Amidst the current social and political turmoil in Venezuela, a discussion over what could drive a foreign military intervention in the country has been making headlines lately. To my surprise, Venezuela’s oil reserves ( the largest in the world ) are among the top reasons people believe the US Government would be after. However, the current shape of the oil industry and the way the market is behaving suggest otherwise.

“Germany has plunged into unprecedented political chaos,” a headline dramatically proclaimed in the prestigious international Foreign Policy magazine in the wake of the German elections in fall 2017. As different parties negotiated for months to find a majority to govern, the writer of the piece, Paul Hockenos from Berlin, felt that the bad results for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) showed that “Merkel’s train wreck raises the question of her ability to lead the party and the nation.”

In a very limited sense, there is private education in the developed world, but almost always private schools are heavily regulated by the government. There is also the issue of compulsory attendance laws. Competition in schooling that is unapproved by government bureaucrats is prohibited since attendance does not qualify as actual “education” in the eyes of the government. We, therefore, lack the means to compare an actual free market in education with government schooling.

If we analyze the ranking of the main technological companies (2017), there is not a single European among the top fifteen. The vast majority are North American and Chinese companies.

It is even more worrying. If we go to the top 50 global technology companies, only four are European, but when we analyze those four, it is more than debatable that they are leaders in innovation, patents and market power. The European indexes of “technology” include, diplomatically, a few industrial conglomerates that have long lost the technological race.