The Economist on public sector reform

Despite all that rhetoric from the tea-partiers, big government is not just the fault of self-interested bureaucrats and leftist politicians. Conservative voters, even if they don’t like taxes, have kept on demanding that the state does more. Just as the left has built hospitals, announced endless programmes to help the poor and indulged the teachers’ unions, the right has built prisons, announced wars on drugs and terror, and indulged generals, farmers and policemen. 

The wisdom of Herb Stein

“IF something cannot go on for ever, it will stop,” Herb Stein once observed caustically. The American economist’s aphorism has proved apt of late—as applicable to Hosni Mubarak’s regime as it was to America’s rising property prices....


From The Economist.

Garton-Ash on US and European reactions to the GWOT

“To return from the US to Europe is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism, but is not, to a continent which is on the front line but still has not woken up to the fact."