Utopia, you are standing in it!

An important recent decision of the Court of Appeal in England and Wales, Sharpe v The Bishop of Worcester [2015] EWCA Civ 399 (30 April 2015) deals with the issue of the “employment status” of members of the clergy. Is a rector, or a priest, or a pastor, or an imam, an “employee”? If so, who exactly is their employer: the local congregation? the governing board of the congregation? a bishop? the local diocese? These are important issues which are mentioned in the case.The question may be important for a number of reasons: for example, for the rights of members of the clergy who believe they have been wrongly dismissed, or the rights of members of the public to take an action against the church or religious body, which may depend on the whether the cleric is an “employee” or not.

The answer offered in England will not be precisely the…

As documented in Commanding Heights: The Battle of Ideas, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan saved their nations from economic malaise and decline.

Today, let’s focus on what happened in the United Kingdom.

Economic liberty greatly increased during the Thatcher years.

She deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the U.K.’s economic rebirth and renaissance, but she also had the wisdom to appoint some very principled and very capable people to her cabinet.

Such as Nigel Lawson, who served as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to a combined Treasury Secretary/OMB Director in the U.S.).

Lawson died last week, leading to many tributes to his role is resuscitating the U.K. economy.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarized his achievements.

…our problems are solvable, as they were a half century ago. One of those crucial problem solvers was British politician Nigel Lawson, who died this week at age 91…

While reading Leopold G. Wickham Legg’s account of the Coronation Banquet in his English Coronation Records, I was struck by the following passage:

On the King’s left hand there are also three tables. At the first sit the “Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine,” the King’s officers…[1]

I immediately wondered why the Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine had their titles placed in scare quotes. My curiosity piqued, I did a bit of digging and stumbled upon something rather strange: they weren’t actual dukes at all. Today, we’re going to look at why a pair of fake French dukes attended British coronations for hundreds of years.

English monarchs claimed the French throne from the 14^th century onward. When Charles IV of France died in 1328, he had no direct male heir. The English king, Edward III, was Charles’ nephew through Charles’ sister, Isabella. French law didn’t allow women to…

Since Pope Francis is very critical of capitalism, I suppose it’s fitting that he had a special meeting with America’s crazy-Uncle-in-the-attic, Bernie Sanders.

With my sixth-grade sense of humor, I confess that my initial instinct (perhaps motivated by the famous line from Animal House about “a wimp and a blimp“) was to write about “the Pope and the dope,” but I’m going to be somewhat mature and instead share some excerpts from a very good column by Charles Lane, an editorial writer for the Washington Post.

Here’s some of what he wrote before Senator Sanders’ departure.

Democratic socialist presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will depart soon for the Vatican… In keeping with Pope Francis’s call for a “moral economy,” Sanders has said he’ll discuss “how we address the massive levels of wealth and income inequality that exist around the world, how we deal with unemployment, how…

I’ve written about how our friends on the left represent the rich, and pointed out how big parts of their agenda are designed to help people with above-average incomes.

Today, let’s have some fun with that issue.

Bernie Sanders has three houses, yet complains about the supposed excesses of capitalism. I wonder if he applies that analysis to his Mini-Me, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

But that $3,500-plus ensemble is chump change compared to what she wore for Vanity Fair‘s obsequious cover story.

Next, we have the irony of “AOC” augmenting her financial status by selling $58 “tax the rich” t-shirts.

By the way, just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s AOC’s tweet.

In other words, we have one rich person selling over-priced products to other rich people so they can virtue-signal about how awful it is that some people are rich.

In the small town where I grew up, in the BFE borderlands of Virginia and N.C., I lived within walking distance of a downtown cinema that opened and closed a few times in my childhood, giving up the ghost completly at about the time I headed off to college.

By the early ’70s, I was walking to it on my own for the first time as my parents had aged out of going out to the movies, the way so many do. I’d see “Vadlez is Coming” or “The Getaway,” “The Three Musketeers” or “American Graffiti,” sometimes on weekends with friends but most often by myself because they weren’t as into cinema as me, and I had a paper route and pocket money.

“The Sting,” which opened on my birthday, Christmas of ’73 in much of the country, didn’t arrive until shortly thereafter. Well before the Oscars, as I remember…