New York City progressives want to import Vienna’s social housing model to fix the Big Apple’s affordability crisis – and Canadian activists would likely feel the same way. The central European capital has certainly promoted its approach as a global success story. But as Tobias Peter demonstrates in City Journal, Vienna’s 100-year-old experiment is expensive, complicated, prejudicial and increasingly unsustainable – not a model but a cautionary tale.
Toppling a Communist Empire for $2.7 Million
Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.
