Even The Beatles understood this

A Vast New Federal Power

               If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,

              If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.

             If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat,

            If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet. 

                                               —The Beatles in “The Taxman”

by Andrew P. Napolitano
Of the 17 lawyers who have served as chief justice of the United States, John Marshall—the fourth chief justice—has come to be known as the “Great Chief Justice.” The folks who have given him that title are the progressives who have largely written the history we are taught in government schools. They revere him because he is the intellectual progenitor of federal power.

Marshall’s opinions over a 34-year period during the nation’s infancy—expanding federal power at the expense of personal freedom and the sovereignty of the states—set a pattern for federal control of our lives and actually invited Congress to regulate areas of human behavior nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. He was Thomas Jefferson’s cousin, but they rarely spoke. No chief justice in history has so pronouncedly and creatively offered the feds power on a platter as he.

Now he has a rival.

Public Choice Theory

Not the Whole Story

by Tibor Machan

ln October 1986 Professor James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. He received the award for his pioneering work in public choice theory, a branch of economic analysis that studies the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats, especially in a representative democracy such as the United States.

Professor Buchanan, who now teaches at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, developed his theory in cooperation with several other economists, most notably Professor Gordon Tullock. (During the development of public choice theory both of these economists taught at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia.) Their book, The Calculus of Consent (University of Michigan Press, 1962), pioneered this new application of economics. Since its publication, other books and journals have followed, including the scholarly journal of the Center for Study of Public Choice, Public Choice, which published extensive and complex studies on a great variety of topics of concern to public choice theorists. Professors Buchanan and Tullock also have inspired numerous other economists, philosophers, political scientists and legal theorists to explore various implications of the public choice approach.

Living the dream

Carlo Marx Meets Mario Tse Tung

by Nicholas Farrell

Italian communists always wanted a revolution in Italy, but I do not think that this is quite what they had in mind: A Chinese man has just bought the bar at their party headquarters in the city of Forlì in the “red” Romagna region where I live.

Attached to the party’s headquarters, the bar is called the Carlo Marx, and the name is written in huge red letters on an enormous white billboard above the terrace outside.

Will the new owners, hailing as they do from the world’s most powerful remaining communist country, change the name to the Mario Tse Tung?

Will they construct suicide nets like those erected around Foxconn’s factory in China to deter the bar’s depressed clients from throwing themselves off the roof? Or maybe banners that warn, “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow”?

Until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Italy’s Communist Party—the Partito comunista italiana (Pci)—became proportionally the largest in the capitalist world after World War II and Italy’s second-most-powerful party, polling about one-third of the vote in its 1970s heyday.

“You try to explain that communism and fascism have much more in common with each other than either does with freedom and democracy, but you waste your time. Their faith blinds them to the facts.”

Scientists and science are not so immune to ideology, after all

Environmentalism was an ugly experiment

Mark Lynas has converted from being an eco-alarmist to a pro-growth rationalist. But he still doesn’t get the problem with green thinking.

by Ben Pile 

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened
his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

Last November, Channel 4 aired What the Green Movement Got Wrong, which featured prominent environmentalists, including Lynas, reflecting on the failures of environmentalism. The film claimed that environmentalists’ opposition to technologies that offered environmentally benign methods of energy and crop production had impeded their aim of creating an ecologically sustainable society. Since then, the debate between pro- and anti-nuclear environmentalists has deepened, exposing the many divisions that exist within the green camp.

What the hell is wrong with bankers?

They’re all Barclays bankers now…

Depicting Barclays’ Libor-fiddling staff as uniquely corrupt overlooks what they share in common with the rest of the reckless ruling class

by Brendan O’Neill 

What the hell is wrong with bankers? That’s the question on the lips of every commentator and politician in the wake of the Libor rate-fixing controversy. The hunt is now on to find the root cause of bankers’ aberrant behaviour, whether it’s in the nerve endings of their heads (they have greed ‘hardwired into their brains’, says one observer) or in their cushioned, value-lite upbringings (apparently they come from ‘the most privileged backgrounds in Britain’). Everyone agrees there must be some mental or lifestyle cause of bankers’ deviancy, which so shocks ‘decent Britain’.

The tyranny of green do-gooders

Rio+20

The latest ‘save the planet’ shindig provided yet another chance for political poseurs to dictate our future.

by Ben Pile 

Some 50,000 delegates and 100 world leaders met at the Rio+20 ‘Earth Summit’ last month to settle on ‘the future we want’. They failed.

‘Let me be frank. Our efforts have not lived up to the measure of the challenge’, said UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, at the opening ceremony. What ‘we want’ turned out to be the opposite of what he thought we wanted. Ban continued: ‘For too long, we have behaved as though we could… burn and consume our way to prosperity. Today, we recognise that we can no longer do so. We recognise that the old model for economic development and social advancement is broken… Our global footprint has overstepped our planet’s boundaries.’

Calvin knew what Roberts pretends to forget

Cool with Coolidge

By James Dewars

Calvin Coolidge was assailed as “silent Cal”—though who wouldn’t wish more a relatively more silent president these days?—and ridiculed by fashionable people everywhere for saying “the business of America is business.”  I’ve got a long passage in the second volume of my Age of Reagan recalling liberal outrage when Reagan put up Coolidge’s portrait in the White House cabinet room in place of Jefferson.

Germany will walk

Germany Will Choose to Bail on the EU Rather Than Bail It Out

By Graham Summers

It all boils down to Germany.

I’ve been forecasting for months that the country will increasingly focus on domestic interests and that it will ultimately opt to leave the Euro rather than prop up the EU.

The former (focusing on domestic issues) is already underway.

Germany Plans Joint Federal-State Debt in Merkel Fiscal Deal

Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to share borrowing costs with Germany’s states to help ease their budget squeeze, completing a deal the opposition said will help secure German ratification of the European Union’s fiscal pact.

The party has run out of booze

Germany Backtracks On Last Week's Summit

by Tyler Durden

Those curious why peripheral European bond yields have once again resumed their levitation creep higher, it is because not only did yesterday the key Merkel coalition partner, CSU, threaten to leave Germany's ruling party hanging "if further euro zone states secure bailouts, saying there were limits to how far his party was prepared to go", but today we have gotten even more furious backtracking on Mario Monti's history "success" less than a week earlier, after on one hand German opposition SPD has said it opposed Direct ESM aid to banks, but more importantly, the German Finance Ministry itself said that the entire bailout timeline is now in question, saying that it "remains unclear if Eurozone finance ministers will decide on Spain's request for banking sector aid at their next monthly meeting on July 9." The ministry also added that a decision could only come once the report on Spain by the troika - the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF - had been finalized. In other words, that much maligned Troika, which Monti had supposedly exorcised from intervening in the economies of Spain and Italy, will, after all be very much present, which also means that all the media spin about last week's "gamechanging" and unconditional bailout summit resolution, has been for nothing, in line with all the skeptical expectations.

Αn old-fashioned model

Two different stories

by RUSS ROBERTS 

Robert Samuelson has an interesting narrative in the Washington Post. He argues that the prosperity of the last 30 years was driven by consumer spending, consumer spending that came from a false sense of wealth as housing prices rose artificially high due to an expansion of credit:

We live in a world of broken models. To understand why world leaders can’t easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied are collapsing. The models differ, but the breakdowns are occurring simultaneously and feed on each other. The result is that the global recovery flags, while pessimism and uncertainty mount.

An American Declaration of Independence From Big Government

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..."

by Richard Ebeling

The Declaration of Independence, signed by members of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is the founding document of the American experiment in free government. What is too often forgotten is that what the Founding Fathers argued against in the Declaration was the heavy and intrusive hand of big government.

Most Americans easily recall those eloquent words with which the Founding Fathers expressed the basis of their claim for independence from Great Britain in 1776:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Lamenting The Lost Legacy Of Independence Day

May providence have mercy on our nation, lest we end up getting what we deserve

By By Bill Frezza

Why do we still celebrate Independence Day? Is it a lingering habit, a mindless bit of nostalgia, a time to indulge in fireworks and barbecues, devoid of any deeper meaning? Can anyone honestly argue that our nation still honors the values, or practices the principles, for which our Founders fought?

Today, most Americans have been trained to be embarrassed by the “extremist” individualist ethos that made the protection of liberty the primary purpose of government. They have been taught to apologize for the shortcomings of the “rich white men” who led the revolution. A majority of Americans now subscribe to an expansive view of government as both great provider and beneficent leveler. Its primary purpose is to redress unequal or unhappy outcomes, regardless of their source, through wealth redistribution on a scale so vast that it mocks the concept “private property.”

The American way to Utopia

The Sovietization Of American Medicine

By Leonid Poretsky

For me, the expanded reach of an already bloated central government brings back bad memories of being a physician in the Soviet Union, which collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucratic inefficiencies two decades ago. I was among the many Soviets cheering for its demise. Now I worry that some of the most ruinous traits of the Soviet system are taking hold of American medicine.

I am not alone. Many opponents of “Obamacare” almost viscerally condemn what they call an unprecedented federal power-grab into personal healthcare. “What makes this so pernicious,” Paul D. Clements, a lawyer for the 26 states opposing the law argued in court, “is that the Federal Government knows that the citizenry is not going to take lightly the idea that there are huge, new Federal bureaucracies popping up across the country.”

Mr. Clements is correct. But perhaps even he does not fully fathom the degree to which Washington has already imposed its will on health-care delivery. American medicine, I fear, is falling increasingly under the control of a centralized health-care politburo that dictates how physicians diagnose, treat and monitor their patients.

Dear Person Seeking a Job : Why I Can't Hire You

Free Trip to Cabo

Potential employers have to respond to the incentives and disincentives that exist in today's world, and those do not favor conventional permanent employees.

by Charles Hugh-Smith

I know you're hard-working, motivated, tech-savvy and willing to learn. The reason I can't hire you has nothing to do with your work ethic or skills; it's the high-cost Status Quo, and the many perverse consequences of maintaining a failing Status Quo.

The sad truth is that it's costly and risky to hire anyone to do anything, and "bankable projects" that might generate profit/require more labor are few and far between. The overhead costs for employees have skyrocketed. So even though the wages employees see on their paychecks have stagnated, the total compensation costs the employer pays have risen substantially.

Thirty years ago the overhead costs were considerably less, adjusted for inflation, and there weren't billboards advertising a free trip to Cabo if you sued your employer. (I just saw an advert placed by a legal firm while riding a BART train that solicited employees to sue their employers, with the incentive being "free money" for a vacation to Cabo.)

Did Merkel Win or Lose?

Everyone on the euro Titanic was relieved that the ship's sinking could once again be postponed

by Pater Tenebrarum

It was interesting to read two articles in German news magazine 'Der Spiegel' that appeared to take completely opposing views on this particular matter.

One article considered her the clear loser of the summit, suffering a 'painful defeat'. 

“It is a painful defeat for Merkel. With the German parliament set to approve the ESM and the fiscal pact on Friday evening, Merkel had been eager to avoid making concessions to the southern Europeans. On the eve of the summit, the chancellor's advisers had ruled out the possibility of easing the rules governing access to the ESM. In particular, Merkel considered IMF oversight of aid recipients to be non-negotiable.

Now, however, she will travel in defeat back to Berlin, where she is scheduled to address the German parliament in the afternoon. Merkel's confidants began trying to put a positive spin on the summit results early on Friday morning. The chancellor had pushed through her maxim of "no liability without oversight," said Hermann Gröhe, general secretary of Merkel's Christian Democrats, in an interview on German breakfast television. Direct ESM aid to banks will only be allowed, he said, once the oversight authority is established at the ECB.

The EU is Out of Money. End of Story.

And Neither the Fed Nor the ECB Can "Print" To Save the Day

By Graham Summers

While various media outlets and “analysts” try to claim that the EU summit was somehow a success and that Europe’s issues are solved, the fact remains that Europe is out of money.  And I mean TOTALLY out of money.

I realize this flies in the face of what 99% of analysts are claiming. But this is a proven fact. Of the various entities that could hold the EU together (the ECB, the IMF, Germany, and the two bailout funds: the EFSF and the ESM) none and I mean NONE of them actually have the capital to do it.

I am continually bombarded with emails from people saying, "well, if things get bad the Fed or ECB will just print and everything is solved."

This is beyond wrong. It is just groupthink based on the idea that the Fed has intervened ever since the Great Crisis began in 2008 (ZeroHedge recently ran an article showing that the Fed has intervened in over two thirds of the months since the Crisis began).

Gradus ad Narcissum

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" "Practice."

By Mark Steyn

It's an old line, and perhaps an obsolescent one. I can't recall the last time I heard anyone use it. Americans don't seem to want to get to Carnegie Hall, not if American Idol is auditioning round the block. And practice is one of those things, like math, the education system seems to have ceded to the Asians. These days, China not only makes most of the pianos, but plays them. David Goldman (the Internet's "Spengler") likes to point out the correlation between the study of Western classical music and success in science. "There's a difference," he writes, "between an engineer and an engineer who plays Bach." Whenever he makes his case, even those of a conservative disposition fill up the comments section with objections: There's nothing wrong with an engineer who likes rock-'n'-roll, or country, or thrash metal or gangsta rap or grunge . . .

Obamacare Is Not Constitutional

The American people can correct the Supreme Court’s mistake

By Sen. Rand Paul

Political observers have described the 2010 Tea Party wave as an extraordinary assemblage of liberty-minded Americans who rallied around the Constitution in order to reclaim their country. One of the galvanizing forces was the passage of Obamacare — the national government’s takeover of our health care. Millions of Americans were enraged by this and other aspects of the Obama administration’s destructive political agenda, and they were sick and tired of their representatives’ failure to do anything to stop it. The 2010 wave election was a direct consequence of Obama’s unconstitutional ideals and czar-like power. And now, with the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare, it is my belief that the American people will be motivated to reorder our political priorities as they did in 2010.

Walking to America

A Fourth of July remembrance of one boy's journey to the land of his dreams

By Jeffrey Lord 

Schmuel knew.

Schmuel was Schmuel Gelbfisz, born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879.

He was the eldest child of Hannah and Aaron Gelbfisz, who were Hasidic Jews. The family had lived in Poland for generations. Schmuel was the oldest of six children.

Two years after Schmuel was born, the Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated and the blame was laid -- falsely -- to Jews. The Russian pogroms began. Tens of thousands of Jews fled to Warsaw, then an outpost of the Russian Empire. While this provided a safe haven of sorts, pretty soon the wave of anti-Semitism that had so murderously swamped Russia itself spread to the Russian-ruled Poland. Polish Jews were subjected to violence, to restrictive laws and higher taxes specifically targeted at Jews.

Judicial Betrayal

Conscience can be an implacable and inescapable punisher

By Thomas Sowell 

Betrayal is hard to take, whether in our personal lives or in the political life of the nation. Yet there are people in Washington -- too often, Republicans -- who start living in the Beltway atmosphere, and start forgetting those hundreds of millions of Americans beyond the Beltway who trusted them to do right by them, to use their wisdom instead of their cleverness.

President Bush 41 epitomized these betrayals when he broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. He paid the price when he quickly went from high approval ratings as president to someone defeated for reelection by a little known governor from Arkansas.

Chief Justice John Roberts need fear no such fate because he has lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court. But conscience can be a more implacable and inescapable punisher -- and should be.

The eleventh commandment

Israel’s Emergence As Energy Superpower Making Waves

By WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.

But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries are moving to step up energy relations with a tiny nation whose total energy reserves some experts now think could rival or even surpass the fabled oil wealth of Saudi Arabia.

Actual production is still miniscule, but evidence is accumulating that the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be an El Dorado: inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world. If this turns out to be true, a lot of things are going to change, and some of those changes are already underway.

Israel and Canada have just signed an agreement to cooperate on the exploration and development of what, apparently, could be vast shale oil reserves beneath the Jewish state.

Detroit Has Run Out of Other People's Money

If there is a cure for Motown's fiscal woes, it's bankruptcy

By Shikha Dalmia

A sigh of relief swept through Detroit recently after a judge threw out a legal challenge to the “consent agreement” the city just signed with the state to clean its books and avoid bankruptcy. The lawsuit, filed by the city’s megalomaniacal legal counsel, represented a level of overreach ridiculous even by Detroit’s lofty standards. But in the tragicomedy that is Detroit, it would have been better if it had succeeded and expedited Motown’s rendezvous with bankruptcy.

If there is any solution to Detroit’s fiscal mess, it may lie in the legal, not political, arena.

Fiscal deficits have been a fact of life in Detroit for decades as residents and industry fled its high taxes, high crime, shoddy schools and erratic trash services, thus eroding its tax base. Now, however, Detroit is flat broke, with a $265 million deficit that it has run out of gimmicks to fix.

Incinerating America’s West

The purpose of the green prosecution is not to protect nature, but to put shackles on humankind

By Robert Zubrin 

As I write these lines, vast wildfires are sweeping through my home state of Colorado and other areas of the American west. Last week, two of my employees had to leave work early to rush home to evacuate their families from imminent danger. Hundreds of houses have already been destroyed, and thousands of acres of trees incinerated, and unknown myriads of wild animals burned alive.

This disaster was predictable, and promises to get worse. Over the past decade, from British Columbia to New Mexico, the world’s most rapid deforestation has been underway in the North American west, with an average of nearly six million acres of forest lost per year — roughly double the three million acres per year rate in Brazil. The culprits here, however, have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles, whose epidemic spread has turned over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition awaiting any spark to flare into catastrophe.

On Equality and Inequality

Equality, Natural Rights and Killing Fields

By Ludwig von Mises

Different and Unequal

The doctrine of natural law that inspired the 18th century declarations of the rights of man did not imply the obviously fallacious proposition that all men are biologically equal. It proclaimed that all men are born equal in rights and that this equality cannot be abrogated by any man-made law, that it is inalienable or, more precisely, imprescriptible. Only the deadly foes of individual liberty and self-determination, the champions of totalitarianism, interpreted the principle of equality before the law as derived from an alleged psychical and physiological equality of all men.

The French declaration of the rights of the man and the citizen of November 3, 1789, had pronounced that all men are born and remain equal in rights. But, on the eve of the inauguration of the regime of terror, the new declaration that preceded the Constitution of June 24, 1793, proclaimed that all men are equal "par la nature." From then on this thesis, although manifestly contradicting biological experience, remained one of the dogmas of "leftism." Thus we read in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that "at birth human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as Fords."[1]

Angela Merkel is Playing You For Fools

Taking Germany out of the picture

By Raoul Ilargi

Oh, come on, leave the girl alone already. First off, all those people talking about a solution for the eurozone need to finally understand there ain't no such thing. And whatever slim chance of a solution the most optimistic - delusional - among them may be so desperate to cling on to, at least they should recognize that Angela doesn't hold the keys to the city. She herself knows it: she's just another gal knocking at the gates, even if she's dressed as the empress.

A thought experiment: how would you solve the euro crisis if Germany were not part of the equation? If you would have to put the de facto German contribution to the puzzle at zero, neutral? What would you be left with then, and what steps would have to be taken to come to a solution? If the sole remaining big players were, let's see, France, Spain and Italy?

That changes the picture, doesn't it? Take Germany out and all you're left with is pretty much roadkill. Plus a motley crue of comparatively small barely breathing rodents like Holland, Finland and Austria.

Two Ways, But Where To?

Electoral fear may be the only medicine

By Anthony de Jasay

Having for a pulpit a regular column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman speaks to us as one who is really sure about what is what. He is also thoroughly exasperated by the pigheaded blindness of those of us who have their hands on the levers of policy and are responsible for the astronomical waste and needless pain inflicted on the economies on both sides of the Atlantic and especially on the Eurozone. His thesis is that we are actually in a state of genuine depression, involving a loss of potential output that hardly bears thinking about. The depression is of our own making and is unnecessary, serving no purpose. It ought to be and could be terminated forthwith.

When Push Comes to Shove ...

Roberts switched views to uphold health care law

By Jan Crawford

(CBS News) Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court's four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy - believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law - led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

"He was relentless," one source said of Kennedy's efforts. "He was very engaged in this."

But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, "You're on your own."

Go figure, the poorest place in Europe is run by Communists

Next stop, Greece

By Simon Black

Ah Moldova… the poorest country in Europe, which just so happens to have had a Communist party majority in its parliament since 1998.

These two points are not unrelated.

Despite having achieved its independence from the Soviet Union over 20 years ago, the state is still a major part of the Moldovan economy…from setting prices and wages to media, healthcare, agricultural production, air transport, and electricity.

Under such management, it’s no wonder, for example, that Moldova has to import 75% of its electricity. It is the exact opposite of self-sustaining.

The government does a reasonable job of chasing away foreigners as well.

It's Never Been Better

As a Share of Household Spending, U.S. Has Most Affordable Food in World 

by Mark Perry

We hear reports all the time that real household incomes are stagnant or falling, the middle class is disappearing, household wealth has declined, and income inequality is rising.  All of those reports might make one think that the standard of living for the average American is bad and getting worse.  But here's one basic measure of a country's standard of living that shows Americans are better off than their consumer counterparts anywhere in the world: The share of household consumption expenditure on food consumed at home, see table below (USDA data here).  

Relative to our total household spending, Americans have the cheapest food on the planet - only 6.6% of the average household budget goes to food consumed at home.  European countries like Spain, France and Norway spend twice that amount on food as a share of total expenditures, and consumers in countries like Turkey, China and Mexico spend three times as much of their budgets on food as Americans.  

Oh, How the Mighty are Falling

"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells"

By Mark Grant

While the markets look at what took place at the last Summit and rally; just wait, it won’t last long. The markets are getting mislead, one more time, by the spin that Europe places on events; by the focus that the giant European propaganda machine spits out from various sources again and again and again. You may recall, in the not too distant past, how the firewall was the thing, how the money needed to be bigger and how we were all led to believe that this giant, massive wall of Euros would protect the core nations of Europe. These nations included Spain and Italy without question and now the first mighty oak has fallen as Spain stepped up to the plate and swung the begging bat.

Saving everybody's face

The real victor in Brussels was Merkel

By Wolfgang Münchau

Mario Monti faced down the German chancellor and won the battle. He will survive a few more weeks or months in politics. It was clever of him to threaten a veto on something Angela Merkel badly needed. He had her in the corner. It was an example of classic EU diplomacy.

But this was only the foreground spectacle. If you look behind the curtain, you will find that, for Italy at least, nothing has changed at all. The European Stability Mechanism was already able to purchase Italian bonds in the open market. The instrument was there, but not used. The agreed changes are subtle. Italy must still sign a memorandum of understanding, and subject itself to the troika – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

A New Health Care System

What can go wrong ?