From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance I discovered that the EU has begun drafting plans to essentially eliminate national boundaries in Europe in favor of transnational regions . England would be split between the Transmanche, North Sea, and Atlantic regions (see map from The Sun ). At first I thought maybe this was a typical internet scam, but the Telegraph actually managed to get an acknowledging quote out of some EU officials: German ministers claimed that the plan was about "underlying the goal of a united Europe" to "permanently overcome old borders" at a time when the "Constitution for Europe needs to regain momentum". I've never been a big black helicopter-Council on Foreign Relations-MexAmeriCanada conspiracy theorist. Among other things, my John Birch Society membership expired some while back, and I haven't gotten around to renewing it. One of these days. Yet I have to admit that this prospect of deconstructing Europe is . . . di...

For those of you out there in the blogoshpere who felt that perhaps I was being too hard on the dollar and its devaluation, I finally found a picture that represents what is occurring between the dollar and the euro at this moment.... Basically, yes, the Euro is taking the Dollar in well you know...it is self-explanatory. And just as Nicholas Sarkozy has commented this will not be good for the United States and from November until now has risked breaking out into a full blown trade war between the trading partners.... Now that the risk of a trade war is settling into the reality that there is a trade war one can only speculate that currency fluctuations will grow in proportion to the intensity and amount of conflict this causes between the EU and the US. Fred Bergsten said as much in 1997 and at the time, many in the current administration were either not listening to him or not paying attention. At its best today 1.00 U.S. Dollar = 0.6406 Euro. At its worst 1.00 U.S. Dollar = 0.5...

In a real economy and not a tragic morality tale personal and economic liberty preclude the ideas of corporate welfare. Economic liberty is a mechanism of trust, hard work and capital investment. An amoral market is defined by the unseen laws of economics. It either values its productive forces or wastes them. These are laws as a regular a clockwork. For years now we have been operating on an unsustainable platform of corporate subsidies, non-free market policies and government support and stagnation in unsound financial vehicles in a mercantilistic economy. Drawing from the lessons of Adam Smith, who was dealing with the same phenomena, and John Nash's revision of Adam Smith that defines it precisely one can see why maximum economic liberty and personal liberty go hand in hand and are opposed to rigid or hierarchical control. They are horizontal systems that allow people to move up or down based on ability. They are in essence a neutral scale people can move along. The two systems...

... here's the full text of the new one from the independent nation of Kosovo: Convened in an extraordinary meeting on February 17, 2008, in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, Answering the call of the people to build a society that honours human dignity and affirms the pride and purpose of its citizens, Committed to confront the painful legacy of the recent past in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness, Dedicated to protecting, promoting and honouring the diversity of our people, Reaffirming our wish to become fully integrated into the Euro-Atlantic family of democracies, Observing that Kosovo is a special case arising from Yugoslavia's non-consensual breakup and is not a precedent for any other situation, Recalling the years of strife and violence in Kosovo, that disturbed the conscience of all civilized people, Grateful that in 1999 the world intervened, thereby removing Belgrade's governance over Kosovo and placing Kosovo under United Nations interim administration,...

I grow increasingly tired of people holding up Europe as the bright shining example of effective social programs. Sure, we've got lots of problems here, but Europe--and the term depends on which nations you arbitrarily decide to include in the term Europe --is still struggling with immense and widespread problems of poverty and unequal income distribution that five decades or more of the welfare state, and nearly two decades since the fall of the Soviet Union have not been able to eradicate. Polska , a Polish business site , takes its analysis of Gross Domestic Product per Capita one step further than those recent sensationalist reports about Great Britain's GDP (primarily on the strength of the fluctuation of the Pound) having slipped ahead of the US: In 2005, the Gross National Income per capita (GNI, Polish: PNB) in Poland, according to the data of the World Bank, amounted to around 7 thousand USD. According to this criterion, Poland is much poorer than Germany or France, wh...

Here's an answer (you'll be able to intuit the question) that sometimes comes up in discussions with my students: "I will not discuss whether or not there are firearms in my home, because it's none of your damn business. However, I will tell you this. Should someone break into my house, where my wife, my three children, one grandchild, and three cats live with me, I will do my dead level best to kill them before they can harm my family. I will take such reasonable precautions as seem to me to be sensible in the context of the moment to insure that they have not broken into my house by mistake, but the ruling idea behind my decision-making will be the safety of my family and not the life of the intruder." I'm sure that, like my students, some of you are taken aback by that blunt statement. On the other hand, I am equally sure that many of you know exactly what I am talking about. Lee, over at A Secondhand Conjecture, has a post about the cultural gap betwee...

I lived in Europe for several years in the 1980s, and truly enjoyed the adventure of never knowing what button, lever, or foot switch would flush the toilet. I hitch-hiked through Yugoslavia (it was still there then) right after the Olympics, and sometimes I still get upset thinking about all the beautiful scenery and generous people who got chewed up on Bosnia and Kossovo. I read about Europe these days, mostly, and I don't think I'd like to live there any more. It's becoming a pretty grim, in many ways colorless, "workers' paradise" with overtones of a social Muslim invasion. One colleague just back from Germany put it to me this way: "The Germans aren't the Germans you used to know." Ah, but at least they still like to take off their clothes.... Travel agency OssiUrlaub.de has started offering nudist flights from Urfurt to Esedom. You have to wear your clothes onto the plane, and put them on again before getting off, but for a mere 499 Eu...

Denmark has officially asked the Bush administration to explain possibly illegal CIA flights staged through Greenland's Narsarsuaq airport to move Al Qaeda suspects into secret detention centers in Egypt, Jordan, Romania and Afghanistan, among other countries. The legal concern arises from the use of private as opposed to official flights to transfer prisoners acquired through rendition, as required by international aviation law. The issue was raised by a recent Danish documentary, The CIA's Danish Connections , which has caused an uproar in that nation's politics : Per Stig Moeller, Denmark's foreign minister, said: "There is evidence in this film which I had not seen before which shows that the Americans are using private airplanes as government airplanes." Lars Emil Johansen, one of Greenland's two representatives in the Danish parliament, demanded an in-depth investigation, saying he did not have confidence in the Danish government, a long-time ally ...

A brief piece from Thoughts on Freedom , the Libertarian blog hosted by our colleagues "down under": [Before you read, to get the context right, you have to remember that "liberal" in Australian politics is much more accurately equated with "conservative" in an American context] ‘Big government is bad for economic growth.’ No shit, Sherlock, i hear you cry. But this isn’t my view, nor one of a neo-liberal free market think tank. It’s from that respected inflation-fighting institution, the European Central Bank, which has come to this conclusion all by itself. No surprise to readers of this blog but papers like this will help spread the gospel of smaller government. The paper concludes that each additional 1% of government spending reduces growth by 0.13%. One interesting finding. The taxes that have the least harmful effects on growth are income taxes. Those that hinder growth the most are consumption taxes and government subsidies. Something to chew on. S...