After President Nixon’s gold default in 1971, many people advocated a return to the gold standard. One argument has been repeated: consumer prices are rising. While this is true, it wasn’t compelling in the 1970’s and it certainly doesn’t fire people up today. Rising...
I write often about inflation, and often emphasize that it is not about rising prices. It is important that we define our concepts correctly. Inflation is monetary counterfeiting. Here is a quick graph I made to underscore the point that although the quantity of...
Credibility at the Fed is about subtleties and about perceptions, as opposed to reality.
An excerpt from the introduction of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle.
An employer is not hiring people in order to acquire dependents and become their meal ticket. He is hiring them for what they produce.
A tired old recipe for global communism in 21st century pseudo-academic clothing.
Rather than asking the source or origin of that wealth — production or plunder –the egalitarians like Thomas Piketty merely see that some have more wealth than others and condemn such an “unequal distribution,” in itself.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker was internationally renowned within the economics profession, but was not nearly as well known among the general public as he deserved to be.
There are inequalities everywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women have median earnings higher than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description.
Many economists, politicians and pundits assert that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s.
Far more important than income inequality is productivity inequality.
It is not just in politics that the non-existent “trickle-down” theory is found.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—otherwise known as ObamaCare—is almost four years old. Despite the technical troubles, what every American should know about the law is that whatever its provisions, whatever the press propagandizes or reports, the...
Under Calvin Coolidge, the ultimate in non-interventionist government, the annual unemployment rate got down to 1.8 percent. How does the track record of Keynesian intervention compare to that?
The popular take on the current debt ceiling stand-off is that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party has a delusional belief that it can hit the brakes on new debt creation without bringing on an economic catastrophe. While Republicans are indeed kidding...
The New York Times had the definitive take on the vicious sell off in gold. To summarize one of their articles: Two years ago gold bugs ran wild as the price of gold rose nearly six times. But since cresting two years ago it has steadily declined, almost by half,...
One of the most common arguments for allowing more immigration is that there is a "need" for foreign workers to do "jobs that Americans won't do," especially in agriculture. One of my most vivid memories of the late Armen Alchian, an internationally renowned economist...
If taxes only concealed hidden costs of what we buy, we’d be lucky, but taxes are destructive in another hidden way.
Advocates of a number of government interventions often argue that such measures are required to deal with the “free rider problem.” Indeed, Mitt Romney has called his insurance mandate in Massachusetts a “free rider surcharge.” Wikipedia describes the “free rider...
First published in 1946, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt remains one of best books on economics ever published. The lesson, to paraphrase Hazlitt, is that economists must look beyond the immediate and visible consequences of economic policies; they must look...
The savings of the wealthy and the innovation of entrepreneurs combined to create a huge benefit for society. Call it trickle down if you want, but it would be more honest to simply call it effective. This is the system that built this country. Relying on trickle up will surely destroy it.
The fundamental issue is not wage rates, but productivity.
For decades, it has been argued that certain goods are “natural monopolies,” which Investopedia describes as: A type of monopoly that exists as a result of the high fixed or start-up costs of operating a business in a particular industry. … The utilities industry is a...
President Obama has long told us that “green” energy would create thousands of jobs. His administration has “invested” billions of tax dollars in a myriad of “green” industries. Predictably, the results have been the opposite of what we were promised. As one example,...
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