FT: “I am increasingly convinced of something that we might call the Carter Rule: rich democracies need a crisis in order to change. It is almost impossible to sell voters on drastic reforms until their nation is in acute trouble. The chronic kind isn’t enough. Reaganism was on offer before 1980, remember. Carter himself was something of a deregulator and fresh thinker in office. But the electorate wasn’t fed up enough at that stage to entertain a total rupture with the postwar Keynesian consensus. There had to be more pain. The parallel with Britain in the same period is eerie: an air of malaise, a false start or two at reform, then a galvanising humiliation (the IMF loan of 1976) that at last persuades voters to give carte blanche to Thatcher. Things had to get worse to get better.”
KC Davis: “I’ve been preaching my gospel that being messy is not a moral failing for years now. But I want to take it one step further: Messiness can be a good thing. All communities should have some messy people. We are not all meant to be Joanna Gaines. Some of us are Molly Weasleys, our homes bursting with the cozy chaos of a loving family and cabinets packed full of odds and ends. We cannot be Martha Stewart because we are Thoreau, so consumed by capturing Walden Pond’s essence that we need someone else to bring us meals and do our laundry. And try as we might, no amount of clutching our items to see if they spark joy will turn us into Marie Kondo’s closet, for we are Albert Einstein’s desk.”
NYTimes: “Drones became entwined with modern armed conflict years before President Vladimir V. Putin sent Russian mechanized divisions over Ukraine’s borders in 2022. But no previous conflict had involved drones used so extensively by two sides, in so many forms or in so many roles. The pivot blended necessity with cold calculation. After Ukraine blunted Russia’s incursions and the two armies settled into opposing trench lines, tacticians in the two countries grasped the lethal punch, disruptive qualities and economic advantages of unmanned weapons. Drones cost much less than other weapons of equivalent power or range, and they reduced risks to those using them, who operate out of view, typically beyond the reach of many weapons that otherwise might reply. When paired with mobile internet routers and secure communication apps, they proved to be remarkably responsive and precise. For nations squeezed between the twin pressures of heavy casualties and recruiting difficulties, they multiplied combat power while preserving thinned ranks.”
Cato: “Hodge advocates a radical restructuring of our tax system to make it more like that of Estonia. Estonia’s whole tax law is only 88 pages long; there’s a flat 20 percent tax rate on individual and corporate income, and a Value-Added Tax (VAT) of 20 percent. One result is that Estonian businesses spend about five hours per year complying with taxes, versus 87 hours per year for US firms. Whether or not we move in Estonia’s direction, those who care about tax policy could easily use Taxocracy as a handbook for simplifying and improving our tax systems.”
The Independent: “Inflation has, in modern history, two and only two causes: first, the federal government spending more than it collects in taxes; second, full central bank accommodation of the spending in its willingness to buy in the open market whatever amount of treasury bonds is needed to enable private lenders to be willing to hold the new issue. In effect the central bank (the U.S. Federal Reserve) is financing the treasury issue even though it is prohibited from doing this “directly,” so it must be achieved indirectly. But a rose by any other name would smell the same.”
