- The same guarded hopefulness applies to an Economist editor’s only true master: the liberal credo of open markets and individual freedom.
- Countries that looked mildly hopeful nine years ago, such as Russia and Turkey, have acquired tsars and sultans.
- Western democracy, too, looks ever less exemplary. Barack Obama may have stopped his predecessor’s waterboarding of American values, but Washington remains synonymous with gridlock.
- The only way to feel good about American democracy is to set it beside Brussels.
Micklethwait woke up today and realized this was his last chance ever to publish his unique British snark to an audience of 1.5 million. So he didn't pull any punches.
Well that was pretty awesome. He also seems to make a lot of conservative-sounding arguments, especially in the economic/financial side. Are the ideologies backwards over in Europe or something? Is there something I'm missing?The same guarded hopefulness applies to an Economist editor’s only true master: the liberal credo of open markets and individual freedom. That liberalism, which stretches back to our founding by James Wilson in 1843, has been attacked from all sides over the past nine years.
...the blows that have rained down on liberal economics have perhaps been even more painful. It is now a commonplace to blame the dominant event of this editorship, the 2007-08 financial crisis, on unfettered capitalism.
The answer is to scale down government...