Relacoes exteriores do Brasil: Diálogos internacionais do IPRI: 30/05

Meu amigo, colega e verdadeiro gestor do IPRI, Marco Túlio Scarpelli Cabral, foi quem concebeu, montou, organizou, mobilizou, preparou este belo programa dirigido a estudantes e candidatos à carreira diplomática, cobrindo vários aspectos das relações exteriores do Brasil.
Venham todos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Caro (a) Estudante,

1. Gostaríamos de convidá-la (o) para a próxima edição dos Diálogos Internacionais do IPRI sobre "Relações Exteriores do Brasil – Contexto e Temas", em 30/05 a partir das 9h00 no auditório Paulo Nogueira Batista, no anexo II do Ministério das Relações Exteriores.

2. Concebido especialmente para estudantes e candidatos ao Instituto Rio Branco, este evento consistirá em um ciclo de palestras, seguidas de debate, apresentando amplo panorama das relações internacionais e da política externa brasileira, conforme programa abaixo:

09:00 – Recepção pelo Diretor do Instituto de Pesquisa de Relações Internacionais, IPRI-Funag, ministro Paulo Roberto de Almeida

09:15 – MRE, Funag-IPRI, possibilidades de ingresso na carreira diplomática, Conselheiro Marco Tulio Scarpelli Cabral, coordenador geral do IPRI

10:00 – O Universalismo da Política Externa Brasileira, Secretário Filipe Nasser Silva, Secretaria de Planejamento Diplomático

10:45 – O Brasil e o Oriente Médio, Diplomata da Subsecretaria da África e do Oriente Médio

11:30 – As relações Brasil-América Latina, Conselheiro João Marcelo Soares, Subsecretaria da América Latina e do Caribe

12:15 – O Brasil e os EUA, Secretário Fabio Cereda Cordeiro, Divisão dos Estados Unidos e do Canadá

15:00 – O Brasil e a China, Diplomata da Divisão de China e Mongólia

15:45 – O Brasil e a Rússia, Secretário Fabiano Wollmann, Divisão da Europa Central e Oriental

16:30 – O Brasil e o Conselho de Segurança, Diplomata da Divisão de Paz e Segurança Internacional

17:15 – Debate Geral, Encerramento, Ministro Paulo Roberto de Almeida

3. Para confirmar presença, basta responder a esta mensagem informando o nome completo e, se for o caso, a instituição na qual estuda ou trabalha.

Atenciosamente,

_________________

Marco Tulio S. Cabral

Coordenador-Geral

Instituto de Pesquisa de Relações Internacionais - IPRI

Ministério das Relações Exteriores

U: http://www.funag.gov.br/ipri

Liberalism: the life of an idea - Edmund Fawcett (The Economist)

Why liberals need to be vulgar

An interview with Edmund Fawcett on his book “Liberalism”

The EconomistMay 23

Insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology, books and arts.

“A feeble creed for weedy people! Rightists and Leninists love that caricature,” says Edmund Fawcett about liberals. The Economist asked Mr Fawcett to reply to five direct questions in answers of roughly 100 words.

Mr Fawcett is the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea”, which was published this month in a second edition, making room for President Donald Trump, Brexit and other political tremors that have shaken the liberal mindset. He was a journalist at The Economist for 30 years before retiring in 2003.

His responses are below. They are followed by an excerpt that he picked because, as he put it: “Liberalism is easy to recognise but hard to sum up. You have to start somewhere, though, and this extract — from my preface — works, I trust, as a front door.”

In a word, liberalism needs to become democratic again.

What is liberalism?

There’s no one-sentence answer, yet you can fill a library with complicated academic answers. The thing to hang on to is that we can all recognise liberalism, especially now it’s under threat. If pressed for a thumbnail, I’d pick out four key liberal beliefs: society is always in conflict; undue power — of the state, wealth or oppressive majorities — has to be resisted; human progress is possible; and everyone deserves society’s respect, whoever they are. Each idea has ancient roots. Looking for them in political form before the 19th-century is like looking for the Athenian bicycle or the medieval microchip.

Not long ago liberals won the Cold War. They dominated public argument and the agenda for policy. What went wrong for them?

When Soviet communism collapsed, liberals needed to wake up and see two things. One, there were attractive non-liberal roads to capitalist development. Liberals shouldn’t have been surprised by Turkey or Hungary, let alone Russia and China. Two, in the liberal West itself, liberalism’s strength and scope greatly varied. Liberalism could be more democratic or less democratic: more for everyone, or more for a few. Liberals are forever forgetting and having to relearn that lesson. After 1945, liberalism spread its benefits and protections to many. Now, liberalism looks too much like privilege. In a word, liberalism needs to become democratic again.

Liberalism devours itself by giving too much freedom and letting anti-liberals undermine it by, for example, banning certain kinds of speech.

No-platforming makes a handy bat for bashing liberals. But liberalism has nothing to answer for. Acceptable speech is bound to be fought over. What’s socially acceptable or unacceptable to say in public shifts. Think of blasphemy. Think of the word “fuck”. The fight now is over demeaning stereotypes and views that endorse them. Unacceptable? Some think yes, some no. Liberalism rightly sets a high bar against laws limiting speech. But legally permissible doesn’t mean socially acceptable. If talk of some kind becomes odious in society, it’s not for liberals to make society change its mind on behalf of free speech.

Liberals do need to sound tougher. They need clearer, shorter, more vulgar ways to say what they stand for.

Is the liberal credo intellectual and passive? Under attack from active, muscular creeds, does liberalism hide in its library?

A feeble creed for weedy people! Rightists and Leninists love that caricature. It’s cheap and easy. But who laughs last? Recall what liberals believe in. It takes tough-mindedness to see conflict in society as inevitable. You need toughness to stand up to undue power, to press for progress even if it rolls back on you, to stand up for everyone, however stupid, burdensome or seemingly useless. Liberals may look wet. But don’t push them. Think of Lincoln or Roosevelt. That said, liberals do need to sound tougher. They need clearer, shorter, more vulgar ways to say what they stand for.

Are there any modern or contemporary thinkers who you rank among the great liberals, or are all liberal heroes of a bygone era?

You can get a long way without giants and heroes. Liberalism hasn’t at present intellectual heroes like Constant, Humboldt or Mill in the 19th century. They not only thought and wrote about, but also practised, politics. On the other hand, liberalism is much better defended in depth intellectually than it was then. That’s hard to see, of course, as knowledge is fragmented and specialised. To make those deep defences accessible to a wide public takes breadth of view and skill at summary. Outstanding professors still combine learning and eloquence, for example, Thomas Nagel in America or Pierre Rosanvallon in France.

---

An excerpt from the preface of “Liberalism”, 2nd edition:

To shore up a weakened building, you need to understand its foundations. You need to grasp what it rests on, why it arose, and what it is for. So it is with democratic liberalism, or to use the more familiar name, liberal democracy. Nobody who witnessed recent political shocks and watched anti-liberal successes in Europe and the United States can doubt that liberal democracy is under challenge from inside and out.

As discrepancies of wealth and power widened in recent decades, disaffected citizens questioned liberalism’s aims and ideals. A great structure of historic wealth and shelter that lately appeared to be the envy of the world showed weaknesses and flaws. As the pride of its occupants gave way to self-doubt, people on all sides asked, were those flaws reparable or fatal? Across the world, liberalism’s geopolitical prestige was dimmed by rising powers that offered attractive-looking non-liberal paths to material progress and stability. The liberal democratic world itself appeared to be splitting as the United States and Britain took illiberal paths politically and unilateralist paths internationally, leaving a shaken France and Germany as European standard-bearers for the liberal order.

This article first appeared in the Open Future section of The Economist on May 17th 2018. Read more about Open Future, The Economist’s global conversation on markets, technology and freedom in the 21st century.

Like what you read? Give The Economist a round of applause.

From a quick cheer to a standing ovation, clap to show how much you enjoyed this story.

The Economist

Insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology, books and arts.

The Economist

Insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science, technology, books and arts

A Italia fabricando uma nova crise europeia - Sebastian Mallaby (WP)

Italy’s new government could be the force that finally breaks Europe

By Sebastian Mallaby

The Washington Post, May 23 at 5:43 PM

Europe has weathered so many shocks — the near breakup of the euro zone, the chaotic influx of 2.5 million refugees, the Brexit referendum — that it is tempting to dismiss the latest existential crisis unfolding in Rome. But Italy’s emerging radical-populist government could be the force that finally breaks the continent’s cohesion. When the man proposed as Italy’s new finance minister declares that “Germany has not changed its vision of its role in Europe since the end of Nazism,” it is time to wake up.

Whether or not Paolo Savona gets the finance job, there is no doubt that he represents the populists’ outlook — one that could have a devastating effect on Europe’s financial position. The two halves of Italy’s new coalition — the right-populist League and the left-populist Five Star Movement — disagree on many issues, but they are united in blaming Italy’s problems generally on the European Union and specifically on the Germans. After Savona’s outburst was published in an Italian newspaper this week, Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader, took to a Roman rooftop and announced on Facebook Live that Savona is “an economist, an expert recognized in Italy and the whole world . . . His only fault? He dared to say that this E.U. — as it is — doesn’t work.” 

This growling cannot be dismissed because, if shorn of the gratuitous reference to Nazism, it contains much truth. The European Union comprises one brilliant success (a single market that facilitates trade not just in goods but also in services); a series of useful collaborations (in policing, scientific research, student exchanges and so on); one brave but politically risky principle (the free movement of people); and one outright catastrophe (the common European currency). Britain is crazy to leave the European Union, because it is not in the currency zone and its flexible labor market allows it to absorb European immigrants effectively. But Italy is different. 

Indeed, Italy is the poster child for the flaws in Europe’s construction. It has amassed terrifying government debts not because it has the privilege of printing the world’s reserve currency (as the United States does); nor because it has a national central bank that can be relied upon to suppress borrowing costs (as Japan does); nor yet because it hid its borrowing behind Wall Street financial engineering and fake statistics (as Greece did). Rather, Italy has been plainly and openly reckless, because such were the incentives created by Europe’s monetary system. 

Europe’s policy mix acknowledges this problem. A single central bank with a single interest-rate policy links the borrowing costs of weak and strong countries, so that the weak can run up debts too easily. Recognizing this temptation, Europe has imposed caps on government borrowing, but these have failed in two ways. First, they have ensured that the main word that national politicians hear from Brussels is “no!” — no to government pensions, no to infrastructure spending, no to teacher pay raises. Second, because any budget rule is arbitrary, the caps have not been enforced in practice. They combine maximum friction with minimum effectiveness. 

Meanwhile, other European policies have actively promoted recklessness. The European Central Bank treats German government debt and Italian government debt equally, boosting the demand for Italian bonds that would otherwise be considered riskier. The central bank also encourages the presumption that, in a crisis, it would rescue Italy, dampening market discipline further. To get investors to believe Italy could plausibly default one day, Europe would have to break the “doom loop” between government and the banking system, so that the government could go bust without the banking system imploding. But that would require European-wide bank backstops. Despite much earnest discussion about centralized euro zone deposit insurance and a euro zone bond that banks could hold instead of dubious national bonds, neither is in the cards. 

In the absence of both political discipline and market discipline, Italy has — guess what — borrowed. When the euro was launched in 1999, Italy had a public debt to gross domestic product ratio of 105 percent; today it is 133 percent. The same incentives are evident elsewhere: In France, for example, the debt ratio has gone from 59 percent to 97 percent. When Italy’s newly elected populists promise to cut taxes and raise spending, they are merely extending the pattern. Their principal innovation is to be brazen about it — and to compare modern Germans to Nazis even as they flout German-backed deficit caps. This will only harden Northern European opposition to centralized bank backstops and so paradoxically entrench the doom loop that perpetuates those incentives for the Italian government to borrow.

How does this game end? In the short term, Europe’s economy is enjoying a cyclical upswing and the central bank is buying bonds via its quantitative easing program, so a crisis is unlikely. But in the longer term, Italy’s debt ratio seems headed into the stratosphere. When the next downturn comes, Europe may find itself dealing with a basket case many times the size of Greece during the last crisis. Greece was small enough to be containable. Italy will be too big to fail, and perhaps too big to save.

Read more:

Anne Applebaum: Watch what happens in Rome. It could be our post-Trump future.

Mario Monti: Former Italian prime minister: The election result will be a nightmare for the E.U.

Davide Casaleggio: A top leader of Italy’s Five Star Movement: Why we won

Judy Dempsey: Angela Merkel is becoming Europe’s weakest link

American Foreign Policy; the jeffersonian tradition under Obama - Book review

H-Diplo Article Review 769 on “Shielding the Republic: Barack Obama and the Jeffersonian Tradition of American Foreign Policy.”

by George Fujii

	2018
	H-Diplo @HDiplo Article Review  No. 769 23 May 2018

Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse

Web and Production Editor: George Fujii 

Michael Clarke and Anthony Ricketts.  “Shielding the Republic: Barack Obama and the Jeffersonian Tradition of American Foreign Policy.”  Diplomacy and Statecraft 28:3 (2017): 494-517.  DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1080/09592296.2017.1347448.

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR769

Review by Gustav Meibauer, London School of Economics and Political Science

 

 

The foreign policy (or lack thereof) of the current presidency has led to a flurry of publications highlighting the purported influence of ‘Jacksonianism’ on the Trump administration’s thinking.^[1] Indeed, at least since Walter R. Mead’s influential book, the four ideational traditions in U.S. grand strategy and foreign policy he identified—Jacksonianism, Hamiltonianism, Wilsonianism, Jeffersonianism—have captured the attention of researchers trying to account for both continuity and change in American foreign policy.^[2] The recent focus on Jacksonianism is preceded by extensive scholarship on principles most closely connoted with Wilsonianism and Hamiltonianism: internationalism and interventionism, the active promotion of liberal values, democracy, human rights, and free trade; in short, the remaking of the world in America’s image.^[3] In their excellently detailed and theoretically rich article, Clarke and Ricketts take it upon themselves to highlight the fourth tradition, namely Jeffersonianism,^[4] and showcase its analytical value in elucidating what remains a topical puzzle: the seemingly inconsistent and contradictory nature of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, particularly vis-à-vis Libya and Syria.

The authors argue that what they perceive as the current literature’s “inability to characterise President Barack Obama’s foreign policy adequately” (495) stems from the failure to account for Jeffersonian influences on President Barack Obama’s rhetoric, decision-making, and corresponding U.S. behaviour. In an impressive, theoretically rich exegesis of Jeffersonian thought, the authors then develop the core ideational tenets and principles of this grand strategic tradition. In that regard similar to Jacksonianism, Jeffersonian principles focus on the “perfection and protection” of the virtues of the republic. Instead of espousing populist values and military strength, however, Jeffersonianism highlights the maintenance of a functioning democratic system, prescribes inherent restraint (even detachment) in foreign affairs, and supports the use of force primarily for the purposes of self-defence, the protection of commerce, and the maintenance of neutrality (501). This, the authors argue, is quite different from simply “isolationism.” Instead, the avoidance of entanglement in the affairs of other states, and the focus on balance of power, on “unmolested commerce” and the principles of free trade, is informed, in their narrative, by Jefferson’s prudent estimation of the interests of what was, in his time, a “small but prosperous neutral power dependent on external trade” tasked with preserving “individual liberty and republican government” at home (502). The article is strongest in the authors’ meticulous, elegantly presented and all-round convincing presentation of Jeffersonian principles, which succeeds in establishing this tradition more firmly alongside its more prominent counterparts and contributes in important ways to the broader research field on the ideational underpinnings of U.S. grand strategy.^[5]

The authors proceed to argue that the principles they have identified can help explain what is often depicted as the contradictory quality of Obama foreign policy: “Such contradictory assessments are the result of a failure to account for the introverted influence of the Jeffersonian tradition” (504). In particular, the “various crises that have confronted the [U.S.] since 9/11” have opened up political space for the resurgence of such views—an assessment that broadly compares with those expressed elsewhere that the post-Cold War era and/or 9/11 respectively have increased ideational competition over America’s interests, strategies, and role in the world.^[6] The authors criticise these approaches for their lack of synthesis and the failure to “account for the broader themes within Obama’s foreign policy approach” (506). 

They therefore have set themselves the task to provide such synthesis, and try to demonstrate the uniquely Jeffersonian element in, variously, Obama’s rhetoric, decision-making, and resulting American foreign policy. It is to the authors’ credit that they focus on the Obama administration’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Libya and Syria to “situate Obama’s strategic response to these civil wars within a well-formed tradition of American foreign policy” (508). This poses a particular challenge, as an analysis highlighting common principles across both cases would have to account for U.S. support for intervention in the one case, and non-intervention in the other. Indeed, the authors argue that Obama’s response to both civil wars “prioritised American domestic ideals” (507) and direct American national security interests (510). Libya did not touch upon such core interests, and thus Obama, viewing the situation instead as a “European problem,” decided to support the intervention by “leading from behind” and “offloading” responsibilities (509): the authors agree with Jack Holland’s characterisation that Obama “utilised all available technological sophistication, coupled with elegant and lofty rhetoric, in order to minimise the costs and risks to the United States” (509-10).^[7]  A similar principle was at play vis-à-vis Syria: Obama withstood pressures to intervene in a conflict he perceived as irrelevant to vital national interests, and instead opted for a more limited strategy of providing military assistance and concentrating on the fight against the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS).

While empirically rich (as much as the current lack of primary data that afflicts all research on topical administrations allows), the case analysis cannot fully live up to the authors’ promise. It is not evident that the authors’ assessment that Obama did not want to commit military force “if there [wasn’t] a threat to national interests” is enough to qualify him as a Jeffersonian. Here, it seems that the authors’ case analysis could profit from a further focus on the domestic side of the story that is so important in the authors’ rich exegesis of Jeffersonian thought. Similarly, the authors’ focus on synthesis may have led them to overemphasise coherence in foreign policy decision-making. Infusing the empirical analysis with an argument around Jeffersonian principles makes sense, to be sure, because it helps flesh out the topical relevance of this foreign policy tradition. Conversely, however, the authors could probably have reached the same analytical conclusions from their cases (namely that the Obama administration had a more restrained understanding of the national interest compared to, for example, Obama’s activist, even expansionist, predecessor) by employing simpler, binary categories.^[8]

The authors themselves stress that Mead’s traditions were aimed squarely at moving beyond such binaries and false dichotomies towards a more nuanced account of American foreign policy (496). But then part and parcel of this move is a more ‘realistic’ conception of conflicting and ever-competing streams of thought. Rather than categorising Obama (or the Obama administration?) as (predominantly) Jeffersonian, then, additional focus could perhaps have been put on fleshing out how the different traditions interact in foreign policy.^[9] The authors point to this themselves when they highlight the different voices and viewpoints present in the administration (are Obama, his Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter all similarly Jeffersonian?). Obama himself, who is mostly depicted as a Jeffersonian, seemed to think preventing a massacre in Libya is in America’s interest (511). Is this about domestic ideas, protecting commerce, or vital security interests, or might Obama be torn between principles of Jeffersonianism and others (perhaps more Wilsonian in nature)? ^[10] Finally, Jeffersonian principles end up causingeither reticent action (in Libya) or, for the most part, inaction (in Syria), only in part. Evidently, as the authors suggest, external factors such as “the inability to get multilateral cover” and “uncertainty over whether [intervention in Syria] would be the first step in an escalatory ladder leading to sustained […] military involvement” formed the other part of Obama’s calculus (511). This point towards a potentially fruitful integration of ideational drivers of foreign policy with external factors in a theory of strategic choice. As such, Clarke and Rickett’s article has enriched the field with a theoretically sophisticated take on the Jeffersonian tradition. By engaging critically with questions of foreign policy change and continuity, the authors offer a nuanced and intriguing account of Obama’s strategic choices. This makes their article a must-read for any scholar or practitioner seeking to understand the ideational underpinnings of past and current American foreign policy.

Gustav Meibauer is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on U.S. grand strategy, coercive diplomacy, and the interaction of external stimuli and elite ideas in foreign policy decision-making.

© 2018 The Authors | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

Notes

[1] Taesuh Cha, “The Return of Jacksonianism: The International Implications of the Trump Phenomenon,” The Washington Quarterly 39:4 (2016): 83-97; Walter R. Mead, “The Jacksonian Revolt: American Populism and the Liberal Order,” Foreign Affairs 96 (2017): 2-7.

[2] Walter R. Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

[3] Amilcar Antonio Barreto, American Identity in the Age of Obama (London: Routledge, 2013); Fraser Cameron, US Foreign Policy After the Cold War: Global Hegemon or Reluctant Sheriff?(London and New York: Routledge, 2002); Siobhan McEvoy-Levy, American Exceptionalism and US Foreign Policy: Public Diplomacy at the End of the Cold War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

[4] Jack Holland, “Obama as Modern Jeffersonian,” in Jack Holland and Michelle Bentley, eds., The Obama Doctrine: A Legacy of Continuity in U.S. Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2016); Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “Thomas Jefferson and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 69:2 (1990): 135-156.

[5] Eric A. Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Adam Quinn, “The Art of Declining Politely: Obama’s Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power,” International Affairs 87:4 (2010): 803-824; Colin Dueck, “Ideas and Alternatives in American Grand Strategy, 2000-2004,” Review of International Studies 30:4 (2004): 511-535; Henry R. Nau, At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Barry R. Posen and  Andrew L. Ross, “Competing Visions of US Grand Strategy,” International Security 21:3 (1996): 5-53.

[6] Holland, “Obama as Modern Jeffersonian.”

[7] Holland, 49.

[8] Tudor Onea, US Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Quinn; Robert Singh, Barack Obama’s Post-American Foreign Policy: The Limits of Engagement(London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); Hal Brands, “Barack Obama and the Dilemmas of American Grand Strategy,” The Washington Quarterly 39:4 (2017): 101-125.

[9] Dueck; Posen and Ross.

[10] David Fitzgerald and David Ryan, Obama, US Foreign Policy and the Dilemmas of Intervention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Richard Pipes; grande historiador do comunismo sovietico, RIP

RIP Richard Pipes, the Great Scholar of Private Property

Richard Pipes, brilliant scholar and advocate of private property, has passed away at age 94.

Foundation for Economic Education, May 22, 2018

 

by Walter Olson

Richard Pipes, the great Harvard historian, has died at 94. Best known for his clear-eyed work on Russia and its Bolshevik Revolution, a topic on which so many thinkers over the past century have fallen short, Pipes also wrote a terrific 1999 book on private property as a cornerstone of civilization, Property and Freedom: The Story of How through the Centuries Private Ownership Has Promoted Liberty and the Rule of Law. It’s a favorite on Cato reading lists, including Tom Palmer’s on principles of liberty and Ian Vásquez’s on economic development. I reviewed it favorably at the time for the Wall Street Journal and noted its wide historical sweep, including Pipes’s account of the many schools and movements since Plato that have taken a stance hostile to rights of private possession. These include not only communists, syndicalists, and the like, but some romantic nationalists and even cultural anthropologists who, for a time, claimed (wrongly) that primitive peoples dispensed with ideas of mine and thine. 

Pipes always had his eye on the real-world consequences of these views for nations and their development. As I wrote, summarizing his argument:

The fork in the road between Britain and Russia, it would seem, came on the issue of whether the ruler could be said to own everything in the country. In England, this idea was challenged and then rejected with the revolutionary consequence that the king had no more right to trespass on an Englishman’s freehold than anyone else did. Nor (eventually) could he exact financial penalties from his subjects—or do much of anything else, such as take away life and liberty—without due process of law. The idea that rights were something prior to government soon made England the most property-oriented country on earth.

By contrast, in unhappy Russia, the czars’ claim to own everything carried only too much weight. The members of the Russian nobility often found themselves acting as collectors-of-tribute on highly revocable allotments. Serfdom persisted because the obligations of nominal landowners to the crown were too onerous to be met any other way. Whole categories of economic endeavor, such as coach inns and flour mills, were decreed to be the property of the royal family. When Lenin sought to ensure submission to the authority of his Soviets by ordering the pulping of old title deeds, he was acting in the tradition of the worst czars."

He was equally cogent when he stepped back for reflections of a more philosophical nature, as when he invoked David Hume on redistribution:

Render men’s possessions ever so equal, men’s different degrees of art, care and industry will immediately break that equality. Or if you check those virtues, you reduce society to the most extreme indigence; and, instead of preventing want and beggary in a few, render it unavoidable to the whole community.”

Whole review here. Ira Stoll rounds up several resources on Pipes’s work including his archive of writings at Commentary, where he reviewed such works as Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital, Tom Bethell’s The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and Eric Hobsbawm’s memoirs, being appropriately scathing about the last of these. A great mind and a great scholar, who chose for his life’s work subjects that could hardly be more important for humanity’s future. 

Reprinted from Cato at Liberty.

O BNDES deu PT, Perda Total - Rubens Bueno

O BNDES deu PT

Rubens Bueno 

 

Diário do Poder 

 

Imagine um país com R$ 1,2 trilhão para investir em desenvolvimento. Esse é o sonho de qualquer governante compromissado com o fortalecimento da economia, com a melhoria da infraestrutura e com a geração de milhões de empregos no país. Pois foi justamente essa montanha de dinheiro que os governos do PT, capitaneados pelos ex-presidentes Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva e Dilma Rousseff, tinham em suas mãos. E o que fizeram? Jogaram na lata do lixo dos campeões nacionais da corrupção.

 

Quem acompanha mesmo de longe o desenrolar da operação Lava Jato conhece bem que fim levaram os irmãos Batista, da JBS Friboi, Emílio e Marcelo, da construtora Odebrecht, e o empresário Eike Batista, do Grupo EBX. Financiados a juros reduzidos com o trilhão do Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES), corromperam políticos, abasteceram caixas dois de campanha e remeteram recursos para o exterior sem gerar uma das principais contrapartidas que um banco de fomento tem que exigir: a geração de empregos.

 

A JBS Friboi fechou dezenas de frigoríficos no Brasil e direcionou grande parte de suas operações para o exterior. A fantasiosa EBX de Eike Batista faliu e deve bilhões ao BNDES e outros credores. A Odebrecht, diante dos escândalos de corrupção, está mal das pernas. E, como resultado disso, milhares de trabalhadores dessas empresas foram parar no olho da rua.

 

Hoje, cabe perguntar ao PT: Qual benefício, além da corrupção, trouxeram ao Brasil os “amigos do Rei” que hoje “está nú” em uma cela da Polícia Federal em Curitiba?

Se havia pelo menos a remota intenção de melhorar ao menos um pouco a vida dos brasileiros com essa política de investimentos públicos em empresas que já eram grandes, ao invés de fomentar pequenas e médias, isso não se configurou.

 

Se pegarmos o avanço da renda per capita brasileira veremos que entre 1994 e 2016, ela cresceu 31%, menos que a média dos países da América Latina e no Caribe, cujo índice avançou 37%. Diante dos países emergentes, onde o Brasil está incluso, a vergonha é ainda maior. Nesse grupo o aumento do PIB per capita foi de 152% no mesmo período. Já as nações desenvolvidas cresceram 42%.

 

Na prática, o BNDES, nas mãos do Partido dos Trabalhadores, deu prejuízos ao país. Como se diz quando um carro é inutilizado num acidente de trânsito, o BNDES deu PT. Perda Total.

 

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Rubens Bueno é deputado federal pelo PPS do Paraná.

A ordem economica internacional em fragmentacao - Michael Spence

Quando idiotas assumem o comando de grandes países, sua capacidade de desmantelar instituições e o ambiente de negócios é inacreditável. Enfrentamos atualmente esse risco.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

ESTADAO

20maio18 

‘Não se sabe qual será a nova ordem econômica'

Para economista, novo modelo econômico global não está claro, o que contribui para elevar as turbulências

Entrevista com

Michael Spence, vencedor do Nobel de Economia de 2001

Cláudia Trevisan, O Estado de S.Paulo

WASHINGTON - A ordem econômica global criada depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial está se desmanchando e não está claro qual arranjo a substituirá, afirma Michael Spence, vencedor do Prêmio Nobel de Economia de 2001, ao lado de Joseph Stiglitz e George Akerlof. Em sua opinião, a nova estrutura tenderá a ser “balcanizada” e a ter menos liberdade para fluxos de bens, serviços, capital, pessoas, informação e tecnologia.

Spence acredita que parte da turbulência vivida recentemente pelos mercados internacionais se deve à incerteza sobre o que substituirá a estrutura do pós-guerra. O ataque a ela vem dos países desenvolvidos, que passaram a sofrer consequências negativas na distribuição de renda em consequência da criação de cadeias de produção global. “É muito difícil prever onde isso terminará.” A seguir, trechos da entrevista:  

No início do ano parecia haver otimismo em relação à economia mundial, mas recentemente esse sentimento deu lugar a turbulências, especialmente nos países emergentes. O que aconteceu?

Na segunda metade do ano passado, houve o que o FMI chamou de aceleração sincronizada no crescimento. As pessoas pensaram que era uma mudança real, mas foi apenas uma retomada cíclica. Agora, temos a combinação da alta da taxa de juros nos Estados Unidos e o nervosismo de investidores internacionais. Fluxos de capital internacionais se tornaram bastante voláteis, o que provocou dificuldades para várias economias emergentes. O exemplo mais recente é a Argentina. Também há incerteza em relação à tensão comercial entre a China e os Estados Unidos e como isso afetará outros países, incluindo os emergentes. Há volatilidade nos mercados, volatilidade nos fluxos de capital e crescente incerteza. E parece não haver um fim disso no horizonte. Ao mesmo tempo, o preço das commodities está subindo, em particular o do petróleo, o que é bom para países exportadores. É um cenário misto.  

Quais são os principais riscos para a economia mundial?

O que me surpreende é que o crescente sentimento anti-establishment e a intensificação da polarização política de maneira geral não contaminaram os mercados ou as economias. Mas eu acredito que essas tendências são riscos. Um conflito aberto entre a China e os EUA nas áreas de comércio, investimentos e tecnologia é outro risco. Por trás de tudo isso, há uma espécie de ruptura da ordem mundial criada depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, com suas convenções relativas a comércio e investimentos.  

Quais as características da nova ordem que poderá substituí-la?

Ninguém sabe, e isso é parte do problema. Há duas possibilidades. Uma é a balcanização (fragmentação) da economia global. A internet, por exemplo, será regulada de maneira distinta em diferentes partes do mundo. A regulamentação da América e da Europa será diferente da chinesa e isso criará problemas para companhias que operem além das fronteiras nacionais. Isso é apenas um exemplo. Eu também acredito que o fluxo relativamente livre de bens, serviços, capital, pessoas, informação e tecnologia – que define como a economia global funciona – será menos livre. A ordem mundial criada depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial tinha o objetivo de facilitar a recuperação no pós-guerra. Mas seu principal efeito foi acelerar o crescimento em todos os lugares, especialmente nos países em desenvolvimento. No passado, a economia aberta e a transferência de parte das atividades econômicas para países em desenvolvimento não tiveram grande impacto sobre a distribuição de renda nas economias desenvolvidas. Na medida em que o sistema evoluiu, os emergentes passaram a responder por fatia cada vez maior do PIB e a eficiência das cadeias de produção começou a diminuir. Há falhas sísmicas cada vez maiores nessa ordem. 

Quais são elas?

As principais se desenvolveram ao longo dos 20 anos. Tendências negativas na distribuição de renda produziram ceticismo crescente em relação à globalização. Isso foi exacerbado pelo fato de que estruturas governamentais não fizeram nada sobre isso. A polarização econômica, social e política que estamos vendo tem uma fonte econômica. Nós vemos isso no Brexit, na eleição de (Donald) Trump e nas correntes anti-establishment na Europa. O que estamos vendo agora são os países desenvolvidos dizendo “não estamos mais dispostos a arcar com as consequências dessas assimetrias”. E os grandes países em desenvolvimento respondendo “bem, nós podemos sobreviver sem vocês”. É muito difícil prever onde isso terminará.  

Há o risco de uma crise nos emergentes semelhante às que vimos no passado?

Não vejo o surgimento de uma crise sistêmica. Se há um problema com potencial de se tornar sistêmico, ele é a grande quantidade de dívida que a economia global contraiu no período posterior à crise (de 2008). Esse passivo vem na forma de dívida soberana, corporativa e das famílias. Na última vez em que olhei, a economia global havia acrescentado três quartos do PIB global em dívida bruta.

As relacoes internacionais numa era de paradoxos - Paulo Roberto de Almeida

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