Bloomberg recently ran an article detailing how difficult high-tax states in the U.S. can make it on wealthier individuals trying to leave.

The idea of the state using teams of investigators to determine if one passes the “Teddy Bear Test” is likely to strike many Americans as creepy and slightly authoritarian. The Germans, however, show just how ruthless states can be in their enforcement of tax compliance.

The BBC reports that German authorities seized a woman’s dog over delinquent taxes. The pooch—a pedigree pug named Edda—was then sold on eBay.

The dog’s owner, NPR reports, admitted the seizure was “legal.” Yet she was bothered by it nonetheless.

"How it all ended, that was absolutely not okay," the former owner said.

Media reports say three officials—a court bailiff and two city officials—arrived at her home in November and began searching for valuables. According to the BBC, German media say officials initially intended to seize the wheelchair of the woman’s disabled husband.

That assertion is fiercely contested by the city, with spokesman Frank Merschhaus calling it "a wicked rumour."

 

"Aids to guarantee the mobility of people with disabilities are absolutely exempt from being seized as...

In his 1993 book The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the late Christian philosopher Michael Novak wrote that certain cultures are more likely to favor capitalism. Among them were the following: Confucian, Jewish, Protestant, and Northern European Catholic.

These cultures, Novak argued, possessed certain commonalities that made them more likely to engage in capitalism successfully and responsibly. Among the commonalities cited by Novak were “a certain rigor and austerity, an almost Stoic sense of sobriety and responsibility, and a certain disdain for corruption.”

The idea that some cultures might engage in capitalism differently than other cultures sounds a bit presumptive to modern ears, but it’s also very capitalistic. Capitalism, after all, is a system that requires a level of comfort with inequalities in material outcomes.

People with skills and services that are scarce, valuable, and in high demand will naturally thrive more than people who lack such skills. The capitalist finds this arrangement perfectly natural, whereas the materialist finds it abhorrent.

Perhaps this is why Novak believed that capitalism, paradoxically, was a system suited for spiritual societies, not materialistic ones. “The only long-lasting foundation for a capitalist society is a moral, spiritual, and religious one,” he wrote.

This...

A  woman who woke up from a thirty-year coma in 2018 would be forgiven if she looked around and came to believe our world is falling apart.

Cable news and social media are a steady drumbeat of negativity. There is a sense the world is not right.

Russian collusion. Xenophobia. Antifa. Unite the Right. Stormy Daniels. #MeToo. Mass shootings. The Deep State. It’s a cacophony of angst, outrage, and political anger.

The woman who emerged from her coma would have little or no idea that the world is experiencing an economic miracle, just as most people today do not. But it’s happening just the same.

The Middle-Class Miracle

As the Washington Post reported last week, people around the world are joining the middle class on a scale hitherto undreamt of (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Strange).

This revelation came during an interview with Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas, who noted that the world is quietly nearing a historic milestone few would have dreamed possible a generation ago.

“By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be ‘middle class,’” the Post reports.

The surge, driven largely by a middle-class explosion in India and China that is...

Pope Francis issued a stark message at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Monday, urging world leaders to fight poverty and pursue social justice.

“We cannot remain silent in the face of the suffering of millions of people whose dignity is wounded,” the pope said in a prepared statement, “nor can we continue to move forward as if the spread of poverty and injustice has no cause.”

But, one might ask, what is the cause?

For most people this is a challenging question to answer. The one constant throughout human history, after all, has been the presence of want and suffering.

The answer poses less difficulty for the pope, who suggested human suffering and injustice stem from “private interests and an ambition for profit at all costs.”

Such an answer likely pleased Davos attendees and Sir Elton John, who was delivering his own remarks on global inequality as Cardinal Peter Turkson was reading the pope’s.

But most informed people, I suspect, find such rhetoric unsatisfying, false (global poverty is retracting, not spreading), and possibly even banal.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, known less formally as Prince William and Princess Kate, announced over Labor Day weekend that they are expecting their third child.

Congratulations are in order, and not merely for the customary reasons. The royal couple is clearly doing its fair share to address Europe’s looming population nightmare, which in recent years has been described alternately a “crisis,” a “disaster,” and “the end of the West.”

Are Europe’s demographics truly this apocalyptic?

A third child would put William and Kate at double the average birthrate in the European Union, which stood at 1.55 in 2013. Government statistics show that in the United Kingdom, one of the most fertile nations in Europe, just 14 percent of families have three or more children.

In Germany, 40 percent of women with college degrees are childless, according to a recent study by the Gatestone Institute. In Portugal, the population has been steadily decreasing since 2010, prompting the nation’s then-prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, to publicly acknowledge, “We've got really serious problems” with demographics. In many provinces in Spain, two people die for every child born. “And the ratio is moving closer...