Via Economic Policy Journal Paraphrasing the late Murray Rothbard, the “two party” system in America during the twentieth century worked something like this: Democrats engineered the Great Leaps Forward, and Republicans consolidated the gains. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson were the transformative presidents; Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan offered only rhetoric and weak tea compromises. In politics, being...
Via Economic Policy Journal William R. Allen By Don Boudreaux Among the ten greatest books ever written in economics is University Economics. First published in 1972, this textbook that is co-authored by Armen A. Alchian and William R. Allen is a marvel. If you read it and grasp even no more than one-third of its lessons...
Via Economic Policy Journal From National Real Estate Investor: Thousands of apartments stood empty in August 2020 that had been occupied only a few months before in urban cores across the country, including in previously white-hot markets like San Francisco and New York. Desperate owners have been dropping rents and offering eye-popping concessions and optimizing...
Via Economic Policy Journal By David Stockman In light of Sleepy Joe’s swell new $1.9 trillion package of more free stuff, it’s time to get out our magnifying glasses again. The purpose is to compute the size of the hole in America’s collective paycheck that purportedly requires such continued, extraordinary beneficence from our not so...
Via Economic Policy Journal By Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. Introductory note: In 2011, Lew Rockwell penned this thorough explanation of what fascism really is and what must be done to combat it. Fascism, unlike what the dominant media narrative asserts, has virtually nothing to do with people expressing politically incorrect opinions, or people refusing to...
Via Economic Policy Journal The Tenderloin–San Francisco, CA By William L. Anderson My colleague from the philosophy department was becoming increasingly angry. He was trying to be polite, but it was clear that he was raging inside. After a few minutes, he smiled a very strained smile and excused himself. Our conversation was about California, or...
Via Economic Policy Journal Well, we got our best indication yet of how mad a Joe Biden presidency is going to be. Biden delivered a speech on Thursday night outlining what he called his “American Rescue Plan.” It was all about spending money, lots of it. The package he proposed includes more than $400 billion...
Via Economic Policy Journal By Brad Polumbo 2020 was one of the worst years in modern American history for small businesses. And now, thanks to a wave of minimum wage legislation that kicked in on January 1, things are about to get even worse. Make no mistake: small business owners are already seriously hurting. When state and...
Via Economic Policy Journal Well, this is quite the roller coaster ride. The New York Stock Exchange announced on Jan. 5 that it was halting plans announced four days earlier to halt trading and the delisting process for China’s three largest telecom companies. The exchange said that the decision was made after discussions with regulators...
Via Economic Policy Journal Loretta J. Mester, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland delivered a speech at the Allied Social Science Associations Annual Meeting (via videoconference). Here is her remarkable comment on price inflation in the talk: I expect this post-vaccination phase of the recovery to continue over the...
Via Economic Policy Journal Dror Poleg, author of “Rethinking Real Estate” and the co-chair of the Urban Land Institute’s Technology and Innovation Council in New York, has written a piece at The New York Times on his thoughts. Here are key snippets: [B]uildings in many traditional employment districts will have to compete more fiercely, and a...
Via Economic Policy Journal Google senior management is about to learn why it is extremely dangerous to coddle up to social justice warriors. SJWs never stop and will throw anyone overboard when they no longer have value. Google itself now appears to be a major target of the SJWs. More than 200 Google employees in...
Via Economic Policy Journal Hollywood producer Ben Everard writes in The Wall Street Journal: [M]any filmmakers prefer to bet on themselves—in industry parlance, “putting the money on the screen.” That is, filmmakers take substantially reduced upfront payments in exchange for potentially lucrative “backend” points, granting filmmakers contractual rights to a portion of theatrical revenues. When...
Via Economic Policy Journal By Hanna Cox In 2020, many of us have become accustomed to terms and concepts we never thought we’d be discussing: “social distancing,” mask requirements, and Zoom parties all come to mind. We can add Section 230 to that list, an obscure provision of the Communications and Decency Act (1996) that...
Via Economic Policy Journal Paul Krugman, economic forecaster In 1988, Paul Krugman stepped up to the plate and told us: The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most...
Via Economic Policy Journal Treasury Secretary MNuchin and his wife. The US Treasury has issued a statement that includes: Today, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service will begin delivering a second round of Economic Impact Payments to millions of Americans as part of the implementation of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations...
Via Economic Policy Journal Peter Schiff sent this tweet out on Monday: Of course, Peter is correct here when it comes to gold. You are way off if you somehow think gold is fiat money. But his son Spencer strikes back pretty hard. Spencer has a point here but there are problems. Bitcoin is a...
Via Economic Policy Journal As the White House door is close to slamming behind President Trump for the last time, the President buckled one more time and signed a bill he had called a disgrace. Trump wanted $2,000 checks to go out to every American ( horrendous price inflationary idea by the way) and settled for...
Via Economic Policy Journal In my continuing back and forth with Dominick Armentano, he comments at the post, If You Didn’t Get $12,000 From the Government This Year, Consider Yourself Among the Scammed: I am not making any case for Fed pumping obviously! Goodness, I am on record for abolishing the Fed! And, yes, I...
Via Economic Policy Journal In honor of the great Austrian school economists, here is a video on Austrian Christmas traditions. The founder of the Austrian school, Carl Menger, was born into a devout Roman Catholic family. In fact, Carl Menger’s maternal grandfather Jozef Geržabek owned an estate around Maniowy in Poland where he built a church...