I recently received an announcement of a forthcoming book, Debunking Utopia.  Its author, Nima Sanandaji, Ph. D., is Kurdish-Swedish and has written Scandinavian Unexceptionalism and The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox. He is the president of the European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (www.ecepr.org).  He began with this: The Nordic countries are used by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and […]

Part I    Ramona and I arrived in Portugal the day after Great Britain voted to leave the EU. While we can’t know the economic implications of Brexit, this rejection of Brussels surely demonstrates dissatisfaction with bureaucratic impositions on daily life.  Especially during peaceful times, people resent command-and-control government.    Generally, most people try to […]

Ramona and I are traveling through Portugal observing the culture and economy of Lisbon and Porto.  We are in route to give lectures at the University of Aix en Provence in France arriving in Lisbon the day after the Brexit vote to leave the EU.  People here were far more interested in the European soccer games.  I […]

Here is a true, empirical, universal generalization: Citizens in large and complex societies become dissatisfied when their government seizes and transfers wealth to prospective voters.   Such allocations are partially, sometimes entirely, based on political calculations.  Whatever the claims and justifications, over time benefits tend to flow toward the wealthy and politically powerful.   And […]