imjingjing

I sometimes wonder, who the real winner of the Cold War was. Traditional wisdom is that capitalism won over communism, right ? The Western world over the Soviet bloc. Freedom and liberty over authoritarianism and government control. Etc Etc. But I wonder if this is really true ? Take the capitalism versus state enterprise debate. Today capitalism is a four letter word to much of the world. The fastest growing economy in the world and the second largest, China,  is significantly  state enterprise driven. Government expenditure as a % of GDP is 53% in France (surprise surprise), 47% in the UK, 43% in Germany and in supposedly the bastion of free market capitalism, the United states, 39%. Government spending has propped up the global economy for five years now and bailed out financial institutions when they were mired in the quicksand. What about freedom and liberty. After the revelations over the last couple of days from a certain Edward Snowden, we may have to redefine the word...

If you have been following the news in the US, you might have noticed an almighty hullabaloo over the the IRS (their tax man) having targeted Tea Party and Conservative groups. Much hot air and righteous indignation is being spouted and Obama has fired the IRS chief yesterday. Almost everybody on earth loves to bash the taxman (rightfully so !) and this is all good fun. Except that I believe that in this case the bashing is wrong. Or at least much exaggerated. What happened is this. The IRS admits that it subjected groups which bore the name tea party, or patriot to extra scrutiny. The fact that such groups are exclusively Republican and that the President is a Democrat seems to indicate political targeting. That is, of course, against the law. Hence all this noise. But why did the IRS do this - after all, they are not fools. If you try and answer this question, a different picture emerges. The problem all started with, in my view,  the appalling judgement by the US Supreme Court i...