The EU: A Prescription for More Stagnation (or Worse)

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In July 2007, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission (Brussels’ top bureaucrat) said rather a lot of the quiet part aloud. The European Union, he boasted, was an empire, an empire of new kind, a “non-imperial empire,” but an empire all the same. For some that had always been the idea. Europe’s former great powers could never, individually, restore the global preeminence they had enjoyed before the world wars. Maybe they could come close to doing so collectively. A united Europe could become a rival “pole” to the U.S., not an enemy, not militarily, but economically and as an exemplar to the rest of the world of a better way forward….

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Argentina: It's Still Milei Time

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Ten or so months on, Argentina’s Javier Milei is still pressing on with his reforms, but even though the Argentine system gives a lot of power to the president, it doesn’t help that his still young party (LLA — La Libertad Avanza) only has 15 percent of the seats in Argentina’s lower house and about 10 percent in the Senate. Even with the help of allies it can only exercise some degree of control via ad hoc blocking minorities.

Midterms are due late next year, and, if a recent poll in Buenos Aires province is any indication (not that much: the midterms won’t be held until October next year, an eon away under current circumstances) the LLA should increase its representation significantly, although still well short of a majority…

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Britain’s Dangerous Territorial Giveaway

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However (very) bad Britain’s Conservative government may have been, the Labour government that has replaced it has proved to be infinitely worse. Much of this (such as the doubling down on net zero) was predictable, but Labour’s destructiveness has extended into areas — including (checks notes) the Indian Ocean — that have surprised even the gloomier pessimists.

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Electric Vehicles: Eurotrashed

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Sooner or later there comes a moment when central planners’ spreadsheets and targets run into reality. And it is rarely a happy moment. Some years ago, officials in the EU, UK, California, and other dim-bulb jurisdictions came up with the idea of imposing a quota system on automakers…

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The Disinformation Panic

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By giving online intermediaries a sizeable degree of immunity from liability for user content, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 combined a characteristically American defense of free expression with a determination to ensure that this promising new sector was not stifled by another American tradition, predatory litigation. The outcome, through blogs, social media, and countless other outlets, has been to open the public square to voices that once would never have been heard.

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German Reparations: Far From a ‘Carthaginian Peace’

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Winston Churchill was “a chief villain of world war 2?” Well, that’s the view (neatly filleted by Andrew Roberts, Churchill’s finest contemporary biographer, National Review’s Mark Wright, and others) of Darryl Cooper, the podcaster recently interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Carlson described Cooper as possibly the “best and most honest popular historian in the United States,” which would be both alarming and remarkable were it true. Cooper takes a revisionist view of the second world war that goes far beyond a continuing reexamination of the past — a basic part of any historian’s work — or even an exaggerated contrarianism into far darker territory.

This is the Capital Letter, not the History Letter, but there was one comment which marched into Capital Matters territory. It appears at the end of a tweet in which Cooper refers to the Treaty of Versailles. “The terms,” he wrote, “would keep Germany in destitution for another decade.”

But did they?

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Portraits of the Reich

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Re-examining the Third Reich remains, even now, essential. Its lessons are too important to be deemed safely settled. But when Richard Evans argues that the task has “gained new urgency and importance” due to the emergence of “strongmen and would-be dictators” within the world’s democracies “since shortly after the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he risks trivializing past horrors by wielding them as a weapon in the current debate over populism. That’s unless he has Vladimir Putin in mind, which would make for a very different discussion…

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Price Controls: Politics and Policy →

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Price controls are back in the news again. A few weeks ago, President Joe Biden had advocated a form of rent control. Now Vice President Kamala Harris is arguing for a federal ban on “gouging” when it comes to “excessive” increases in the prices of groceries and food products. There is a suspicion that she would like such a law to extend beyond that area, but she may have backtracked on that after earlier criticism. And just what are “excessive” price increases? Doubtless all will be cleared up at Harris’ next press conference…

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Coal’s Rich Seam

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Wicked, grubby old King Coal, they said, was on his last legs.

Weeks before the signing of the Paris Climate Accord at the end of 2015, Carbon Tracker (“aligning capital market actions with climate reality”)  estimated that if the world was to meet the climate target set out in the agreement, then, according to the International Energy Agency’s “450” scenario, “the production from … existing coal mines is sufficient to meet the volume of coal required … It is the end of the road for expansion of the coal sector.”

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