The environmentalists had a field day during the corona pandemic. The anti-human policies they have called for, protested for, disrupted societies and other people’s lives for, were suddenly implemented en masse, albeit on a temporary basis. Think of it as a trial for green policies.
The crisis of 2020 has invited a lot of comparisons to the past, particularly the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 and to various war efforts. For those concerned with banking, public finance and monetary policy, the summer of 1914 might be a more appropriate candidate.
A disturbing trend among true believers is to quip that “Bitcoin fixes this,” almost regardless of what the problem may be.
The kind of reasoning that underpins the tired old asymmetric information bogeyman in health care falls straight into the behavioral symmetry between market participants and policy makers that is a core contribution of modern public choice economics: it is not believable to submit that governments have magic wands.
“Laissez-faire” Stockholm seems to fare better than locked-down New York.
Riding out storms and sharing risks across billions of people is a feature, not a bug, and the affluent capitalist nature of our institutions puts us in a better position to deal with them.
Contrary to what almost everyone has said during the last three months – from media talking heads to presidents and epidemiologists and your neighbor – the growth of pandemics is not exponential. The number of people infected and number of dead don’t follow “exponential” curves. They follow S-shaped curves.
Contrary to the U.S., where President Trump and Governor Cuomo and countless other political figures compete for the attention of their constituents and populace and underlings, the Swedish experience has been one of decentralized decision-makers and arms-length officials calling the shots.
Let poor countries grow rich, and in due course they will, too, look after their forests.
Instead of succumbing to the eternal alarmism that should undermine ecologists’ credibility, we should accept that maybe – just maybe – the world is getting better. And much-reviled capitalist markets are, in no small feat, to thank for that.
Who counts as green? Whose debt should be subsidized?
An efficiency-minded environmentalist could object that this trip shouldn’t be made, a Marxist-leaning commentator that this was an example of the horrible waste and misallocation of the capitalist system.
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
Perhaps the money of the future isn’t some sophisticated crypto token, but a private promise to consume a widely used service.
Standing accused of all kinds of allegedly harmful things ranging from wealth inequality to privacy invasions, from voraciously destroying the Earth to indebting poor people, the idea of capitalism is in trouble.
What angers most people about climate alarmists is their doublethink, cognitive dissonance, and ability to rationalize their own behavior.
By removing the market’s solution to collapsing banks, this unraveling forced electorate-sensitive governments to take up the residual risk and backstop the financial system that Scottish banks themselves so effectively regulated in the past.
A “hostile” corporate raider can only buy shares that others voluntarily sell.
Ronald Reagan once remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Similarly, the financial economist Campbell Harvey recently wrote that the four most dangerous words, feared by central bankers...
The confused objections to share buybacks illustrate the failure to look past the immediate effect and to understand what financial markets do.
Rothbard does not refute White’s thesis that Scottish banking was less regulated and hence more stable and well-functioning than England’s banking system in the same 145-year period.
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