The US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is having trouble with his socialism. The younger voters get it, but many of the older liberally-minded people don’t-  the kind of people who read the New York Times and probably like its endorsement of Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar and find socialism rather difficult to swallow. The New York Times has many...

Capitalism rules the world. Correct. But Bernie Sanders has his doubts about it.  Good. It is a malicious system in many ways but as Winston Churchill might have said, it is better than all the alternatives. Nevertheless, it’s time overdue to tame the beast.

After the Second World War the Western world did make a big effort to mitigate some of its wo...

In Munich this past weekend at the Security Conference the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, nailed her anti-Chinese colours to the mast. Despite being a liberal on many issues and the leader of the fight to impeach President Donald Trump, she has joined forces with Trump in preaching that the West must not allowed itself to...

Do we know how to end poverty in the Third World? Do we know why some economies expand and others don’t? Not really. There is no clear formula for growth. The two Nobel economics prize winners of last year, the husband and wife team of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, write in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “The uncomfortable truth is that...

Can we be happier? All of us probably experience grave unhappiness at some point in our lives- a bereavement of someone close, a job loss, a bad illness, a vindictive boss, a drop in income or status, a loss of love for or from one’s partner, even a divorce, a standard of living when ends can hardly be met. Every reader can add their own woes to thi...

Let’s cut to the chase – there is no question, no doubt, that the government of Myanmar and the army which controls it have committed the most vile atrocities against the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority that lives in the West of the Buddhist-dominated country.

The International Court of Justice (the World Court) which ruled last week against the M...

The struggle for the Donbass region in the eastern and southern Ukraine goes on, seemingly never endingly. It’s now six years since dissident militias threw off the yoke of the central government in Kiev and declared their de-facto independence. They were supported by Russian troops which at first president Vladimir Putin denied and then later admit...

In the Chinese government's eyes it has three rebellious parts of China on its plate – Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In Tibet, protestors from time to time have clashed with police and soldiers. In Hong Kong, the reform and freedom demonstrations are now in their eighth month. In Taiwan, society has constructed a form of democracy anathema to Beijing...

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, Sherlock Holmes lectures Watson on the unlikely subject of free trade.

Holmes: “Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to read you an extract from The Times: ‘You may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff,...

When it comes to war the world does move on for the better. Right now there are no interstate wars. The longest running civil war of our era, in the Sudan, is over. The second longest, in Afghanistan and Syria, are winding down. Only one country in the world actually threatens the use of nuclear weapons- North Korea- but its arsenal and its credibil...