That didn’t take long. Only hours after the final results came in for a British exit from the EU, political leaders in Scotland are talking about renewing their drive to secede from the United Kingdom.
Pointing to the fact that a large majority of Scots voted to remain in the EU, Scottish advocates for independence are now claiming (convincingly) that Scotland is leaving the EU against its will.
Janet Yellen gave her semi-annual testimony before the Senate Banking Committee this week. In the Q&A time, Senator Pat Toomey criticized the Fed’s policy and suggested that it has only worked to “shift the timing of economic activity.” Tho Bishop briefly mentioned the exchange in his great post earlier this week, and I had to take a closer look.
The news of Britain’s decision in the EU referendum—and the subsequent resignation of David Cameron—created a wave of confusion and fear on financial markets. The pound sterling dropped to its lowest level since 1985, and the London stock market opened with a FTSE 100 lower by 8.9% compared to the day before.
Britain’s historic decision to leave the European Union represents a blow to political centralization. However, it’s also a sobering reminder that the work of advancing peace and economic freedom is never done. Britain may be extricating itself from EU political control, but if its goal is genuine progress and prosperity, it will need to do much more than simply sever its ties with Brussels.
The new failure of radical socialism in Venezuela is exposed when one looks at the number of people who seek to leave the country. Many people have run desperately away from the regime imposed by Chávez and continued by Nicolás Maduro.
Decentralization and devolution of state power is always a good thing, regardless of the motivations behind such movements.
Hunter S. Thompson, looking back on 60s counterculture in San Francisco, lamented the end of that era and its imagined flower-child innocence:
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The GDP framework and the output gap is an abstraction that does little more than provide justification for the interventions of government officials.
According to popular thinking, the key cause behind either inflation or deflation is the difference, or the gap, between what an economy is producing and its potential output. Potential output is the maximum amount of goods and services an economy can turn out when it is at full capacity.
Three quarters of a century ago, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an attack on the Soviet Union across a front 3,000 miles long. Barbarossa moved the war into its global stage. It prefigured the final alliance system. It moved the Final Solution to the industrial level of killing. It helped bring the United States into the war, and certainly opened the floodgates of “pre-Lend-Lease” from the United States to Stalin’s Russia.
It has already been pointed out that a country can enjoy domestic peace only when a democratic constitution provides the guarantee that the adjustment of the government to the will of the citizens can take place without friction. Nothing else is required than the consistent application of the same principle in order to assure international peace as well.
