Economic Trends
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Elkhart, Indiana, Thrives Despite Obama Administration’s Policies
Former President Obama tweeted in honor of the anniversary of signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation…
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The Effect of the Coronavirus on Financial Markets
We should take a sober, dispassionate look at forces acting upon the U.S. financial markets. Headlines indicating a “panic” are vastly overwrought.
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The Technocrats Will Not Save Us
Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and low unemployment in America. In other words, the United States will eventually experience worsening inflation at some point, as well as another general economic downturn.…
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Why We Must Keep Section 230 and Pay the High Cost of Free Speech Online
One can’t pretend the internet hasn’t made the dark side of free speech more dangerous. But rather than a censor, it’s time for a gut check.
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The Underappreciated Trend in Mortality and Inequality
Most economists, left or right, care about human development. By human development, they mean more than simply increases in income. They refer to a greater ability for individuals to choose the lives they deem most fulfilling under continually weakening constraints. Regardless of their political leanings, most economists will also be concerned with the inequalities in…
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How Liberalism Can Survive Left-Right Polarization
We need to form in our minds a beautiful vision of the society and world we want to inhabit, not in its detailed operation like the central planners, and not as an end state like the socialist utopians, but in its ever-evolving institutions that serve human well being above all else.
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Your Pessimism Is Ridiculously Inaccurate
The incessant drumbeat of negativity about the U.S. economy and about globalization – and the blinkered focus on problems (real and only apparent) divorced from the larger context of the economy’s successes and of Americans’ stupendous prosperity – gives us a dangerously inaccurate sense of the state of the economy and of ordinary men’s and…
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•
Are There No Alternatives to Labor Unions?
Do worker-owned labor corporations not exist because they are economically unnecessary or because they have yet to be tried, perhaps due to the long fixation on labor unions?
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The New Totalitarians
Like their Marxian and Nazi forbearers, these new totalitarians look at the world with a fanatical self-righteousness that they have the clear and correct vision of the “true” bases of society’s ills and the only answer for its healing.
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Helping San Francisco’s Homeless One Individual at a Time
“Something must be done about the homeless.” That refrain seems to be the only thing people agree upon with respect to San Francisco’s tragic and intractable homelessness crisis. The city has lurched between the progressive and sometimes tolerant-to-a-fault policies for which it is known and periods of what reads and looks like urban warfare, encampments…
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•
Elkhart, Indiana, Thrives Despite Obama Administration’s Policies
Former President Obama tweeted in honor of the anniversary of signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation…
-
•
The Effect of the Coronavirus on Financial Markets
We should take a sober, dispassionate look at forces acting upon the U.S. financial markets. Headlines indicating a “panic” are vastly overwrought.
-
•
The Technocrats Will Not Save Us
Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and low unemployment in America. In other words, the United States will eventually experience worsening inflation at some point, as well as another general economic downturn.…
-
•
Why We Must Keep Section 230 and Pay the High Cost of Free Speech Online
One can’t pretend the internet hasn’t made the dark side of free speech more dangerous. But rather than a censor, it’s time for a gut check.
-
•
The Underappreciated Trend in Mortality and Inequality
Most economists, left or right, care about human development. By human development, they mean more than simply increases in income. They refer to a greater ability for individuals to choose the lives they deem most fulfilling under continually weakening constraints. Regardless of their political leanings, most economists will also be concerned with the inequalities in…
-
•
How Liberalism Can Survive Left-Right Polarization
We need to form in our minds a beautiful vision of the society and world we want to inhabit, not in its detailed operation like the central planners, and not as an end state like the socialist utopians, but in its ever-evolving institutions that serve human well being above all else.
-
•
Your Pessimism Is Ridiculously Inaccurate
The incessant drumbeat of negativity about the U.S. economy and about globalization – and the blinkered focus on problems (real and only apparent) divorced from the larger context of the economy’s successes and of Americans’ stupendous prosperity – gives us a dangerously inaccurate sense of the state of the economy and of ordinary men’s and…
-
•
Are There No Alternatives to Labor Unions?
Do worker-owned labor corporations not exist because they are economically unnecessary or because they have yet to be tried, perhaps due to the long fixation on labor unions?
-
•
The New Totalitarians
Like their Marxian and Nazi forbearers, these new totalitarians look at the world with a fanatical self-righteousness that they have the clear and correct vision of the “true” bases of society’s ills and the only answer for its healing.
-
•
Helping San Francisco’s Homeless One Individual at a Time
“Something must be done about the homeless.” That refrain seems to be the only thing people agree upon with respect to San Francisco’s tragic and intractable homelessness crisis. The city has lurched between the progressive and sometimes tolerant-to-a-fault policies for which it is known and periods of what reads and looks like urban warfare, encampments…