The recent meltdown of the mortgage bubble illustrates a basic insight of Austrian Economics:  cheap money leads to distortion and malinvestment, which can only be resolved through mass liquidation.  Liquidation is an anodyne term, but in real life it means lost jobs, declining wages, “upside down” bank notes, bankrupt businesses, and stagnant housing values.  The Federal Reserve’s decision after the September … [Read More]

Challenger Joe McLaughlin was half right in describing the stakes of the North Carolina 3rd Congressional District’s Republican primary: It was, as he told Congressional Quarterly, about the future of the Republican Party in his congressional district and beyond. But Congressman Walter Jones’s nearly 20-point margin of victory doesn’t signal the end of the party. It points the way out of … [Read More]

In response to my recent piece on science and religion, one of the commenters, GM, took me to task:  “you may want to consider and ask why atheists seem angry.  There’s no indication that you understand why.” I have to confess, GM was right:  I do not understand why some atheists are so angry. I have no trouble understanding that some … [Read More]

The realm of prophecy and prediction is a notoriously dangerous territory in which to venture if one takes things too seriously, but I hope you will forgive a light little wander into that domain. The question at hand is the rise and fall of nations. The period since the collapse of European Communism from 1989 to 1991 has witnessed a great … [Read More]

It is indicative of the disastrous social trends that began in the 1960s, that we are now faced with the most odious kind of snobbery, that of celebrity, namely that of Barbara Walters and her memoirs. The fact that someone taught her to act--her mother or her public school teacher--constitutes child abuse to the nth degree. This Walters woman is the … [Read More]

Perhaps the greatest compensation for trading cramped digs in Rome for a spacious house in the U.S. is that I have my beagles back. Susie and Franz-Josef are out back now, sniffing the trails of long-scampered squirrels, and howling merrily for blood. One advantage of living in New Hampshire instead of New York is that “out back” refers to the spacious … [Read More]

How hated are the neocons?—When even sports writers are on your case, you know the peasants with pitchforks can’t be far behind. From a piece headlined “Are the Mariners the Neocons of Baseball?”: “Should we be worried the Mariners are baseball’s equivalent of the Bush Administration? Fiscally undisciplined with negligible positive returns? Check. Marketed as veteran leadership despite any veterans … [Read More]

During the height of the globalization age in the late 1990s, many leading Zeitgeist watchers were celebrating the rise of the “New Cosmopolitans,” a term coined by business reporter G. Pascal Zachary. A new civilization was being born out of the increasing flow of money, products, ideas, and most important, people, across the borders of decaying nation-states. In this post-modern globalized … [Read More]

NEW YORK--So there I was, at the Waverly Inn, Graydon Carter’s little toy that is the hottest ticket in the Big Bagel since two years, when the booth next to mine filled up with young people, all of them scruffy and dressed like the homeless, their girls rather plain and some of them even ugly. Par for the course, I thought … [Read More]