It doesn't take an immense amount of insight to see the relevance of Tocqueville's central concern to our situation today. What are the so-called Twitter mobs if not the "tyranny of the majority" at work?
The problem of the European Union has never been a lack of monetary and fiscal stimulus, but rather an excess of these. This has failed to produce real growth, and now we're getting more of the same, but even bigger.
Hayek is guilty of pointing out what should be abundantly obvious: both democratic and authoritarian regimes can commit grave crimes against human rights.
France faces a future of spiraling debt and declining economic growth. So Emmanuel Macron has now embraced economic nationalism as a way out. It's not likely to work.
With oil prices in likely long-term tailspin, corrupt governments can't count on oil sales to bail them out anymore. But Mexico's government didn't get the memo and still clings to the state oil monopoly.
As states in various areas of the Continent embarked on centralization and territorialization in the fourteenth century, communities very often took up arms against forms of taxation. The Cornish Rebellion of 1497 against national taxation is an example of this trend.
John Maynard Keynes's supporters still insist that he was a mild and benign liberal. In truth, Keynes supported the blood-soaked Soviet regime and called himself a socialist.
Whatever happens with the virus, the real story, the real historical change, is probably economic. Abenomics—Japan's ultra-Keynesian experiment—seems to be dead.
