Once upon a time a distinguished European leader almost described the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy as: … a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive […]
Our old enemy the EU Working Time Directive (WTD) last sighted was embroiled in deep procedural wrangling as between the various parts of the EU machine. Can it be left to rot in this long grass for long enough to get it entangled with new EP elections and maybe a […]
While we are thinking about who ‘allows’ what, the British Government have announced that Dutch MP Geert Wilders will not be allowed to enter the UK, as his very presence will ‘threaten national security’. The public debate appears to be focusing on this man’s right to speak his mind. Not […]
You get what you pay for. Nature fills a vacuum. What goes up, comes down. Pride comes before a fall. And so on. Thus: Since the calamities of the Balkan wars, the average European planner has assumed that there are two worlds of military operations: NATO and EU missions on […]
Back to earth with a bump. Here is a startling puff-piece for radical communism in the Independent. It is all about a neo-Trotskyist postman, one Olivier Besancenot, who it is claimed ‘defies the Trotskyist stereotype’ by having short hair and wearing well-fitting jeans and a black or white T-shirt. His […]
More high-pitched noise on the status or not in the Catholic Church of Bishop Richard Williamson, with Chancellor Merkel ploughing in: "This is not just a matter, in my opinion, for the Christian, Catholic and Jewish communities in Germany but the Pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there […]
Remember this posting on the Cost of Stupidity? My conclusions: Small sustained differences in performance mean big differences in absolute outcomes. • •The steady and quite rich get steadily quite a lot richer. The poor have to be more than steady to start to close the gap. • The stupid […]
Recalling my posting a few days ago about moral hazard I espied this glum account of the Eurozone’s woes: For a long time, they all looked the same. The reckless and the virtuous, the sneaky and the upfront, all the member countries of the euro-area were treated identically, or nearly […]
President Obama’s inauguration speech of course attracted huge interest. And intense analysis. See eg this breakdown of how often he used the words I, You, They and We. And this subtle look at it from the point of view of Greek rhetoric, pointing out pathos, bathos, logos and even anaphora […]
Back when the Euro was launched, senior US economist Martin Feldstein annoyed a lot of people by warning that the Euro was likely to lead to dangerous new tensions in Europe and between the EU and USA. Here is a flavour of the argument: Since there is no major country […]
