First off, apologies for leaving this blog to languish without giving any explanation. The fact is, I’m not prioritizing it any longer. But am not ready to give up totally quite yet.

So my posts will continue to be infrequent for the foreseeable future, although I’ll be more active on twitter.

Anyway, to break my four-month silence, I want to recommend this excellent podcast by Philippe Jurgensen on why jobs are so scarce in France.

I’m always amazed by the ability of French economists to diagnose the country’s ills and by the inability of its leaders to do anything about them.

In recent years stacks of reports (by Michel Camdessus, Christian Blanc, Michel Pébereau, the Attali Commission – as well as too many books to mention) have identified the structural factors that hamper French growth – rigid labor markets, an unreformed public sector, rotten universities, a perverse tax-and-benefit system, etc.

In this podcast, Jurgensen neatly summarizes all this and points to the obvious solutions that politicians are unwilling to try.

What is a pro-market voter to do in Thursday’s British election? It is difficult to get excited about the choice on offer.

Economic liberals want a modest, efficient state. Gordon Brown’s record immediately disqualifies Labour.

Over the past 10 years, first as chancellor and then prime minister, he has thrown money at Britain’s rotten “public” services, and predictably failed to improve them.

Over the past 18 months Brown has tackled the financial crisis by spending the nation’s cash for generations to come and by propping up failed institutions.

He has printed money like there is no tomorrow, and is leaving a budget deficit at a post-war high which is feeding a ballooning national debt.

I once supported New Labour, but the current administration has run out of ideas and steam. The party needs to nurse itself back to political health through a stint in opposition.

What about the Liberal Democrats, a naturally centrist party (which suits me fine)? But under Nick Clegg, the Lib Dems have not returned to their roots in the historical party of liberty.

In many ways, Clegg has run to the left of Labour. He wants to soak the rich through a “mansion tax”, curb takeovers in the name of “public interest”, and split investment banking from retail banking, echoing the old US Glass-Steagall Act.

All party leaders have engaged shamelessly populist rhetoric over the banking crisis, but Clegg has been by far the most vindictive in bashing “greedy bankers”.

Most crucially, Clegg does not see the fiscal fix the country is in. Last year the deficit was £160bn – almost £3,000 per British man, woman and child. And Clegg wants to cut taxes (for low-income people) and calls for only limited spending cuts – in the future!

Which leaves the Conservatives. They are certainly not offering a frontal, Thatcherian challenge to the rampant Leviathan.

David Cameron has retreated from the austerity plan he promised last year. And he is short on detail about how he would restore public finances.

But he is the only leader to have given people a glimpse of fiscal mess they are in, and he wants to tackle it sooner rather than later. This is the main reason why my vote – if I had one in Britain – would go to him.

In addition, the Tories have good ideas about reforming health care through competition rather than command and control, and even better ones about freeing schools from local authorities.

No prime ministerial candidate is anywhere near adequate from a libertarian point of view. But Cameron’s vision of a modern Britain is the closest to the liberal ideal recently spelt out by The Economist:

“a country which lives within its means, pays the state to do what it can do effectively and no more, stops subsidising failure through sloppy, bloated benefits rolls and educates its young to hold down serious jobs in an economy in which the government stops hogging the capital markets, complicating the tax code and heaping up regulation.”

Charles Krauthammer’s analysis of the Biden incident is worth reading in full, but here’s a taster:

“In these long and bloody 63 years, the Palestinians have not once accepted an Israeli offer of permanent peace, or ever countered with anything short of terms that would destroy Israel. They insist instead on a “peace process”… the point of which is to extract preemptive Israeli concessions, such as a ban on Jewish construction in parts of Jerusalem conquered by Jordan in 1948, before negotiations for a real peace have even begun.

Under Obama, Netanyahu agreed to commit his center-right coalition to acceptance of a Palestinian state; took down dozens of anti-terror roadblocks and checkpoints to ease life for the Palestinians… and agreed to the West Bank construction moratorium, a concession that Secretary Clinton herself called “unprecedented.”

What reciprocal gesture, let alone concession, has Abbas made during the Obama presidency? Not one.

Indeed, long before the Biden incident, Abbas refused even to resume direct negotiations with Israel…

And Clinton demands that Israel show its seriousness about peace?”

David Brook’s balanced editorial in today’s New York Times sums up my own general view of Obama better than I could do myself.

Highlight:

“Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.”

Mark Steyn has a characteristically eloquent article in the Washington Times about the “Greek tragedy”, as he calls unsustainable entitlements. Highlights:

“We hard-hearted, small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government. Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest…

The perfect spokesman for the entitlement mentality is the deputy prime minister of Greece. The European Union has concluded that the Greek government’s austerity measures are insufficient and, as a condition of bailout, has demanded something more robust…

So the aforementioned Greek deputy prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, has denounced the conditions of the EU deal on the grounds that the Germans stole all the bullion from the Bank of Greece during the Second World War. Welfare always breeds contempt, in nations as much as inner-city housing projects. How dare you tell us how to live! Just give us your money and push off.

Unfortunately, Germany is no longer an economic powerhouse. As Merkel pointed out a year ago, for Germany, an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it…

Why be the last handsome blond lederhosen-clad Aryan lad working the late shift at the beer garden in order to prop up singlehandedly entire retirement homes? And that’s before the EU decides to add the Greeks to your burdens. Germans, who retire at 67, are now expected to sustain the unsustainable 14 monthly payments per year for Greeks who retire at 58.”

Great article in City Magazine on abuse of “eminent domain” – as Americans call the compulsory purchase of property commandeered for the “public good”.

You may have heard of the Supreme Court ruling in the Kelo v New London case a couple of years ago. It said it was OK for the government to force owners to sell not just to itself, but to a developer.

This article tells of a similar state-sanctioned private landgrab in New York, and powerfully makes the case for full protection of property rights.

While I’m on the subject, and as I’m always on the lookout for libertarian rock songs, I recently spotted the video opposite.

It’s about eminent domain – a fantastic tune as well.

Ian Anderson’s lyrics are here.

The EU will soon be represented by Catherine Ashton, a Briton who was active in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late 1970s and treasurer of that vocal pacifist group between 1980 and 1982.

Questions over her past have been voiced by some Eurosceptics, including a MEP, and some British papers.

Lady Ashton denied reports that she had accepted money from Moscow, and that was that. She is sure to be confirmed by the European Parliament in the coming days.

What bothers me about this is not that she was in charges of CND finances at a time when the USSR was financing pacifist groups across Western Europe. I’m a trusting kind of guy and am prepared to believe her.

So okay: I accept that Moscow – whose main aim at the time was maintaining military superiority over democracies in Europe – made an exception for the UK, and refrained from funding those agitating against the deployment of short-range missiles there.

But what about the cause itself? You can’t hold someone’s youthful beliefs against them – if they have repudiated them. But in her response, Ashton did not repudiate her CND involvement.

And her supporters in the blogosphere and the media have even defended it, many calling formed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky a far-right witch-hunter for pointing to the CND’s dubious finances.

I am in complete agreement with this online article posted by The Economist after her nomination.

Excerpts:

“IMAGINE a British Conservative politician—call her Catriona Aston—coming from obscurity to gain one of the top posts in the European Union, just as Baroness (Catherine) Ashton has emerged from the Labour ranks to be the EU’s new foreign minister.

Imagine that on closer scrutiny it turns out that in the early 1980s the fictional Ms Aston worked for a cold-war think-tank called something like the ‘African Freedom Foundation’, which campaigned against the spread of communism in Africa.

Imagine that on closer examination it turns out that this outfit enjoyed strong behind-the-scenes support from the then apartheid government in South Africa.

Among its supporters and officials are unrepentant defenders of the fascist regimes in Spain and Portugal and even those who said that Nazism had been a lesser evil than communism.

It is easy to imagine what would happen. The hapless Ms Aston would be publicly disgraced and would have to resign forthwith.

How could an EU representative credibly deal with the developing countries when she in the past had been a defender of a racist colonial regime?

Nuance, context and balance would go out of the window. Nobody would ask if all causes supported by the former South African regime were equally evil, or if communism had maybe cost more African lives than apartheid. …

The fact remains that the Kremlin found CND and other “peace movements” useful ways of undermining the unity of NATO, weakening the West’s defence posture and stoking anti-Americanism.

The ex-dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, an expert in Soviet penetration of the West, says: “the worldwide disarmament campaign in the early 1980s was covertly orchestrated from Moscow. To a substantial extent it was also funded by the Soviet bloc”…

Imagine a 1980s Europe where CND had triumphed, with left-wing governments in Britain and Germany scrapping NATO, surrendering to Kremlin pressure and propping up the evil empire.

Her opponents complain that Lady Ashton is ineffective. As a CND organiser, that may have been a blessing.”

The inglorious qualification of the French soccer team to next year’s World Cup finals at the expense of Ireland (the last-gasp goal was scored thanks to a handball) has triggered an avalanche of anguished reactions in France itself.

Many have taken the form of historical quotations. Jacques Attali exclaimed: “We are all Irish” – echoing the Le Monde headline “We are all American” after 9/11. The sports minister spoke of her “cowardly relief” – a phrase first used after the 1938 Munich agreement between Hitler and the Western Allies.

But why stop here? Here’s my personal list of relevant – or slightly adapted – quotes:

“Vae victis.” (Brennus)
“One more such victory and we’re lost.” (Pyrrhus)
“All is won, except honor.” (Francis I of France)
“It is so cruel to fall at the hand of a Frenchman.” (Duke of Berry)
“France has won a battle, but France has not won the war.” (De Gaulle)
“Ich bin ein Dubliner.” (JFK)

I’m sure there are more. Any suggestions welcome.

Excellent leader in The Economist on 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It stressee that political freedom and economic liberty are intimately linked, and that progress in both should not be taken for granted.

A key excerpt:

“At present capitalism is too often judged by the excesses of a few bankers.

But when historians come to write about the past quarter-century, Lehman Brothers and Sir Fred “the Shred” Goodwin will account for fewer pages than the 500m people dragged out of absolute poverty into something resembling the middle class.

Their success is not just a wonderful thing in itself-the greatest leap forward in economic history. It has also helped spur on other chaotic freedoms: look at the way ideas, good, bad and mad, are texted around the world.

For in the end, no matter what China’s leaders tell Mr Obama when he visits Beijing later this month, economic and political liberty are linked-not as tightly as people hoped 20 years ago, but still linked.

Look forward, and China’s internet-obsessed emerging middle class will surely have an appetite for liberty beyond the purely economic. Change could happen as unexpectedly as it did in 1989.

Even the most fearsome fortresses of repression can eventually be breached. Then it was Honecker and Ceausescu; tomorrow it might be Castro, Ahmadinejad or Mugabe; one day Chavez or even Hu”

Whichever side of the Atlantic you live on, the government is forcing you to ditch ordinary incandescent light bulbs and switch to “compact fluorescent lamps”.

The rationale is that incandescents are wasteful – most of the energy they consume is turned into heat rather, not light – while CFLs are efficient (just try turning on one of each, wait for 10 minutes and touch them: you’ll really feel the difference.)

In his latest column, Jonathan Rauch asks: “Is this a smart way to save some energy? Or, rather, an example of ham-handed environmental grandstanding?”

After weighing various pros and cons, Rauch votes for n2. Expensive low-energy light bulbs have been around for decades, and are now selling mostly by government fiat. A spontaneous choice they are not.

Rauch lists some of the problems with CFLs:

“As someone who has recently made a good-faith effort to switch, I can tell you that fluorescents deserve their not-ready-for-prime-time reputation.

They are slow to come on and slower to reach full brightness. They come in weird, ugly shapes, typically reject dimmers, and don’t even fit in half the places where I need to put them.

Their reliability is spotty. And they contain toxic mercury, making breakage and disposal problematic. That’s before considering their light, which is mediocre at best and ghoulish at worst.”

Rauch goes on to consider various other problems – notably the fact that, as one town in Iowa found, low-energy bulbs can lead to an increase in energy use for lighting, as people keep them turned on in the mistaken belief that they are free to use.

Rauch concludes that it can make sense to reject efficient but costly CFLs in favor of cheap, ordinary light bulbs that are more expensive to use.

People should be allowed to do so, and that choice need not be environmentally detrimental if electricity is priced properly. Amen to than.

Another good argument against CFLs is offered by the French economist Remy Prud’homme, who in a recent paper factors in the heat emitted by ordinary light bulbs.

In summer, that heat is indeed wasted: incandescents are truly wasteful. But in winter – when most of your lighting us takes place – those ultra-hot bulbs reduce your heating bill.

If you take this into account, and Prud’homme has done the sums, a switch to CFLs would INCREASE total energy bills in France by some 7bn euros (the equivalent adjusted for population would be $50bn in the US).

And since heating comes mostly from oil and gas – as opposed to electricity, which in France comes mostly from clean nuclear plants – this would also result in a RISE in CO2 emissions!

So CFLs are bad for users and bad for the environment. They are, in Prud’homme’s words, a “false good idea”.