Mugabe and Ian Smith

A number of people seem to be having trouble with the logic of Ian Smith's rebellion against the wishes of other people that he turn his country over to black majority rule back in the 1960's when everyone else was doing it. OK, everyone except South Africa. One such article notes that "Few could argue with the logic of redistribution when some 5,000 white commercial farmers owned two-thirds of the best arable land in a country of millions of blacks."

I'm not sure why this is so difficult to argue against. First, prior to white settlement, there weren't millions of blacks. There were fewer than one million, because without white farms, the country did not produce enough food to feed that many people. Second, there simply isn't any evidence that the black farm workers were ready to run the farms, let alone the entire country. They have been in charge for 30 years now. They now have most of the land, and they are producing less and less. They are on track to starve by the millions.

Much has been made of the 30,000 people who died in the bush war, mostly black insurgents. That was over a period of 15 years. Mugabe, not long after coming to power, killed 20,000 Ndebele civilians in one year. The loss of life, when you consider the collapse of the life expectancy, has been in the millions under Mugabe.

It's really hard to make a good argument that Zimbabwe, under any plausible scenario, would have been better had Ian Smith conceded in 1965 that black majority rule was inevitable.

No help from China on oil prices

Wall Street was thrilled today by the news that China is raising the domestic price of gasoline and diesel for its consumers. This, we hope will reduce demand for petroleum products in China and lead to a decline in the price of oil.

This is dreaming. If there's one thing that experience should have taught us by now, it's that gasoline is largely price inelastic, particularly in the short term. In this country, prices are up around 35% over the past year and demand has dropped about 3%. The Chinese are upping price by 18%. Should we expect more than a 2% drop in demand? They represent only about 10% of world consumption, although the fastest growing component. A 2% drop in a 10% segment means an overall reduction of .2%. Hardly a ripple in the supply stream.

We're going to $5 gasoline. Thanks to China's move to increase prices, that day will probably be postponed by a week.

Save AgriVino! Abolish OLCC!

It has just been reported that Agrivino is going to close its doors in early July, due to the narrow interpretation of certain liquor control laws that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission has adopted. They are saying that AgriVino's high-tech Enomatic system is illegally allowing "self-pour" by customers.

AgriVino was planning to provide a very high-tech system for dispensing tastes. Economatic is "state-of-the-art wine dispensing and preserving system," which allows the dispensing of single tastes from wine bottles without exposing the wine to air. Instead, carefully measured one-ounce quantities are pushed out by argon, a noble gas that does not react chemically with wine, into the customer's waiting wine glass.

The problem is that the customer was supposed to pay at the front desk, receive a card, and use the card to sip wine until the money ran out. However, the cashier did not physically handle each pour; the computerized system did this. No can do, says OLCC.

This despite the fact that the central computer was keeping track of the number of pours for each person and would stop delivering when it felt that the customer was drinking too fast. At the price of a sip, this strikes me as a pretty academic concern, but they made the effort. In the real world, this would be among the best regulated and least excessive environments for drinking wine in Oregon.

OLCC wants us to believe that they are forced into this position by ORS 471.360(b), which they say prohibits "self pour" by customers. If you read the statute, you'll see that it says:

(b) No licensee of the commission shall permit any person to mix, sell or serve any alcoholic liquor for consumption on licensed premises unless such person has a valid service permit issued by the commission.

Notice that the statute forbids any unpermitted person to serve liquor. It does not say that, at every step, a permitted person must be taking part. In restaurants, the waiter does not pour every glass of wine. In a tavern, the waitress will almost never pour from the pitcher of beer.

Clearly, OLCC does not require a permitted person to physically take part every time an alcoholic beverage flows from a container into a glass, but they are insisting that AgriVino do this, even though it would destroy the efficiency that makes it possible for them to offer the public such wonderful wines at reasonable prices.

This is not over.

The Way out of Iraq -- Money

From the start of the Iraq war, I was plagued by the sense that there was simply no peaceful solution through which the U.S. could exit. It now seems that combat deaths are setting new lows and although there hasn't been much tangible political progress, the rhetoric doesn't seem to be all that strident.

I have never claimed to understand the Iraqi mind, so I never tried to say for sure how far they would go with their antipathies towards one another. Pretty clearly, the Kurds despised the Arabs, probably with more fervor and more justification than the Sunni/Shiite split within the Arab community. I have felt all along that the Kurds would not give up their share of oil, about 40% compared with their 20% representation in the population. This meant that the remaining 60% of oil revenue would perforce be divided among the 80% of Iraqis who are Arabs. I was pretty sure that the economic conflict would form on sectarian lines and would be bloody.

But the economic conflict may be unnecessary. At $30/barrel, there wasn't enough cash there to make everyone happy. Even the $30 wasn't clear profit, as the Iraqi infrastructure would have absorbed a lot of it. But $120 is a whole new ballgame. Just on the back of an envelope, it looks like Iraq would have enough money to bring all the Shiites into the middle class and let the formerly prosperous Sunni administrative and professional class be prosperous again. Subtract the economic imperative, and there may not be enough enmity left for a civil war.

Arabs are historically very good at math (think "Al Gebra") and the thought may have occurred to them as well. They need to stop killing one another in order to get rid of the occupation and cash in. There is so much cash available that the corrupt political class (essentially a redundant phrase) can become spectacularly rich without depriving their less privileged supporters.

I'm going to now predict that a combination of fatigue and greed will lead to a modus vivendi in Iraq among the factions. One of the conditions will be that Americans leave. The super embassy in Baghdad may become an issue. But the violence will decline and we'll eventually stop spending our resources there, so we can devote them to the consequences of food riots elsewhere.