Articles

The real problem of the minimum wage concerns a very different group of people. Yet you will not see these people in newspapers or TV and they are not part of government negotiations at all. They are the unemployed people. Hence, what economists argue as some “redistribution problems” between employers and employees is not at the core of issues with minimum wage.

Last winter, the polls of trust for Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski varied between strong 60 to 80%. Almost no one could have predicted that only four months later he will lose the elections to a young, 43 years old, unknown presidential candidate of the radically right Law and Justice party. Komorowski, supported by the Civic Platform, was defeated twice. And this means that we have entered a completely new age of Polish politics.

Iceland does not have much chance to go wrong. The current system is sufficiently large a disaster to require trying something else. They experienced capital controls, hyperinflation and there are financial crisis on average every 15 years. The currency suffers from chronic degradation. It would be nice to take a chance on an experiment in a country where the changes of a poorly performing financial system cannot be impeded by too powerful bankers and politicians.

The Slovenian experience with privatisation has been marked by two phenomena. First, the Slovenian State did not exit enough business – there was widespread failure to privatise. Second, the privatisation campaigns that were undertaken suffered from several severe problems – there was widespread privatisation failure. Both phenomena were related even though the precise relationship can be modelled in several ways.

On Friday, May 8, 2015, the Civil Development Forum (FOR) together with many international partners such as the Austrian Economics Center, Liberty Fund, 4liberty.eu, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom and European Students for Liberty with the assistance of Polish organizations and media partners, held the Warsaw edition of the Free Market Road Show 2015.

During the Free Market Road Show 2015 in Warsaw, organized in cooperation with Civil Development Forum (FOR), we asked Mrs. Barbara Kolm, President of the Friedrich A. v. Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria and Director of the Austrian Economics Center which is responsible for organizing of this extraordinary international conference tour, what all the fuss is about?

European ideal is not – to my mind – “being the first“ at any costs. Europe does not need to conquer anybody – these times are over and the fundamentally colonialist subconscious idea of Lisbon Strategy has faded into our Medieval past.

The spectrum of hate speech is very broad, varying from hatred to extremely abusive forms of prejudice. Oxford English Dictionary defines hate as “an emotion of extreme dislike or aversion; detention, abhorrence, hatred”. And often the qualification of an action as “extreme” is treated as a decisive parameter in defining hate speech.

While the European Union is pursuing regulation and centralisation and European economies continue to grapple with the crisis, on May 7, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) hosted an international conference “Austerity without reforms – economies without growth” in Vilnius, Lithuania. The conference was organised in cooperation with the Austrian Economic Center and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation as a part of the Free Market Road Show 2015.

2014 passed under the sign of decreasing unemployment and increasing employment in Bulgaria. Although a big part of the population still hasn’t felt the benefits of these favourable tendencies, they are not only present in the leading economic centres, but also in some of the smaller regions of the country.