The Globe and Mail - Neil Reynolds Columns

EU rules: Be successful, be punished

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00 EDT

Weasel words are words that appear precise but which are, in fact, ambiguous. The metaphor derives from the capacity of weasels to devour the contents of an egg without hurting the shell. Shakespeare cited this remarkable skill in As You Like It: ''I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs.'' Novelist Stewart Chaplin described the metaphorical function of the phrase in a short story (''A Stained-Glass Political Platform'') in 1900: ''If you heft the egg afterward, it's light as a feather and not very filling when you're hungry. But a basketful of them would make quite a show and would bamboozle the unwary.'' Wordsmith William Safire incorporated it in his 1968 classic Safire's Political Dictionary, giving Teddy Roosevelt credit for popularizing it (along with pussyfooting, mollycoddling and bully pulpit).

GM's rich history: Almost as Canadian as American

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comAs GM Canada tells it, in its corporate history, it all began on an Ontario farm in the 1850s when a young man named Robert McLaughlin cleared his land using an axe with a handle he had made himself. Mr. McLaughlin found a market in Bowmanville for his high-quality axe handles - then tried his hand at a bigger project. By the time he finished his first horse-drawn carriage, he had orders from his neighbours for more. With his solid reputation for quality work - ''one grade only, and that the best'' - his farm wagon workshop flourished. In 1876, in nearby Oshawa, he opened his first carriage factory.

Obama's myth of foreign tax breaks

Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comIsaac Merritt Singer, sporadic inventor and itinerant actor, gets the credit for the first U.S. multinational company. Mr. Singer didn't invent the sewing machine but, in 1851, he did devise a model that was easier to make and easier to operate, transforming it from industrial machine to household appliance. Singer Manufacturing Co. established its first subsidiary in Scotland in 1860. By 1880, it was operating profitable manufacturing plants and sales offices in Canada, Austria, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and India - and was selling more than half its global sewing machine production abroad. By 1900, copying Singer's success, a large number of other U.S. companies had gone multinational, among them General Electric, Westinghouse, Western Electric, Eastman Kodak and Standard Oil.

Harper's slaying the protectionist dragon

Fri, 8 May 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comIf it's Monday, it must be Lithuania. If it's Tuesday, it must be Latvia. If it's Wednesday, it must be the Czech Republic - where globe-trotting International Trade Minister Stockwell Day caught up with Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week, in the words of the official communique, ''to deepen Canada's strategic partnership with the European Union.''

Justice for all, except bondholders

Wed, 6 May 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.com Denouncing them as greedy speculators, and intimating thereby that they deserved to forfeit their constitutional rights, U.S. President Barack Obama has deeply wronged a small number of investment firms. These are companies that hold Chrysler debt and insist on going to court to determine its worth in bankruptcy proceedings. For these villains, Mr. Obama has suspended the exquisitely expressed American promise, still recited by millions of children and all new citizens, of ''justice for all.'' Henceforth, such speculators can consider themselves disqualified for equal treatment under the law - provided they incur the wrath of the White House.

Easy money and the loss of character

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comDoes character matter? We are obliged to say yes. Character must matter. But where does character show itself in the pre-eminent economic conundrum of our times - the market meltdown of 2008 and the deepening recession of 2009? Yes, Chrysler workers accepted pay and cuts to benefits to save their jobs. But that concession was forced on them, and they remain ready to bill the people of Canada for any pension defaults down the road. In this case, the retreat on wages speaks more to strategic necessity than moral choice.

Blame oil, not banks, for recession

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comIn his state-of-the-economy speech last week at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama explained the global markets meltdown of 2008 as an exclusively U.S. dysfunction - caused solely by Wall Street's ''excessive debt and reckless speculation.'' He cited government as a malefactor only for its failure to stop the corporate pillaging. The economic calamity began, he said, with dubious mortgages in the housing market. The reason for these dubious mortgages wasn't a decade of easy credit; rather, it was that ''Wall Street saw big profits to be made.'' The U.S. recession went global only after Wall Street packaged the dubious mortgages and peddled them worldwide.

Of politics, nonchalance and monetary policy

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

reynolds.globe@gmail.comOn June 23, 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon met with H.R. (Bob) Haldeman, his chief of staff, and ordered the cover-up of the bungled burglary, one week earlier, of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate hotel in Washington. Tape recorders in the Oval Office preserved this conversation, subsequently famous as the ''smoking gun'' that forced Mr. Nixon to resign two years later. The same tape recorders preserved Mr. Nixon's response a year earlier to a British devaluation of the pound:

Jefferson knew how to deal with pirates

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00 EDT

In authorizing U.S. Navy snipers to use lethal force this past weekend against the Somali pirates who held an American hostage in the waters off the Horn of Africa, U.S. President Barack Obama acted with distinctly Jeffersonian dispatch. Three shots, three fewer bandits. Thomas Jefferson, the illustrious third president (1801-09), conceded that only Congress could declare war but held that presidents could unilaterally conduct defensive military actions whenever they saw fit - a right he interpreted liberally from the moment he assumed office. When he ordered the U.S. Navy to immobilize the infamous Barbary pirates in 1801, he didn't inform Congress until the modest fleet was so distant from American shores that it could no longer be recalled.