Here is an interesting (but not altogether clear) piece about Cyprus and ‘national insolvency’ by Stephen Kinsella at Harvard Business Review: … national borrowing on the modern scale really only began around the seventeenth century. Before that in the monarchical era, so-called “court bankers” provided cash-strapped sovereigns with loans and […]
My new piece at Commentator on how these new press ‘regulations’ might or might not tackle ‘egregious practices’: So we have no lack of sanctions in this area, formal and informal. Just as we have the strictest laws against killing people. Yet in a country of some 60 million people […]
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the murder of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Here is the piece I wrote on the 8th anniversary. It mentions the proliferation of insane Serbian conspiracy theories somehow hinting that I was linked to the assassination and/or lobbied for the then Deputy Prime […]
Another piece by me at PunditWire that looks at a magnificent example of using language to demonstrate that ‘really’ the issue is about something else. Not a disaster. But the speaker’s gloriously moral and meritorious response to it: I promised both the government and the NHS that I would see […]
It’s always worth reading anything written by the prolific and perceptive Walter Russell Mead. Here he is on how we need to invent Liberalism 5.0: Briefly, the idea is that after World War II America was organized around a group of heavily regulated monopoly and semi-monopoly companies. AT&T was the […]
My new piece at the Commentator explores the wilder shores of the UK’s Health and Safety neurosis in the context of how we look at ‘risk’ – and asks rhetorically whether the way the Americans balance the risk of guns against the freedom to own them is really so unreasonable. […]
I was so moved by the thrilling experience of trying to cross the road in Hanoi that I sent the Commentator a piece comparing and contrasting socialism (and socialists) in Vietnam and here. If you have never been to Hanoi or indeed Asia before, nothing can prepare you and your […]
My latest Commentator piece tries in very broad terms to explain exactly why it is foolish to say that Libertarians and Socialists are ‘bedfellows’: Basically, there are only two forms of government: (a) Those (very few) deriving explicitly from the US Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving […]
Y’all are sitting there pondering one of the great Left issues of the day. Is Facebook part of the class struggle? Are people on Facebook a class, and if so are they exploiting or exploited? Why are new forms of social media so dangerous? Yes, it’s the American Left in […]
Richard Murphy is a hyperactive socialist/collectivist whose main role in life is to expand the state in all directions. He even calls this expansion ‘courageous‘: The result is that the Courageous State needs to have policies to: Constrain the world of feral finance that has so dominated the economies […]
