Now that Barack Obama has been re-elected President, he’s going to have to deal with the mess he inherits. That was the chuckle James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal had at the expense of the results last week. As goes messes, there have been two of them in our times of trouble. The first [...]
In late 2011 and early 2012, there was a fierce debate among several prominent economists on the possible ways in which government deficits today could impose a burden on future generations. Specifically, Keynesian economists Dean Baker and Paul Krugman were arguing that right-wing concerns over the debt burden were nonsensical, because (for the most part) [...]
What a gift to civilization this United States of America is. If you had to count the ways, how many very big things there are in which this country has positively excelled over its over two centuries of history. There is of course the political order watched over by our Constitution. Popular government remaining limited [...]
“Are the good times really over for good?” asked Merle Haggard in his 1982 lament. Then, the good times weren’t over. In fact, they were coming back, with the Reagan recovery, the renewal of the American spirit and the end of a Cold War that had consumed so much of our lives. It is hard [...]
Barack Obama & Jack Kemp “Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” So said President Obama to his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, in the debate [...]
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” For books on Politics and Economics visit The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for [...]
“Austerity” has become the watchword of the year. Governors, prime ministers, and presidents around the world are talking about cutting welfare benefits, curtailing public union power, and reducing deficits. We’ve over-promised at the public trough, and now we must pay the price. Whoever is elected president in November is going to face the need to [...]
Nikolai Lenin said that when the time came to hang the capitalists, they would trip over each other to sell the communists the necessary rope. One is reminded also of the similar case of a Canadian mining firm whose owner in order to keep the business worked with Castro and generously donated money to his [...]
Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century The great temptation and delusion of socialist regimes is to attempt to guarantee the value of things rather than the ownership of them. This was also the great mistake of the Bush and Obama administrations’ response to the crisis of 2008. Value depends on dedicated [...]
When Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981, the nation had just endured a recession the year before. Then another recession materialized on Reagan’s watch in a few months’ time, in the fall of 1981. The labor force participation rate—which measures the proportion of the population at work or looking—had been rising throughout the 1970s, but [...]
Forbes columnist extraordinaire Peter Ferrara was once kind enough to call my own Econoclasts “a brilliant, overlooked book.” I know another brilliant book that wasn’t overlooked when it came out last year (it was a bestseller), James Rickards’s Currency Wars, but it sure could do with a dose of renewed publicity and attention about now. [...]
The charge about the old days of the American economy—the nineteenth century, the “Gilded Age,” the era of the “robber barons”—was that it was always beset by a cycle of boom and bust. Whatever nice runs of expansion and opportunity that did come, they always seemed to be coupled with a pretty cataclysmic depression right [...]
In a discussion with another famous conservative, Richard Weaver objected to the view that the solution of our problems lies in following in the footsteps of “our ancestors.” This was not enough, he argued, for we must ask “Which ancestors?” After all, some were wise while others were foolish. In a similar manner we may [...]
At the famous Federal Reserve confab at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Chairman Ben Bernanke laid the groundwork for Quantitative Easing III. He couldn’t contain himself about how well the first two versions of the big Fed asset-purchase program had turned out over the last few years—unemployment is down from the peak and all that. Bernanke even [...]