‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, … The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.’ Written in the shadow of the First World War and the October Revolution, WB Yeats’s words in ‘The Second Coming’ capture a feeling that resonates just as […]
‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.’ This is what Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once wrote. It’s accurate when we think about public debt. The question is not whether it can continue forever, but when and how it ends. Some are already […]
On July 28, more than 30 so-called ‘top economists’ called for a wealth tax in the UK. Glance at the list of signatories and you’ll see the usual names who oppose almost any market reform: Thomas Piketty, Ha-Joon Chang and Martín Guzmán. Ironically, just over a year ago, many of them signed another letter warning […]
Marx was wrong, Burnham was right: capitalism wasn’t replaced by communism, but by managerialism. In ‘The Managerial Revolution’ (1941), James Burnham wrote that the bourgeoisie weren’t sinking into the proletariat – they were being replaced by ‘administrators, technicians, managers’. If, like me, you love Edmund Burke, this might remind you of his mournful line: ‘The […]
After the recent heatwave, Londoners have been forced to endure sweltering conditions inside their own homes – and this is no accident. The state is actively discouraging the use of air conditioning. As London Centric reports, A/C is ‘effectively banned’ in new houses and flats by planning rules. Before developers are allowed to install so-called […]
Nietzsche once wrote, ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’. In the case of the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (BRICS), the first two lines apply – but not the third. We didn’t kill it. The BRICS project was a slow-motion suicide from the start. The 17th BRICS summit […]
Zohran Mamdani, the person who defeated Cuomo in the primaries and is now seen as a mayoral contender for New York – the beating heart of capitalism – recently declared in an interview: ‘I don’t think we should have billionaires.’ Mamdani is not alone in this view. The visible edge of economic populism – the […]
In an interview with the BBC, Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of modern Singapore, once recounted a formative moment from his student days in London: stepping out of the Tube at Piccadilly Circus, he saw an unattended newspaper stand. Commuters would stop, take a paper and drop the correct amount into an open cardboard […]
On June 2, Zia Yusuf, the Chairman of Reform UK, tweeted that a UK version of DOGE – the Department of Government Efficiency – had been launched. Promising an ‘Elon Musk-style’ slashing of government waste, the initiative echoes the American attempt to apply Silicon Valley’s business mindset to the public sector. Now, with Musk stepping […]
