Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been taking a lot of flak for his series of speeches at George Washington University over the last few weeks. Commentators have marveled at his mischaracterization of the gold standard and his defensiveness at the suggestion that loose Fed monetary policy of the early and mid-2000s played a role [...]
Modern society is based on the idea of economic growth, a continually expanding cycle of expectation (which supplies the motivation to drive the economy forward), trade leading to income, income leading to consumption and investment. This expansion is made possible by improvements in technology making possible cheaper production (machines replacing slaves and eventually workers) and [...]
This presentation, “A Brief History of Economic Crisis in the United States,” was part of the Free Enterprise Institute’s Founders’ Day Breakfast, November 2011. […]
We seem to be haunted by the fear of our machinery and what it is doing to us, or what might happen when it goes wrong. According to landmarks of popular culture such as the Terminator and Matrix movies and Battlestar Galactica, sooner or later the machines will turn upon us. They will use us [...]
“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.” Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month–for we are not to speak of the poor without unctuous empathy. Yet, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reports in “Understanding [...]
Imaginative Conservative Readers, considering how much we revere Burke here, I thought it might be good to reprint the following two pieces from him. While I knew he and Adam Smith were close friends, I did not realize until yesterday (February 19, 2012) that he had briefly reviewed each of Smith’s major works. Burke’s words [...]
John C. Calhoun A hundred and fifty years ago, our country was in the midst of the most difficult and deadly experience of its history, the Civil War, in which 660,000 would perish. How had it come to be that the country was in Lincoln’s words, “half slave, half free,” and because of [...]
The Southern Agrarians represent one of the most interesting movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Principled as well as intellectual, the Agrarians offered much for America to ponder. Sadly, however, it is quite possible the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s will be remembered, if at all, as a footnote to [...]
When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1] While [...]
Wilhelm Röpke was an unusual free-market economist working in a difficult time. I believe that we should see him, first of all, as a product of 1914, the year which launched what he called “the devastation on so gigantic a scale to which mankind, then having gone mad, dedicated itself.” Mustered to war as a [...]
An economist is someone who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it would work in theory. —Ronald Reagan Does economics have any real value? That blunt question has been voiced with greater frequency in recent years. After all, mainstream economics, with its cherished theories and complex mathematical models, failed to predict or to prescribe [...]
Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Chairman: I hope you all had a pleasant lunch. These hearings of the United States House Committee on Financial Services are now called to order. Mister Benjamin Levine, thank you for coming here. Are you The Wandering Jew? Levine: Depends. Barney Frank (D-MA): Mister Chairman, please insert into the record that The [...]
M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets, “It all depends on how prosperous you want to be.” Prosperity, most of us would agree, is generally a good thing. The Western World has been quite good at it, although prosperity has often required that we compromise on the important things that got us [...]
Last week in Kansas, President Obama laid out his vision of economic history. In example after example drawn from the last hundred years, he showed that interventions on the part of the federal government in the form of taxes and regulations have proven to bring the free-market system to its optimal best. Restraint on taxes [...]