Steven Pinker is well known for his theory that violence (globally speaking) is now at lower levels than its every been, and that this is due to the triumph of enlightenment ideas. While I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think Pinker overstates his case sometimes. For example, the fact that the world has not been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust is not due to the fact that the large regimes of the world are particularly enlightened. In fact, US policymakers routinely discussed using nuclear weapons well into the Vietnam War.

The Chinese government has done the following to prop up its stock markets:

1.    Cut interest rates several times

2.    Cut reserve requirements

3.    Prevents large stock owners of a company from selling their share for 6 months

4.    Induced stock brokers to buy $19 billion of shares

5.    Imposed restrictions of short selling

6.    Stopped new issues of stocks and IPOs

7.    Directed pension funds to buy more shares of stock

Last month, the United States Supreme Court declined to take up a case involving Arizona’s and Kansas’s attempts to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The two states sought SCOTUS review in an attempt to overturn a prohibition imposed by lower federal courts.

The political and economic turmoil in Greece has perhaps elicited more commentary than any other economic event over the past years. Among numerous discussions on the fragility of the banking system, the Eurozone, and the black hole of government spending, there’s one issue that stands out: the failure of international organizations and supranational states.

A few hours ago, a Greek minister for administrative reform,  George Katrougalos, told a radio station in Athens that reopening the banks “probably is not technically possible this week.”  The minister’s choice of words is, to be charitable, less then ingenuous.