Dalrymple has written often of the debt situation in Europe and what it portends for the EU. Now, at the Library of Law and Liberty, he takes a look at the situation in America:

The American situation is far from unique; in the two countries in which I spend most of my time, Britain and France, the inability of governments of whatever stripe to put public finances on a sound basis is by now plain for all to see. A slowdown in the rate of growth of the national debt is what is now regarded by much of the population as the most ferocious and heartless austerity.

He makes this important point about the Keynesian approach:

The name of poor old Keynes is regularly invoked, as if he had ever supported deficit spending that (in the case of France) has lasted nearly half a century without interruption. Government deficits are not run any longer, if they ever were, to stimulate demand when demand contracts in the private sector: they are run to create economic dependence on government and as a permanent unearned subsidy (unearned, that is, by the economy as a whole) of the living standards of the entire population.

The concluding economic outlook is not comforting, though it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

Politicians and their matey informality on Dalrymple’s Hilarious Pessimist blog:

One of the reasons I preferred Mr Brown to Mr Blair was that he never tried to make himself known by a diminutive of his first name….The vogue of our political class for being known publicly by diminutives grates on me: Anthony Benn, Anthony Blair, Nicholas Clegg, Christopher Huhne, Edward Miliband, Edward Balls. What is all this informality about? After all, one cannot imagine Bob Peel, Ben Disraeli, Bill Gladstone, Dave Lloyd-George, Stan Baldwin, Nev Chamberlain or Jack Major.

In the Salisbury Review: “Public transport is the great theatre of the world, which is why I always take it (whenever I can) in preference to that frightful contraption, my motor car. You learn so much on public transport; in a car you just lose your temper.”

From Pajamas Media:

Considering the awfulness of noise as a destroyer of quality of life, its effects on health have been comparatively little studied. Some time ago, however, it was discovered that those living near a major airport, Schiphol in Amsterdam, and subjected to aircraft noise had higher blood pressure than those who lived in its absence. Two papers in a recent edition of the British Medical Journal, one from Britain and one from America, confirm and extend this observation.

Dalrymple continues his recent writings on animals in New English Review:

When I was young and taken to the zoo I always wanted to go straight to the reptile house. First, however, I had to see the boring old chimpanzees, lions, hippopotamuses, etc., because those were what my adult supervisors always wanted to see. (I remember the notice in the hippopotamus house, apologising for the smell but saying that we, that is to say the hippopotamuses, like it.)

I would pester the adults by asking constantly whether we could go to the reptiles soon, much as a child in a car asks ‘Are we there yet?’ Eventually the adults would say Yes, but reluctantly, for they did not really want to see the reptiles, in fact they wanted not to see them.

In the New Criterion Dalrymple takes a walk through Zurich, seeing it through the eyes of the Lenin portrayed in Solzhenitsyn’s book Lenin in Zurich.

I walked up the Spiegelgasse, the narrow street in which Lenin lodged in 1916…Here Lenin lodged in spartan conditions, reluctant to spend any party funds on himself: a proof, if any were needed, that there are worse vices than simony, peculation, and defalcation of funds. It would not be possible to lodge in such conditions now, of course; not only has the Spiegelgasse been gentrified since Lenin’s day, but such spartan conditions have probably been made illegal in Switzerland…

Other than the plaque, there is no trace of Lenin’s residence in the Spiegelgasse, except for an image of him, half red and half green, that changes colour depending on the angle from which it is looked at, in the window of the trinket shop that has opened on the ground floor of Number 14. Such is the fate in the modern world of men who think they embody history itself: They become playful images to amuse the pseudo-sophisticated of our age.

Dalrymple’s newest piece at Taki’s Mag is a reminder that belief in socialism often starts with hatred:

There is one group of people whom it is morally permissible to hate, and of whom in these times of speech codes it is allowed or even obligatory to speak hatefully: namely, the rich. This is rather odd when one thinks of it, for economic resentment was ultimately responsible for more deaths in the last century than racial hatred. Yet to be a racist is to put yourself outside the pale of decent society; to be an economic egalitarian is to establish your generosity of spirit and profound sense of justice.

Read the rest here