Freedom Line Blog

Under current British law, only a few factors can keep a member of the House of Lords from office: bankruptcy, conviction on charges of treason, and holding judicial office amongst them. Apart from that short list, removing a peer requires an act of Parliament, something that last happened nearly a century ago, when two members were removed for supporting the U.K.’s enemies during World War I. With that precedent in mind, Parliament should act to remove Lord Nazir Ahmed, who provides a similar set of circumstances. From the Daily Caller:

British Lord Nazir Ahmed put a £10 million ($16 million) bounty on both President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush Friday, according to The Express Tribune, an English language Pakistani newspaper.

Nazir, who is of Pakistani heritage and a member of the British House of Lords, reportedly made the comments while at a reception in Haripur, a Pakistani city 40 miles north of Islamabad. Nazir told the audience that he was putting the bounty out for the capture of the American leaders in response to the bounty placed on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed by the United States.

Saeed, by the way, is the terrorist thought responsible for the gruesome 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed over 160 people. By his words and his actions (he claims that he would sell his home to pay the bounties for Bush and Obama), Lord Ahmed has shown himself an enemy to Britain, the United States, and the forces of civilization throughout the world. He ought not be allowed in the front door of the House of Lords, let alone in a seat there.

The Daily Caller profiles a new book, Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics, that explains why aging and shrinking populations in China, Japan, and Europe will dramatically alter American foreign policy.

Some of the book’s findings are startling:

• By the end of this decade India will surpass China as the most populous nation.

• Japan will lose 1 million people a year by 2060, contracting from 127 million to less than 87 million.

• Europe’s expensive social welfare model and aging populations will increasingly spur governments to scale back military spending in order to fund burgeoning entitlement program.

• Even though America’s current rate of replacing itself gives it a demographic advantage, unless serious reforms are instituted to entitlement spending, it too will continue to cut military expenditures to pay for rapidly expanding benefits for the elderly.

India surpassing China means that democracy – not a communist-controlled autocracy – will be the government adopted by the most populous country on Earth.  It may also encourage the United States and India to forge a closer strategic partnership around shared values to check China’s ambitions.

And of course, we’ve already seen how the European model of heavy on services, light on defense is making the region – though not a few individual countries – increasingly irrelevant when it comes to making the world safe.

In his budgets, President Barack Obama has chosen to increase spending on entitlements and gut defense, arguing like a European that multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and NATO can accomplish more than any one nation.

Paul Ryan highlighted this danger in his latest budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal.”  In it, he faults President Obama for cutting $500 billion from the Defense Department instead of making the changes needed to entitlements so that Americans can be protected both at home and abroad.

Americans need not accept decline through badly prioritized budgets.  Instead, using innovative entitlement reforms like the ones in Ryan’s Path to Prosperity, we can have sustainable entitlement programs and a robust defense.

We’ve got the people.  Now we need to implement the right policies.

The Wall Street Journal reports that India’s explosive growth in college graduates isn’t translating into employment for millions of newly minted degree holders.  The biggest problem: lack of critical thinking and communication skills.

To compensate, companies are spending large sums of money coaching graduates into employability.  According to one Indian business executive, the problem is the credential mentality infecting education:

“How are you able to change the mind-set that knowledge is more than a stamp?”

Sound familiar?  American higher education too is tempted to treat knowledge-building as a service rather than a task.  When students are treated like customers, the link between effort and reward is broken.  The result is a certification that doesn’t translate into employment.

With half of India’s 1.2 billion population under the age of 25, up to a million new workers a month are estimated to join the labor force over the next decade.  If India continues down the path of graduating young people without critical thinking skills, those workers – and the growing Indian economy – will be in serious trouble.

Traditionally, presidents facing opposition at home go abroad to find policy and political success.  Basically, if you can’t beat them, play with someone else.  It’s an especially useful move in the latter part of a president’s second term, when lame duck status settles in and speculation about a successor mounts.

Perhaps we’re seeing that now with one-term President Barack Obama.  One thing is missing, however, from the script: a foreign policy success.

So far, the president’s 10 day Asian trip has been a disaster.  It started with a badly handled mis-impression that 34 warships costing $200 million a day were escorting the president to India.  (They weren’t.)  Then his staff was embarrassed by press handlers working for the Indian government.  Now, he’s failing to secure a crucial free trade deal with South Korea while being ostracized at the G-20 meeting for his fiscal and monetary policies.

All this may make him more likely to be defeated in his reelection campaign, but it is a terrible projection of powerlessness to the rest of the world.