The democratic system of government has many advantages, but it is bedeviled by the electorate’s tendency to fall for snake-oil salesmen peddling economically devastating nostrums. In recent years, the climate change “net zero” nonsense is the most obvious of these follies, but they stretch back through democratic history to the repeal of the Corn Laws […]

The United Auto Workers’ success in unionizing a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee suggests that the reported death of private sector unions is not imminent. Fifty years ago, even in cyclical industries unionized workers were close to Japan-style lifetime employment, with any layoffs in business downturns allocated by inverse seniority, so that after a few years […]

The European Court of Human Rights’ decision sanctioning Switzerland for having not done enough to combat global warming is typical of all international bodies. It flouted the original restrictions imposed on the court’s activity, the decision did direct economic harm to ordinary Swiss citizens, and the Court exhibited utter contempt for Swiss democracy. International bodies […]

Britain and the United States are together the progenitors of modern democracy and it has since spread worldwide, albeit suffering a retreat in the last decade. Nevertheless, the current governments under which we are groaning suggest that the U.S., Britain and Western Europe are not very good at operating a democratic system. Can it be […]

I was shocked this week to discover that the Pan American Highway, much admired in my youth as a potential connector for the entire American continent, is still incomplete, with a 66-mile Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia that has been held up by environmentalists since 1972. Given the hyperbolic multiplier from completing first-move infrastructure, […]

It has long been a nostrum among economists that central banks should be independent of their countries’ governments. The 1998 decision granting “independence” to the Bank of England was specifically motivated by that thesis. Yet in practice, central banks have not stood staunchly against the free-spending proclivities of their governments; instead, they have indulged them, […]

President Biden’s denunciation of the takeover of the modest remnants of U.S. Steel by Nippon Steel, the premier steel company of the United States’ most important ally, leads to only one conclusion: protectionism and autarky are reaching 1930s levels. There are other parallels; for example, wars are breaking out all over the world, as they […]

President Biden recently produced his Budget for the next fiscal year, with projections for the next ten years; even with swingeing tax rises on the “wealthy” and sharp cuts over the decade in real defense budgets it proposes a series of trillion-dollar deficits, beginning with $1.78 trillion in the year to September 2025. When you […]

At a lunch in 2002, British political commentator Iain Dale horrified me by proposing a “modernization” of the Conservative party. My view was that it had gone badly left under John Major and needed a “re-Thatcherization” or even better a “re-Liverpoolization” rather than a further trek in the wrong direction. However, under David Cameron and […]

Jacob, Lord Rothschild, who died this week at 87, was mourned mostly as a philanthropist, his 1980s venture with Charterhouse J. Rothschild lost in the mists of time. That is a pity, because Rothschild’s vision should have been the way forward for British finance after the foolish 1986 Financial Services Act had destroyed its traditional […]