The Economist on the Greek default

Other aspects of the restructuring are more troubling. One is that the European Central Bank (ECB) was able to sidestep a coercive write-down of its Greek bonds, acquired as part of a programme to stabilise bond markets in troubled euro-zone countries. That will undermine its power to stop future market panic through bond purchases, since investors now know that the larger the ECB holding of a country’s bonds is, the bigger the write-down private investors would suffer in a restructuring.

Gavekal on the coming Eurozone balance of payments crisis

Over the past two years, the euro crisis has morphed from a sovereign crisis in a peripheral country (Greece), to a banking crisis, and back to a sovereign crisis in core countries (Italy, Spain). At every turn a "solution" is devised whose purpose is to "save" the euro but whose actual result is simply to push the crisis into new and more desperate terrain. The latest solution - aggressive easing by the ECB - means that the next phase of the euro disaster will be a balance of payments crisis. Indeed, the ECB's change of operating procedures undeniably "solves" last year's problem of eurozone governments financing themselves. But what kind of solution is it when, as Jacques Rueff put it 50 years ago, the ECB's move amounts to "financing expenditures which have no return with money that does not exist"? The highest-odds scenario is thus that the bloated eurozone public sector, having guaranteed its financing for the next three years, will stop all effort at reform, and that the southern European countries will become even less competitive than they are now. In turn this means that -- barring a collapse in oil prices -- their dollar trade deficits will grow larger and that a classic balance of payments crisis is thus right around the corner.

So far, this crisis has not materialized because of the generosity of the Fed, whose swap lines already total US$100bn. To all intents and purposes, the Fed is now financing not only the US budget deficit but also the southern European trade deficits, while the ECB gets to carry the exchange rate and solvency risks. (This Fed-dependence carries a delicious historical irony: one of the prime goals of the euro architects was to create a powerful alternative to the dollar, ensuring that Eurocrats would never again be subservient to Washington. Yet today, thanks to the euro, Europe must go cap in hand to Washington to stay solvent).

Mark Lilla on Americans' politics

Americans' assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. They are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S.Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul, who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of liberalism, not conservatism.

Mark Lilla on Fascists

Fascists hated so many aspects of modern society - representative democracy, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, bourgeois refinement - that we forget that they were anything but nostalgic for Church and Crown. There was nothing conservative about them.

Mark Lilla on conservatives

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke's view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for: we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to pre-existing opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke's critique of the French revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege.

Hugh Roberts asks Who Said Gadaffi Had To Go?

It is tendentious and dishonest to say simply that Gadaffi was "killing his own people"; he was killing those of his own people who were rebelling. He was doing in his respect what every government in history has done when faced with a rebellion. We are all free to prefer the rebels to the government in any given case. But the relative merits of the two sides aren't the issue in such situations: the issue is the right of a state to defend itself against violent subversion. That right, once taken for granted as the corollary of sovereignty, is now compromised. Theoretically, it is qualified by certain rules. But as we have seen, the invocation of rules (e.g. no genocide) can go together with cynical exaggeration and distortion of the facts by other states. There are in fact no reliable rules. A state may repress a revolt if the permanent veto-holding powers on the Security Council allow it to (e.g. Bahrain, but also Sri Lanka) and not otherwise. And if a state thinks it can take this informal authorisation to defend itself as read because it is on good terms with London, Paris and Washington and is honouring all its agreements with them, as Libya was, it had better beware. Terms can change without warning from one day to the next. The matter is now arbitrary, and arbitrariness is the opposite of law.

Christopher Hitchens on death

"Death has this much to be said for it:
You don't have to get out of bed for it.
Wherever you happen to be
They bring it to you - free."
- Kingsley Amis