There is an impatient restlessness inside our globalized economy that is constantly tearing down and building anew. This particular aspect of the economy is like an unstoppable machine that runs over all obstacles. To resist is considered futile. Such views are often expressed in major liberal newspapers where economic dogmas are affirmed (and discarded) almost [...]
How often can writers pretend to discover some well-known thing for “the first time ever?” With poor Adam Smith it has happened again, but commercial promotion inadvertently raises an important matter that only begins with the great First Economist’s religion… or lack thereof. A prominent newspaper starts its book review by insulting its audience: “As [...]
You see one every day on the streets of Kathmandu, what a friend calls D3 meaning the Daily Dead Dog. Stiller and flatter than before, sometimes the canine corpses are hauled away by the city, at other times unceremoniously chucked off the road into a ditch or the bushes. Then Nepal’s kites—handsome, eaglesque, carrion-eating birds—do [...]
It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from a historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones—and often deliberately so. Far from viewing the past as a potential [...]
President Obama has spent much of his time and effort “fighting economic inequality” since before his presidency began. Tax policies, spending programs, and rhetoric have combined over the past six years in particular to form a veritable War on Economic Inequality during his administration. This has led many in the Republican Party to snicker even [...]
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan is on a gold roll. In September, Greenspan published a thought piece in Foreign Affairs musing on the indubitable monetary qualities of gold. “If, in the words of British economist John Maynard Keynes, gold were a ‘barbarous relic,’” Greenspan wrote, “central bankers around the world would not have so [...]
Every nation has its “founding myth,” as we are apt to hear from post-modern quarters. But is this ever true when it comes to our economic history. In curricula from K-12 to history graduate school, it is staple fare that as a new nation in the early nineteenth century, the United States nurtured its “infant [...]
We continue to see constant progress in reducing human labor to a mechanical routine, like the script followed by workers in chain restaurants or the swiping motion that’s pretty much the only skill left in staffing the Walmart check-out line. If you think about it, the compliant behavior required by the scripted service worker is, [...]
Justin Welby, the humble and good-humored Archbishop of Canterbury, marked himself from the beginning of his reign by the contrast he struck with his predecessor Rowan Williams, now Baron of Oystermouth. Lord Williams was one of the seminal reasons for my conversion to Anglicanism. He was born in Ystradgynlais in Swansea, Wales, to a Welsh-speaking [...]
Incredible legerdemain has been coming out of the Barack Obama policy shops. Taking the cake is the administration’s response to the Congressional Budget Office report showing that Obamacare will reducejobs for lower-earners. Here’s the official spin: unfortunates (as we used to call them), bolstered by health insurance provided by the government, will now be able [...]
The Pentagon’s $800 million spent on Afghan economic development has “accomplished nothing,” says the intrepid gumshoe hunting down waste, corruption and inefficiency. Meanwhile, he has 322 investigations still underway, across the US government’s similar $120 billion spent there so far. An official who does not mince words, Mr. John Sopko, who heads the US Special [...]
The musty old document that supposedly governs this country, the Constitution of the United States put into practice way back in 1789, makes no provision for the governmental institution that has proven the most influential of our time: the Federal Reserve. About the only clause in the whole multi-page document that might even remotely pertain [...]
I hardly know where to start in responding to Messrs. Richards’ and Witt’s “response” to my earlier article on “Distributism in the Shire”. More to the point, I hardly know where to end. There seems so much to discuss. There is the question of Tolkien’s agreement with Belloc on the practical aspects of distributism, specifically [...]
Last week at the President Ronald Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif., the staff made a nice move. On the occasion of the publication of the first volume of the collected works of the progenitor of supply-side economics, Arthur B. Laffer, out from storage and onto display came the original wicker table on which [...]