Category: Current Affairs

Ban elephants. That is what the Thai Prime Minister has decided.

Thaksin Shinawatra says elephants brought in from the countryside cause road problems in an already congested capital city. In his national weekly radio address, he said he had told the Interior Ministry and the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority to “not let elephants into Bangkok”. Scores of domesticated elephants – estimates range from 60 to 250 – roam Bangkok streets with their handlers, begging for food or promoting the sale of ivory trinkets. They sometimes get hit by vehicles or fall into drains. Many of the elephants, extensively used for logging, were made redundant by a 1989 ban on the industry. Thaksin said financial backers purchase elephants and then rent them out to the tourist-tout handlers.

Traffic jams in Bangkok are considered to be among the world’s worst. It can take four hours to cross town, which is one reason why many Thai cabs come equipped with bathroom facilities. At six p.m., in the middle of rush hour, downtown traffic goes less than a mile an hour, on average.

Here is a discussion of Thai traffic problems, and their solutions. More mass transit, rerouting one way roads, and road pricing are the most promising alternatives to the status quo. Banning elephants is not mentioned, which leads me to suspect that the Thai Prime Minister is using them as a scapegoat (or should I say scape-elephant?) for the problem.

Don’t even ask about Thai traffic in the monsoon season.

I have heard numerous scenarios of how the capture of Saddam might prove counterproductive for Iraqi reconstruction. Perhaps the Shiites no longer need U.S. protection from a Saddam return, and they will cease to support us. Perhaps the American public will now demand a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country.

The market appears to disagree with these fears. Since the capture of Saddam, the Iraqi dinar is up nearly eight percent, as reported by The Financial Times. Since mid-November the currency is up sixteen percent. To be sure, this price is a managed float. Nonetheless the price is set in a daily bank auction, combined with information taken from the street markets. It is commonly conceded that the market is a good barometer of Iraqi political expectations about the future of the country.

Walking around Paris, I came across the following in The International Herald Tribune:

“The government wants to correct France’s image,” said Christophe Beaux, technical adviser for the Ministry of Economy, Finances and Industry. “Our image has been stained by cliches,” Beaux said. “The bad publicity generated by the 35-hour workweek, by workers going on strike, gives people the impression that French people do not like to work.”

Those cliches and bad publicity will just kill your reputation, won’t they?

Note, however, that the French proclivity for strikes should not be attributed to laziness. (Here is some more systematic data: Excel file, html, comparing the French to other countries. Of the G-7, only the Canadians strike more.) In fact many French strikes are hard work. French strikers are more likely than most striking nationals to march, blockade, destroy, or otherwise make their displeasure public. This tendency stems from the centralized nature of the French economy and governance. A few tractors or transport strikers can shut down large parts of the country and thus suffice to grab national attention. French strikers are working hard in their quest for rents.

Addendum: French diplomats are now at strike, this should make at least Andrew Sullivan happy.

Read Jacob Levy on the new French measure to ban private individuals from wearing conspicuous religious symbols in the classroom. This would include Islamic headscarves, Jewish yarmulkes, and “large” Christian crosses. Don’t even ask about the Sikhs, who are obliged to wear turbans as their hair grows long. Here is a brief excerpt from Jacob’s analysis:

The proposed law is really quite repressive. One item that hasn’t been much mentioned in the English-language press is that it also prohibits wearing any visible political symbol (buttons and badges and so on). One article I read about that proposal in Le Monde last week made quite clear how arbitrarily that will be enforced, with school administrators drawing their distinctions between what is and what isn’t political. An AIDS ribbon? An anarchist’s A button? A button in support of SOS-Racisme? One administrator said that that wouldn’t be prohibited, because anti-racism, isn’t a political value but a republican value. But the ban clearly isn’t restricted to a bright-line rule against partisan affiliations, either. It is going to leave tremendous discretion in the hands of principals to ban what they dislike and allow what they like.

Here is more:

It is, always, all about France and the French state, never about the conflicting obligations in conscience felt by committed religious believers.

Chirac’s announcement– which was not a surprise– referred to ‘the Islamic veil, under whatever name one gives it.’ This is a recurring rhetorical device of the laicitists. There are, as far as I know, no reported incidents of French Muslim schoolgirls attending school actually veiled. French Islam is not, as a rule, that conservative. What is at stake is headscarves, and the incessant use of “voile” instead of “foulard” is an attempt to elide the difference between committed believers and fundamentalists.

Worst of all, it is estimated that about 2/3 of the French public support this measure. The only bright side is that France’s reputation in the Arab world is likely to take a big hit.

I hope that I will be able to afford this one day but, if not me, my sons.

1. Parisians own about 200,000 dogs.

2. Those dogs leave behind approximately ten tons of droppings every day.

3. In the average year, it is believed that six hundred people break a limb slipping on such droppings, or when trying to pick the droppings up.

4. A brigade of sixty green motorcycles drives around town, picking up droppings. Of course they reach only a small percentage of the total.

5. There is a sizeable fine (about five hundred dollars) for leaving droppings behind. In a recent year only four people had to pay the fine.

6. The core problem is the absence of a Parisian police force. The only police in Paris are the Police Nationale. They consider it beneath their dignity to enforce such laws.

7. The city of Paris cannot control its own bylaws for security, traffic, or sanitation.

8. Only towns with less than ten thousand inhabitants are allowed to have their own police forces. Larger police forces would be considered a threat to national power.

9. There is something to be said for federalism after all.

The facts are from the stimulating Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. If you are looking for a book to explain how France works, here is a good place to start.

I am in Paris as the American representative to a UNESCO conference on cultural diversity. Approximately twenty scholars and public figures will be attending, but I expect to have the strongest sympathies for cultural free trade.

From my point of view the timing for this conference could not be better. The French like to charge that American mass culture has no respect for diversity or minority points of view. But recently a French panel recommended a ban on religious attire in French public schools. Headscarves, skullcaps, and “large” crosses would not be allowed. Apparently sufficiently small crosses would be OK, Stars of David would be OK too, again provided that they are not too conspicuous. Many people in France expect that this measure will pass into law, Chirac just endorsed it. French Muslims, of course, are irate. Note that many French Jewish schoolchildren have been afraid to wear religious attire to public school for some time, mostly for fear of being beat up. Randall Parker offers commentary and numerous links on all of these issues.

The French also failed this week to rewrite the veto powers written into the Nice agreement of 2000. More specifically, the French and Germans cannot push through any EU reforms they wish. Instead, the Polish and the Spanish, both allies of the U.S. I might add, keep enough voting rights to have veto power. This development, of course, favors the rights of the smaller countries, although there is now talk of a financial punishment for Poland and Spain. Now I am waiting to see what happens when one of the smaller EU countries fails to meet the three percent rule for deficits, just as the French and Germans have failed to do.

Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their crews and insurers, appears to notice that pirates are assaulting ships at a rate unprecedented since the glorious days when pirates were ‘privateers’ protected by their national governments. The 18th and 19th-century sponsors of piracy included England, Holland, France, Spain and the United States. In comparison, the famed Barbary corsairs of North Africa were an irritant. Raiding rivals’ merchant vessels went out of fashion after the Napoleonic Wars, and piracy was outlawed in the 1856 Declaration of Paris (never signed by the US). Since the end of the Cold War, it has been making a comeback. Various estimates are given of its cost to international trade. The figure quoted most often is the Asia Foundation’s $16 billion per annum lost in cargo, ships and rising insurance premiums.

The International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which collects statistics on piracy for ship owners, reports that five years ago pirates attacked 106 ships. Last year they attacked 370. This year looks worse still. In the first nine months, there were 344 attacks, up from 271 for the same period in 2002. Twenty crewmen have been murdered so far this year, up from six a year ago. If violent crime increased more than 300 per cent in five years in New York or London, the public would demand urgent police action. At sea, where the only lives lost are those of poor seafarers from the Third World, no one cares.

Here is the full story. The U.S. government is not making this a priority, but the next major terrorist attack may well be seaborne.

The Cato Institute sponsors the $500,000 biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Nominations for the prize which will awarded in May can be made here.

The Italian Communist Party recently put a rider in a bill to ban all child labor in advertisements. The main goal was to disrupt the government but now it appears that the bill will pass. If so, babies will no longer be allowed in Italian television ads. One in three Italian TV ads uses a baby, although (because?) Italian women are having so few babies. 1.2 children are born per woman, well below the replacement rate, and one of the lowest rates in the world. Some companies are wondering how they will publicize diapers. The source is the Weekend Financial Times, this French Internet Cafe makes linking very difficult.