Alex Singleton

High taxes in European Union member states will make our economies economic dinosaurs, warns the European Central Bank. The Financial Times reports:
Many European governments could slash their spending by a quarter or more and still provide top quality public services, a senior official at the European Central Bank argued on Friday [23 March].
The radical prescription […]

The Financial Times reports that the European Commission Neelie Kroes has criticised Nicolas Sarkozy’s support for protecting French companies:
The European Union’s ­competition commissioner on Friday expressed her “shock” at the protectionist rhetoric of Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading challenger for the French presidency, saying it was in France’s interests to promote the European single market and […]

Katherine Mangu-Ward writes in Reason magazine about Bank of America’s new programme to give access to credit cards in the United States to those without social security numbers - basically illegal immigrants. She points to a Wall Street Journal article which says:
In recent years, banks across the country have begun offering checking accounts and, in […]

Shortly after the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz for World Bank President in early 2005, the UK’s Development Secretary Hilary Benn held a meeting in the House of Commons with over 200 employees of development charities to talk about his government’s Africa Commission report. Toeing the government line, he broadly welcomed to the appointment of Wolfowitz. […]

In March 2008, the European Union and United States will implement an “open skies” agreement, allowing EU carriers to fly from any EU city to any US city, and vice versa. The current restricted market will give way to greater competition and lower prices. One absurd practice that will be whisked away is the requirement […]

The President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, is quoted in The Daily Telegraph today criticising some of the more intrusive, negative approaches to fighting climate change. He supports practical measures to improve the environment, but disagrees with some of the intrusive approaches being suggested.
He says that: “Cheap air travel is a great thing […]

Zimbabwe’s socialist dictator Robert Mugabe has called for critics of his government’s physical beating of the main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to “go hang”. In a deluded statement, Mr Mugabe said:
We do not accept their criticism at all, here are groups of persons who went out of the way to effect a campaign of violence, […]

In 1994, the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa launched the mobile phone brand Orange in the UK. The company’s previous entrance into the market with the Rabbit wireless phone had been a flop - the system required customers to be within 100 metres of a transmitter to get coverage. With Orange, Hutchison invested not just […]

I found this gem via the EU-themed blog Kosmopolit:
According to recent surveys, an increasing number of Hungarians oppose the immigration of Pirese to their country. Never heard of them? The Pirese were invented by a research institute to compare the attitude of Hungarians towards existent minorities - Roma, Germans, Slovaks, Serbs - with their feelings […]

“What is called economic power, while it can be called an instrument of coercion, is, in the hands of private individuals, never exclusive or complete power, never power over the whole life of a person. But centralised as an instrument of political power it cretes a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery.” - Friedrich […]