In yesterday’s edition of NY Times, Paul Krugman opened a puzzling discussion on the economic performance of Europe relative to the United States (link), suggesting that the European model of social democracy is an envy for economic success compared to the U.S economy.

I wrote a column in Financial Express on Friday: How leftist is India?. This draws on the data shown in this previous blog post. I just noticed a piece in The Economist which dwells on related themes which is well worth reading.
Many people wrote me email about this piece. An important criticism of this evidence [...]

As mentioned in my previous post, most businessmen will do anything they can to preserve their position.  This extends to people in all realms.  Whether manufacturers, farmers, financiers, academics or politicians, those who wish to preserve their power will promote as many measures as necessary to do so.  In the case of those in the [...]

Shifting away from central planning
Traditionally, Indian socialism has involved government control of all aspects of financial products or processes. As an example, government specified the time of day at which trading starts and the time of day where it stops. The RBI committee process on currency futures and interest rate futures specified that trading must [...]

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” – Frederic Bastiat

Pundits, pontificators and plebeians all have polarized around the issue of national healthcare. Many have spoken wisely on the pros and cons of the proposed system, a heartening fact given the relative deafening [...]

Received the email “parable” below today. Interesting that I received it just after reading Chris Leithner’s latest newsletter (yesterdays post) – synchronicity?
An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class.
That class had insisted that socialism worked and that [...]

Socialism is alive and well. In America, as elsewhere, however, the socialist movement isn’t and never has been a worker’s movement, as it has been made out to be. Socialism has been, from the start, a movement of intellectuals. It festers on college campuses. It is a framework constructed by very [...]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights” during his State of the Union Address in 1944. He noted that while “under the protection of certain inalienable rights…our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness….true [...]

An alternate history that I find interesting is a scenario where, in 1947, the British kept one city in India – e.g. Surat. This is analogous to the British control of Hong Kong in China after the communist revolution.
Why is Surat interesting for such an analysis, and not Bombay? It sounds too implausible for free [...]

At Casey Research, we are trying not to be overly pessimistic, but there’s no denying the mass of bad news coming to us from all fronts: the forces of collectivism are using the cover of the crisis they largely created, aided and abetted by capitalism’s quislings, to roll over the individual.
Even so, contained within the [...]