In December 1989 the SED voted down a motion to dissolve itself, and the commission that later audited its money recorded a deciding reason: its property. Every renaming since has left the legal person intact, so the claim that Die Linke is legally identical with the SED rests on the German state’s own findings. That identity makes the party answerable for a balance sheet, which it has already settled. It does not make it guilty of the deaths at the Wall, and the reason is German criminal law.
By Raphael Bauer37 min read
On 8 December 1989 the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the party that had ruled East Germany for forty years, opened an extraordinary congress in an East Berlin sports hall. At the end of the debate a delegate from a …
Berlin froze its rents in 2020, and in the weeks that followed the number of flats advertised fell by more than half. Catalonia capped its rents the same year, and researchers found no sign that supply shrank. Stockholm has held rents down since the war, and the average wait for a flat there is now nine years. The evidence says rent control works as designed, for the people it was designed for, and sends the bill to everyone who has not arrived yet.
By Raphael Bauer36 min read
The average tenant who got the keys to a rent-controlled flat in Stockholm last year had waited nine years for it. For a flat in the inner city the wait was twenty-one years. Nobody set out to build that. Sweden set out to build a system in …
A Starship launch puts about as much carbon dioxide into the air as sixteen full transatlantic flights. Every launch the United States has so far authorised — three sites, 145 flights a year — comes to roughly six hours of world aviation. Methane and oxygen is the cleanest chemistry in rocketry, and the carbon it adds is negligible. The things that genuinely are wrong are all cheap to fix, and not one of them is the fuel.
By Raphael Bauer23 min read
Every so often somebody notices that a Starship is very large, that it is filled with fossil natural gas, and that SpaceX would like to fly one most weeks, and concludes that the biggest rocket ever built must be a climate problem in …
Carl Menger came to economics through the newspapers, tutored a crown prince, fought the most famous battle over method in the history of economics, and left a body of work you could read in a fortnight. It contains the idea that value is a judgment people make, not a property of things, and an account of how money comes into being that economics had to rediscover a century later.
By Raphael Bauer39 min read
Between the eighth and the seventeenth of March 1892 a commission sat in Vienna to decide what the money of Austria-Hungary should be made of. Its most eminent member was a fifty-two-year-old professor of political economy who had spent the …
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