Liberalni Institute

On June 23, 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU. If Czechs and Slovaks were able to separate an entire country, Czechoslovakia, in six months, surely Whitehall and Berlaymont can find a way to separate one EU member state sooner than in six years.

We commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact armies\' invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an event that in many respects showed to the whole world the desperation of people struggling for self-determination under totalitarian regimes.

I’m writing this article from the point of view of a Czech libertarian. It’s meant for foreigners, not necessarily libertarians, to get a better grasp of Czech politics than what they can get from their usual sources of information.

While the Member States still have at least the sole jurisdiction in criminal matters, they maintain a good deal of sovereignty. Once an EU “federal” criminal framework begins to take root, it won’t take long before we will all be committing three EU felonies a day.

Fear that people will not buy new flats because they will have higher interest rates. If the people do not invest more, the prices of these assets will stagnate or fall. Whoever buys in times of a loose monetary policy, wins. When screws begin to tighten, the winner is the one who sells first.

At the end of the day, efforts to protect domestic businesses are always paid by the consumers. Nothing is free, the same is true also for protectionism. It leads to higher prices and worse quality of services that protected businesses offer.

Populist, xenophobic, and eurosceptic movements are raising across the Old Continent. There is at least one far-right party for each European country. Some of these are big and significant, while others are not. So what are these parties and where are they?

In the Czech Republic, we have gone through four decades of central planning of prices of practically everything. And the result? Either the price has been set too high and surpluses have been accumulated, or too low, and the television in the evening informed the audience about shortages of underwear and toilet paper.

The narrative of the whole debate is not about freedom, but about the right to travel. Probably not all people should have the right to live wherever they want, but everyone should have the freedom to try it. And, after all, data show that immigrants are beneficial to the economy.

The 90% of the 2.2 million people that took part in Catalonia\'s referendum voted for the independence of the region. Only 7.8% voted against it. But the most relevant data is that only the 42.2% of the 5.3 million people entitled to vote went to the polls.