Last week, our ruling Progressive class cheered New York Democratic mayor de Blasio’s disbanding of an NYPD intelligence unit that had been keeping watch over the city’s Muslim community. Republican President George W. Bush’s mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace,” in response to 9/11 and Muslim terrorism in general, had drawn similar plaudits from the same Progressives. But this protectiveness does not mean that Progressivism is Islamophilic. Nor are the words and actions from on high that minimize Islam’s relationship with the terror that has struck America in the last generation attributable to ignorance.
Crisis and Leviathan: IMF Edition
Why do we still have the International Monetary Fund? It began life in 1944 with one rather specific purpose, to make sure that currencies traded at fixed rates of exchange. Since at least 1973, few currency issuers (brave exceptions include China and Panama) have shown the slightest interest in fixed exchange rates. Shouldn’t the IMF have folded a long time ago? What happened was mission creep. For about thirty years, from 1944 to 1973, the IMF did in fact supervise a world generally on fixed exchange rates. These were the “thirty glorious years” in France; the time of the “economic miracle”…
