Ronald Stewart-Brown argues that if we are thinking of withdrawal we should not let the unattainable best be the enemy of the attainable good. Therefore we should be prepared to negotiate to stay in Europe for trade through a new inter-governmental customs union agreement with the EU. Blind faith in the EU is not a […]
The most jaw-dropping aspect of the foreign exchange scandal, for which some of the world’s largest banks were ordered yesterday to pay enormous fines, is that the miscreant traders continued their activities after their jobs had been saved by the taxpayer. Put to one side the wisdom or otherwise of the bank bailouts themselves. Here were traders […]
Tim Morgan explains why supporters of capitalism should welcome the debate over inequality – and must never allow it to appear synonymous with unfairness. Ever since the publication of Capital in the 21st Century, prominent supporters of capitalism have rivalled each other in their denunciations of Thomas Piketty’s egalitarian thesis. In so doing, they have […]
A recent opinion piece published on the MarketWatch website and written by Paul B Farrell carried the headline “Ayn Rand vs. Adam Smith: the only midterm election that counts.” While this antithesis between Rand and Smith is an established debate among economists, Farrell’s article placed it in an aggressively political context and attached a level […]
The current situation in the Italian labour market—if it can be called that—is a textbook illustration of all that can go wrong when bad economic ideas obtain a secure institutional home, from which it is impossible to dislodge them. On that cheery note, I have no magic bullet that can dislodge labour’s political dominance backed […]
In the late late 80s I ran the London office of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte (IGFM or the International Society for Human Rights) a German headquartered group which focused heavily on helping the victims of communism. We publicised prisoners of conscience in the gulags, provided material aid to dissidents and smuggled samizdat information out […]
Imagine that the EU had simply stuck Britain with a bill, out of the blue, for £850 million – enough to fund 30,000 nurses and their pensions. There would have been outrage. Why, we would have asked, should Britain be surcharged for prosperity? Why should we be fined for having had the wisdom to keep […]
We know that Soviet countries flourished after the breakdown of the Iron Curtain, improving life for millions of people, but exactly how did things change? In an exclusive for CapX, Tim Knox and Adam Memon of the Centre for Policy Studies draw up 9 graphs to explain everything you need to know about life in […]
Where were you on the evening of November 9, 1989? Most Germans over the age of 35 can answer that question. It was perhaps the most important and certainly the most cheerful day in the history of post-war Germany. And it was a day completely dominated by the celebration of freedom. Looking at the faces […]
This weekend it is 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. It’s easy now to believe that it was always doomed to collapse but there was a time when many feared that the only thing that was inevitable was the triumph of communism.Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm appeared ready to apologise for the death […]
The resilience of the Chinese state and of the Chinese communist government has been for decades a source of deep misunderstanding in the West. One can find the first and most striking instance of this in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Brij Mohan Kaul tried to exploit China’s weakness: in Tibet, which in 1959 experienced a widespread […]
In his now-notorious book Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty asks whether the distribution of wealth is socially useful. His most straightforward statement of the importance of the “usefulness” of the distribution of wealth and income appears in Part 3 Chapter 11, in a subsection entitled “The Rentier, Enemy of Democracy”, wherein he says: […]
Trans-national trade is generally a force for good, fostering international relationships and generating wealth. There are, though, exceptional circumstances in which this is not the case. The slave trade, for instance, created huge prosperity for some but abject misery for others and, in some quarters, apologies are still being demanded for these past misdeeds. The […]
In the war of ideas, it is hard to win conclusive intellectual victories. Equality is a good example. In 1980, egalitarian socialism was firmly on the British political agenda. In the US, Jimmy Carter may not have proclaimed himself a socialist, but he did appear to have undermined his fellow Americans’ self-confidence. New Deal assumptions […]
Politicians are often at their most revealing when they respond to an unexpected question. At a public meeting in Cheshire the other day, Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron was asked about interest rates by a woman who was anxious about her mortgage. “It would be lovely to say can we have low interest rates forever,” […]
Why do poor people stay poor? In theory, we know how to go from misery to prosperity, thanks to a right combination of capital and work. We also know that this combination works best when handled by private entrepreneurs, watched over by a legitimate state. When, after the collapse of the Soviet pseudo-model, the whole […]
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