Belarus has a Parliamentary election

Today's election in Belarus - Europe's last dictatorship - will have observers and opposition candidates. Some political prisoners have been freed and some opposition politicians have been given TV coverage on the monopoly state media. Alexander Lukashenko says the elections will work according to the "rules of the West", I doubt he will be kidding anyone.

It is a little less oppressive, but political prisoners remain in Belarus. There are limits on how candidates may campaign, with only small noticeboards allowed and a limit of £400 in spending. This, naturally, benefits the incumbents in the Parliament. 41 of the 110 Parliamentary seats have no opposition candidates. All seats in Parliament are held by Lukashenko's supporters, in a classic communist style rubber stamp assembly.

So with the state controlled media, candidates barely able to campaign and Lukashenko running his own small personality cult dictatorship, the chances of change in Belarus are next to zero. Even Vladimir Putin thinks he is too much of a dictator.

Having said that Lukashenko has managed to hold onto power by maintaining internal stability - dictatorships can be very good at controlling crime, because the state doesn't like any competition. In addition, Belarus's close relationship with Russia has seen it continue to get heavily subsidised gas and oil from its neighbour - which it then rations to its population, reselling the rest at market prices to the West. As a result, if the election IS deemed fair (in that the votes cast are reflected in the result and there is little overt intimidation), Belarus 's dictatorship will demand legitimacy from the West - because democracy is king, right?

The Sunday Telegraph has a two part report report from its correspondent, Colin Freeman.
Part one notes on Lukashenko "Cameramen have reportedly been sacked after showing his bald patch on TV, and until recently, there was even an official ban on cracking jokes about him"
Part two he meets a dissident, arrested for advocating closer ties to the European Union. He said "They chuck you in a jail for ‘administrative detainees’, where there are usually about 20 people in a tiny room with hardly any space to move around... You got no exercise, not even for 10 minutes a day, and you’re not allowed any visits or food from relatives, and the food gives you diarrhoea. Even a fortnight inside, he adds, leaves you weak and “half-brain dead”.

The simple point is that Belarus should not be rewarded for "democracy", it should be rewarded for freedom. That means a free and open press, the right to protest, the right to criticise the government, and to hold government accountable through an independent judiciary, and constitutional courts. Belarus is a very long way from that. To let Belarus off after this facade of freedom would be a travesty to those Belarussians who have been imprisoned, tortured and murdered by Lukashenko's goons since Gorbachev let Minsk go its own way.

Pay for your mistakes?

While I bemoan those who give or take credit without being able to bear the risk either way, Crusader Rabbit has an interesting post on those who bemoan the "costs" of alcohol or drug use imposed upon the public health system.

Send them the bill. In other words, if the hospital determines that you are to blame for your accident - you pay.

That's inherently appealing - responsibility for the harm you impose on yourself or others. However ACC gets in the way - at the moment we all pay ACC for the costs of all those who have accidents causing personal injury. The better first step is to individualise ACC, and allow people to choose who to get accident insurance from - meaning premiums will vary. If you don't pay for accident insurance then you pay the bill. Of course such insurance would have to be compulsory unless the right to sue is returned - a big additional step.

So if you are turning up at A&E regularly drunk, then funnily enough your premiums go up. If you don't, your premiums go down. Then the only costs left that remain a concern are those who don't get insured - in which case you might ask, why drink alcohol heavily instead of buying accident insurance? That becomes another issue - but why should the costs of recidivist foolishness be socialised? Why should the state owned monopoly ACC be retained?

Vote McCain or Obama with The Economist

The Economist has an online "vote" for the US Presidential Election through its website. The hook is you must register with the publication to vote, but that does reduce the odds of multiple registrations to vote multiple times, and anyway you should be reading the Economist on a regular basis shouldn't you?

It works in a rather interesting way. The Economist has basically classified every country in the world as a state using electoral college rules. Every country gets at least three electoral college votes, and then by population gets more. The candidate with the majority in a country gets the electoral college votes of that country.

Unsurprising, Obama is overwhelmingly ahead. In the UK it is 86% to Obama, in Australia 85%, in New Zealand 81%, China gives Obama 79% (France 90%). Only El Salvador, Slovakia and Colombia look like possible McCain territory (but many countries have few votes).

However, regardless, it was only listed in the Economist on Friday, so it should have an overwhelming response in coming weeks. Go on, cast your vote.

Tesco Dandong - convenient for North Koreans

The Amnok river separates the People's Republic of China from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (yep the more words implying "people" and "democracy" the more oppressive it is). Mao Tse Tung once said that the two countries were as close as "lips and teeth" in relations. The differences are stark between Dandong on the Chinese side of the river and Sinuiji on the Korean side. You see in Dandong there is a Tesco, a three storey one. Dandong is a thriving city. Sinuiji is a stark contrast. On the left you can see Kim Il Sung Square in Sinuiji, you can see the shadow from the statue and the people, with no cars. On the right you see Sinuiji stadium, run down, filthy from the industrial pollution, and people roaming around on foot and bike - no cars, no sport, but something was happening there on that day. I daren't even guess what.

Until recent years, the DPRK patrolled this bordered harshly, and scope for bribes and corruption with border guards was very low. However, the stark economic situation on the Korean side has seen that change. For a price, DPRK border guards will let people through, and North Korean entrepreneurs (bless them) have been doing just that. According to the Sunday Telegraph, they are some of the best customers for Tesco Dandong in China, "They buy soap, toilet paper, shampoo and food, of course". This is what capitalism can provide, which totalitarian socialism cannot.

The nearly worthless DPRK won currency trades not at the official rate of 20.5 to the Chinese Renminbi, but 400.

The Economist this week also reports on the Koreas. It notes that North Korean society is in serious flux, because of the border becoming more porous and economic changes in neighbouring countries flooding through to the country in curious ways:

"Earlier this decade DVD players fell dramatically in price, so South Korean households quickly dumped their old VCRs in favour of the new players. Smugglers picked up the old units for next to nothing and sold them in North Korea for US$40 or so apiece - a price that plenty of urban North Korean familis could afford if they saved up. The consequence was what Mr Lankov (Australian National University) calls a "video revolution": a flood of South Korean soap operas, melodramas and music videos entering North Korea by the same route and delighting new audiences. The impact of the astounding affluence on display - the star's clothes and cars, Seoul's glittering skyline - exposes the central lie on which the regime bases its claim to rule: that South Korea is a backward, impoverished and exploited."

In other words, the hermit kingdom whereby everything about the outside world could be controlled - as North Korean radios had no tuning dial to allow foreign stations to be heard, like North Korean TVs, as satellite dishes were banned, as the internet was banned - is starting to unravel. The dire economy has resorted to many near the borders taking advantage of opportunities to buy and sell what they can to better themselves, and as a result the news of the outside world is drip feeding in. Not that residents of Sinuiji would have any illusions - from their side of the river they have watched Dandong grow like umpteen other Chinese cities in the past 20 years, into a brightly lit capitalist beacon of wealth, whilst around them is the dreary poverty of their socialist paradise.

Tesco's slogan is "Every little helps", and it can say, in China, it's doing just that for North Koreans. It's far more than you'll notice most politicians in the West doing for them.

Our children will thank us

So say the environmentalist lobby. The likes of the Green Party, and indeed the vast numbers who believe that it is critical now to force or subsidise people into a low carbon dioxide future because of the "costs" of climate change. The primary point such doomsday merchants make is how unreasonable it will be to allow "our children" to pay for this.

So have you noticed how willing so many are to use their children's taxes (and grand children's) to bail out the unwise borrowing of so many today? Why not pay the cost now? Why not ensure that the risks of foolishness are born by those who took them? Government borrowing transfers problems to future generations - it may be justified to manage the capital costs of core government spending, such as defence infrastructure, but to bail out banks?

Whose children will thank you because you were prepared to support governments who borrowed off their future taxes due to the mistake of a minority of people offering and taking credit unwisely?