CNE Monatsmagazin Digest
September 2008

English Summary

10 Years After: Michael Kastner, owner of buchausgabe.de, talks about the first ten years of his online bookstore of liberal literature. You can select out of 800 titles. "What I am missing are not books on particular subjects. What I miss are popular authors of liberal ideas", Kastner says. "In the USA and in Great Britain you find authors like F. Paul Wilson, Dave Barry and Terry Pratchett, who make use of their liberal views in their novels and short stories. I would like to see more of this sort of belles letters, in which authors do not try to educate you, but which reflects a deep understanding of liberal ideas."

Talk, Talk, Talk: The Alpbach Economic Symposium is a cornerstone of the European Forum Alpbach in Austria. This year's symposium revolves around the central question of how European market economies can be further developed in order to be able to meet the challenges of international competition and the demands of sustainable development. What does the future of an economic model look like that has provided citizens with a maximum degree of freedom, solidarity, and prosperity? CNE's Head of Academic Affairs, Hardy Bouillon, will be one of the speakers.

Tokio Hotel: The General Meeting of the MPS 2008 will take place in Japan. The topic will be Technology and Freedom. On this, Yoshinori Shimizu, Chairman of the Organizing Committee, says: "Thanks to the founding fathers of the MPS who embarked on the intellectual battle against socialism in 1947, the world is a far better place at its 60th anniversary. Technologies and free markets have been principal sources of enhanced economic welfare. The third industrial revolution led by information technology and bio-technology sets the world economy on the rising tide. At the same time, though, the world faces new and different challenges related with technologies that could jeopardize the freedom and the dignity of human life."

The Dictionary of Economic Education by Hermann May is written by several classical liberal authors to help pupils and students understand and professors teach economics. The entries are easy to comprehend, hence economic education for everybody. Like the 6th edition, the new 7th edition is an enlarged version and includes 100 pages more on information about modern economics than previous versions.

The Battle of Ideas 2008, a two-day festival of high-level, thought-provoking debate organised by the Institute of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art will take place in London early November. One focus will be on India and China and the need to define prosperity in these regions differently. As the organisers put it: "Despite the rapid growth of the emerging economies, however, all reasonable projections point to a continued gap for decades to come between the West and the rest. China and India may soon become the world's largest economies, but it is not certain they will ever be the richest. Does this matter? 'Good enough' technology such as Tata's Nano, only a tenth the price of a Mercedes Smart Car, may allow people to enjoy some of the benefits of development without having to catch up in dollar terms."

The last word, or: Radio Gaga: "Instead of pawning up to the truth - that it has made a policy decision not to televise cricket - the BBC has tried to blame the ECB, says Stephen Pollard. "BBC's casually misleading attitude to news - its refusal to accept that Israel ever has a case for self-defence, its failure to label terrorism as terrorism, its sneering reporting of anything which doesn't fit into its left-liberal prejudices - is now so deep a part of its culture that its own executives don't even realise that their own deeply misleading statements (I'm being charitable) are so easy to spot", Pollard argues.

Click here to view the full Monatsmagazin in German.

Dr. Hardy Bouillon is Head of Academic Affairs at the Centre for the New Europe.