[This is Part Three in a three-part series on Canadian Health Care. See Part One and Part Two.]

For years there has been a struggle in the Eurozone between those that want to transform it into a transfer union and those that who want a Europe of independent and cooperating countries. The latter including Austria, Finland, the Netherlands and Germany want strict limits for deficits and debt brakes as envisioned in the Fiscal Stability Treaty.

For most experts the key factor that sets the foundation for healthy economic fundamentals is a stable price level as depicted by the consumer price index.

In this way of thinking, a stable price level ensures the visibility of the relative changes in the prices of goods and services.

Consequently, it is held, this leads to the efficient use of the economy’s scarce resources and hence results in better economic fundamentals.

This interview was originally published in the March 2018 issue of the Lara-Murphy Report.

A specter continues to haunt the world, the specter of Karl Marx. Two hundred years ago, on May 5, 1818, the father of twentieth century totalitarian communism, the guidebook writer of revolutionary mass-murdering dictatorship, and the inspirer of disastrous socialist central planning was born in Trier, Germany.

I have spent my whole adult life in the shadow of one man, Karl Marx.

By the age of 14, I recognized how important Marx was in history. I began to study some of his writings when I was a senior in high school. I continued to study him seriously in graduate school, and in 1968 my book on Marx was published.

One of the few positive things in the ill-named USA FREEDOM Act, enacted in 2015 after the Snowden revelations on NSA domestic spying, is that it required the Director of National Intelligence to regularly report on its domestic surveillance activities. On Friday, the latest report was released on just how much our own government is spying on us. The news is not good at all if you value freedom over tyranny.

Phew, the disaster is averted – at least for the time being. After Donald Trump threatened to not extend his tariff exemptions to the EU, the US administration announced last month that another one-month relief will be granted. The EU now has until June 1 to make concessions to the US, or else will face tariffs of 25 percent on steel and ten percent on aluminum.