The national debt has surged more than half a trillion dollars in the last three weeks, as the suspension of the debt ceiling in late October has allowed the government to borrow as much as it wants. — Report in The Washington Examiner America’s national debt is approaching $19 trillion, and has surged over the least [...]
Calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” Donald Trump this week ignited a firestorm of historic proportions. As all the old hate words — xenophobe, racist, bigot — have lost their electric charge from overuse, and Mr. Trump was being called a fascist [...]
It has been said by some of his critics that Pope Francis does not understand capitalism, having grown up in Peronist Argentina. This may be true. But it is also true that the economic system which is now a way of life in our own country is not exactly free enterprise as the proponents of [...]
There’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress think that these “scientists” are covertly pushing an ideological agenda that lurks behinds all their jargon and “methods.” That’s somewhat true. When applied to the lives of human [...]
Maybe it is the Amish in me, but I have never been good at wasting time. First thing in the morning it seems my mind is alert, and I’m thinking of the next problem to be solved, the next essay to be written, then the next meeting to attend, and the day’s work to be [...]
Here is what I learned from the article* about Amazon in the New York Times: Amazon is the place where your performance is constantly monitored with the latest metrics and you better not have a baby or get cancer. And where you embrace the “purposeful Darwinism” that encourages you to rat out your fellow employees [...]
From Adam and Eve to Eddie Cochrane, from earning your daily bread by the sweat of your brow to the summertime blues and beyond, work has always been the scourge of existence. A recent essay in The Atlantic suggests that Genesis is about to be reversed and the curse lifted. According to Derek Thompson, humanity, [...]
Our Southern forebears did not practice economics. They practiced political economy—which is concerned with human well-being. Those old-time Southerners did not assume that man is to be understood wholly or chiefly as an economic being. Economics, as practiced today, is a utilitarian and materialistic study. It is concerned with maximizing profit, with describing the actions [...]
In a recent essay* for the Christian Post, “The Christian Right: A New Hope for the Republican Party,” Napp Nazworth argues that Christian political conservatism offers the best resource for expanding the party’s base among non-whites. Citing the demography deficit within the Republican Party, Nazworth argues “social conservatives are most attuned to the sympathies of [...]
Will we, before it is too late, use the vitality and the magic of the marketplace to save this way of life, or will we one day face our children, and our children’s children when they ask us where we were and what we were doing on the day that freedom was lost? Ronald Reagan [...]
“There are significant differences between the American and European version of capitalism. The American traditionally emphasizes the need for limited government, light regulations, low taxes and maximum labour-market flexibility. Its success has been shown above all in the ability to create new jobs, in which it is consistently more successful than Europe.” — Margaret [...]
Only a short time ago, the prediction that Professor Milton Friedman would receive the Nobel Prize in economics would have been greeted by a broad spectrum of reactions ranging from horrified impossibility to an unemotional expression of obvious inevitability. Indeed, when the formal announcements were made in the fall of 1976, the range of reactions [...]
Since China devalued its currency three per cent, global markets have gone into a tailspin. Why should this be? After all, three per cent devaluation in China could be countered by a U.S. tariff of three per cent on all goods made in China, and the tariff revenue used to cut U.S. corporate taxes. The crisis in world [...]
Everyone knows what Adam Smith stood for: free trade, the division of labor, the minimal state, the invisible hand, the illimitable growth of wants and needs. But few people are aware of his criticisms of what came to be called “capitalism.” In the “Overture” to his grandly symphonic The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Peter Gay describes [...]