CDU chief Friedrich Merz’s economically suicidal net-zero constitutional change in the Bundestag and the recent spate of anti-capitalist legal judgements in Britain and the U.S. highlight the alarming rise in economic illiteracy not only in the legal profession, but among politicians, journalists and pundits in general. Big Government, regulation and above all the rise of the pernicious nonprofit and consultancy sectors have dangerously reduced the percentage of our masters who have ever had to meet a private sector payroll or understand what it requires to do so. Remedying this will take more than one short-term fix of Elon Musk. Continue reading →

Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney flew to London last week for talks with Britain’s Kier Starmer, both of them upset about President Trump’s aggression, populism and protectionism. Starmer’s immediate instinct, to snuggle ever closer to the corrupt rotting carcass of the European Union will do Britain no good, nor will Carney’s instinct to create a global socialist authoritarian uber-state achieve anything for Canada. Instead, to protect themselves against the new assertive United States, they should revive an idea that would fill both men with horror: Imperial Preference (and yes, they should call it that, not some feeble woke alternative, as I will explain)! Continue reading →

The Atlanta Fed’s advance estimate of Gross Domestic Product for the first quarter has recently turned sharply negative, to caterwauling glee from the usual suspects in the media and the Blob. Their rapture is economically irrational; GDP was deliberately designed to include government spending, thus flattering orgies of waste such as the Biden administration. It is far past time to turn to Gross Private Product, a measure that reflects only those outputs with measurable value in the market. On that measure, the picture for 2021-25 is much grimmer and that for 2025-29 will be brighter than on the official cooked statistics. Hopefully the voters in November 2026 and 2028 will notice their additional well-being and distribute their favors accordingly. Continue reading →

Germany’s voters last week produced a massive demand for greater freedom, with the nationalist AfD’s share of the vote more than doubling to 20.8%. The outgoing government parties all did badly, the SPD losing 9% of the vote, the Greens 3% and the free-market FDP damaged so badly by its participation in the socialist coalition that it fell out of the Bundestag entirely. Yet the likely incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz promptly ignored the will of the voters and announced his intention to coalesce with the SPD, thus condemning Germany to another half decade of explosive immigration and climate change mania economic collapse. Learning from history is not a German skill and nor is responsiveness to voters. Continue reading →

President Trump wants lower interest rates. That is natural; he is by profession a real estate developer and low interest rates make real estate developers’ lives easier and more profitable. However, when the Fed’s inflation target is 2% and actual inflation is 3%, interest rates below 5% or so wreck the economy in the long-term. There is one way for President Trump to get his wish of interest rates around 2% without wrecking the economy: he should bash the Fed until it replaces Ben Bernanke’s idiotic 2% inflation target with a zero target that means fully stable prices over decades. Real estate developers can then have low interest rates. And the rest of us can prosper, free from the fear that the inept Fed will wipe out our savings and condemn us to an impoverished old age. Continue reading →

Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people with non-violent disagreements with the prevailing regimes in Britain and the United States have been debanked, and the Central Bank Digital Currency, enthusiastically backed by many central banks, could make it impossible for such people to live at all by de-moneying as well as de-banking them. Leftist governments have become totalitarian, because new technology has enabled them to be so. We need anti-surveillance technology and an AI Bill of Rights to reverse this Orwellian process. Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: The Bear’s Lair is happily continuing for the foreseeable future as we were never dependent on USAID funding. Our sincerest condolences to our suddenly impoverished fellow writers.

President Trump has had a very successful first few weeks in office, issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders that not only reversed much of the damage of the Biden administration, but also made some changes that had been needed for decades. Inevitably, there were also a few mis-steps. However, both Trump’s temperament and belief system could lead to damaging errors in the future, and the delicate and infuriating process of passing legislation through Congress may worsen matters further. There are thus many things that could go wrong and turn what should be a stellar Trump second term into a disappointment, or even a fiasco. Continue reading →

Just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, so one cannot help giggling that a Chinese inventor with a small team and modest resources has by his open source DeepSeek AI system outsmarted the behemoth “geniuses” that came up with the $500 billion Stargate announcement. Large bureaucracies subtract value, government subtracts even more value and ivory-tower HR wokery subtracts most of all. Small scale entrepreneurialism, fiercely independent of conventional pieties, is necessary not merely to “beat China” but to produce Industrial Revolutions. Continue reading →

Western civilization has declined a long way since its 1991 triumph with the fall of most of Communism. The hard left bears little responsibility for this decline; they have had only a modest share of power. Even the center-left does not bear all the responsibility, their tenure has included some decent governments such as that of Bill Clinton in the United States, and even bad center-left governments, such as Tony Blair’s or Joe Biden’s, offered hope of redemption through an opposition victory. Most of the damage, which has ranged from decline almost to cataclysm, came from governments of the center-right. It is the slimy center-right, opportunistic and unreliable, who must be fought for civilization to succeed. Continue reading →