The Bear’s Lair

The Bear’s Lair: The yawning global fiscal pit

President Biden recently produced his Budget for the next fiscal year, with projections for the next ten years; even with swingeing tax rises on the “wealthy” and sharp cuts over the decade in real defense budgets it proposes a series of trillion-dollar deficits, beginning with $1.78 trillion in the year to September 2025. When you […]

The Bear’s Lair: Tory “Modernization” project was a total disaster

At a lunch in 2002, British political commentator Iain Dale horrified me by proposing a “modernization” of the Conservative party. My view was that it had gone badly left under John Major and needed a “re-Thatcherization” or even better a “re-Liverpoolization” rather than a further trek in the wrong direction. However, under David Cameron and […]

The Bear’s Lair: The road not taken for British finance

Jacob, Lord Rothschild, who died this week at 87, was mourned mostly as a philanthropist, his 1980s venture with Charterhouse J. Rothschild lost in the mists of time. That is a pity, because Rothschild’s vision should have been the way forward for British finance after the foolish 1986 Financial Services Act had destroyed its traditional […]

The Bear’s Lair: Traditional regimes governed better

In studying the economic history of the last two centuries, I am struck by the fact that the various revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries by and large did not produce improvements in economic governance. Most traditional societies adapted to economic change perfectly adequately, whereas post-traditional societies have shown themselves vulnerable to dictatorship and […]

The Bear’s Lair: Biden’s people have lost the denominator

In the recent Congressional Budget Office projections of the budget deficit to 2033 (which as you would expect, make gloomy reading) there is one morsel of good news: revenues in 2024 (and extrapolated to 2033) are higher than previously expected because immigration brought more people into the workforce. That caused me to wonder: to what […]

The Bear’s Lair: Smith, Keynes, Marx or List?

I am always careful to stay out of arguments with professional economists because my economic knowledge is back-of-an-envelope stuff and comes unstuck when folks get technical. Still, the general principles are important. Adam Smith’s free markets have served us well for 250 years and were (mostly) the basis of the Industrial Revolution; Karl Marx’s economic […]

The Bear’s Lair: Trump’s policies represent traditional Republicanism

Former President Donald Trump is often accused of not having a policy program for a potential second administration. Commentators talk of his followers as being mere cultists and suggest that the soft-left belligerence of the George W. Bush administration represented more authentic “Conservatism.” This is wrong; on most subjects (I will discuss the exceptions) Trump […]

The Bear’s Lair: Shut down the WEF Communists

The World Economic Forum meeting last week was interesting in that, for the first time, some dissent appeared to the WEF’s party line. That party line is not “corporatism” which requires private property (albeit owned by corporations). With its slogan of “You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy” the WEF negates private property and represents […]

The Bear’s Lair: Oligarchy beats oligopoly

There is a central contradiction in modern capitalism. Markets have become concentrated in a few ultra-large companies, which then attempt to broaden their spectrum of employees through “diversity” initiatives. Yet the oligopoly of large companies diminishes competition and harms consumers, while “diversity” weakens trust within the corporations and increases communication costs. How much better was […]

The Bear’s Lair: Mexico needs a Milei

Mexico appears to face a dismal future after its election on 6 June this year. The leading candidate Claudia Scheinbaum is a devoted follower of current President Manuel Lopez Obrador, and according to current polls is likely to win and thereafter follow his hard-left policies. The opposition candidate Xóchitl Galvez combines the forces of both […]