In the latest episode of conservatism as “progressivism driving the speed limit,” former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum proposed the idea of paid leave at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday voted unanimously to keep the federal funds rate unchanged. Overall, the FOMC signaled it has made a dovish turn away from the promised normalization of monetary policy which the Fed has promised will be implemented “some day” for a decade.
In the wake of the March 15 New Zealand shootings, advocates for new gun restrictions in New Zealand have pointed to Australia as “proof” that if national governments adopt gun restrictions like those of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement, then homicides will go into steep decline.
It is not every day the iconic F.A. Hayek is associated with support for one-world government. Yoram Hazony’s critique of Hayek on that score highlights interesting fissures in theories of political economy on the Right. In some of his newspaper writing, and in The Virtue of Nationalism, the Jerusalem-based academic argues that Hayek advocated replacing independent nations with a world-wide federation.
Despite the ECB’s subsidy of the Eurozone’s banking system, it remains in a sleepwalking state similar to the non-financial, non-crony-capitalist zombified economy. Gone are the heady days of investment banking. There is now a legacy of derivatives and regulators’ fines. Technology has made the over-extended branch network, typical of a European retail bank, a costly white elephant. The market for emptying bank buildings in the towns and villages throughout Europe must be dire, a source of under-provisioned losses.
Last week, the ECB announced the reintroduction of targeted long-term refinancing operations for the third time. TLTRO-III is scheduled to start from next September. The idea is to make yet more money available for the banks at attractive rates on condition they increase their lending to non-financial entities.
Even by the middle of the 18th century, the English language lacked a widely-used set of standard definitions to English words. While English dictionaries existed, those that did were widely considered deficient for a variety of reasons. Famous Scottish philosopher and historian, David Hume, complained that the English-speaking world possessed “no Dictionary of our Language, and scarce a tolerable Grammar.”
