Friday, September 28, 2012

A Case for Public, Not Private, Austerity

As Spain and Greece Burn, Estonia Offers a Lesson, with Ryan Bourne, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 28, 2012. "Usefully, the Eurozone crisis has provided a natural experiment in how to deal with a severe downturn. The results of that experiment have not favored the unsophisticated Keynesian view that more borrowing is the answer. The highly indebted Southern European states decided to run big fiscal deficits in the aftermath of the crisis, and now face suffocating debt burdens and still-uncompetitive labour markets. On the other side of the spectrum, the Baltic nations (especially Estonia and Latvia) cut government spending and liberalized their economies. While the short term effects were painful, these two countries grew by 8.3 percent and 5.5 percent last year—remarkable when you consider that Greece, Spain, and Italy are in recession."

Thursday, September 20, 2012

The Failings of Private Austerity

Why Larry Summers Is Wrong About the British Economy, with Ryan Bourne, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 20, 2012. "Despite all the talk about huge spending cuts, spending has actually increased in real terms since 2010, while new tax hikes have been piled on top of the tax rises implemented by the previous Labour government.

The O'Dwyer Extradition Case

Why It Is Fair to Extradite Yorkshire Web Piracy Suspect, Yorkshire Post, September 20, 2012. "I do not expect that a defense of Richard O’Dwyer’s extradition will be popular. But I do believe that the extradition arrangements between Britain and the U.S. are fair, and that O’Dwyer’s case illustrates why."

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The Transnationalist Strategy and the First Amendment

Re: WH Asks YouTube to Pull Anti-Islam Video, Contentions, September 19, 2012. "The problem with the White House’s efforts is not just that they are wrong in principle and feeble in practice. It’s not just that it has handed all the agenda-defining power to Islamist radicals, and refused to recognize that the video is an act of political judo against the U.S., and a pretext for violence, not its cause, in the Middle East. It’s not even just that it plays into the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s seemingly-lost campaign for U.N. action against the ‘defamation of religion,’ which the Obama Administration rightly opposed."

Monday, September 17, 2012

Defending the US-UK Extradition Treaty

Why the US-UK Extradition Treaty is Good Law, ConHome, September 17, 2012. "Hard cases make bad law, the saying goes, and some of the cases that have attracted British attention – and condemnation -- to the 2003 Extradition Treaty between the U.S. and Great Britain are indeed hard. But not all of them are. Indeed, most extraditions from Britain to the U.S. – and all of them from the U.S. to Britain – excite no public controversy at all. The Treaty deserves more than to be condemned by anecdote; it deserves to be examined on its merits."

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Arms Control and the Need for Verification

Missing the Point on Arms Control, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "Over the last several weeks, Rose Gottemoeller, the Acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, has given speeches in Stockholm and Helsinki that, while focusing on Europe, set out the Administration’s broader philosophy on arms control and verification. This philosophy is profoundly misguided."

Stolen Valor and the Origin of the 'Crazy Vet'

Re: The ‘Crazed Veteran’, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "The virtue of Stolen Valor is the way that it methodically and systemically uses documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests to reveal fraud after fraud, fake after fake, and lie after lie from supposedly traumatized veterans who in reality rarely even served in the military or saw combat at all."

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The EU's Explicitly Elite Approach

The EU’s Pursuit of Stability Über Alles, Contentions, September 12, 2012. "The EU turned from an instrument for restoring a degree of stability to one dedicated to the preservation of the status quo. That approach – and Dalrymple is absolutely right about this – is bound to fail. It means the EU, which still talks a lot about increasing Europe’s power in the world, is more interested in pursuing policies which guarantee Europe’s continued relative decline. It also means that the reality of German dominance of the EU – politics win in the short run, but economics win in the long haul – is becoming ever more obvious to most Europeans, which is one reason why the EU is less popular now than ever."

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

UN Programme of Action Lives On

U.N. ‘Programme of Action’ Does Little Damage, So Far, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 11, 2012. "The 2012 Review Conference for the U.N.’s “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects” (PoA), concluded with a consensus agreement on Friday. The agreement continued the PoA’s track record of over-promising and under-delivering, but, in the context of the PoA, that is about the best outcome the U.S. could realistically have achieved."

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The PoA --Time for the US to Quit This Farce

U.S. Should Quit U.N.’s ‘Programme of Action’, Heritage Foundation Foundry, September 4, 2012. "So let’s sum up: The PoA has achieved little of use, has a constantly expanding agenda, promotes restricting civilian firearms ownership, and seeks to advance this agenda by the slow elaboration of international norms. It is high time for the U.S. to quit this farce."

Defending the US-UK Extradition Treaty

The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty: Fair, Balanced, and Worth Defending, with Andrew Robert James Southam, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #2723, September 4, 2012. "The 2003 Extradition Treaty between the United States and Great Britain is intensely controversial in the United Kingdom. The treaty resulted from a British process and is a modern and praiseworthy approach to extradition that is based on an objective evidentiary test, requires dual criminality in all cases, and has a proportionality standard. The European Union’s European Arrest Warrant does not have these virtues and therefore urgently needs reform, as does Britain’s participation in the Council of Europe’s European Convention on Extradition and acceptance of the jurisdiction of the supranational European Court of Human Rights. While Anglo–American cooperation on the treaty and on extradition and international criminal justice can be improved, the 2003 U.S.–U.K. Extradition Treaty is fair, balanced, and worth defending."