The future ain’t what it used to be.—Yogi Berra It almost makes one want to go Green just to contemplate the trees that have been sacrificed for the writings of economists. They, like weathermen, claim to be custodians of a predictive science. Both get paid to be wrong much of the time, but at least [...]
“We should be grateful we don’t get all the government we pay for” someone remarked to me at a local Republican strategy conference earlier this year. The hard coastal rain combined with the flat tire on my rental car awaiting me in the parking lot had dampened my spirits, so I didn’t have the energy [...]
In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict tells us that “if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper [...]
Does Hilaire Belloc’s proposed transition to a proprietary economy leave us with only an evil means to otherwise good end? I ended my last reflection on Hilaire Belloc’s An Essay on the Restoration of Property by asking whether the government redistribution of property is the only way to make the transition from a non-proprietary state [...]
Somewhere, the Sage hath said, Philosophy is easy; plumbing is hard. The Sage is correct; we should be suspicious of systems that exist only in the mind, but are never seen on the ground. It is only on the ground that they can be tested, and on those grounds alone we should take our stand. [...]
Property and the Just Wage In the last installment, we maintained that the only means to economic equilibrium was the just wage: unless each person gets a fair proportion of the wealth he produces, there will not be enough purchasing power in the mass of men to clear the markets. We noted that in the [...]
What Does an Economy Do? If what we said in the last installment is correct, then the first task of any humane science is to determine what its purpose is. The indispensable requirement for any economic system is that it must provide the material basis for life for a sufficient number of its citizens so [...]
Some wag somewhere has remarked that economists suffer from “physics envy.” One could certainly make that charge against W.S. Jevons (1835-1882), one of the founders of marginal economics, when he wrote that a “perfect system of statistics … is the only … obstacle in the way of making economics an exact science”; once the statistics [...]
Property in the hands of labor is freedom. Labor in the hands of property is slavery.—Dmitri Kleiner From the earliest days of Distributism, distributists have exhibited a certain lack of interest in economics. This is a rather odd stance for the adherents of an economic theory. Distributism was defended generally on moral and social grounds, [...]
Our friends at ISI Books have recently published a very interesting new book on the political economy entitled Toward A Truly Free Market. Author John Médaille describes the theme of the book this way: “Economics, or more properly, political economy, cannot be a proper science unless it is a humane science; to be a humane [...]
Dr. Kirk wrote in Prospects for Conservatives: “…the conservative believes that men and nations possess free will, and that if a nation or a civilization tumbles to its ruin, such catastrophe is the consequence, for the most part, of the failure of heart and mind of the people who made up that nation…” [...]
Prolonged, widespread joblessness, collapsing real estate markets, and lower economic growth are a few of the many headline issues about the economy. Recommendations range from more stimulus to denying unemployment benefits but there is little in these discussions that convinces us policymakers know what they are talking about and there is much that is misleading, [...]
Below is an excerpt from a NY Times article (7/20/10) on the new British Prime Minister’s plan to cut government spending 25% and shrink government bureaucracy (I added a few comments in all caps). Tough economic times are the only reason such a plan has a chance. Wait a minute, aren’t we having tough economic [...]
Forgive the scattershot tendencies and directions of this essay. Just lots of short items written quickly from my hotel room in downtown Portland, just blocks from Powells (which I’ve yet to visit). A few book recommendations I’m currently reading Sam Gregg’s new book, Wilhelm Roepke’s Political Economy. Written in a more academic but equally engaging style [...]