Watching the world’s leaders stumble their way through the economic crisis, it often feels as if political success and economic understanding are mutually exclusive. Even the Chinese, who over the past generation have engineered a dramatic turnaround from their...
MARKETS
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. – AYN RAND
Bumbling Ben Bernanke
It seems that the primary qualification needed by any chairman of the Federal Reserve is the ability to never admit error, no matter how damning the evidence. During his tenure on the job, Alan Greenspan set the standard for implausible deniability. But in a speech...
A Pro-Free-Market Program for Economic Recovery
My pro-free-market program for economic recovery is a provisional 100-percent-paper-money-reserve system applied to checking deposits, accompanied by a demonstrable commitment to ultimately achieving a 100-percent-gold reserve system.
Employee Free Choice Act: Organized Extortion Made Possible by Federal Labor Laws
Congress should not only reject the transparent power grab known as the Employee Free Choice Act, it should start hacking at the root of the complex federal regime that denies free choice in bargaining. That means repealing the Wagner Act, so that labor law can recognize and protect the absolute right of companies and employees to deal with each other on an entirely voluntary basis.
Inflation and Deficits: Politicians Cause Inflation
With the massive increases in federal spending, inflation is one of the risks that awaits us. To protect us from the political demagoguery that will accompany that inflation, let's now decide what is and what is not inflation. One price or several prices rising is not...
Billion Euro Antitrust Fine Against Intel
The European antitrust regulator has announced last month that it will fine Intel Corporation $1.44 billion (1.06 billion euros) because it "harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for...
The Decline of General Motors
If a company as great and as economically powerful as General Motors once was can collapse into a shadow of its former self, so too can every other company in the United States. So too can the United States itself.
The Housing Boom and Bust
Hot off the press is my colleague Dr. Thomas Sowell's 43rd book, "The Housing Boom and Bust." The book is an eye-opener for anyone interested in the truth about the collapse of the housing market that played a major role in our financial market crisis....
Fraud in Academia: Grade Inflation 101
Soon college students will come home and present parents with their grades. To avoid delusion, parents should do some serious discounting because of rampant grade inflation. If grade inflation continues, a college bachelor's degree will have just as much credibility...
The Housing Boom and Bust
In the spirit of bipartisanship, my newest book-- "The Housing Boom and Bust"-- shows how both Democrats and Republicans ruined both the housing markets and the financial markets. Like so many disasters, the current economic crisis grew out of policies based on good...
Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis
The financial crisis is, fundamentally, a moral crisis. To end the crisis, we must acknowledge that government intervention caused it, and we must demand that the government begin removing its coercive hands from the economy. With an eye to the short term, we must demand that it scale back the powers of the GSEs, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC; and with an eye to the long term, we must demand that the government abolish these agencies entirely and restore a gold standard run by private, currency-issuing banks subject solely to the objective commercial and bankruptcy codes.
Green Jobs
Once we put our minds to it, nothing is easier than to think of things that would require the performance of virtually unlimited labor in order to accomplish virtually zero result.
Standing Keynesianism On Its Head
As Employment Increases in Response to a Fall in Wage Rates, the Rate of Profit Rises, Not Falls
Broken Windows, Broken Principles
Economic success requires recognition, not evasion, of the fact that the principle of cause and effect applies just as inexorably in financial policy as it does in the scientist’s lab. Only when we reestablish acceptance of this idea can we hope to reverse course and return to the road of long term prosperity.
Tax Cuts and the “Trickle Down” Economics Straw Man
Among the suggestions being made for getting the American economy moving up again is a reduction in the capital gains tax. But any such suggestion makes people on the left go ballistic. It is "trickle down" economics, they cry. Liberals claim that those who favor tax...
The Fundamental Obstacles to Economic Recovery: Marxism and Keynesianism
While the influence of Marxism stands directly in the path of a fall in wage rates and prices, by blocking its way with laws and threats, Keynesianism aims to prevent any attempt to overcome these obstacles by allegedly demonstrating the futility and harm of doing so.
False Solutions and Real Problems: The Housing Crisis Revisited
Someone once said that Senator Hubert Humphrey, liberal icon of an earlier generation, had more solutions than there were problems. Senator Humphrey was not unique in that respect. In fact, our present economic crisis has developed out of politicians providing...
Message To The Bailout Boys: Bankruptcy is Economically Valuable
What is bankruptcy? Bankruptcy is a financial state that occurs when a person or business can no longer repay its debts. In the legal sense, bankruptcy begins when a court recognizes that the financial state of bankruptcy exists. The bankruptcy court takes charge...
Obama’s “Logic” on the Mortgage Crisis
In his "Remarks by the President on the mortgage crisis" on February 18, Obama stated: Our housing crisis was born of eroding home values, but it was also an erosion of our common values, and in some case, common sense. It was brought about by big banks that traded in...
Blame Socialist Government Policies Not Capitalism for the Financial Crisis
Massive government interventions in the market in the form of myriad regulations and financial irresponsibility on the part of the government are really to blame.
Change Under Obama
The President’s statement reveals a great deal about his understanding or, more correctly, lack of understanding of economics.
Let General Motors Go Bankrupt
Shifting the financial pain of business failure onto society at large is unjust.
Economic Recovery Requires Capital Accumulation, Not Government “Stimulus Packages”
The blind rush into massive “stimulus packages” is the culmination of generations of economic ignorance transmitted from professor to student in the guise of advanced, revolutionary thinking—the “Keynesian revolution.”
Government Bailouts are Unjust: Let Bankruptcy Courts Take the Wheel
Is General Motors to become a brain-dead patient in a Federal bailout ward, languishing on tax-funded life support beyond all hope of recovery? Not if Congress steps aside and lets the bankruptcy courts do justice through adjudication.
Upside Down Economics
From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us. What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the...
Soviet Show Trials with Wall Street Bankers in Shackles
Those seeking to deify the government and raise it above the citizens, that they are encouraging a servant to forget his place and to become the master of those whom it is his duty to serve.
As Wall Street Bonuses Go, So Goes the Liberty of All of Us
"There will be a time for [Wall Street executives] to make profits and there will be a time for them to get bonuses. Now is not that time." So said President Obama on January 29 to reporters (source: "The Kudlow Report," CNBC). So we receive President Obama's...
The Real Problem With Tim Geithner for Treasury
Tim Geithner is an awful choice for Treasury secretary, but not for the reasons other objectors are suggesting.
Lured To Disaster by “Affordable Housing”
Behind the housing boom and bust was one of those alluring but undefined phrases that are so popular in politics-- "affordable housing." It is hard for me to know specifically what politicians are talking about when they use this phrase. But then politics is about...
Congress’ Financial Mess
Today’s housing mess can be laid directly at the feet of Congress and the White House.
Falling Prices Are the Antidote to Deflation
A disastrous economic confusion is the belief that falling prices constitute deflation and thus must be feared and, if possible, prevented.
Teaching Economics
Many professors, mostly on the liberal side of the political spectrum, use their classrooms to proselytize students. I have taught economics for the past 40 years and challenge anyone to find even one student, among the thousands who went through my classes, who can...
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