2012: The end of the world as we know it?

Our panel discussion of what the next year has in store for us was surprisingly philosophical: Jamie Whyte discussed the redistributionism built in to democracy and Brendan O'Neill gave a rallying cry against "middle class miserablism". More concretely, Alex Massie discussed the US presidential election (it'll get bad, and then worse) and Douglas Carswell gave a short-term pessimistic, long-term optimistic vision of things to come in British politics. His economic outlook was remarkably Austrian too — reason enough to be optimistic, if you ask me.