Wendell Berry In this lecture Mr. Berry challenges our assumptions about the economy, our culture and our place in the world. He also asks profound questions regarding our connections with each other and the environment. Will we seek to escape our limits and reconnect with nature, our families, our neighbors and our own [...]
Sixty-nine percent of voters nationwide are angry with the policies of the federal government. To understand why, it’s important to remember that most voters believe tax cuts and government spending cuts are good for the economy. Collectively, voters have voted for politicians who promised spending cuts and tax cuts in just about every election over the [...]
In a recent series of articles Michael Black argued that the Corporation can only be understood theologically – further, that the modern economic crisis is a crisis of the Corporation. But what about the “Market”, which is the other big player in the economic game, along with the State and the Corporation? In economic theory the corporation [...]
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 [...]