Putin is always looking for new ways to consolidate his power, and a well that never seems to run dry for him is the traditionally state-friendly Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Kirill I, the primate of the Church, recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of his leadership, and Putin took the opportunity to state his support for […]

Like Argentina, Venezuela is blessed with a superabundance of natural resources. And like Argentina, it is cursed with intellectuals and politicians whose ideas about how the world works are deeply at odds with reality. As a result, despite its oil riches Venezuela is saddled with ruinous inflation and has been forced to devalue its currency. […]

In twenty years, children might go to school in the few remaining malls. Thanks to online shopping, physical shops are closing all across the country, and the overbuilt mall industry is looking for ways to fill the space. FT reports: If the US is destined to lose more shops, mall owners need to get more […]

The map of America’s wealth is changing. With the exception of San Francisco, the cities that generated America’s prosperity and attracted its greatest talent for over a century are now losing out to cities that few outside the US know exist: Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are losing significant ground while Austin, […]

Jon Huntsman, the former Ambassador to China, is getting nervous about how things are playing out in Asia: “The tensions are real,” he said, citing the two nations’ maneuvering over islands in the East China Sea. Risks also are being raised by expanding activities such as surveillance flights in the region by other nations, including […]

Cyprus has long been an oligarch’s playground for Russian billionaires with close ties to the government. In 2009 Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, died in prison, where he had been languishing after accusing Russian officials of tax fraud to the tune of $230 million—$30 million of which he claimed was deposited in Cyprus banks. The […]

French President François Hollande did his best ostrich impression on Thursday, skipping the beginning of an EU meeting on budget cuts and turning off his phone. The meeting in Brussels was meant to hammer out a compromise between Hollande and austerity-minded UK Prime Minister David Cameron. The two were tens of billions of euros apart on […]

We must enact a “New Pioneering” Homestead Act.This proposal, the last of the lot, is an even bigger idea than a National Service/Baby Bond program. It is impossible to take seriously now, but it may not be after the foregoing nine reforms have been undertaken. This one has the potential to produce even more new […]

An article in Slate is throwing the brakes on the shale train. University of Chicago Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is critical of bullish predictions of America’s bright energy future: [T]he days are long gone when you could stick a pitchfork in the ground and get a gusher that would produce for years. The new wells are expensive (on the order […]

We must relocate the culture wars, sending them back to the states and the local communities where they have at least some chance of being reasonably well managed.Rather like the real but obscured moral/political aspects of the health care dilemma, the abortion issue and issues concerning marriage for homosexuals and surrogate parenthood and certain related […]