Yearly Archives: 2014

Luis Rubio  My best reading this year was Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, a history of the origin of Anglo-Saxon liberalism and its differences with its continental counterpart. Daniel Hannan, English politician and historian, addresses face to face an explanation of the origin of Western civilization centered on the concept of […]

Luis Rubio   Mexican society has never been one to trust its government. At least from the time of the proverb of the Spanish Conquest “Obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not comply”), generation after generation has been skeptical of their governors and have trusted them only on exception. Government after government […]

FORBES  – diciembre 2014 Luis Rubio George Orwell would have understood the contradictory attitudes of Mexicans. In his book 1984 he coined the term “doublethink”, the ability to believe contradictory things. Without doubt, in contrast with developed countries, which tend to be coherent with regard to service provision, we Mexicans are accustomed to permanent contradictions. […]

Luis Rubio The discussion on minimum wages is increasingly less realistic and more electioneering. And ever more risky. Of course, our politicians are fully within their rights to propose ideas and set forth their propositions, but that does not make their proposals viable which, despite sounding attractive, are highly irresponsible. In one of his many […]

Luis Rubio “When I visit a country, wrote Montesquieu, I am concerned less with knowing what the laws are than if they are applied”. The Rule of Law is a complex phenomenon not permitting facile definitions. Some presidents affirm that they respect the Rule of Law because they obey the law, never acknowledging that the […]

Luis Rubio In “The Guns of August”, Barbara Tuchman relates how a series of apparently unrelated events and circumstances led inexorably to WWI and the greatest human carnage that the world had witnessed until then. Will the massacre of Iguala have a similar effect? This is not an idle question. Over the past weeks, the […]

Luis Rubio As anyone who has sat through a Shakespearean play will attest, the second act can be long and painful, and the hero often faces setbacks. Something like that appears to be happening to the Mexican economy. The vision emerging from the Finance Ministry is that the country is poised at the threshold of […]

Luis Rubio “Perfect storm” is an expression that describes an event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically. That’s what Mexico seems like these days. The total absence of governmental response to the events of Iguala exposed the cesspool, affording the opportunity for all of the resentments, fears, angers and opportunists […]

Luis Rubio What happened in the past weeks that changed the whole panorama?  From a government perceived as exceptionally skillful it now conducts itself as if under siege. Is it possible for a single incident, horrific as it was, to transform so many things in so little time? It seems clear that the occurrences in […]

Luis Rubio “To lose one parent, wrote Oscar Wilde, can be considered a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”. Careless or not, one of the laws of life is that the moment will come sooner or later. The loss of a parent, or of an intellectual parent, constitutes one of the greatest moments, and […]