall fell. Communism disappeared. Hundreds of millions of subjects of the Soviet empire became free.

The spirit of liberty remains. Sometimes deeply buried. But the spirit of liberty remains.

Che Guevara, the Argentinean communist who fermented revolutions in Cuba and the Congo, was finally dispatched by the Bolivian forces in 1967. Some 42 years later — long after the specter of revolutionary communism ceased to hound most of mankind — Che appears to be having the last laugh. His image is ubiquitous in the West — adorning the shirts and bags of an affluent but historically illiterate generation. Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, was spotted wearing a Che t-shirt few years ago. This year's "Icons" collection by Belstaff (an Italian clothing company) contains a "Che Guevara replica jacket."

Che Guevara, as Alvaro Vargas Llosa shows in The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty, was a megalomaniac and a murderer. Embarrassingly for the young idealists sporting his image, he was also a racist, a homophobe and an anti-Semite. "The Negro is indolent and lazy," Che opined about his Congolese comrades, "and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent." Ignorance about the real Che is universal. Thus, Angola's capital of Luanda boasts a Che Guevara Street and the South African capital of Pretoria may soon be graced by a street of the same name.

The continued — albeit limited — attractiveness of communist ideals and some of its protagonists, such as Karl Marx (anti-Semite), Vladimir Lenin (founding father of the Gulag), Fidel Castro (visit Cuba and see for yourself), and Che Guevara, suggests that mankind is yet to come to terms with the legacy of communism. Nazi victims are rightfully remembered in countless books and films. Their relatives can visit well-funded museums in Berlin and Washington, D.C. Except for a few discredited characters, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran among them, people around the world know about the nature and extent of the Holocaust. The crimes of communism, in contrast, remain, by and large, shrouded in veils of ignorance and denial.

Communism has so far escaped an appropriate degree of moral opprobrium for several reasons. As the historian Paul Hollander argues, most victims of communism died due to appalling living conditions in the Gulag and laogai (the Soviet and Chinese forced labor camps respectively). They were not killed in a determined way — as symbolized by the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Moreover, the evidence of communist crimes is often difficult to collect. The Russian archives, for example, have been shut by a government determined to whitewash Russia's communist past including its most notorious protagonist — Joseph Stalin.

The complicity of the current governing and intellectual elites in most of Central and Eastern Europe in the perpetuation of communism is another reason. Some, like the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, were Soviet spies. Others, like the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, were ordinary communist party members. While the degree of their complicity with communism varies, these men (and women) have been morally compromised. Absolute condemnation of communism, in other words, would amount to condemnation of their past behavior.

Few people have the courage publicly to admit their mistakes. Most prefer to justify their actions or to forget them. Unfortunately, many of the Western intellectuals who promoted communist ideas and minimized communist crimes have never recanted. Driven by naïve idealism and loathing of Western imperfections, they embraced a utopian vision of a society free of inequities between classes, races and genders; a society free of profit, greed and war. The more Western democracies tried to overcome their shortcomings, the more did the Western idealists trust the empty rhetoric of communism.

In the end, the only equality that communism achieved was that of a breadline and that of a mass grave. Che Guevara symbolizes communism like no other. His image, like his beliefs, belongs in the dustbin of history.

• After 20 years, Paul Hollander looks back at why the Berlin Wall fell.

• Nazism and Communism: Why you rarely hear about the atrocities of Soviet communism.

• Imposing “paradise” at gunpoint.

• Flashback to 1990: Why the Soviets fell.

• Fear and Loathing in the Soviet Union: Cato president Ed Crane discusses his trip to the other side of the Iron Curtain in 1982.

• Podcast: Why Russia must confront the criminal nature of its communist past.

Have you noticed that many politicians who have trouble dealing with reality also seem to prefer fantasyland when dealing with budgets?

Those on the left never stop claiming that problems will be solved if only tax rates are increased. Why then does California, with its 10.6 percent state income tax rate, have a huge budget deficit and a 12.2 percent unemployment rate, while Texas, which does not have a state income tax, enjoys a budget surplus and a below average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent?

Why then does nearly bankrupt Rhode Island with the eighth-highest overall state tax burden in the United States, including a 7.75 percent income tax rate, have a 13 percent unemployment rate, while South Dakota with the fourth-lowest state tax burden and no state income tax, have virtually full employment with only 4.8 percent unemployment?

New York politicians have been living in political fantasyland for many years. Upper-income people living in New York City have faced the highest state and local income tax rates in the country (over 12 percent). Recent studies show high-income earners are in mass flight from New York to friendlier tax environments. The rational thing for New York politicians to do would be to cut tax rates to make New York more competitive; but no, they increased taxes on the top earners (many of whom continue to pack their bags).

It is not only politicians who live in fantasyland, but others as well, such as some labor leaders. The new (in office since January) Republican governor of Puerto Rico, Luis G. Fortuno, inherited a budget deficit of $3.2 billion, which is larger than any state budget in the United States on a per capita basis.

For many years, Puerto Rico has suffered from bloated government with five times as many government workers per capita than California. Seventy percent of the budget goes for government salaries and benefits.

Mr. Fortuno has had little choice but to take drastic action to keep the government from going bankrupt and losing its credit rating. He has already laid off 4,000 government employees, and he plans to lay off another 17,000 this week.

As would be expected, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who brought on a good part of the crisis through its excessive employment and wage demands, is now trying to prevent the governor from doing what is needed.

The SEIU has yet to learn that a parasite that kills its host soon finds it has no place to live (work) — just ask the auto union. Unlike the governor, the SEIU and the others continue to live in fantasyland, ignoring the fact that the cookie jar is empty.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has a long history of confusing facts with fiction, this past week added to the administration's claim that "nearly 650,000" jobs have been created or saved by the stimulus package. He said the recovery plan "is operating as advertised" and is on target to reach the president's goal.

In reply, the highly respected economist, Alan Meltzer, who has a long history of being able to distinguish between facts and fiction, said: "The administration can make up any number it pleases. The number has no meaning. The Council of Economic Advisers gets a number for jobs saved using the same model that Dr. Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein used when they forecast that the $787 billion stimulus program would keep the worst unemployment rate in this recession at about 8 percent. But as we all know, since that bill became law, our economy has shed some 3 million jobs and the unemployment rate is nearing double digits."

Ironically, the Obama administration and the politicians who run New York, California, etc., may ultimately help Mr. Fortuno by driving many of their highest-earning and most productive citizens to Puerto Rico.

Mr. Fortuno has made it clear that he believes the key to solving Puerto Rico's economic problems is to reduce the size of the government and take its foot off the windpipe of the private sector. He told me at a breakfast meeting last week that he wants to reform the tax system and reduce rates for everyone.

Any American citizen (which includes all native-born Puerto Ricans) who resides in Puerto Rico pays income taxes to the Puerto Rican, not to the U.S., government. The maximum income tax rate in Puerto Rico is now 33 percent, just a couple of points lower than the U.S. federal rate.

But if Mr. Obama succeeds in raising the maximum federal income tax rate up to the 50 percent range (by letting the Bush tax cuts expire and increasing "surtaxes" to fund his health care and energy schemes), and if the high-tax states continue to raise their rates so the total burden on upper-income people reaches 60 percent or more, Puerto Rican residency is going to become increasingly attractive.

At the moment, most who flee the high-tax states go to states without an income tax like Texas, Florida, and so on, but they still have to pay the federal income tax. Thus if Mr. Fortuno is able to reduce the maximum marginal tax rates in Puerto Rico to the mid-20s, many job-creating entrepreneurs are likely to make a beeline toward what will increasingly be an island paradise, where tax rates will be half of what they are on the mainland.

The only thing I don’t like about this video is that I fear people may no longer want to watch the ones I narrate.

As President Obama proclaimed when introducing his American Graduation Initiative, which is now part of the ironically titled Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act:

By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world….Already we’ve increased Pell grants by $500. We’ve created a $2,500 tax credit for four years of college tuition. We’ve simplified student aid applications….A new GI Bill of Rights…is beginning to help soldiers coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan to begin a new life — in a new economy.  And the recovery plan has helped close state budget shortfalls…at the same time making historic investments in school libraries and classrooms and facilities all across America.  So we’ve already taken some steps that are building the foundation for a 21st century education system…one that will allow us to compete with China and India and everybody else all around the world. 

Now, while a college education could furnish important learning that helps drive innovation and economic development, it could also be as worthless as conferring a bachelor’s degree on a dog. What’s important is that people actually learn things of value, not simply that they get degrees. But a funny thing happened in China…

Yesterday, news broke that China’s top education official has been sacked. Reports the New York Times:

Facing rising criticism over the quality of schools and a crush of jobless college graduates, China’s legislature announced Monday that it had removed the minister of education after six years on the job and replaced him with a deputy.

China has been cranking out college graduates at a breakneak pace, but the quality of the education has become highly suspect and, perhaps more importantly, there haven’t been nearly enough jobs to employ all the newly credentialed. In other words, simply producing more graduates — no matter how much it has frightened some people in America – has largely been a waste.

The obvious lesson from this should be that it’s foolish to simply make massively expanding the ranks of degree holders a national goal. But that doesn’t compute for many U.S. politicians, despite abundant evidence that we don’t need heaps more graduates anymore than China does. It’s getting elected that matters most to politicians, and as long as voters keep believing that government is opening the door to the middle class simply by pushing more and more people to college, politicians will keep wasting taxpayer dollars on unnecessary degrees.

So let’s hope that both voters and politicians will learn China’s clear college lesson: Fixating on degrees is not very smart. Failing that, let’s hope that we at least don’t have any rioting… 

You’re a billionaire but you don’t want anyone, least of all the taxman, to know. What do you do? Head for a palm-fringed island paradise or a snow-covered Alpine micro-state? Wrong. The world’s most opaque jurisdictions – the ones that will best shield you and your cash from the light – are mostly in the heart of the most sophisticated and powerful global financial centres. London, Luxembourg and Zurich are in the top five most secretive jurisdictions, according the first comprehensive index of financial transparency ever compiled. Yet top of the pile, beating the British Virgin Islands, Belize or Liechtenstein as the best place to hide wealth, is Delaware. One of the smallest states in the US, it offers the best protection for anyone who does not want to disclose their identity as a beneficial owner of a company. That is one very good reason why the East Coast state hosts 50% of the US’s quoted firms and 650,000 companies – almost equivalent to one company per Delaware resident. …Delaware – the political power-base of the US vice-president, Joe Biden – offers high levels of banking secrecy and does not make details of trusts, company accounts and beneficial ownership a matter of public record. Delaware also allows companies to re-domicile within its borders with minimal disclosure, and allows the existence of privacy-enhancing “protected cell” or “segregated portfolio” companies, among many other stratagems useful for protecting the identity of those who do business there.

While greatly concerned with communism in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Americans -- hostile or sympathetic -- actually knew little about communism, and little is said here today about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. The media's fleeting attention to the momentous events of the late 1980s and early 1990s matched their earlier indifference to communist systems. There is little public awareness of the large-scale atrocities, killings and human rights violations that occurred in communist states, especially compared with awareness of the Holocaust and Nazism (which led to to far fewer deaths). The number of documentaries, feature films or television programs about communist societies is minuscule compared with those on Nazi Germany and/or the Holocaust, and few universities offer courses on the remaining or former communist states. For most Americans, communism and its various incarnations remained an abstraction.

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

Communist systems ranged from tiny Albania to gigantic China; from highly industrialized Eastern European countries to underdeveloped African ones. While divergent in many respects, they had in common a reliance on Marxism-Leninism as their source of legitimacy, the one-party system, control over the economy and media, and the presence of a huge political police force. They also shared an ostensible commitment to creating a morally superior human being -- the socialist or communist man.

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder. People were persecuted not for what they did but for belonging to social categories that made them suspect.

In the aftermath of the fall of Soviet communism, many Western intellectuals remain convinced that capitalism is the root of all evil. There has been a long tradition of such animosity among Western intellectuals who gave the benefit of doubt or outright sympathy to political systems that denounced the profit motive and proclaimed their commitment to create a more humane and egalitarian society, and unselfish human beings. The failure of communist systems to improve human nature doesn't mean that all such attempts are doomed, but improvements will be modest and are unlikely to be attained by coercion.

Soviet communism collapsed for many reasons, including the economic inefficiency that resulted in chronic shortages of food and consumer goods, and pervasive and mendacious propaganda, which amounted to the routine misrepresentation of reality highlighting the gap between theory and practice, and promise and fulfillment. The political will of leaders behind the Iron Curtain diminished over time -- in part because of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 revelations about Joseph Stalin's crimes but also because of their own experiences of the system's flaws. They no longer had the will to crush dissent. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev allowed new revelations of the errors and evils of communism to be aired -- further undermining the legitimacy of communist rule.

The failure of Soviet communism confirms that humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience. But communism's collapse also suggests that under certain conditions people can tell the difference between right and wrong. The embrace and rejection of communism correspond to the spectrum of attitudes ranging from deluded and destructive idealism to the realization that human nature precludes utopian social arrangements and that the careful balancing of ends and means is the essential precondition of creating and preserving a decent society.