The coronation of King Charles III next Saturday is planned to be on a smaller scale than that of his mother Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That is appropriate; Elizabeth’s coronation may have taken place in a relatively poor country still living under the effects of postwar rationing, but it was graced with an immensely glamorous young Queen and Winston Churchill as prime minister. This week’s ceremony will inevitably be lacking in both respects, even though “Squishy Rishi” Sunak has two more degrees than Sir Winston. It will also fall short of the 8,000 guests in 1953, including representatives of 129 countries and a U.S. delegation headed by George C. Marshall, whose Marshall Plan trumped any achievements of President Joe Biden, boycotter of the current festivities. Nevertheless, even this modest celebration will have a positive effect on Britain and its economy, showing again that constitutional monarchy beats an elected President. Continue reading →

Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton is currently the world’s richest man, worth around $239 billion; he is notable in coming neither from the United States nor from the tech sector. His wealth is a product of globalization, which has produced demand for Western fashion brands among a substantial fraction of 8 billion people. Globalization is just one of the forces artificially inflating the wealth of the richest at the expense of the rest of us; I will herein examine the history of extreme wealth and the factors inflating it and forecast the conditions that will produce the world’s first trillionaires. Continue reading →

Saudi Arabia recently signed a contract with China to sell oil with payment in yuan (China’s currency, sometimes known as renminbi, for inscrutable Chinese reasons). Argentina and Brazil are proposing to use a common currency, the sur, for trade between them. India and Russia are undertaking trade in rupees and rubles. This is a gathering trend, that may eventually result in deposing the dollar as the leading international currency. It is thus worth thinking about what a de-dollarized world might look like, and where the costs and benefits would fall. Continue reading →

Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 “Leviathan” described life in a state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short.” Fortunately, shortly after Leviathan was published, the Tory architects of the English Restoration Settlement brought several protections into the British and later American Constitutions that revolutionized our fates: they were property rights, Habeas Corpus and the First Amendment protections for free speech. Alas, in the 21st Century those protections of ordinary people are being removed, allowing government to oppress them in a way impossible in the preceding 350 years. This time however, our fate will be worse, for modern medical advances will make our lives not only nasty and brutish, but achingly, unbearably long. Continue reading →

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) this week announced the winner of its auction for the loans and deposits of the failed Silicon Valley Bank: First Citizens BancShares (Nasdaq:FCNCA), a North Carolina outfit with no obvious synergy with SVB’s customer base or tech know-how. Given First Citizens’ capital base of only $14.1 billion ($9.7 billion of which is stockholders’ equity) compared to the $72 billion of SVB loans it took on, there must be some chance of a cascade of bank failures. For those who think this unduly pessimistic, I have a tale to tell you – from 1973. Continue reading →

Since the time of Sir Robert Peel (Prime Minister 1834-35, 1841-46) the British Conservative party has been notorious for its inability to conserve anything worthwhile, let alone to restore anything that its opponents had dismantled. For a few years in the 1980s, it appeared that Margaret Thatcher, while imperfect on several issues, had reversed this tendency, and was making Britain a country in which a free market conservative might reasonably want to live. Alas, her ouster in 1990 led to a rapid reversal of many of her policies, and the recent Conservative governments since 2010 have followed the traditions of the Quisling 1945-75 period rather than those of Thatcher herself. Continue reading →

The Federal Trade Commission under its fearless leftist chair Lina Khan is proposing to ban non-compete agreements, which prevent employees from working for a competitor for an often lengthy period after their departure and are applied to some 30 million U.S. employees. The usual Chamber of Commerce types and “conservative” journalists have squawked, arguing that Ms. Khan is a hardline Marxist (possibly true) and that she is eating away the very foundations of free market capitalism. Well, I have news for them: partly because of the Fed’s “funny money” policies over the last decade, the U.S. economy is now thoroughly corporatist, not capitalist, and moves like this proposal that free workers from wage serfdom are highly beneficial. Continue reading →

The reputations of past Presidents are continually being re-evaluated. Woodrow Wilson, a demi-god at the time of the 1944 film “Wilson,” has now been sharply downgraded by both left (for his racism) and right (for his rigid Progressivism and his share in the disastrous Versailles Treaty). Conversely, Harry Truman and Calvin Coolidge have been rehabilitated by history. Another such rehabilitation is being attempted on Dwight Eisenhower, not highly regarded at the time of his departure; I will argue that the rehabilitators are wrong, and that for several reasons he was a thoroughly unsatisfactory President. Continue reading →

The admirable Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.-Ga.), my favorite Congressperson, this week called for a “national divorce” by which “blue states” and “red states” would separate, thereby allowing the “red states” to form a smaller union of the like-minded: Christian, capitalist and economically vibrant. It’s a lovely idea, but the new Red America, increasingly wealthy yet ideologically alone in the world, would be immediately subject to attack, possibly by direct military action, certainly by massive subversion. Freedom cannot now be established in a universally hostile world; it requires a new home of its own, attainable only through space exploration. Continue reading →