Martin Meenagh blog

In 1961, following a series of strategies and plans developed under President Eisenhower and Vice-president Nixon, CIA officials presented to President-elect Kennedy a scheme to undermine the communist regime in Cuba. The idea was very simple. A force of US-trained Cuban 'exiles', equipped with light arms, would land on the island, and, without American air and sea cover, would engage Cuban forces. Simultaneously, an insurgency by anticommunist forces would deliver a wave of rebellion, which would then result in regime change. Naively, President Kennedy approved the plan. It turned out to be a disaster. Part of the reason it became a disaster was that Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell of the CIA were simply not telling the truth to the president. They had no indication of any insurgency, had not developed a scheme for leadership change--which, after Suez just four years before, one would have thought essential--and, moreover, they believed that the USA would have to back the...

A couple of years ago, I went looking for alternative economic theories. A few demented readers will note that this turned into an effort to understand mad wave sequences based on the Fibonnaci curve, what precisely generalists who talked about distributism actually meant, and why libertarians never engaged with human nature. The odyssey turned into a pootle, really, and what I really remember of that Summer can be mostly summed up in the phrase ‘David Johns’ Pie Shop’.   However, the side of me that has some (frayed) credibility as an intellectual historian has been out and about lately, and I’ve become very interested in the recrudescence of Modern Money Theory, which independently and on a number of fronts, appears to be emerging as a source of discussion in sundry economic circles. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been pointing out the similarities between recent IMF papers on the nationalisation of money by Benes and Kumhof, the English monetary acts of the restoration, an...

We are now within two weeks of an American election where, to borrow and mangle a phrase of Nate Silver’s, the signal is hidden by the noise. I’ve long thought that Barack Obama had a good chance of being a one-term president, and in a year when the Republicans had a good candidate, he would probably be buying retirement property. The American economy has not improved and will not until the foreclosure crisis, the federal debt and deficit, the triffin-style dollar and trade problem, and the peculiar mix of banking and ethical crisis in financial markets is resolved. In turn, these problems reflect both a global collapse in ethics and a real world collapse in sustainable raw material supplies, which could only be displaced in the long run by a radical drop in demand—and population—or a change in technology. Since such a resolution would be the work of Sisyphus, Tantalus, and more than one nutter with a missile, the only conclusion is that Obama, as with a slew of Japanese and Europea...

I spent a half day at the Adam Smith Institute Conference yesterday—held in the suitably evangelical gathering of the Emmanuel Hall in Westminster—and a curious experience it was. Madsen Pirie turned up in pumps and a Nixon-era sky-blue suit to give a polished rendition of ‘capitalism—it’s wonderful’ before denying most of the nostrums of the economic literati, including rational choice and market equilibria theories, and finished with a vague distinction between systems, examples and mechanisms. At heart, I think that he shares a good deal with the distributists’ embrace of small business but probably depends upon the donations of larger ones, and I wouldn’t be surprised if several decades of abuse from the more stupid of modern journalists and politicians hadn’t set up a whole wall of defensive straw men in his mind. Tim  Worstall appeared—raving like a sort of Arthur Mullard or Peter Vaughan about the Monetary Policy Committee being the ‘essence of communism’ (which to be fair...

My late mother, like many women, was a very good judge of what you might call ‘creepy’ character in men. This was a sort of innate talent. It was probably enhanced by her position as a woman who, though relatively young, was from a world in which sexism, sexual violence, and jokes about rape were endemic in a way which is frankly unimaginable today. She never could stand Jimmy Saville, I recall, and I often wondered if she sensed something about him.   In ordinary terms, such an observation would be what you might term an anecdotal smear, since Mr Saville has of course gone to his judgement and very little can now be proven against him. To my mind, there is a very strong case to answer; over a dozen women, who have been named, have now come forward with consistent stories which fit with the recollections and regrets of other independent witnesses. If ‘Sir Jimmy’ were a one-off, history would record the terrible pain which surrounded those who had claimed to have encountered hi...