Some group calling itself the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution yesterday opposing what they see as the leading human rights issue of our time. You’re probably thinking, maybe they’re now addressing the situation in Darfur, or perhaps they’re talking about Communist China’s treatment of Tibetians. Perhaps there maybe a resolution about Cuba’s [...]

The Obama administration, rather than dealing with the root cause of the violence along the Mexican border, has decided to adopt a policy to deal with the symptoms. The problem is that this policy will neither alleviate the symptoms nor come close to treating the problem. WASHINGTON – The Obama administration promised Tuesday to help [...]

Governments, ready to spend boatloads cruiseliner-loads of money they don’t have, are trying to borrow it — to the extent possible — from the markets. I mentioned yesterday that the US was starting to print our own money to lend to ourselves. Britain is facing a similar problem — they were auctioning off some bonds, [...]

Just over two years ago, I offered a worst-case prediction of where this economic crisis could lead. Wait, though, it gets worse. America isn’t an empire in the conventional sense of the word, but we are an economic empire. The dollar is the currency of the world, from middle eastern oil to the reserve currencies [...]

The Economist Free Exchange Blog, responding to this pro-protectionism piece by Joe Weisenthal, half-heartedly suggests that maybe Joe meant that a little infant industry protection for green industries is in order: I wonder if he is suggesting some sort of infant industry type policy to stimulate domestic manufacturing of more enviromental products. Interesting idea, but [...]

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao: “President Obama and his new government have adopted a series of measures to deal with the financial crisis. We have expectations as to the effects of these measures,” Mr. Wen said. “We have lent a huge amount of money to the U.S. Of course we are concerned about the safety [...]

Many people have worried about the threat that China and India post to America by moving towards first-world economic powers. After all, they have, between the two of them, somewhere in the realm of 2.5B people, and if the same proportion of their students become engineers and scientists as we see here, they will be [...]

Socialism/Communism has largely caused the collapse of any nation that’s truly tried it. Russia is the biggest example; China has seen the writing on the wall and has allowed economic modernization and liberalism to creep into their country to keep the system moving. Even most of Europe, who we libertarians would consider democratic socialists, understand [...]

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you! More than one million French workers downed tools yesterday in the first general strike to hit a major industrialised nation since the start of the global financial crisis. Unions said more than two million public and private sector workers took to the streets across France to protest against President [...]

Iceland, not a nation known for political instability, may be in serious trouble: Considering the devastating effects they experienced, the people of Iceland reacted to the economic crisis with relative calm in the weeks following the collapse of the krona and the failure of the country’s three major banks. Yes, there were rushes on grocery [...]

I’ve pointed out the old saying — “If you owe the bank $5,000 and can’t pay, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $5,000,000,000 and can’t pay, the bank has a problem.” Well, the bank has a problem: What he might have said was that the nations funding the majority of America’s public [...]

Okay, that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s what it boils down to: But it’s worth zooming in on why the Chinese are making this a priority right now: Chinese economists see universal health care as a way to induce consumption and economic dynamism. The Chinese have a high savings rate — indeed, an [...]

From The Economist’s Free Exchange blog, the Brits are learning that you can’t play the King when you’re only a Duke: Do not do as America does, unless you are a very big country (or economic bloc). That seems to be the lesson Britain is learning as the pound weakens and confidence in the credit [...]

Some midnight regulations need to be rolled back, and quickly: The quintessential French blue cheese found itself the unlikely focus of a trade war after the Bush administration took punitive action for the European Union’s ban on imports of US hormone-treated beef. America imposed a 100 per cent import duty on a long list of [...]

There’s a new freedom-oriented website out there: Freedom Politics. From their initial blog posting: Lovers of liberty, rejoice. Today, we’re launching FreedomPolitics.com, a site dedicated to the pursuit and protection of freedom. We’re not the only ones who think freedom needs a hand, but as a Freedom Communications site, we follow the model of an [...]

Back in the day, antitrust regulators decided that including a browser with an operating system was an unfair competitive measure. But to this day, they’ve only ever enforced this against Microsoft, and the EU is still pushing: European antitrust regulators have told Microsoft Corp. that the company’s practice of including its Internet browser with its [...]

Back in October, I posted on a little problem appearing in Venezuela. The government’s spending requires very high oil prices to keep the books balanced, and $40 oil is not exactly close to that target. So what does Venezuela need? Quick money: President Hugo Chávez, buffeted by falling oil prices that threaten to damage his [...]

“As I’ve said before, the United States does not torture,” said President Bush in 2006.  “It’s against our laws and it’s against our values.” The AP brings us the latest episode of the other half of the story: “We tortured Qahtani,” Crawford said, making her the first senior Bush administration official to say that aggressive [...]

Germany is now reporting the worst recession they’ve faced in at least 12 years has begun: The German economy, Europe’s largest, contracted more than economists expected in the third quarter, pushing the nation into the worst recession in at least 12 years. Gross domestic product dropped a seasonally adjusted 0.5 percent from the second quarter, [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to devote time to the credit crisis and bailout. Unfortunately, the news cycle is often so short that it’s difficult to keep up. Today I was lucky to be able to catch the bailout modification. With the busy times ahead, though, there’s something that needs to be [...]