After decades as an international pariah, Myanmar is being well compensated for its moves toward reform and less dependence on China. Last week the United States announced plans to relax some of the sanctions it imposed on Myanmar over the past two decades. Now comes news that British Prime Minister David Cameron is planning a visit. Cameron’s trip […]

As public pension schemes in states like California and Rhode Island continue to collapse, union pension funds in the private sector are also facing massive shortfalls. A new Credit Suisse report finds that managers of multi-employer pension systems have overestimated their plans’ funding at 81 percent; the bank’s calculation, based on new reporting standards, is a more dismal 52 […]

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker remains the poster child for the war against collective bargaining privileges and other perks for public-sector unions. Although the outcome of last year’s battle was a coup for Governor Walker, it was not without repercussions—foremost being the upcoming recall election. As recently as February, Walker looked quite vulnerable.But the unions can’t […]

Europe has long prided itself on being greener and more environmentally conscious than the rest of the developed world, with its commitment to a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions 20 by 2020 being the clearest indication of this consciousness. There’s just one problem with this conceit: Green policies may actually be increasing CO2 emissions […]

For years, American fans of the blue model have argued that a more European approach would fix U.S. manufacturing job woes. Aggressive government promotion of favored local industries, they say, could reverse the decline of the blue-collar factory jobs that were the engine of our economy in the mid-20th century.Perhaps they should take a closer […]

Another Via Meadia intern has somehow escaped the tight institutional surveillance program we run to publish a piece under his own name. This time it is recent Harvard and Crimson veteran Yair Rosenberg, who has an article in Tablet that does exactly what we try to do here: substitute a little light and reason for […]

Drug legalization advocates often predict that regulating and taxing drugs like cocaine and heroin would lower usage and create a new and lucrative source of government revenue. Their optimism seems ill founded, however, given that the government can scarcely control the abuse of the legal drugs available at Walgreens.The WSJ lays out the grim facts: Some […]

I did not head off to work today meaning to write again about Syria, but some things just can’t be helped. I was launched into my current orbit by a remark in today’s Washington Post. Not coincidentally, perhaps, it was a sentence written in that telltale sign of basic journalistic fraud: weasely, evasive language that […]

Thomas Carlyle hated the cocksureness of ideology, worried that the best of human qualities were being mangled by unbridled technology and commercialization, and struggled to reconcile a loss of traditional religious belief with the need for faith. Can anyone think of a reason to read such a 19th-century relic today?

A little economic history goes a long way to show how money and debt interact. The Tea Party movement may have strange ideas about public policy, but its instincts on basics are not that far off the mark.