When our government subsidizes home purchases, recklessness is invited.
Economics
Self-Enforcing Discrimination
Minimum and maximum prices are but two ways do-gooders handicap poor and discriminated-against people.
Consumers’ Sovereignty and Natural vs. Contrived Scarcities
One of the great myths about the capitalist system is the presumption that businessmen make profits at the expense of the consumers and workers in society. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the free market, consumers are the sovereign rulers who determine...
Falling Interest Causes Falling Wages
Monetary policy is actually putting the hurt on labor. Let’s look at why.
Ruinous ‘Compassion’
Minimum wage laws reduce employment opportunities for the young and the unskilled of any age.
Greek Problems Born from Socialism
The real issue is whether Greece’s decades-long experiment with failed debt-financed socialism will be allowed to survive much longer.
The Myths Underlying Today’s Currency Wars
One myth driving the irrational policies of central planners is the idea that a depreciating currency is good for a domestic economy.
Spontaneous Order
Central planning creates the kind of inefficiency that brought down the Soviet Union. While Americans shopped in malls full of goods, Russians waited in long lines.
Fairness and Justice
Knowing results alone cannot establish whether there is fairness or justice.
Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics
“Whether one is a conservative or a radical, a protectionist or a free trader, a cosmopolitan or a nationalist, a churchman or a heathen, it is useful to know the causes and consequences of economic phenomena.”
Hurts So Good: When Exactly Are Falling Prices Bad?
Falling consumer prices are good for the consumer and the economy, but they are bad for central banks looking to maintain asset bubbles and for governments looking for a graceful way to renege on their debts.
The Most Common Error in Economic Debates
Have you ever been in an argument about whether we should raise taxes and then someone tosses out a real whopper? “The top tax rate for decades after World War II was over 90% and look how the economy boomed!” Or perhaps you read a Paul Krugman column where he said...
The Doctor-Laborer Inversion
The battle over minimum wage is raging. Emotions are running hot. Some cities are setting the bar very high. For example, Seattle is mandating a $15/hour wage. Economically, the issue is very simple. Minimum wage laws do not raise anyone’s wage. This is because it’s...
Israel Kirzner: Entrepreneurship, Competition and the Market Process
On October 13th, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics was announced in Stockholm, Sweden, with French economist, Jean Tirole, the recipient for his work on developing models to better assist governments in regulating private enterprise. A couple of weeks earlier, Reuters...
Embarrassing Economists
There are economists, most notably Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who suggest that the law of demand applies to everything except labor prices (wages) of low-skilled workers.
Predatory Journalism Against The Freedom To Price
Editorial demagoguery against “predatory” lending might well be called predatory journalism — taking advantage of other people’s ignorance of economics to score ideological points, and promote still more expansion of government powers that limit the options of poor peo…
Why is the Gold Standard Urgent?
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...
The Wrong Idea About Inflation
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...
Perception vs. Reality at the Fed
Credibility at the Fed is about subtleties and about perceptions, as opposed to reality.
Book Excerpt: Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle
An excerpt from the introduction of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle.
Mob Rule Economics and “Living Wages”
An employer is not hiring people in order to acquire dependents and become their meal ticket. He is hiring them for what they produce.
Capital in the 21st Century: Thomas Piketty’s Envy Problem
A tired old recipe for global communism in 21st century pseudo-academic clothing.
The Inequality Trap Distracts from the Real Issue of Freedom: Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century
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.
Gary Becker (1930-2014)
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.
Wage Discrimination
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 …
Is There Wage Stagnation?
Many economists, politicians and pundits assert that median wages have stagnated since the 1970s.
Income Inequality vs Productivity Inequality
Far more important than income inequality is productivity inequality.
The ‘Trickle-Down’ Economics Bogeyman
It is not just in politics that the non-existent “trickle-down” theory is found.
ObamaCare’s First Few Years
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...
A Return to Keynes?
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?
Debt Ceiling Delusions
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 Golden Cycle
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,...
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