Dear loyal readers: Today is International Women’s Day, and although it is tempting to ignore the whole event, given its socialist origin, we have decided instead to list items of special interest to women in this week’s reading list.
The first subject is politics. This piece in the National Review explains why the Left is on life support. Let us not forget, ‘there was once a time when the center Left appeared like the natural governing philosophy and coalition in the West after the Cold War. The details were different in each country, but the general outline held. Having made permanent peace with capitalism, the center Left could capture upwardly mobile social liberals while expanding its coalition with new immigrant groups. Where could the old constituencies of workers go? To the Right? Hardly. The electoral potency of Gerhard Schröder, the influence of the center-Left Olive Tree coalition in Italy, and the runaway success of New Labour’s Tony Blair and New Democrat Bill Clinton made this liberal technocratic view appear unstoppable. The Cold War politics that favored the Right were gone. The politics of a globalizing world were those of a soft Left that was also getting rich.’
All that has changed now. An important read.
The second area of great importance to women, that on which politics depends, is freedom of speech and freedom of the press. As such I have linked to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s incredibly powerful speech on the freedom of the press, and the disgrace that is Impress and the regulator. Powerful.
Finally, we have economics, and international trade in particular. Considering that women make the majority of purchases and essentially control the market, a trade war could prove disastrous for them, their families and their household budgeting.
President Trump is raising tariffs 25 per cent on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, claiming that cheap steel from other countries has hurt the American steel industry. It is certainly true that steel imported at lower prices hurts our steel industry.
However, Trump supporter and consistent conservative Mark Levin has slammed Trump’s tariffs as an unpatriotic tax on all Americans. This is a critically important read, no matter what side of the debate you are on.
