What can I wish you for the next year? More power and gold? Or should I say more of a real life of your own Work and freedom? Less taxes comes to mind. The world is accelerating at a brisk pace. Turbulence all over the bloody place, to be taken literally. The balance is delicate. Shall we all perish in the rush or shall we find nirvana in peace? Maybe we need the turbulence to be reminded how peaceful it could be if we all just did all we could to reach for it. If you ask me, last year was bad enough although history has seen worse. In any case, I wish you all a better 2008. It helps to keep repeating the same wishes every year.

Dr. Carl-Johan Westholm, founder of the online voting site FreeEurope.info and Mendez de Vigo MEP (tbc)
Could introducing a new EU constitution be so important that policy makers abandon democracy for it?
The present EU leadership seems intent on introducing fundamental rules by stealth: following rejection by referenda in two countries in 2005, the Dutch and Danish parliaments may shortly submit the “Reform Treaty” to their voters.

In an interview with EurActiv, Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), says Europe must address levels of red tape that are still "far too high", tax policies that are "far too aggressive", labour laws which are "too inflexible for SMEs and businesses that need to be agile", and an intellectual property regime which "fails to promote investment" if it wants to promote entrepreneurship and innovation across the continent.

For those who have never heard of Austrian Economics, take some time to visit the website of the von Mises Institute , based in New York and celebrating soon their 25th anniversary. As often happened, European intellectuals of class had to flee to the U.S. to florish and get recognition. Today, this still happens although less dramatically and partly because those who did flee still need time to reach their height of recognition.

One of the questions that often comes back is the question of what happened to trigger the turn-around in Ireland. In the beginning of the 1980's Ireland was experiencing an economic downturn. Not really a big surprise as this country was the poorest of all of Europe. The history of Ireland is also a turbulent one, with massive emigration and massive poverty. Before that it was literally occupied, sometimes rather brutally by the English. But in the 1980's all that changed. Ireland made itself attractive to investors, invested a lot in education and research, reduced the public sector and reduced the taxes. The country started to grow at more than 5% per year (the triple of most EU countries) In barely 20 years time, the Irish became the most wealthy of all EU citizens. Even the recent peace in Northen Ireland can to some extent be contributed to a side-effect of this economic success.

By Frank Shostak Von Mises Institute. Posted on 6/5/2007

Why do individuals pay much higher prices for some goods versus other goods? The common reply to this is the law of supply and demand. But what is behind this law? To provide an answer to this question economists refer to the law of diminishing marginal utility. At that point, most people stop listening. Too technical for me! But in fact, it is not. The concept of marginal utility is the essential building block of a sound theory of human action as it applies in the science of economics. But too often, the mainstream theory is misleading. So I offer this Austrian attempt to demystify the idea.

Speech by Jürgen Stark, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB given at the conference “Fiscal Policy Challenges in Europe” organised by the German Ministry of Finance and Centre for European Economic Research 23 March 2007