Late last year, HSBC agreed to pay a record-breaking $1.9 billion fine to regulators following a report of the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that revealed serious anti-money laundering failures. But even with a whopping fine, the settlement HSBC has reached won’t be enough to stop banks from accepting dirty money. Senior individuals must […]

We must repeal the 17th amendment in order to rebalance American federalism.It once made some sense to centralize governance functions to make them more effective, just as it made sense to make manufacturing and production processes bigger to take advantages of economies of scale. Now good sense that recognizes technological change should clearly point us […]

Slate’s Matt Ygelsias is trying to start a small business by renting out a condo, and he’s finding out just how hard the blue model is on entrepreneurs. After detailing his personal battle with the DC bureaucracy for a single basic business license, travelling from office to office, filling out form after form, and losing precious […]

The origins of Groundhog’s Day.

Does the American middle class (and by extension, the middle class in other advanced democracies) have a future in a post-blue world? That is the basic question at the heart of American politics;. As I’ve noted, 4.0 liberals think that it doesn’t, and think that the defense of the blue social model is the only […]

With the news that French forces have retaken not only Gao but Timbuktu, a colleague asked me this morning if I was surprised by the speed of French success. Here, in essence, is what I answered.No, I’m not at all surprised about the initial success of the past 18 days. The French force is the […]

Last week I erred by identifying the now-rescinded FICA tax cut from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent as part of the Bush-era tax cuts; it wasn’t. A reader pointed out that this was a 2010 Obama Administration decision, part of the broader stimulus program.  I had forgotten that. Everything else I said about it stands, but while […]

As readers of my blog have discovered (perhaps with a measure of irritation) my favorite cognitive style is free association. The following post is an exercise in putting together bits and pieces—in the event: flea markets, cowboys, hobos and the root insight of anarchism.This exercise was triggered by the issue of The Christian Century on […]

Is Japan drifting to the right? The ongoing dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) has triggered a debate about the trajectory of Japanese politics, and the return to power of the old guard Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has further enlivened it. […]

The nature of world politics has changed more rapidly in the past four years than anyone expected. From the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the financial crisis of 2008, the United States had enjoyed a unprecedented period of hegemony. A decade ago, the US defense budget by itself was larger than the combined […]