Democrats prepare to follow Margaret Thatcher’s example—but backward.
CITY JOURNAL
October 18, 2008
If the Democratic Party wins a filibuster-proof Senate majority on Election Day, it likely will pass the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA is reminiscent of trade union legislation passed in Great Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister—except that it would work exactly in reverse. And its effects, too, would be exactly the reverse of the stunning economic growth over which Thatcher presided.
A review of: A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today.
In the wake of the First World War, leaders of the Western powers — Britain, France, Italy, and America — assembled in Paris to redraw the maps of the world. From the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, they meatballed together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; they invented Iraq and Jordan ex nihilo.
John Hawkins: Why are Europeans so secular compared to Americans?
Claire Berlinski: American religiosity doesn’t need to be explained; after all, throughout history, in every civilization, people have believed in the supernatural. What needs to be explained is European atheism, which is the aberration-unique in the world and in human history. It has its origins in politics, I think, not metaphysics. Voltaire was of the view that it is not so much the intrinsic power of the argument for atheism that caused people to reject faith, but rather the corruption of the Church, and largely I agree with him. Before the French Revolution, there were no atheists in Europe. Heretics, sure. But atheists? Unheard of.
Without the right political, social and moral institutions, it’s just a utopian theory.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 21, 2008
The free-market system, it is now fashionable to say, is to blame for the current financial crisis. By way of rejoinder, a growing cohort of commentators have argued that the crisis should be understood not as a failure of free-market economic theory but as its vindication. They argue that the U.S. government perverted the wisdom of the market by encouraging banks to make loans no rational actor would make — and that the players took the risks they did because they held a reasonable expectation of a government bailout should things get hairy.
New York Sun, March 21, 2008
A Review of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
In suggesting that Islamic extremism may be, if not a spent force in the Middle East, no longer the most dynamic or important one, Robin Wright has more credibility than most. In 1983, Ms. Wright surveyed the wreckage of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Beneath it lay the remains of her friends. Two years later, Ms. Wright wrote “Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam.” The title is self-explanatory and its thesis, unfortunately, has hardly passed into obscurity.””
A review of The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.
Last month, en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London’s tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still.
In 1995, having read Olivier Roy’s The Failure of Political Islam (1992), Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes asked, “How can someone who knows so much be so completely wrong?” Mr. Roy’s latest work, Secularism Confronts Islam, prompts the very same question. It is a remarkable book: articulate, original, lucid, without a paragraph that fails to contain an interesting thought. It is clearly the product of a wide-ranging intelligence in possession of a refined analytic sensibility, a first-rate historical education and a generous spirit. And one wonders how someone who knows so much could have written it.
According to the dust jacket, church historian Philip Jenkins intends God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis ( Oxford University Press, 289 pages, $28) to function as a calming salve, a reassuring counterpoint to “overheated rhetoric” about Christian Europe’s imminent collapse under the weight of secularization and Muslim immigration.
IT TAKES ON average 62 working days, 16 separate documents, and the equivalent of $5,000 to acquire the permits to open a business in Italy. In France, it takes 53 days, 15 documents, and $4,000. In America, it takes a mere four days, four documents, and $166. In The Future of Europe (MIT Press, 172 pages, $24.95), economists Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi provide a wealth of such examples to buttress their argument that Europe is on a state-subsidized train to economic and political irrelevance, but as anyone who has tried to do business in Europe knows, those statistics alone are all you really need.
THE FILM SUBMISSION aired in the Netherlands on August 29, 2004. It was promptly and predictably decried by Muslims as blasphemous. Fair enough; it was. If you make a film that depicts verses of the Koran printed onto the skin of half-naked women, you must expect to be called a blasphemer. Expecting to be murdered is another story. Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh expected no such thing; he continued to cycle through the streets of Amsterdam unarmed and unprotected, dismissing the threats against him as empty bluster.
