Every so often, you read something so ridiculously stupid and absurd that you assume that you’re being pranked. So you look to the date of the article to see if it says April 1. Or you look at the Internet address to see if it’s a parody of a real website. So when I read […]

Centuries from now, I’m sure historians won’t bother teaching about the Magna Carta, the Constitution, the end of slavery, or the collapse of communism. Instead, people who want to know about human rights will learn about these great European developments. In France, it is against the law to say your husband is under-endowed or that […]

The mess in Europe has been rather frustrating, largely because almost everybody is on the wrong side. Some folks say they want “austerity,” but that’s largely a code word for higher taxes. They’re fighting against the people who say they want “growth,” but that’s generally a code word for more Keynesian spending. So you can […]

I’m in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I just finished speaking to a regional conference of the European Students for Liberty. I subjected the kids to more than 90 minutes of pontificating and 73 PowerPoint slides, but I could have saved them a lot of time if I simply showed them this Rahn Curve video and then […]

For quite some time, I’ve thought of Herman van Rompuy as the poster child of Europe’s incompetent political elite. Virtually unknown to people in the real world (his sole claim to fame is that a British MEP, in a speech that went viral on YouTube, said he resembled a “low-grade bank clerk”), the President of […]

With all the fiscal troubles in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, there’s not much attention being paid to Cyprus. But the Mediterranean island nation is a good case study illustrating the economic dangers of big government. For all intents and purposes, Cyprus is now bankrupt, and the only question that remains to be answered […]

Yesterday, I did a serious post outlining the absurd policies being pursued in France, Italy, and Greece, along with some much-deserved scorn for the throw-fuel-on-the-fire statist analysis of the International Monetary Fund. Later in the day, I posted a cartoon about Greece and also included links to other amusing posts about the mess across the […]

Every day brings more and more evidence that Obamanomics is failing in Europe.  I wrote some “Observations on the European Farce” last week, but the news this morning is even more surreal. Let’s start with France, where I endorsed the explicit socialist over the implicit socialist precisely because of a morbid desire to see a […]

Spain’s received a bailout, Greece is having another election tomorrow, and the European political elite is pushing for more centralization. In other words, business as usual in the continent where voters think you can get nothing for nothing (this satirical cartoon is now European reality) and politicians think every problem can be solved by more […]

Guido Westerwelle is supposed to be the German version of a libertarian. Currently serving as Foreign Minister, he was the chairman of the supposedly pro-market Free Democratic Party for 10 years and Wikipedia says he was known as a “proponent of an unlimited free market economy.” Sounds like a good guy, right? Just the type […]