The Atlantic: "Africa's Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World"
(...) The economic evidence that they were right, building since the start of the new century, now seems incontrovertible. In the ten years from 2000 to 2010, six of the world's ten fastest-growing countries were in sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, and Rwanda. In eight of the past ten years, sub-Saharan Africa has grown faster than Asia, according to The Economist. In 2012, the International Monetary Fund expects Africa to grow at a rate of 6%, about the same as Asia. (...) >>>
Feb. 26, 2012
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Are entrepreneurs amoral? -
At one time entrepreneurs used to be gentlemen with a code of ethics. Not any longer. The psychology of over regulation may be to blame for one. Faced with a plethora of rules and bureaucracy the average human being tends to turn the question on its head: it's no longer, what's not allowed, but what can we get away with. The law becomes the root of unethical logic. There are other causes evidently, but this is intriguing.
Business men are not synonymous with markets: whoever had anything to do with market places, knows the self-sustaining and self-perpetuating mechanism is the essence of morality: virtues are: investment, patience, and profit; vices are: impatience and greed -
FXStreet: "The markets are showing remarkable patience"
(...) Markets don’t care about the source of the money. Money is fungible—it’s all the same. Trading professionals also don’t care (much) about Keynesian economics or other ideological debates pertaining to competitiveness and sustainability. You can seldom make money betting on the ideas of dead old white men, but you can make money betting on how other traders will perceive conditions. So far, conditions are okay, day to day, and the long run is made up of a series of short runs. At this point, lousy conditions about Greece and sovereigns in general are built into the general expectations world-view. This prolonged drama—two years and 16 summits and counting—is now the new normal. (...) >>>
Feb. 2, 2012
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Leftist freedom-envy -
This moment in time we can see in the Netherlands in front of our eyes how the Left is stealing the epithet liberal. They envy the Right its claim to Liberty. Its sounds so good and well, free. They say, hey, we are for freedom too. But as Hannan states, when push comes to shove they're always willing to subordinate the individual to the power of the state. Faced with the basic choice, individualism or collectivism, they chose the latter.
Telegraph: "Why I'm happy to call myself a liberal", by Daniel Hannan
My old friend Sholto Byrnes asks at The New Statesman whether “liberal” is becoming a dirty word again. He recalls the way Michael Dukakis was bludgeoned to a bloody pulp by the epithet in the 1988 American presidential election, and cites two contemporary examples of liberalism in retreat, one to do with gay rights in the US, the other with multiculturalism in Germany.
If we scrape away the barnacles that have attached themselves to it, the word “liberal” is rather an attractive one. It means committed to freedom, generous, tolerant. In politics, of course, words acquire connotations. As far as I can tell, the use of “liberal” and “conservative” to denote opposed ideological factions began in the Hispanic world at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (...) >>>
Oct. 19, 2010
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Comparing the systems -
Templeton: "Ayaan Hirsi Ali comparing Africa, the Dutch mixed economy and American Classical Liberalism"
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LQL: "FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN A PHILOSOPHY OF LIBERTY", by Gennady Stolyarov II
I was recently asked to attempt a formulation of ten crucial principles of classical liberalism, the worldview which animated the American Revolution, the European Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the libertarian revival of free-market thought in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Classical liberalism—even when it is not explicitly espoused—still has considerable residual influence on the political and economic institutions of the Western world and is having an increasing impact outside the West as well. I see the principles of classical liberalism as primarily forward-looking. These ideas need not only characterize aspects of humanity's past. They can also guide and ameliorate our future. The following ten principles are not exhaustive, and they have been formulated broadly to account for differences in opinion on particulars within classical liberal circles. (...) >>>
November 16th, 2009
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Hardly ever discussed are some of the worst excesses of state interventionism. This has been going on since the early days of the European common market: while Africans starve to death, in Europe good food is destroyed to enforce higher prices (here's it's done in one of France's infamous protests):
Breitbart: "French farmers dump liters of milk into fields in Nordausques"
French farmers dump liters of milk into fields in Nordausques, northern France. European dairy farmers poured three million litres (800,000 gallons) of milk into a Belgian field on Wednesday in a bid to highlight their desperation over falling prices. >>>
Sept. 16, 2009
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Front Page: "The Capitalist Manifesto", by Vasko Kohlmayer
From the current economic crisis through third-world poverty to global warming, capitalism has been blamed for nearly every major problem of our day. Accused of fostering discrimination, exploitation, environmental destruction and a host of other ills, it looms as a popular villain in the contemporary western psyche.
But this viewpoint could hardly be more unfair, argues Robert Murphy in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. In this much-needed work, Murphy takes on the most common anti-capitalist myths and exposes them for the lies that they are. In the process he shows that capitalism is not only innocent of the charges leveled against it, but it is actually one of the best things that has ever happened to man (and also to the environment).
This may come as a shock to those fed by the leftist propaganda of the education and media establishments. Take, for example, the often made claim that capitalism exploits the poor to serve the interests of the rich. “Historically, this is precisely backward,” notes Murphy. Before capitalism came along, the vast majority of people lived lives of endless drudgery, poverty and squalor. Those who believe that feudal serfs spent their time enjoying pristine nature, doing handicrafts and attending opera until capitalism spoilt their fun by imposing hard labor should think again. (...) >>>
O Day, Aug. 4, 2009
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Heritage Foundation/WSJ: "2009 Index of Economic Freedom"
Ranking the countries ... and Glenn Beck's comment: "Is Capitalism causing collapse?"
Jan 22, 2009
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Facebook: "Shall we learn from history?", by Robert Owen
Many liberal commentators have placed the blame for our nation's current economic difficulties on "laissez-faire capitalism," which they never define. George Reisman, Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, insists that the term should be defined as "private ownership of the means of production [with government] limited to the protection of the individual's rights against the initiation of physical force." He would welcome a return to such a system. He states: "There are presently 15 federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce." Claiming that these intrusions are the underlying cause of America's economic travails, he adds, "Under laissez-faire capitalism, 11 of the 15 cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state and treasury would remain." (...)
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Dec 6, 2008
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Politeia: "Hurray! It's the Weekend of Capitalism!"
ay what you will, call him names! A lame duck, yes mistakes have been made, the rules of laissez-faire capitalism were violated, but right now it is he who stands between prosperity through free market principles, and the forces of Statism, who wish to reduce the financial sector to a tragic shadow of its former self, a mere government utility! While experts in the US are still trying to figure out what happened, some Europeans already knew before the event: it's capitalism, stupid! Isn't the cause of crime, the law? Now is the time for the coup of state, let the ax fall on the evil system! Here are two opinions: one by the most underestimated US President in history, George W. Bush - and an article by Objectivists Yaron Brook and Don Watkins on the Op-Ed page of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: a urgent plea for the separation of Economy and State. Europeans are urged to take note of a field virtually unknown to them. (...) >>>
Nov 15, 2008
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Related:
- "The Perversion of Development Aid"
- The Economics and Monetary Dossier
To archive >>>
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