Garreth Bloor is Vice President for Transatlantic Affairs at the South African Institute of Race Relations, South Afr

Can the EU Survive the Next Financial Crisis?

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.

What Did the Founders Mean by “Invasion”?

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.”

Block: How I Profess My Libertarianism to My Students

I am a professor (I teach economics at Loyola University New Orleans). In my view, this means I should profess something. I would be bland and uninteresting to my students if all I did was offer them all sides of every controversial issue in an even-handed way, so that none of them even had a clue as to where I stood on any topic. Of course, I would be derelict in my duty if I only offered my own viewpoint. As John Stuart Mill says in his “On Liberty” (paraphrase) “if you only know your own side of an argument, you don’t even know that, since all views are contrasted with all others.”

How Countries Fall into the Welfare Trap

People like the welfare state because they suppose that it comes at no costs and provides many benefits. If people knew how much the present consumption of social benefits entails less prosperity in the future, the population would have a critical attitude towards the welfare state and politicians would have a harder time selling their fraud. Just as a society that ranks security over liberty loses both, a society that attributes a higher value to social benefits than to wealth creation ends up with neither wealth nor benefits.

Decades of Transit Trouble on New York’s Subways

As the New York City subway system continues to deteriorate, this word is verboten by political and media elites here: Privatization.

Even the supposed friends of private enterprise, the Manhattan Institute, don’t argue for the abolition of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the state agency that has run the subways since the late 1960s. Some supposed friends of laissez-faire don’t accept that private transportation systems can ever effectively run the trains and make money.