Margaret thatcher

Sunday

Ruchir Sharma

Why America has more lawyers per capita than any other country

Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.” The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts.

lawyers

Thursday

Geoff Hill

How the Special Relationship could be renewed after US-UK elections

A record number of countries will hold elections this, including Britain on July 4 and the United States on November 5. These two great powers — each with a veto at the UN — have enjoyed a bond that has survived for so long, is it known on both sides of the Atlantic as “the Special Relationship.” There have been stand-offs: Britain refused to join the war in Vietnam, and when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982, the US did not intervene. But Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher worked in tandem to bring down the Berlin Wall. And if the view on Ukraine and Gaza is not always the same, there is a shared commitment to the sovereignty of Russia’s neighbors and to a peace in the Middle East that secures the rights of Jews and Palestinians alike.

special relationship

Monday

Charles Lipson

Biden’s pause of weapons shipments to Israel is another misstep

President Biden just made a strong move against Israel, ordering the US government to stop shipping weapons supplies to the Israeli Defense Forces. It was his fine strategic mind at work, once again.  Usually the public defers to the president and his advisors on foreign policy, unless the issues become very prominent or the president forfeits their trust. Those are the two problems now facing the Biden administration. The war in Gaza is a major issue — and the public has zero confidence in Joe’s strategic wisdom. He lost the public’s confidence on that score after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the failed attempts to appease Iran. Now, they are unlikely to defer to his judgment in distancing himself from Israel, America’s greatest ally in the region.

biden weapons

Tuesday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Pelosi is right to put China on notice

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has always had a flair for the dramatic. During the Trump presidency, for example, she ostentatiously tore up his State of the Union speech. But for sheer spectacle, it will be hard for Pelosi to top her “will she, won’t she” visit to Taiwan this week. In spite of the suspense, there was never really any doubt about it. For weeks China has issued dire warnings about the perils of her visit. So, as it happens, have several commentators, including The Spectator’s Freddy Gray, whom I debated on the Americano podcast, and who seems to have a bad case of the collywobbles about the Pelosi trip.

Monday

James Snell

Henry Kissinger’s likely last book is on leadership

Leadership, Henry Kissinger writes in his latest book, is a medium by which a society moves from the past of its memory to the future of imagination. It is “indispensable.” As Kissinger says, “Decisions must be made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed.” Without leadership, ordinary people are, he argues, incapable of “reach[ing] from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.” But leadership is also, in Andrew Roberts’s phrase, “a ‘protean’ thing with little fixed definition.” Leadership is ultimately what leaders do; it goes in whatever direction they choose.

kissinger

Wednesday

Steven F. Hayward

The ‘natcons’ are here to stay

Cast your mind back to the 1990s for a moment. The left, dispirited at their generation-long rout at the hands of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and enraged by the ratification of limited-government trends at the hands of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, were looking for a new rallying point. By the end of the decade, the intellectual left had settled upon a new epithet: “neoliberalism.” Although the term was not brand new, it exploded in popularity in left academic journals and soon in left media too. Simply put, “neoliberalism” means “democratic capitalism.

Monday

James Snell

Boris Johnson saved by his hollow party

Boris Johnson has survived the attempt by some in Britain's Conservative party to remove him as prime minister. The margin not quite close. But by being so publicly called into question, both the prime minister and his party have been weakened. Dogged by real and performative public disapproval, Johnson will have difficulty remaining in power for the rest of the parliamentary term, and more performing to do in the next election to remain in office after it. In the fabled axioms of British politics, two things are meant to be clear. One is that the Conservative party is the natural party of government. The country is slightly right-of-center, the logic goes, and it is a rare Labour challenge which can defeat this innate advantage.

Sunday

Freddy Gray

Are you ready for the Summer of Biden?

Ah Biden, Sleepy Joe, the gaffe machine from Scranton, Penn. He’s familiar to everyone, but an unknown quantity as a presidential candidate for 2020. Yes, he has failed before, twice. Yes, he’s doddery. But he keeps coming top in the polls and we keep being told that President Trump fears him the most. One thing is certain, however: for as long as Biden’s campaign goes on, he’ll boob and boob and boob again. His ability to say something stupid is mind-boggling. And in a perverse way, it is one of his strengths as a candidate. His near-senility makes him strangely memorable. Recall the Summer of Trump in 2015, when the Donald blew up the news cycle at least once a day with some outrageous remark?

summer of biden

Thursday

James Delingpole

It’s not science I don’t trust – it’s the scientists

Everyone knows the real reason people like Donald Trump are sceptical of climate change is that conservatives are fundamentally anti-science. Some doubt science because it conflicts with their religious beliefs; others because its implications might mean radically shifting the global economy in an anti-growth or heavily statist direction, which goes against their free-market ideology; others because, being conservative, they are prisoners of their dogmatism, need closure and fear uncertainty. I hear this all the time from lefties on social media. And there seems to be some evidence to support it.

margaret thatcher roberts scientists