As is well known to readers of this column, it is my considered opinion that economic policy and management reached a global all-time apogee (so far – one can always hope) under the British prime ministership of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Liverpool (prime minister, 1812-27.) However Liverpool is generally thought to have had one enormous […]

I have written in the past that while Keynesian stimulus spending made no sense whatever for western countries whose budgets were substantially in deficit before the 2008-09 recession began, it was more justifiable in China, with a substantial budget surplus at the start of the recession. However it now appears I was wrong. Far from […]

On October 31, the world’s seven billionth inhabitant will be born. This should be a matter for deep mourning. Not only does inexorably increasing population pollute the planet, and lessen the likelihood that the majority rather than a minority of the world’s inhabitants can achieve a Western living standard, it also hugely raises the probability […]

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 masterpiece “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” described the process of capitalist wealth creation as being one of “creative destruction.” It’s a lesson that policymakers have not taken sufficiently to heart, largely because they have to answer to sentimental democratic electorates. Creation sells well to an electorate whose instincts, […]

Mass protest movements should be deeply distrusted, but taken seriously. They almost never represent the populace as a whole, but they sometimes represent the future – many of the unpleasant novelties of 1968 have been inflicted on us ever since. Also, like the Bonus Marchers of 1932, their demands may make more sense than the […]

We are now within three months of the climacteric year of 2012 around which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was built, and therefore within fifteen months of a period in which the Kyoto restrictions will no longer have effect. No fewer than sixteen conferences have been held in an attempt to find a successor to Kyoto, […]

The resignation a week ago of Jurgen Stark, Germany’s representative on the European Central Bank’s executive board, was due to a failure by the ECB to follow the German concept of Ordnungspolitik. In the German view, Ordnungspolitik – which may roughly be translated as the politics of order – demanded that Greece be treated harshly […]

The Census Bureau’s study of American incomes, poverty and health coverage issued last week was most interesting when considered, not as a metric of this recession, but as a long-term picture of where American living standards are going. If median incomes are back to 1996 levels in real terms, then the stagnation which followed the […]

As the Great Recession drags on, politicians assure us that “Prosperity is just around the corner” in Herbert Hoover’s unfortunate words, if we only follow their favored nostrums, usually involving spending more public money. However experience of the 1930s combines with the wisdom of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s “This time it’s different” to suggest […]

President Obama delivered to House Speaker John Boehner this week a list of just seven regulations Federal agencies proposed to impose, each of which would cost over $1 billion and the total cost of which would be $109 billion. If you contemplate the latter number, you will come to realize why U.S. economic growth is […]