Freedom’s Just Another Word For Crisis-Prone

        This article holds the perception that economic freedom is an evil and can not be trusted. The author uses empirical  data to analyse this core insight and further argues that freedom is another word for crisis.

     “So it seems that the Index of Economic Freedom in practice tells us little about the cost of abandoning free market policies and offers little proof that government intervention into the economy would either retard economic growth or contract political freedom. In actuality, this rather objective-looking index is a slip-shod measure that would seem to have no other purpose than to sell the neoliberal policies that brought on the current crisis, and to stand in the way of policies that might correct the crisis.”

http://dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0909miller.html

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Barack Obama:a weak president being pushed leftward ?

         Mr. Obama  was  endorsed  in part because  he had surrounded himself with enough intelligent centrists. It also said that the eventual success of Mr.Obama ‘s presidency would be based on two things: resuscitating the world economy; and bringing the new emerging powers into the Western order. He has now hurt both objectives.

        The decision that the U.S. goernment made on Sep.11th to slap a 35% tariff on imported Chinese tyres was an awkward decision; completely contrary to Obama’s re-affirmed earlier: to avoid a serious commitment to trade protectionism in times of economic crisis. In addition, the move of  the Chinese tire levy punitive tariffs is extremely a huge political mistake,  confirming his critics’ worst fears about the president’s inability to stand up to his party’s special interests and stick to the centre ground he promised to occupy in office.

      What I find meaningful is Mr.Obama’s Leftward trend, which makes a coincidence with this and last  week’s topics in class. However , one is history, while the other is nowadays reality. “Evidence of a weak president being pushed leftward might cause investors to worry whether he will prove similarly feeble when it comes to reining in the vast deficits he is now racking up; and that might spook the buyers of bonds that finance all those deficits.”

       The following link is  the original  cover story of  The Economist, Sep.19th

http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14450332&source=most_commented