I have written in these pages before of the tendency of the United States to apply the laws that normally operate within its borders to individuals and institutions beyond them (Harry Potter and the Conflict of Laws (2010)). US tax securities and antitrust laws have long been applied extraterritorially with little regard for the potential conflicts with the domestic let alone the international application of the laws of other nations. This is especially true in our increasingly digital world of e-commerce e-payment and online IP.

Two recent examples of the long arm of US law enforcement prompt me to return to this favorite subject. First the somewhat amusing story of the US tax bill being contested by Mayor Boris Johnson of London. Second the decidedly less amusing account of BNP and other foreign banks that have run afoul of US sanctions against providing services to designated rogue nations.

Boris Johnson is the erudite and disheveled Mayor of London. This old Etonian is a towering figure in the UK Conservative Party and a sharp-tongued journalist. He is also a US citizen having been born in New York and raised in the United States until age five. In 2009 he sold his London house for a £730000 profit. Under UK tax law profit on the sale of a first home is not taxable. Under US tax law the worldwide income and profits of US citizens are taxable regardless if they have lived outside the US for the prior 45 years – as in the case of Boris Johnson. The US is one of very few nations that tax the worldwide income of its citizens; the Mayor does not see why he should be required to pay capital gains tax to the IRS since he has not resided in the US for decades and the property itself is in England. All I can say is welcome Boris to the extra-territorial application of US law.

The second example is more complex. The United States benefits from the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the global economy. From energy trading to international finance global trade is commonly settled or at least denominated in dollars. From time to time the US Government adopts sanctions against other nations as an instrument of foreign policy. Cuba is a long-running and counter-productive example; Iran and Sudan are more recent and perhaps more understandable targets. Earlier this year BNP Paribas plead guilty to the charge of violating US sanctions and agreed to pay a record $8.9 billion fine. While I have no direct knowledge of the facts in the BNP case the French bank does appear to have angered the US authorities for its knowing and senior-level disregard of US sanctions against Iran. However while I am no fan of the radical theocracy imposed on the Iranian people by its current autocratic regime I also wonder how we would like it if China decided to prosecute an American bank for violations of a ban it had imposed on money transfers to (say) Vietnam. While we in the US view Iran as an “evil empire” China may view things differently.

Now of course China has yet to expand its banking laws outside its borders (but newly enhanced Chinese antitrust laws provide a precedent) and the Chinese Renminbi is not (yet) the global reserve currency; however this could also change. My point is that in an increasingly multilateral world marked by electronic commerce and finance that easily pass national physical borders we need to be careful not to end up with a tangled web of national laws purporting to extend internationally. Thanks to the strength of the US military and economy during the past 50 years the United States has occupied a privileged position which has permitted it to set global norms from the reserve currency status of the dollar to the domain-naming authority and freedom of the internet. As other nations most notably China begin to assert their authority to apply laws beyond their borders we risk ending-up in a balkanized world with reduced trade reduced prosperity and reduced understanding. Instead we need to develop mechanisms and institutions that can harmonize differing local laws or at least mediate the clash of conflicting rules. After 10000-plus years of civilization we should be up to the task.

Earlier this month the Republican Party in the United States swept to victory in the majority of mid-term elections. Now having achieved control of both houses of Congress and thereby the powerful committee chairmanships the Republicans are in a position to stymie President Obama’s agenda for the remainder of his second term. While the President’s inner circle muses publicly that he may act via executive order to achieve as much of his agenda as possible – – thereby circumventing Congress — Republican leaders are once again raising the specter of shutting down the government to block the Executive Branch from implementing its agenda.

As tempting as it would be to send all our elected officials home never to return there is a more mature alternative. President Obama is running out of time to build and secure his legacy. While I believe he will be seen in future years as having been a more successful president than he was viewed during his time in office much like Harry Truman; he nonetheless needs to show that he can lead the Nation and reach across the aisle to achieve policy goals. Making inspirational speeches is not a useless talent; however actually turning words into deeds is what makes history.

The Republican Party leadership also has much to lose. If Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader-elect McConnell stick with the politics of “No” they will jeopardize any chance their party may have to regain the Presidency in 2016. Alternatively both parties could abandon their absolutist positions and get on with the work of the Nation.

Let’s start with comprehensive tax reform to simplify corporate and individual tax rules lower corporate tax rates and eliminate unjustifiable loopholes such as the capital gains treatment of carried interest. Our leaders could then go on to tackle immigration reform which would benefit our economy fulfill the promise we hold out as a nation to be a beacon to the world (“give me your tired your poor…” etc.) and possibly help the Republicans garner additional votes from the growing Hispanic community. Finally our representatives could actually pass and sign a budget that begins to balance our national books and reduces the $18 trillion debt we have bequeathed to our children. There are of course many other important issues that should be addressed from balancing environmental protection with economic activity continuing the reform of healthcare (regardless of one’s view of Obamacare) living up to our international responsibilities in trade human rights and foreign aid and improving our public school systems. Meanwhile the international arena careens from crisis to crisis as regional powers test their limits in a world in which US authority and boots on the ground have been curtailed.

In short there are urgent issues requiring serious attention and action on the national agenda. Neither we nor our allies around the world can afford to wait and watch while the nation with the greatest capacity both economic and military makes policy via partisan political sloganeering rather than a sound pursuit of the national interest.

I took a quick trip this week to London to review some early-stage investments and catch up with old friends. My trip also coincided with a crescendo of activity and media attention leading up to next week’s important referendum on Scottish independence. As I write today opinion polls indicate that the contest is a dead heat.

Let me state four conclusions up front: A “yes” vote on the withdrawal of Scotland from the United Kingdom would be a disaster for Scotland a sad day for the rest of the UK a serious threat to England remaining in the EU and an invitation for the further disintegration of nation states across Europe and beyond.

I have been asking my in-the–know London friends how things got to this dangerous point. Opinion is split among (1) Prime Minister Cameron really did not have any choice if he wanted to avoid civil rebellion in Scotland; (2) it was a dumb political gambit made at a time polls showed it was inconceivable that the Scots would vote “yes”; and (3) had the Prime Minister permitted a third option (stay in the Union but with greater devolved authority) it would have easily carried the day.

How we got here is perhaps no longer relevant – so much water under the proverbial bridge over the Clyde. However it seems insane to me that this hard-fought 307 year Union has been put at risk with so little planning and so little opposition.

As to the planning (or lack thereof) there are a myriad of important questions as yet unanswered. To name just a few: Will the newly independent Scotland become a member of the EU? Would it qualify? What will be its currency? The Pound? An Argentine-like peg to the Pound? What institution will stand behind this currency (not the Bank of England surely)? Will savers and investors leave their money in Scottish institutions? Will a free Scotland become a member of NATO? Who will defend it? What portion of the UK defense budget will it assume?

It amazes me that voters are expected to go to the polls next week and vote on such an important question without being presented answers let alone a fully detailed plan of separation. Over the past several years government regulators around the world have demanded that systemically important financial institutors (SIFIs) prepare detailed resolution plans or “living wills.” These documents run into the thousands of pages and deal with the minutiae of how to avoid another disorderly liquidation like that of Lehman Brothers. Imagine if a resolution plan comparable to the platform for Scottish independence were submitted to any competent regulator – it would get rejected upon first review and its proponents would be justifiably sacked.

As to the lack of opposition this seems to be changing although I hope it is not too late. Prime Minister Cameron’s Conservative government appears to have hit the panic button and has called in the not-so-loyal opposition to help along with former Labor PM Gordon Brown. Mr. Brown who is a formidable intellect and under-appreciated for his role in staving-off financial ruin post the Lehman collapse has made impassioned pleas to preserve the Union. Let us hope he succeeds. I however remain mystified as to why a referendum was ever permitted in the first place and if yes why only the Scots get to vote and not all members of the Union.

If our 14-year-old son Walter approached his mom and me with a half-baked idea to leave the family home to live in a separate apartment (paid for by his parents) we would first tell him “hell no” and if it nonetheless came to a vote we would out vote him. Under no circumstances would be wait around until Walter enlisted his sister to bring the vote to an even 50-50.

As we say in the United States “I don’t have a dog in this hunt.” [Oops I forgot fox hunting is no longer legal in the UK.] However as an outsider who lived eight years in the UK and maintains an abiding admiration and respect for the country I think it would be a horrible result if the independence vote carried the day.

As I come to the end of a long summer holiday in France it seems only fitting to return to one of my favorite themes in this blog – the French economy – in this my first piece of the “rentrée.” I have been very critical in these pages about the first two years of the presidency of Francois Hollande but I think the penny (or centime) has finally dropped; I only hope that it is not too late.

Before I return to the plane of national politics let me first relate how bad things have gotten in the French economy via the story of a friend I will call “Charles” in this piece. Charles is an experienced and successful real estate agent in the South of France. While his clientele ranges from old-line French families Gulf Arabs to the occasional American it is increasingly Russian in composition. The weak French economy has not yet destroyed the allure of the Côte d’Azur as a vacation destination so Charles’ business is good except that he gets to keep little of the fruits of his labor as his combined corporate and personal tax burden exceeds 80%.

It is not news that France imposes a high tax burden nor that many French entrepreneurs hedge-funders and bankers have fled France primarily for London. Indeed the English capitol is often (albeit erroneously) referred to as the “sixth largest French city” and candidates for French national office routinely make London a campaign stop. However finance and internet jobs are reasonably transportable. What is remarkable to me and demonstrates the depth of the problems facing France is that a real estate agent who intends to continue to sell French properties is so desperate to reduce his tax burden that he is leaving France for England. Other than gravediggers there are few professions more tied to the land than property agents; yet it has apparently gotten so bad in France that Charles is moving to London. As a “non-dom” in the UK Charles reckons he can work half as hard and earn twice as much after tax.

So with this sad tale as context I return to the macro level. At the end of August Francois Hollande disbanded his Socialist government agreeing with Prime Minister Valls to purge the cabinet of left-wing hot heads such as Minister of Industrial Renewal Arnaud de Mountebourg (as famous for his grandiloquent defense of French industrial jobs as for his blindness to jobs that could be created in the new economy. This week newly reconfirmed Finance Minister Michel Sapin abandoned France’s commitment to the EU-mandated 3% budget deficit target for 2015 and admitted that the country will not achieve this goal before 2017.

As dire as this may all sound these are good developments and signs that President Hollande is finally getting to grips with the real challenges facing France. He is no longer pretending that the French state can protect every job at Peugeot build a modern digital economy operate a huge welfare state and at the same time meet Germanic austerity targets. In a August 28 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times economist Paul Krugman correctly argued that austerity is the wrong policy for France contrasting the German obsession with balanced budgets to the US Federal Reserve’s expansionist monetary policy over the past few years. However I believe he misses the mark in lauding the health of the French economy and blaming long-standing French malaise on false media assessments of the underlying strength of the economy.

My view is that postponement of smaller budget deficit targets must be linked with true underlying economic reforms of the French economy. Indeed Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany hardly a radical reformer herself this week called on fellow European leaders to press on with economic reforms to open up their economies and drive growth. This takes great courage on a continent in which politicians have long lied to their electorates and used soaring government debt as the means to reconcile spendthrift social programs with weak growth.

Santa may well be European as the proud Finns claim but neither he nor ECB President Draghi nor Francois Hollande can achieve real economic growth deficit reduction low inflation job creation preservation of existing jobs a short workweek early retirement generous social programs and adequate military defense and international engagement. This summer Francois Hollande ran the numbers and figured this out; let’s hope it is not too late for this socialist to lead a liberal revolution.

I am a great fan of The New York Times – a reader since childhood and an admirer of its journalists since my earliest days at Reuters. It is perhaps for this reason that while most of New York’s chattering classes were focused on whether Jill Abramson’s firing from her lofty post as Executive Editor was rooted in sexism I was more drawn to the Times’ remarkable Innovation report that leaked the same week.

The 97-page Innovation report is a surprisingly self-critical assessment on where the Grey Lady stands in the transition from analog to digital challenging all media. It is the product of six months of largely internal reporting by a hand-chosen committee of Times journalists led by A.G. Sulzberger the Publisher’s son and next in line to the throne. Based on the honesty and clarity of the analysis the paper’s future is in good hands. The report does not stint on uncomfortable facts; across nearly ever measure reader engagement with the New York Times is down over the last two years. Readership across platforms: down; overall page views: down; home page visits: down; time spent on sites: down; iPhone active users: down. The report sees this last measure as particularly troubling given that the whole industry has been suffering from falling print readership while regarding mobile usage as the great counterbalancing hope.

I am more taken with the very steep decline in the number of unique visitors who find their way to Times’ content by navigating first to the homepage – from over 150 million to fewer than 60 million over the past two years. Undoubtedly more of us are reaching this content via third party links and social media. However for an institution long obsessed with the question of what appears on the front page of the analog newspaper this is heresy. The report draws the obvious conclusion that The Times needs to get better at engaging and tweeting with its large online community but notes that other publications such as Huffington Post and BuzzFeed are way ahead.

To me the example of the fixation with page one of the traditional newspaper and its less successful sibling the online homepage points to a deeper cultural and strategic issue at The Times: It is a product built for its producers more than for its consumers. For over a century the most tangible sign of advancement for a journalist has been to have her article chosen to appear on page one of the paper. It is a litmus test of relevancy and quality. While online parallels exits (most tweeted story most emailed story most viewed story) it is harder to boast to your friends and family that your “listicle” or slide show of dumbest-ever CEO bloopers was the most re-tweeted item on Business Insider. This will change over time and already has across generations.

A more obvious sign that The Times is written and edited by and for journalists is the length of the articles. I am always surprised when I read a given story in both The New York Times and the Financial Times and the latter is one-third shorter without compromising on quality or “must know” content. In the paper editions this is merely an inconvenience highlighted by the very user-unfriendly: “Continued on Page A14” in the Times versus stories that generally begin and end on the same page in the FT. However on line especially on mobile devices with limited screen real estate article length is a complete turn-off – literally. It thus often seems to me that the question posed by Times’ editors to their journalists must be: “Do you have any more material on this subject that might appeal to some reader?” Rather than “What do you think the average reader needs to and wants to know about this subject?”

This reminds me of an anecdote told to me by the late Colin Marshall made Lord Marshall of Knightsbridge for the great turn-around of British Airways he accomplished with Lord King. I had gone to see Lord Marshall early in my time at Reuters to learn how he had helped engineer a dramatic improvement in the service culture of the airline from its dismal BOAC days to “BA – The World’s Favorite Airline.” Colin was very generous with his time and took me through the many elements of the cultural change program he undertook at BA. One of the changes he described which was relevant to Reuters and I believe The New York Times was a change in the scheduling of flights. Lord Marshall explained that in the BOAC days flight schedules were often set at times which were convenient for the pilots to fly the planes – not necessarily times at which the most passengers would find convenient or aligned to their business schedules.

The Times Innovation report recognizes that the publication needs to promote stories better in social media tag important topics to facilitate search and navigation “better understand our users” and even “collaborate with business-side units” but I was surprised that this otherwise brave report did not directly address the issue of story length and target customer: For whom is the product being created – the journalist who has a full reporter’s notebook or the time-starved reader? There is much discussion of “reader experience” and the importance of design. There is even a laudable commitment to becoming digital as opposed to paper first; however I do not detect the courage to change the product itself. This is an understandable conservatism when the traditional product has been so good and when issues of “church and state” are raised. Unfortunately it is also a major obstacle on the road from analog to digital. As a reader I hope the Times will have the courage to make it to the other side.

This past week the European Court of Justice ruled that Google had a duty to delete links to online content which a Spanish plaintiff complained was now misleading or at least no longer relevant. While the Court based its landmark decision on the narrow grounds that Google was a "data controller" within the meaning of the 1995 Privacy Directive the ruling is being hailed by European privacy advocates as enshrining a "right to be forgotten" in EU law. This doctrine has its judicially murky antecedents in 19th century French and German rules permitting a gentleman to engage in a duel to defend his honor and as I argue below it is similarly outdated.

It is not my place to comment on whether the European Court of Justice has appropriately interpreted and applied EU law. Moreover I am very sympathetic to the desire of individuals in Europe and elsewhere to maintain a zone of privacy from the increasingly powerful encroachments of current technology. This sentiment is running particularly hot in Europe these days thanks to the Snowden revelations concerning the extent of US surveillance and the still troubling recollection of Stasi and other authoritarian domestic spying. Nonetheless I think the Court’s decision makes bad public policy – policy which is at risk of being further extended by a European Commission proposal to formalize the “right to be forgotten” in a new Privacy Directive.

So here is my admittedly American view of the core issue. If there is a libel or gross inaccuracy contained in a published article which happens to appear in Google or other search results the remedy should lie in a direct action against the original publication not against the electronic tool which makes it possible to find the faulty content. To me going after Google or Yahoo or Bing is tantamount to suing the maker of an old-fashioned library card catalog if it gives you the Dewey Decimal Number by which you can locate a pornographic or seditious text in a large library. We may not like the powerful messenger but our complaint lies with the original publisher.

If the European Court of Justice or more appropriately the EC insists on placing the burden of action on Google then a more tailored remedy would be to require search engines to provide an equally prominent right of rebuttal to the aggrieved claimant (i.e. the right to post and link correcting information or just the other side of the story) rather than requiring the search engine to delete the link entirely. This remedy would have found favor with the great US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who was famous for his observation in support of a public airing of information that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In his 1927 concurring opinion in Whitney v. California 274 U.S. 357 Justice Brandeis seemed to presage the outcome of the Google case: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies to avert the evil by the processes of education the remedy to be applied is more speech not enforced silence.”

It is easy to blame the decision of the European Court of Justice on a lack of understanding as to how the Internet actually works. Indeed it is naïve to think that simply making the offending article invisible to Google searchers will make it disappear given the copying of content as it propagates across the web and resources such as the Wayback Machine. However there is something deeper at work: a fundamental difference between Europe and the United States as to the role of free markets vs. government action. The Google decision can be viewed as the judicial expression of a deeply held European view that it is the responsibility of government to police the media and to intervene to censor and erase offending content. The US approach in contrast is best captured by the Justice Brandeis quote above: the most effective remedy for misleading speech is more speech so as to permit an educated citizenry to make an informed decision.

The immediate result of the Google decision will be a more geographically fragmented Internet; some minor inconvenience and cost to search engines and a boon to private investigators and business intelligence providers. These latter firms will enjoy greater pricing power as information concerning individuals becomes less readily available through free and generally available sources like Google. As I tell my teenage kids information once published never disappears. It is always available to the deep-pocketed litigant or the prospective employer – it may just be a bit harder to obtain for the casual Google user. This is a perverse result if one truly cares about personal freedom and privacy from government or corporate surveillance but it might just satisfy the 19th century dueler.

In the month since Michael Lewis’ latest book Flash Boys was released there has been much heat generated but little light shed on the practice of high frequency trading (HFT) in the financial markets.

At the outset I should admit that I am a fan of Lewis’ past work as he combines a rarely published combination of insider’s knowledge of financial markets and engaging story telling. However in Flash Boys I believe Lewis muddies two important principles that should govern financial markets: First that markets should be fair to all participants and second that individual participants should be rewarded for their hard work. My criticism is best explained through a series of thought experiments.

Experiment 1. Imagine Tom and Doug are each professional investors. They each receive a copy of the latest GE Annual Report at 5pm one afternoon. Tom is a diligent professional and stays up all night reading the full report including all footnotes to the financial statements. Doug is bright but lazy and goes out drinking all night. At market open each places a trade in GE. Tom makes a fortune based on his analysis of a subtle trend revealed in the segment detail relating to GE Credit; Doug loses his shirt.

Is this an unfair result? Should the securities laws prohibit Tom from working this hard so as to level the playing field with the lazy Doug? Few if any of us would say yes. However if this is the case we have implicitly accepted the principle that markets can reward participants unequally based on their work efforts.

Experiment 2. Same facts as above; however this time the diligent and wealthier Tom decides to hire a promising accounting student to stay up all night and pore over the GE financial statements. When Tom and Doug trade the next day Tom makes the same profits (less what he paid the student) while Doug gets wiped out.

Again few of us perhaps outside France would say that our sense of market fairness precludes Tom from paying for and profiting from research performed on his behalf. Now we have accepted the principle that markets can reward participants unequally based on their ability to fund research.

Experiment 3. In this example Tom and Doug have each performed the same research but Tom has purchased an expensive fiber connection to the stock exchange while Doug relies on an old AOL dial-up connection. Again Tom makes a killing while Doug loses his shirt.

Perhaps this is a slightly more difficult case; however if you accept the result of Experiment 2 I see no reason why I should not be able to use my money to purchase a speed advantage as opposed to an information advantage.

In each of the foregoing examples an unequal starting position in work or capital has turned into a trading advantage but unless one wishes to argue that the securities laws should be designed to counteract all differences in society I cannot see a principled basis to deny Tom from profiting from his hard work or investment. This is not to say that I do not endorse efforts to achieve a more just and equitable society at large (see e.g. Pinketty Capitalism in the 21st Century); however I do not believe we should conflate the very relevant discussion on economic inequality with what constitutes unfair trading practices.

I do not here want to get into the debate as to the benefits if any of High Frequency Trading. There is a respectable argument made as to the enhanced liquidity and price transparency HFT brings to the equities market just as a similar claim is made in favor of another hated practice short selling. I want to focus here instead on which practices truly harm the proper functioning of our markets and which simply seem unfair based on the fuzzy logic I challenge in Experiments 1-3 above.

I believe there are trading practices that harm markets and should be prohibited – front running by an agent against its principal and insider trading by the officers of an issuer are but two examples. These are wrong not because of differences between the work undertaken or money spent by the trader but because in each case a fiduciary duty is owed by the agent or officer to the principal. Similarly the US securities laws have long prohibited fraud and misrepresentation.

My mission is not to defend or protect high frequency trading. Rather it is to disentangle the arguments raised against these practices so as to focus on protecting the quality and fairness of free markets not to attempt to level all differences among market participants in the interests of some idealized concept of equality. Thus I would be perfectly comfortable with a rule that prohibited HFT firms (or anyone else) from submitting thousands of orders that are then rapidly cancelled if the sole reason for placing the orders were to discover the prevailing market price or spread (NBBO) and then trade on that knowledge. However my rationale would not be that it is unfair to allow the HFT firm to use its incredible investment in speed it would be that as a policy matter we want bids and offers submitted into execution venues to represent either actual investment decisions or activities such as market-making undertaken by broker-dealers in the ordinary course of business.

Some may think this is a distinction without a difference. However I believe it is important to maintain free and fair securities markets and this in turn requires clarity of regulatory thought.

A war of words has been raging across the Atlantic during the past several weeks touched off by a sloppy attack on London in the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times. Among a long list of perceived but poorly researched ills attributed to the UK’s capital city was the core complaint that the city has been hollowed-out by a mob of largely Russian oligarchs who have turned locals into no more than "valets" to the super rich. This is not the London I know.

For the last 20 years I have been visiting London at least quarterly and from 2001 through 2008 our family lived full-time in central London. I worked for an English company Reuters Group PLC drove (poorly it must be said) on the right-hand side of the road sent my children to quintessentially English schools and tried not to complain too often about the weather. I was not in fact a fan of the all-pervasive grey chill which seemed to pass as weather from October through March nor of the drunken soccer hooligans who were dispatched by various "service" providers to attempt home repairs but these are minor complaints. The London I know is a great place to live.

While it is true that London welcomes rich people from all over the world the currently unpopular Russian oligarchs among them it is also open to international artists musicians journalists and the proverbial "Polish plumber." In truth London has supplanted New York as the new international melting pot.

I grew up in New York City the child of European emigres who loved the City as I do and instilled in me the sense that New York was an amazing international melting pot of foreigners — stereotypes including the Irish cop the Greek coffee shop owner and the Italian fireman. However in my school there was only one or two non-Americans and truth be told we did not have the Chinese laundryman over for dinner at the house. In contrast up to half the students in my kids’ London schools were foreign-born and the professionals not just bankers whom I worked among and socialized with came from all corners of the world. Our neighbors in Kensington were Swiss American Italian Swedish Emirati and yes even English. I did not find London to be a hollowed-out ghetto in which a local underclass serve largely absentee oligarchs. I found London to be a vibrant open international city following an enlightened civic policy to be a modern melting pot. To be sure were I born middle class English and found myself priced-out of my capital city I might feel resentful of rich foreigners. However closing the city gates to foreigners is a blunt and self-defeating tool to promote affordable housing.

The NY-LON relationship need not be an "either or" choice any more than San Francisco and Los Angeles need be cast as rivals. We can live in multiple cities during our lives visit them and others frequently remain virtually linked when away and appreciate the virtues and work to improve the perceived shortcomings of several favorites. Above all the attractiveness of one town need not depend on the degrading of another. London and New York are pretty fantastic places to Iive to say nothing about Sydney Hong Kong San Francisco Los Angeles Chicago Barcelona Berlin or Paris.

I don’t usually take up local New York politics in this blog partly because they seldom interest me and partly because I don’t presume that readers are following Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York any more closely than say Mayor Boris Johnson of London or Mayor Fernando Haddad of Sao Paulo.

This time it’s different because New York’s new mayor is raising issues of national and global importance: wealth and income inequality and what to do about it on the local level. Im not talking here about the truly local question that consumed New Yorkers last week of whether Mayor De Blasio ordered the Sanitation Department to let the snow pile up in wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan as retribution for their support of former Mayor Bloomberg or as an opening salvo in class warfare. This was a sideshow and even the new Mayor has now admitted that the clean-up could have been better managed. The more revealing issue last week was the intra-party battle between Mayor De Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo over the funding of public school pre-kindergarten programs.

During Bill De Blasio’s mayoral campaign the candidate proposed adding such pre-K programs and funding them with an additional tax on New York City’s wealthiest residents. Following De Blasio’s landslide victory this campaign platform has hardened into an absolute mandate — ostensibly directed in support of early childhood education. The Governor who is up for re-election later this year and is a fellow Democrat has vowed to reduce not increase taxes. In presenting his 2014-2015 Budget the Governor offered a generous solution: New York State would find the money in that State budget and commit to fund the pre-K programs for five years.

Now it gets interesting. Rather than graciously accepting the Governor’s offer and grabbing legitimate credit for championing the cause of New York City children the Mayor has insisted that he wants the unilateral ability to impose his tax on the wealthy. I will not here get into the intricacies of New York fiscal goverance but the short answer is that the Mayor and City Council cannot raise local taxes without State approval. Nor will I try to address the interesting economic policy question of the point at which the tax burden becomes so oppressive that a tax rate increase actually raises less money by driving job creators away (or at least failing to attract new ones who have the choice of where to base themselves). Here I only want to address the following political question: Does the Mayor truly believe that raising taxes on the wealthy is the best way to help those less fortunate or is the point just to play populist soundbite politics?

I believe the issue of inequality and the pulling apart of society is serious and presents a moral political and economic challenge in the United States and elsewhere. However as much as I believe that Brooklyn deserves its streets to be plowed as competently as Manhattan I do not believe cities are the right forum in which to tackle the redistribution of income and wealth. We need a national debate on these topics and nation-level solutions through means which include income and estate taxes but also deregulation access to education and employment and other economic growth-oreinted policies. Local city and state governments should promote job growth provide safe clean streets and innovate in public education to equip the next generation for the jobs of this century rather than the last.

The much maligned President Francois Hollande of France also came into office proclaiming a mandate to raise taxes on the rich to 75% plus and to reduce the workweek and lower the retirement age. As he learned over his first stormy years in office these are great populist campaign slogans but actually lousy economic policies by which to govern. President Hollande has now come around to espouse a less popular but more pragmatic set of policies to reduce taxes and promote job creation.

Perhaps Mayor De Blasio will similarly recognize that the campaign is over and it is now time to govern to improve the lives of all New Yorkers rich and poor. As he no doubt learned in snowy New York this week failing to plow the streets and direct traffic in Manhattan mostly hurt poor working-class families from Brooklyn and Queens who were trapped in horrendous traffic snarls on their commute home.

It seems almost presumptuous to add yet another voice to those of world leaders and talking heads lionizing Nelson Mandela today; however I was fortunate to have met with him several years ago and I am motivated to share a personal remembrance.

Mr. Mandela was already long out of office but not out of power. We met on one of his last trips to the UK and the voyage and advancing age made him appear frail. However his voice was clear and his eyes twinkled brightly – especially when we talked about the then approaching South African World Cup. Mostly we spoke about Reuters which the great man credited with helping to keep him alive all those years on Robben Island by continuing to focus world attention on his long and lonely fight for freedom both personal and national.

What I shall remember most are his gentle smile and soft eyes but what the world should not forget is his superhuman lack of bitterness or desire for revenge after being treated so badly for so long by the country he loved. That reconciliation was possible after such unjust treatment should give us all hope that other deep and bitter conflicts can also be overcome.

Mandela the human body finally gave out at the remarkable age of 95; Mandela the example and aspiration for us all had already long-passed into rightful immortality.