Ann Marlowe thinks that the US should abandon its “stability” fetish since,
We’ve forgotten that extremist ideology mainly emerges from forced “stability,” not from free societies. As Elliott Abrams wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Sunday, “regimes that make moderate politics impossible make extremism far more likely. Rule by emergency decree long enough, and you end up creating a genuine emergency.”
That is not untrue, but that’s not the reason “stability” has become a thing of the past.
The reason is that technology has caught up with repressive regimes. Daniel Henninger, in his article Stability’s End, encapsulates in a sentence this fact,
Technologies with goofy names like Twitter and Facebook are replacing political stability with a state of permanent instability.
Mubarak unleashed the camels after trying to shut down the internet, the Iranian mullahs carry out executions by the thousands. The Medieval measures won’t work, any more than the Jimmy Carter 1979 approach to foreign policy would.
Indeed,
This new, exponentially expanding world of information technologies is now creating permanent instability inside formerly stable political arrangements.
This stuff disrupts everything it touches. It overturned the entire music industry, and now it is doing the same to established political systems.
Adding to the instability is the increasing food inflation. Larry Kudlow points out that
In addition to Egypt, the people have taken to the streets to varying degrees in Algeria, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen. Local food riots have even broken out in rural China and other Asian locales.
…
The CRB food index is up an incredible 36 percent over the past year, including 8 percent year-to-date. Raw materials are up 23 percent in the past year. Inflation breakouts have occurred in China, among various Asian Tigers, and in India, Brazil, and other Latin American countries. Even Britain and Germany are registering higher inflation readings.In dollar terms, the price of wheat has soared 114 percent over the past year. Corn has surged 88 percent. These are incredible numbers.
And let’s not forget that the world’s poor are the hardest hit by food-price inflation. They literally can’t afford to buy bread. It brings to mind the French Revolution in the 18th century. When you see this kind of mass protest in the streets, spreading from country to country, you see a pattern that cannot be explained by local conditions alone.
In our hemisphere, Venezuela has the highest inflation – 28%, as the economy contracts while the government takes over private property and food production and distribution. Chavez is ruling by emergency decree: if “Rule by emergency decree long enough, and you end up creating a genuine emergency” is the case, for how long will Hugo Chavez’s regime stand, considering these numbers?
“Instability is the new status quo”, states Henninger, and I agree.
The question remains, how will political systems and societies adapt to it? How will the US, when its own administration is passing thousands of pages-long laws that haven’t even been read?
