The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy

The main threats to democracy lie within liberal societies themselves.

By Vladislav Inozemtsev

In the late 1980s, at Cold War’s end, many believed that democracy, as obvious political best practice and key driver of strategic success, would without doubt spread and ultimately become universal. A prominent advocate of this prediction, Francis Fukuyama, stated his view in more careful and conditional terms than the many who did not read his fine print, but nuance aside, the coming global triumph of democracy was in those days a widespread expectation that many prominent observers, not least Samuel Huntington with his earlier “third wave” analysis, played a part in bringing about. It is no longer so widespread a view. The ostensible reasons are many, but let us note the three most common themes.

Life, With Dementia

Protecting the Vulnerable

The California Men’s Colony is using convicted killers to care for inmates
 who can no longer care for themselves.

By PAM BELLUCK

Secel Montgomery Sr. stabbed a woman in the stomach, chest and throat so fiercely that he lost count of the wounds he inflicted. In the nearly 25 years he has been serving a life sentence, he has gotten into fights, threatened a prison official and been caught with marijuana.

What if the tractor had never been invented?

Productivity in the economy is almost the only thing that matters

By James Pethokoukis

Recall President Obama’s strange ATM problem from last year:

There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.

Now, economists think productivity is a good thing. And automation improves productivity. As economist Paul Krugman famously put it, 

“Productivity in the economy is almost the only thing that matters.”

The Platinum Rule

The presumption of growth

By Anthony de Jasay

Platinum is worth more than gold. Though the best should not act as the enemy of the good, it is a bad mistake to lose sight of the platinum once, if by great efforts, the gold has been gained.

After watching for two years the tragic-comic Greek drama, the vicious downward spiral sucking a country into a black hole despite one futile effort after another to "rescue" it, many European governments are telling themselves (though staunchly denying it to the world): "There, but for the grace of God, go I". Softened up by this awful example, 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union [EU] have agreed to conclude treaties with one another to observe the golden rule of a balanced budget allowing only a minute deficit, and to adopt the domestic legislation, including a constitutional amendment if necessary, to implement it. True to form, Great Britain and the Czech Republic begged to be excused (which prevented the radical move of putting the Golden Rule directly into the EU treaties). The passage of the Golden Rule through 25 legislatures is hardly assured, but even the intention of making it the established European fiscal standard merits a look at its logical foundations.

Modes of Self-Denial

There is a set of fairly universal rules of conduct that comes about spontaneously as a matter of by and large everybody behaving in his or her best interest by treating others the way they wish others to treat them. A rational person will refrain from stealing the property of others in the expectation of others not stealing his, rather than he and the others all stealing from each other. Technically, these rules are conventions which are adhered to out of self-interest and by and large enforced by the threat of retaliation.

The Day It Became the Longest War

Cheers and Tears

by Charles Cooper
"The President will see you at two o'clock."

It was a beautiful fall day in November of 1965; early in the Vietnam War-too beautiful a day to be what many of us, anticipating it, had been calling "the day of reckoning." We didn't know how accurate that label would be.

The Pentagon is a busy place. Its workday starts early-especially if, as the expression goes, "there's a war on." By seven o'clock, the staff of Admiral David L. McDonald, the Navy's senior admiral and Chief of Naval Operations, had started to work. Shortly after seven, Admiral McDonald arrived and began making final preparations for a meeting with President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The elites are making a virtue of intolerance

France's criminalisation of Armenian genocide denial is only the latest outburst of twenty-first-century state intolerance

by Frank Furedi 

Last month, the French Constitutional Council struck a blow for the ideal of a tolerant and open society. It declared that the French government’s new law punishing the denial of the Armenian genocide was unconstitutional and infringed upon the freedom of expression.

Have they gone insane ?

ECB Balance Sheet Hits Record $3.9 Trillion on History-Making Bank Loans

By Jana Randow 

The European Central Bank’s balance sheet surged to a record 3.02 trillion euros ($3.96 trillion) last week, 31 percent bigger than the German economy, after a second tranche of three-year loans.

Lending to euro-area banks jumped 310.7 billion euros to 1.13 trillion euros in the week ended March 2, the Frankfurt- based ECB said in a statement today. The balance sheet gained 330.6 billion euros in the week. It is now more than a third bigger than the U.S. Federal Reserve’s$2.9 trillion and eclipses the 2.3 trillion-euro gross domestic product of Germany (EUANDE), the world’s fourth largest economy.

The ECB last week awarded banks 529.5 billion euros for three years in the biggest single refinancing operation in its history, adding to the 489 billion euros it lent in December. The flood of money, which aims to combat Europe’s sovereign debt crisis by unlocking credit for companies and households, has increased the risk exposure of the 17 euro-area central banks that together with the ECB comprise the Eurosystem.

“With the dramatic expansion of its balance sheet since last summer, the ECB has become the most active central bank in the world,” said Klaus Baader, chief euro-area economist at Societe Generale in London. “The ECB’s measures are absolutely justified, but it has to be aware of the risks on its balance sheet and think of an exit strategy.”

Why Greece Cannot Be Allowed to Live

And Why Merkel Is In Such a Hurry to Get FiskalPakt

By John Ward

Why Berlin, Washington, the German Constitution, the Fiscal Union and the Greek bailout are unstoppable forces hitting immovable objects.

Quite a few of you will already be aware of the facts I’m about to discuss. What you might not have done is put them together in order to make more sense of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s currently somewhat delicate situation.

Nine days ago on February 28th, The German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe ruled that both the existing EFSF and its planned successor the ESM are unconstitutional in the Bundesrepublik. Even as things stand now, any use of EFSF funds approved by Merkel will be illegal. This is part of the reason why she and Wolfie Strangelove don’t want to talk about boosting it just yet, on the grounds that a bazooka will be just as illegal as a pea-shooter, only much more noticeable.

The Mindset of the Modern Tyrants

Government By 'Expert'

Can Limited Government and the Administrative State Co-Exist?”

by Richard A. Epstein

The “co-exist” gives away the game. Historically, the term entered the political lexicon with Nikita Khrushchev’s famous 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to signal his break with Stalin’s murderous policies that sought constant confrontation with the West. Coexistence meant the West could go its way so long as the Soviet bloc could go its own way too—a live-and-let-live relationship where occasional interactions would iron out any difficulties that arose. Nine months later, he announced to the West, “We will bury you.” Less than five years after that, the United States and the Soviets came to the brink during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets sought to alter the global balance of power by using Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a base for its operations.

Peaceful coexistence, therefore, does not offer an ideal paradigm of how the rule of law does, or should, interact with the modern administrative state. To see why the two are ultimately incompatible, we must consider the nature of both the “rule of law” and the “administrative state,” about which I have written more extensively in my recent book Design for Liberty.

Kill John Deere

Outlaw Productivity Gains And Technological Advances

By WALTER WILLIAMS

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 2011 manufacturing output grew by 11%, to nearly $5 trillion. Were our manufacturing sector considered a nation with its own gross domestic product, it would be the world's fourth-richest economy. Manufacturing productivity has doubled since 1987, and manufacturing output has risen by one-half.

Letters from Cuba

They don’t know everything, my love, they don’t know…

By Yoani Sánchez

Will there be microphones here? You ask me while poking your head into every corner of the room. Don’t worry, I say, my life goes on with my guts on display, letting it all hang out. There is no place dark, closed, private… because I live as if walking through a gigantic X-ray machine. Here is the clavicle I broke as a child, the fight we had yesterday over a domestic trifle, the yellowing letter I keep in the back of a drawer. Nothing saves us from scrutiny, my love, nothing saves us. But today — at least for a few hours — don’t think about the police on the other end of the phone, nor the rounded eye of the camera that captures us. Tonight we are going to believe that only we are curious about each other. Turn off the light and for a moment send them to the devil, disarm their eavesdropping strategies.

With so many resources spent on watching us, we have conjured away from them the primordial facet of our lives. They don’t know, for example, even a single word of that language made for twenty years together, that we can use without parting our lips. They would score a zero on any test to decipher the complex code with which we say the trivial or urgent, the everyday or the extraordinary. Surely none of the psychological profiles they’ve done on us tell how you comb my eyebrows and jokingly warn that I’m going to end up looking like Brezhnev. Our watchers, poor guys, have never read the first song you sang me, much less that poem where you said one day we would go to Sydney or Baghdad. Nor will they forgive us every time we escape from them — without a trace — on the diastole of a spasm.

Like Agent Wiesler in the film The Lives of Others, someone will listen to us now, and not understand us. Not understand why, after arguing for an hour, we come together and share a kiss. The astonished police who follow our steps can’t classify our embraces, and they wonder how dangerous to “national security” are those phrases you say only in my ear. So I propose, my love, that tonight we scandalize them or convert them. Let’s take the ear off the wall and in its place oblige them to scribble on a sheet: “1:30 am, the subjects are making love.”

Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?

Ctrl-Alt-Del

By Niall Ferguson

As a freshman historian at Oxford back in 1982, I was required to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ever since that first encounter with the greatest of all historians, I have pondered the question whether or not the modern West could succumb to degenerative tendencies similar to the ones described so vividly by Gibbon. My most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest attempts an answer to that question.

The good news is that I do not believe that Western civilization is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline. In my view, civilizations do not rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History is not one smooth, parabolic curve after another. The bad news is that its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

Broken Windows

The police and neighborhood safety

By GEORGE L. KELLING and JAMES Q. WILSON

In the mid-1970s The State of New Jersey announced a "Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program," designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.

The Educational Octopus

Doomed to Failure

Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.   –    Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943)

by Mark J. Perry 

What would you conclude about the quality of product or service X under the following circumstances?

1. The employees of Airline X and their families are offered free airline tickets as an employee benefit. The employees refuse to travel with their families on Airline X and instead pay full fare on Airline Y when flying.

2. The employees of Automaker X are offered a company car at a substantial discount and they instead buy a car at full price from Automaker Y.

3. Employees at Health Clinic X and their families are offered medical care at no additional cost as a benefit and yet most employees of Clinic X pay out-of-pocket for medical services at Clinic Y.

The Way That History Went Down

Τhe origin of gross disparities is more mundane than we are led to believe

By Thomas Sowell

Different histories, geography, demography, and cultures have left various groups, races, nations, and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

In centuries past, the majority population of various cities in Eastern Europe consisted of people from Western Europe — Germans, Jews, and others — while the vast majority of the population in the surrounding countrysides were Slavs or other indigenous peoples of the region.

Just as Western Europe was — and is — more prosperous than Eastern Europe, so Western Europeans living in Eastern European cities in centuries past were more prosperous than the Slavs and others living in the countrysides, or even in the same cities.

One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that the Romans conquered it in ancient times — a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.

Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages’ centuries earlier head start.

The genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back

Walking through a moral minefield

The Abortion Act, intended as a humane response to hardship, has been subverted by changing times.

By Theodore Dalrymple

The discovery that sexually selected termination of pregnancy is available in Britain should surprise no one; and if we are surprised, it can only be because we have not been paying attention for the past 40 years. Sexually selected termination is, after all, the natural result and logical extension of the way the Abortion Act has been interpreted during all this time.

Several consultants and what I suppose we must now call their customers have been caught in flagrante committing an illegal act that most people will find thoroughly distasteful. No doubt the doctors involved will now find themselves in hot water, and the chairman of the Care Quality Commission, the Orwellianly named organisation in charge of supervising the compliance of abortion clinics with the law, has already resigned.

Why Men Don't Hug their Kids ?

Love is not dependent on hugging

After an emotionless John Prescott admits he never shows affection to his son... Why don’t men hug their kids?

By THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Well I never thought I should come to the defense of John Prescott but I am on his side when it comes to his failure to hug his son (as he revealed on Desert Island Discs) or tell him on air (during the Jeremy Vine show) that he loved him.

The very fact that he should have been asked to do so demonstrates how our increasing tendency to express emotion in public, both in word and deed, actually undermines our ability to distinguish genuine from bogus feeling. There is no reason to suppose that Lord Prescott is other than a loving father. He does not need to hug his son or tell him he loves him for his love to be evident, it is clear from his whole manner of treating and being with him, not from gestures such as hugs.

Hedgies Unlikely to Wear Greek Gifts

Ignore the pro-acceptance hype: Greece will have to apply CACs

By John Ward
When it comes to finance and dealing with the media, motive is everything. On the whole, the larger bondholders represented by the IIF’s Charles Dallara need the Greek restructure bailout to work. The Hedge Funds don’t. The larger banking institutions can try all they might to create some form of impetus towards acceptance, but this is not like a US election race where some folks want to be with the winner – and thus hype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the media roll being attempted will roll off the backs of the Hedgies like water off a greased duck.

Yesterday we were fed release after release saying these folks have accepted and those folks are coming on board. But the feeling one gets at the end of most media reportage is one of cows voting for vegetarianism.

Erdogan's Annexation of Cyprus Threat

As Greeks set elections for April 29th

Wannabe EU member Turkey yesterday threatened to annex part of the EU…

One of either Manuelo Barroso or Lucas Papademos has allowed the date of the Greek election to leak following their meeting last Friday. It’s going to be April 29th. Whether this will make Berlin, the bondholders, Brussels or anything else beginning with B more or less happy is anyone’s guess. In the now pretty obvious countdown to default, EU reality is in another place never imagined by George Orwell. We have the eurozone spinners, for example, pushing a new oxymoron to explain their utter confusion and economic illiteracy: growth-friendly fiscal consolidation. About the kindest thing I can say about that phrase is that it sounds like something Hazel Blears might have said.

Democracy versus Liberty

When democracy trumps liberty, democracy can destroy itself

By Tibor R. Machan

Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society it is liberty that’s primary; the entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, to make sure that the rights of individuals, to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness, are protected from any human agent bent on violating them.

Democracy at its best is but a byproduct of liberty. Because we are all supposed to be free to govern ourselves, whenever some issue of public policy faces the citizenry, all entitled to take part. Democratic government rests, in a free society, on the right of every individual to take whatever actions are needed to influence public policy. Because freedom or liberty is primary, the scope of public policy and, thus, democracy in a just society is strictly limited. The reason is that free men and women may not be intruded on even if a majority of their fellows would decide to do so. If someone is a free, which means a self-governing, person, then even the majority of one’s fellows lack the authority to take over one’s governance without one’s consent. I cannot be otherwise unless there is prior agreement by all to accept such a process. The consent of the governed amounts to this and that is what the US Declaration of Independence means when it mentions that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

Back to Capitalist Basics

Ibn Khaldun, Mahathir Mohamad etc

By Ralph Benko

In a noteworthy essay in the Financial Times entitled “West needs to go back to capitalist basics”, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad forthrightly observes that:

“A new “Bretton Woods” should be convened with adequate representation from the poor countries. It should consider a trading currency based on gold, against which all other currencies should be valued. The fluctuation of the price of gold would be minimal. Business would be exposed to less uncertainty. Governments should fix the exchange rate based on gold or economic performances.”

Dr. Mohamad’s call in this and certain other respects so closely mirrors the prescription contained in the new book by Reagan Gold Commissioner Lewis E. Lehrman (with whose eponymous institute this columnist professionally is associated), The True Gold Standard as to be positively uncanny.

Disorderly Greek Default To Cost Over €1 Trillion

IIF's Doomsday Memorandum Revealed

By Tyler Durden

While everyone was busy ruminating on how little impact a Greek default would have on the global economy, the IIF - the syndicate of banks dedicated to the perpetuation of the status quo - was busy doing precisely the opposite. In a Confidential Staff Note that was making the rounds in the past 2 weeks titled "Implications of a Disorderly Greek Default and Euro Exit" the IIF was doing its best Hank Paulson imitation in an attempt to scare the Bejeezus out of potential hold outs everywhere, by "quantifying" the impact form a Greek failure. The end result: 

"It is difficult to add all these contingent liabilities up with any degree of precision, although it is hard to see how they would not exceed €1 trillion."  

A grim & bleak beauty

On architecture and art in Coventry

by Anthony Daniels

I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials and the things of fame That do renown this city.                                 —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

On the night of November 14, 1940, the ancient city of Coventry was firebombed and one of the finest assemblages of medieval buildings in Europe vanished. The following morning, the Provost of the Cathedral, the Very Reverend Richard Howard, traced the words “Father forgive” on the charred surface of the ruined walls of the fifteenth-century cathedral, and vowed that there would be no revenge or retaliation. He counted neither on Bomber Harris nor on post-war British architects.

Deus Ex Machina

There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion

With most of the world’s major economies as well as the financial system bankrupt, there is only one solution that can save the world economy. Like in the Greek tragedies, Deus ex Machina is now the only way that the world can avoid a total economic collapse. This would involve God being lowered down onto the world stage and miraculously saving the plot.

by Egon von Greyerz

For those few who believe in this, may God bless them. But since this is a very unlikely solution most people will instead rely on governments and central banks to save us. But how can anyone possibly believe that totally incompetent and clueless politicians and central bankers could solve anything. They created the problem in the first place and are therefore totally unsuitable to play the role of Deus. The main objective of governments is to stay in power and thus to buy votes. Therefore they are incapable of taking the right decisions. And the opposition, aspiring to power is even less suitable since they will lie through their teeth and promise the earth in order to be elected. (We know that there are exceptions like Ron Paul, but the voters will most probably find his medicine too strong to swallow.)

What about central bankers, can’t they save us? Unfortunately any sensible person who becomes a central banker loses all his senses and becomes a prisoner of the political system.

Solution?

The Laffer Curve And Austrian School Economics

In the bust phase, any change in the tax rate drives a big change at the margin of economic activity

A parody 'Neo-Laffer curve'. Critics argue that the assumption that the curve should be a simple, smooth and empirically identifiable one is not borne out by real world evidence.

by Keith Weiner

Jude Wanniski, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, coined the term “Laffer Curve” after a concept promoted by economist Art Laffer. Laffer himself says the idea goes back to the 14th century

Tocqueville Would Be Proud

Americans still support private land stewardship

By G. Tracy Mehan

Proud members of the Loyal Order
of Water Buffalos Lodge

The growth of the private land trust movement in the United States has often been cited as a premier example of Alexis de Tocqueville's insight regarding the American genius for forming voluntary associations to achieve common goals, avoiding both the perils of hyper-individualism and an intrusive government. When done properly, these trusts or conservancies typify the best of what is sometimes called "free market' environmentalism.

Land trusts engage in entirely free-market transactions with willing landowners who are able to sell or donate the development rights on all or part of their land in return for compensation or favorable tax treatment. They grant a conservation easement to the land trust which is responsible for protecting the easement for generations to come.

Such easements can be for purposes of soil and water conservation, aesthetics, wildlife corridors or preservation of rural and agricultural life-or all of the above.

The first land trust was established in 1891 in Massachusetts, by the landscape architect Charles Eliot, to preserve 20 acres of woodland. By 1950 there were still only 53 such trusts in 26 states. Today, there are similar trusts or conservancies in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

Everything you wanted to know about the Greek Restructuring and you were afraid to ask

Greek Restructuring - The Week Ahead

By From Peter Tchir

The situation in Greece should create some big headlines this week.  The bond exchange “invitation” is set to expire at 3pm EST on Thursday March 8th.  This is the so-called Private Sector Involvement or PSI.  Greece has other steps to take during the week, and ultimately the Troika will determine how to proceed with the bailout, but not until the results of the PSI are known.

It could be a week of confusing, misleading, and market moving headlines.   Figuring out the “proper” reaction to each bit of news will require understanding the terms, and hoping the headlines are accurate – which given how confusing the situation is, cannot be fully counted on.  Remember, the original “invitation” from the Greek government was for an amortizing bond, which was then changed to a series of 20 “bullet” bonds, so the level of confusion remains high.

Types of Greek Debt

Total Hellenic Republic Debt according to Bloomberg is €354 billion (all debt outstanding amounts are based on data from Bloomberg).

Oops !!!

ECB Says Greece May Not Get Enough PSI Participation, Der Spiegel Reports

By Brian Parkin

Greece may fail to garner enough investors to participate in a voluntary writedown of its debt, Der Spiegel magazine reported, citing unnamed officials at the European Central Bank.

A second Greek bailout is partly tied to investors’ agreeing to the writedown by a March 8 deadline.

The changing dynamics of Greece's Crisis

Shifting from Financial to Political

By Stratfor

Summary

The European financial crisis centered for several years on the idea of preventing Greece from defaulting on its national debt. However, the rest of Europe has had time to prepare itself for any potential fallout from a Greek default. This is changing the dynamic between Greece and Europe even as emerging societal trends within Greece are illustrating changes in the relationship between Greece's political elite and its people. These trends will continue as the crisis transforms from a financial one to a political one.

Analysis

Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, European leaders' actions have been dictated by a presumed need to keep Greece from defaulting on its massive national debt at all costs. Even at the cost of losing domestic popularity for supporting a Greek bailout, and even if Greece seemed unwilling or unable to repay the money Europe poured into it, European politicians prioritized the prevention of a Greek default in order to prevent the euro -- and possibly the European Union -- from collapsing. However, that could now be changing, along with the relationships between Greece and the rest of Europe and between Greece's political elite and the Greek people.

Unintended Consequences

A Rule of Thumb approach to the European Crisis

"Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."  Sigmund Freud

By John Mauldin

Let me introduce Mauldin's Rule of Thumb Concerning Unintended Consequences:


"For every government law hurriedly passed in response to a current or recent crisis, there will be two or more unintended consequences, which will have equal or greater negative effects then the problem it was designed to fix. A corollary is that unelected institutions are at least as bad and possibly worse than elected governments. A further corollary is that laws passed to appease a particular group, whether voters or a particular industry, will have at least three unintended consequences, most of which will eventually have the opposite effect than the intended outcomes and transfer costs to innocent bystanders.

Death By A Thousand Cuts

Whatever the name for today’s failed system is, “capitalism” is not that name

By Keith Weiner

Capitalism died when they decided to subsidize railroads for the sake of national prestige in the mid 19th century.

Capitalism died when, to compensate for the consequences of subsidized railroads, they passed anti-trust laws in 1890, under which it is illegal to have lower prices, the same prices, and higher prices than one’s competitors.

The Myth of Margaret Thatcher

A great and noble failure

Conservatives must come to grips with the noble failure of the Iron Lady

By Peter Hitchens

“The Iron Lady,” the cruel motion picture about Margaret Thatcher, makes much of her decline into bemused old age. It arouses sympathy for her among the undecided, and passionate sympathy among those who already revere her. No wonder. I cannot think of any other living person who could have been treated in this fashion. In a way it is a compliment to her that, even in the lonely, desolate weakness of her final years, her enemies—the unintelligent, intolerant left—continue to hate her.

With such people attacking her, it is hard not to rally to her side. But what about those of us who have an uncomfortable and growing suspicion that she was not as good as she is made out to have been? I am one of them. I still cannot resist the feeling that her reputation is not just inflated but damaging to the conservative cause.

I last saw her some years ago at a London publisher’s party, terribly diminished, surrounded by fawning persons who did not seem to see that she was unhappy, lonely, and puzzled. I felt almost ashamed to be there.

The Fallacy of the Santa Claus principle

It's Not Really about the Debt

by Frank Shostak

In his Outside the Box e-letter, February 13, 2012, respected economic commentator John Mauldin presents an interview with Dr. Lacy Hunt, a highly regarded US financial economist. According to Hunt the key factor behind the current world economic crisis — in Europe and the United States in particular — is a very high level of debt relative to gross domestic product (GDP). For instance in the United States, as a percentage of GDP, both public- and private-sector debt is currently at around 400 percent, while in the eurozone it is 450 percent.

The eternal curse of Monetary Illusions

Inflation: an Expansion of Counterfeit Credit

by Keith Weiner

The Keynesians and Monetarists have fooled people with a clever sleight of hand.  They have convinced people to look at prices (especially consumer prices) to understand what’s happening in the monetary system.

Anyone who has ever been at a magic act performance is familiar with how sleight of hand often works.  With a huge flourish of the cape, often accompanied by a loud sound, the right hand attracts all eyes in the audience.  The left hand of the illusionist then quickly and subtly takes a rabbit out of a hat, or a dove out of someone’s pocket.

Watching a performer is just harmless entertainment, and everyone knows that it’s just a series of clever tricks.  In contrast, the monetary illusions created by central banks, and the evil acts they conceal, can cause serious pain and suffering.  This is a topic that needs more exposure.