Sam Bowman

The American Enterprise Institute's James Pethokoukis posts an updated version of the Obama jobs chart. Note the green dot — what the unemployment rate would be like without the early retirements and other people who, in one way or another, have decided to stop looking for jobs altogether.

Ayn Rand seems to be everywhere these days. Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee presumptive for Vice President, is a fan (although his actions have often not matched his words); the world's media have become slightly obsessed with explaining how appallingly individualistic she and her writings were; and, best of all, the Adam Smith Institute's Ayn Rand Lecture this year was a roaring success.

I'm away in Ireland at the moment, but I enjoyed watching this video last night and thought readers of the blog might too. It's a surprising look into the American regulatory state, with plenty of points that will be (sadly) familiar to viewers on this side of the Atlantic as well. (Quite a few of the points are also rather surprising to see on Fox News — in a funny way it's quite a subversive film.)

I'm in City AM this morning writing about the new French Tobin Tax, something we're particularly interested in here at the ASI:

WHEN Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime executed an aristocrat on trumped-up charges of treason, stirring up bloody memories of the Revolution, his chief of police is said to have remarked that it was “worse than a crime; it was a blunder”.

I was on Radio Five Live this morning in discussion with the Living Wage Foundation’s Director, Rhys Moore. The news hook was the story today about Whitehall cleaners demanding a pay rise, which I’m actually pretty sympathetic to – I’d rather public money went on a slightly higher wage bill for cleaners than the considerably higher wages of the many, many unnecessary quango staff that the government pays for, the bloated public service, and so on.

In this month's Reason Magazine (whose parent, the Reason Foundation, is now home to our own Tom Clougherty), Tim Cavanaugh writes that rail screws the poor:

Over at the excellent Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Deirdre McCloskey has weighed in with a tour de force post. The blog's philosophical symposium on free market fairness is, she says, "factually mistaken". The assumptions philosophers make about reality are misguided; modern history tells us much of what we need to know:

So that's sorted, then. Greece has given the pro-bailout parties a narrow majority (thanks to a quirk of the Greek electoral system that gifts fifty extra seats to the party that wins the most votes). Greece will take another bailout; the markets can stop panicking; the crisis is averted; the euro is saved.