In response to discrimination and persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. They had moved further east into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, despite the violence...
He later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized...
Happiest and the most comfortable. It is hard in the stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is in reality the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders...
Half of the American population agree with at least one conspiracy [theory] . . . Far from being an aberrant expression of some political extreme or a product of gross misinformation, a conspiratorial...
Government had degenerated into what has been called an ‘administrative’ or ‘managerial’ state, hierarchical and bureaucratic in its mode of operation, dedicated to generating ever more complicated re...
First networked polity. ‘In no country in the world,’ declared Tocqueville, ‘has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multitude of objects than in America’:
Do you think that I believe that you will protect us? I said, yes. He said, I no longer believe that you will protect us. Your actions over recent years have made clear that to you detente is more imp...
Democracy’, we are in fact referring to a number of different interlocking institutions. People sticking pieces of paper into ballot boxes, yes. Their elected representatives making speeches and votin...
Crisis seemed to vindicate the Soviet model. For, if Marxism-Leninism stood for anything, it was the prediction that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Now it seemed...
Complaints from France that Washington was exploiting its reserve currency status in order to collect seigniorage from America’s foreign creditors by printing dollars, much as medieval monarchs had ex...
Between economic freedom and government regulation? Chapter 2 will address these issues. The specific question I ask is how far very complex regulation has become the disease of which it purports to b...
Aunque el liberalismo económico y político anglófono sigue siendo las más atractiva cultura del mundo, tiene el reto de hacer frente, como ha ocurrido desde la revolución iraní, a una seria amenaza pr...
As inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention R...
And growing need for fixed income securities, and for low inflation to ensure that the interest they pay retains its purchasing power. As more and more people leave the workforce, recurrent public sec...
An increase in the supply of paper money, and hence a decrease in the purchasing power of the currencies in which most bonds were denominated. A rational investor who anticipated a major war would sel...
Achievement to create the first modern insurance fund, based on correct actuarial and financial principles, rather than mercantile gambling.
According to Christakis and Fowler, we cannot transmit ideas and behaviours much beyond our friends’ friends’ friends (in other words, across just three degrees of separation). This is because the tra...
What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today’s contributions being used to pay today’s benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future u...
We must pose the familiar question about how far our civil liberties have been eroded by the national security state… Somehow it is always a choice between habeas corpus and hundreds of corpses.
Vice President Nixon the following year: he was even prepared to use atomic weapons to shore up the French position in Indochina.63 The United States cannot afford to preclude itself from using nuclea...