Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

In Venezuela, savvy shoppers are hunting down scarce supplies of toilet paper with a smartphone app. The smartphones, compact packages of electronics, are several generations more advanced than the white square, but they are available when the toilet paper isn't, because unlike the toilet paper they aren't subsidized and price controlled. While Hugo Chavez did at one point unveil a Chavezphone for the poor, he succumbed to the wonders of Cuba's Socialist medicine before they could become as big as Obamaphones. But if Venezuela ever falls to the dumbphone, then there won't be a smartphone app to find a smartphone with. The sight of modern men and women hunting down toilet paper with smartphones seems like the Soviet Union as reimagined by William Gibson, but it's a common enough outcome in an economy that is really a patchwork of uneven subsidies. The Arab Spring was fueled by the social media apps of smartphones and anger over insufficient subsidies for stap

Every city is by necessity a tyranny. Density determines how people live and how they do not. Freedom is in part inefficiency and city living is fed by the need to achieve social efficiency. Bloomberg's much denounced nanny state tactics are only an extension of the same drive to maximize social efficiency. Bloomberg may have become the poster billionaire for such behavior, but the majority of cities have their own solutions to the problems of people that come at the expense of individual freedom. The same efficiency that compresses the maximum number of people into an existing space is also applied to every other area of their lives. In cities of strangers, there is no area of life too intimate to be examined and made more efficient. Unlike the country, the city is its own frontier. Its great adventure is not exploration, but existence. The city is always changing, mutating, falling apart and coming together under assault from waves of new immigrants and social challenges. Its

How does one define a nation? That is truly the fundamental question of amnesty. The libertarian argument in favor of amnesty comes down to the question of whether nations even necessary at all. If the only characteristic that matters is freedom then borders and the other vestiges of nationhood only interfere with the flow of the free market. America then becomes a set of ideas and its only usefulness is as a space for harboring those ideas. This ideological definition of a nation demands that it sacrifice its survival to its ideas. This notion is found most strongly among liberals for whom the actual physical survival of the country ranks a distant second to its duty to live up to its ideals. That is why liberals can argue that torture is wrong even in a ticking nuclear bomb scenario. In the real world countries don't do well as vehicles for ideology. A country is a practical entity that encompasses the real life needs and challenges of people, while an ideology tends towa

We utilize systems to achieve goals whether it's defending the country or fighting poverty or making the trains run in time or achieving political change. Modem systems are systematic creatures that aim to achieve goals by maximizing control over all the subsidiary elements of the problem. So if you set out to solve poverty, you need control over all the social and economic elements that either cause poverty or could be used to ameliorate poverty. Those elements include the sum amount of national wealth for the purposes of wealth redistribution, the rate of    unwed teen pregnancies and any forms of racial discrimination... and that's just for starters. Even poverty, which would seem like a rather simple phenomenon becomes a system which takes into account tools like abortion, progressive taxation and discrimination laws. The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every s

This has been a very long week and while there has been Thank G-D some important progress, there is still a road ahead. That means more reruns and shorter less edited new articles. Thank you for your understanding and patience.  THE DISPENSABLE OBAMA The Dispensable Nation is the story of a struggle between two Democratic administrations; the one that exists and the shadow administration that Hillary Clinton attempted to create as Secretary of State. Like any fawning propaganda text, The Dispensable Nation has to be read on two levels. On one level, it’s a critique of Obama’s foreign policy. On another level, it exists to make the case for Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2008, Obama campaigned against Hillary Clinton as the peacenik versus the warmonger who voted to invade Iraq. Now Hillary’s people are preparing to run her as the peacenik alternative to the warmonger of the previous administration who was too hard on Iran and the Taliban. To understand how terrible the for

When the big things start getting out of control, we start focusing on the little ones instead. Tackling small problems we can't solve is a good way to feel good about the big ones that we can't. Can't do anything about the nice young men from Nigeria, Somalia and Bangladesh who occasionally stop maxing out social welfare and working odd jobs to set off bombs in the London Underground or butcher a soldier within sight of his base? Just arrest an 85-year-old woman who shouts at Muslims that they should go back to their own country. At 85, she probably won't put up much of a fight. Then send out 1,200 police officers to protect Muslims from the wrath of a few dozen angry Brits who might conceivably hurt their feelings. And follow that up with some interfaith sessions with community leaders and you're all set. Can't do anything about Muslims rioting and burning cars in Stockholm? Just send them out to leave parking tickets on the charred wrecks afterward. The

The dominant struggle of the 20th Century was the attempt to reconcile the growth of industrial economies with the social welfare demands of the left. The various attempts to "Steal the Thunder" of the left by adopting its social programs led to horrors such as Nazism on the one hand and the growth of the welfare state on the other. Communism was finally defeated by adopting its program. The national battle against a Russian Communist empire was won while the domestic struggle against the left was lost. The welfare state created a fifth column of bureaucrats and recipients to act as the left's electorate. Instead of stealing the left's thunder, they subsidized the triumphant long march of the left. The liberal Republican prescription is still to Outleft the left, adopting some of its more popular ideas and social policies in a more sensible fashion. And they have never understood that the strategy, even when it succeeds in the short term, is doome

Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams. American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work. Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets. The Soviet Union fell because its Communist collectives were not able to equal the West in the mi

Ever since FDR made it his campaign song in 1932 while running for office during the Great Depression, the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party has been that Tin Pan Alley classic, "Happy Days are Here Again." But no matter how often the old Victor spun, it would not be until well after Roosevelt's death that happy days would be here again. Like Hope and Change, Happy Days are Here Again was a blandly optimistic and non-specific promise that good times were coming. Someday the happy days would arrive, an appropriate enough sentiment for a song whose pivotal moment came in the movie "Chasing Rainbows" where it was sung to reassure a cuckolded husband who is threatening to kill himself. And in an even more appropriate bit of symbolism, the actual movie footage of that moment is as lost as the happy times. No matter how often the Democratic Party cheats on the American people, it can always break out a new rendition of "Happy Days are Here Again&quo