RUTHFULLY YOURS

The culture of entitlement is so well entrenched that handouts, which see the minority that pays taxes subsidising those who do not, have morphed into “rights” impossible to wind back. Given that the battle is lost, fiscal conservatives should focus instead on reducing impediments to growth
As intractable budget deficit after budget deficit forebodes national ruin and frames the forthcoming election, there is no shortage of fiscal conservatives complaining that the Government has failed to cut spending. Maybe I have missed it but I can’t recall one that has actually set out and quantified exactly where material expenditure cuts should be made and can feasibly be made. When it comes to specifics there is empty space. Why? The answer is simple. It is just too darn hard.

In 2013 the Centre for Independent Studies established its TARGET30 campaign with the objective of fashioning a public debate that would lead to a reduction in general government spending (federal, state and local) from around 35% of GDP to 30% in ten years. This is a laudable objective. But, predictably, no progress has been made or is remotely in sight.

The bulk of the growing expenditure burden is in the areas of health, welfare, pensions and education, which account for an estimated 60% of federal government spending in 2015-16. It is all electorally inviolable. Certainly new promises (of the reckless Gillard kind on Gonski, hospital funding and the NDIS) should be resisted. But once a program is in place it is all but impossible to make cuts.

Too many people are now getting some benefit or other. Added to this, the culture of entitlement is so well entrenched that handouts, which involve a minority of the population (predominantly the despised ‘rich’) subsidising the maintenance and lifestyle of the rest, have morphed into rights. Short of some cataclysmic overturning of the existing order this will not change. In fact, it will become akin to a law of nature.

Ask yourself, if Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher failed to stem the growth in entitlement spending, as they did in a less far-gone age of dependency, what chance has anybody now?

The question then becomes what to do, if you believe – unlike left-green politicians living in their own delusional world – that growing debt will eventually lead to national ruin. The only feasible answer is to boost economic growth to pay the bills. Sure keep on fighting the good fight to contain spending but understand that this is largely whistling in the wind and that any solution will predominantly lie on the supply side of the economy.

In 2012 a former New York Times reporter named Patrick Tyler published an invidious book called “Fortress Israel,” the point of which was that the Jewish state is a modern-day Sparta whose “sabra military elite” is addicted to war.

“Six decades after its founding,” Mr. Tyler wrote, Israel “remains in thrall to an original martial impulse, the depth of which has given rise to succeeding generations of leaders who are stunted in their capacity to wield or sustain diplomacy as a rival to military strategy.” Worse, these leaders do this “reflexively and instinctively, in order to perpetuate a system of governance where national policy is dominated by the military.”

Israel’s reflexive militarists are at it again, though probably not as Mr. Tyler imagined. Last week, Moshe Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff and a member of the ruling Likud party, resigned as defense minister following ructions regarding the appropriate role of the military in political life. In his place, the prime minister intends to appoint Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing political brawler whose military career never went higher than corporal rank.

The spat between the prime minister and Mr. Ya’alon began in late March, after an Israeli soldier named Elor Azariah shot and killed a Palestinian man who was lying wounded and motionless on the ground after trying to stab another soldier. Sgt. Azariah is now standing trial for manslaughter and faces up to 20 years in prison. Video of the killing suggests the wounded Palestinian was no threat to the soldiers when the sergeant put a bullet in his head.

The killing has been emphatically—and rightly—condemned by Israel’s military brass. But Israelis also have little sympathy for Palestinians trying to stick knives into their sons and daughters, and Messrs. Netanyahu and Lieberman have offered expressions of support for Sgt. Azariah and his family, to the applause of the Israeli right and the infuriation of senior generals. As often as not in Israel, military leaders and security officials are to the left of the public and their civilian leadership.

If that were the end of the story, you might have a morality tale about Mr. Netanyahu’s political instincts. Or you might have a story about the high ethical standards to which Israel holds itself. What you don’t have is anything resembling a mindlessly belligerent “sabra military elite” that wants to kill helpless (though not innocent) Palestinians to protect its own.

But that isn’t the end of the story. At a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day earlier this month, Yair Golan, Israel’s deputy chief of staff, compared trends in Israeli society to Germany in the 1930s. When Mr. Netanyahu rebuked him—correctly—for defaming Israel and cheapening the memory of the Holocaust, Mr. Ya’alon leapt to the general’s defense and told officers that they should feel free to speak their minds in public. Hence his ouster. CONTINUE AT SITE

Barack Obama announced the lifting of the U.S. arms embargo on Vietnam on his visit to Hanoi on Monday, marking an important milestone in America’s rapprochement with its old adversary and its broader pivot to Asia. The decision also sends an unmistakable signal to Beijing’s leaders that their efforts to bully its neighbors have backfired.

Hanoi has reason to be deeply uneasy about Chinese intentions. Beijing has reclaimed land on disputed rocks in the South China Sea and created military bases that threaten its neighbors’ claims. In 2014 it placed a deep-sea oil exploration rig within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone, leading to a maritime standoff between the two navies.

Vietnam’s top leader, General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, visited the White House in July and called the U.S. a force for regional stability. His concerns over militarization of the South China Sea and freedom of navigation refute Beijing’s claims that the U.S. is stirring trouble in the region.

Vietnam’s military, while dwarfed by China’s, is still the most formidable in Southeast Asia. It garrisons 23 of the shoals in the disputed Spratly Islands, as compared to China’s seven, and can offer the U.S. and its allies access to the deep-water naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. But first both sides have to prove that this relationship will be stable and lasting.

Washington has already allowed the sale of arms related to maritime security, including six Defiant 75 fast-response boats for Vietnam’s coast guard. But Hanoi wants to reduce its reliance on Russia for advanced weaponry and forge closer military ties with the U.S. CONTINUE AT SITE