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Apr 24, 2025
It cannot be said enough that economic growth is defined not by what people do, but by what they don’t. Which certainly helps explain the big declines in future-seeing equity...
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Apr 23, 2025
“DOJ Urges Federal Judge To Break Google’s Search Grip.” How interesting it would be to focus group the previous headline to a broad swath of the American people,...
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Apr 23, 2025
Alabama’s politicians are arrogantly substituting themselves for Alabama’s parents.
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Apr 22, 2025
The future will be defined by economic growth that will make the present appear limp by comparison. Driverless cars will loom large precisely because they’ll free humans from...
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Apr 21, 2025
While there’s no evidence that Albert Einstein uttered the quip long associated with him about compound returns as the “8th Wonder of the World,” it’s not...
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Apr 21, 2025
Markets are powerful, they always speak, and they’ll overrun central bankers including those at the Fed.
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Apr 19, 2025
“Will Andersen’s father looked at a golf course and thought it should be a farm. Will looked at a farm and thought it should be a golf course.” That’s how the...
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Apr 18, 2025
When Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, the deal wasn’t seen as obvious or a slam dunk… for Facebook. Which is a statement of the obvious, one...
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Apr 17, 2025
“I have such easy access to my fans and customers.” Those are the words of Kylie Jenner, from a 2018 Forbes profile. Jenner was on the path to billionaire status, but in...
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Apr 16, 2025
The EU is presently trying to limit a prominent source of income for Meta. The biggest victims will be European businesses.
The EU wants to force Meta to provide Facebook and...
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Apr 15, 2025
With its antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the FTC’s goal is to force the sale of WhatsApp and Instagram, Meta’s up-to-now most successful acquisitions. Wise minds inside...
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Apr 15, 2025
Jobs are the easy part. It’s worth remembering every time a politician talks about “jobs created” by his or her economic program. They’re missing the point....
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Apr 14, 2025
What's constant and that reflects reality for it being constant can't be adjusted on the assumption of inconstancy.
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Apr 12, 2025
There’s foolish and then there’s macroeconomics. Macroeconomics insults foolish.
Was “economics” always this dense? Acknowledging that there’s no...
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Apr 11, 2025
It’s easy to forget that a little over five years ago U.S. schools were closed, public events were canceled, dining inside restaurants was illegal, the operation of all manner...
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Apr 9, 2025
“Every single decision we made was wrong.” That’s how Nvidia founder Jensen Huang described 1995 in the life of Nvidia. Crucial about the wrong decisions was that...
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Apr 9, 2025
Rationalizing the negative impact of President Trump’s tariffs on the stock market, Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has said that stocks are essentially a rich person thing,...
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Apr 8, 2025
Before investor Bill Ackman requested from President Trump a pause on his tariffs, he perhaps reasonably observed that Trump deserved the benefit of the doubt, that he’s often...
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Apr 7, 2025
To hide behind “economists” as a reason for disliking anything is to frequently misunderstand your argument and to kill your argument before you’ve begun.
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Apr 5, 2025
“Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.” That was the headline of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by conservative Hoover Institution scholar Michael Boskin on...
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Apr 4, 2025
Debt is a sign of progress. It’s a market signal about growing future earnings for families and businesses.
Despite this, politicians continue to argue the opposite. Looking...
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Apr 3, 2025
President Trump promises to bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. If we forget that he can’t do what he claims he will, we can at least think about the horrid economic...
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Apr 2, 2025
President Trump is doing major damage to his presidency. And no, this opinion piece is not about tariffs. Much more economically damaging than tariffs is a falling currency. Gold is...
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Apr 1, 2025
“There is a ‘treasure trove of medicines that could be used for so many other diseases.’” Those are the words of Donald C. Lo, former head of therapeutic...
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Mar 31, 2025
Markets work around government stabs at price controls, and invariably tell the truth.
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Mar 29, 2025
Right and Left, Republicans and Democrats brought great shame on themselves with their efforts to ban TikTok. Pizza Hut crystalizes the previous truth.
But before discussing Pizza...
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Mar 28, 2025
If the U.S. were ever so foolish as to want to shrink inequality, doing so would be easy: abolish usage of cars, planes, computers, smartphones and the internet. Presto, inequality...
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Mar 27, 2025
History will show that as traditional test scores meant to gauge in-class learning fell in the U.S., so rose the economic prospects of that same U.S. Pundits fail to see this because...
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Mar 26, 2025
They all want to “rent” Warren Buffett’s name. If Buffett thinks highly enough of your business to invest in it, most every investor not named Buffett will...
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Mar 25, 2025
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates used to say that his company’s biggest competitor was Goldman Sachs. Yes, the investment bank. Gates’s point was that business success is...
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Mar 24, 2025
Money is an effect of wealth. Nothing else.
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Mar 22, 2025
On January 26, 2023, popular U.S. hamburger chain Five Guys opened in Seoul, South Korea’s capital city. The weather was rainy and humid, but South Koreans braved up to twelve...
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Mar 21, 2025
“Would you like fries with that?” What you just read is a question, an economic cost, but also arguably a symbol of the difficulties fast-food restaurants have long...
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Mar 20, 2025
Recently a prominent member of the libertarian community died. Notable about the individual’s death is what he left behind.
Though he earned good money over the decades, the...
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Mar 18, 2025
It’s a popular lament on the right that Montgomery (Maryland) and Fairfax (Virginia) are the two richest U.S. counties in an income sense. Each abuts Washington, D.C. Get...
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Mar 18, 2025
Google isn’t at all certain that it will be as prominent tomorrow as it is today. See its planned acquisition of New York City-based Wiz if the previous sentence confuses...
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Mar 17, 2025
Production is money. Nothing else. These things can't be planned.
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Mar 15, 2025
When asked if he attended his Lincoln High School (Brooklyn) reunions, the recently passed New York City real estate mogul and civic leader Marshall Rose said he did not, that he...
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Mar 14, 2025
Businesses fight consumers every day for access to precious capital. Yes, you read that right. The businesses economists tell us are reliant on consumption are in a battle for...
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Mar 13, 2025
“Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to see anybody.” Those were the words of polymath thinker, actor, entertainer and director Mike Nichols (1931-2014) at...
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Mar 12, 2025
A gold standard would do wonders for economic growth, but would almost certainly not limit the growth of our federal government. The view that it would insults markets at least three...
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Mar 11, 2025
Milton Friedman was incorrect. About the negative income tax, specifically. The great Nobel Laureate (1912-2006) viewed a negative income tax as something that would encourage...
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Mar 10, 2025
How can these private monies replace the dollar when their value is measured in dollars?
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Mar 8, 2025
When we look back on 2025 in 2030, rest assured that we’ll have forgotten or moved beyond what had us so scared in 2025. While what will happen next week is nearly impossible...
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Mar 7, 2025
In the seriously great news department, pancreatic cancer is expected to pass colorectal cancer as the second biggest cause of cancer-related death by 2030. Yes, it’s great...
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Mar 6, 2025
Panicky politicians caused the coronavirus crack-up, period. If not for their tragic inability to keep their cool, the coronavirus scare would have been anything but. To ignore the...
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Mar 5, 2025
Apple should be free to hire whomever it wants, and without regard to what its critics think. The previous assertion is about private property and freedom, but it’s worth...
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Mar 4, 2025
A federal tax levied on a New York City resident is a tax on a Floridian. The previous truth is rarely discussed by economists and pundits focused on Floridians who’ve escaped...
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Mar 4, 2025
Importing Silicon Valley skills in addition to its products.
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Mar 3, 2025
Prices are how a market economy organizes itself, and as such are not meant to be tamed by government.
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Mar 1, 2025
“He was just the waiter.” That’s what one of the owners of legendary New York steakhouse Peter Luger said about Wolfgang Zwiener. “All” he’d done...
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Feb 28, 2025
Whatever worries you about what’s going on in the world, stop. The advice is wise not because your fears aren’t potentially valid, but precisely because they’re...
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Feb 27, 2025
It always interested Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane that while left-handed writers represent roughly 11 percent of the population, something like 40 percent of Cato’s staff...
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Feb 26, 2025
“Carried interest” is extraordinarily misleading. It implies a fixed and very certain income stream in the way that interest bearing accounts at banks do. Which is the...
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Feb 25, 2025
100% percent of any Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) savings should be returned to taxpayers. This shouldn’t even be a debate, but sadly it will be since neither side...
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Feb 24, 2025
To suggest that higher interest rates would strengthen the dollar is like saying a facelift will fix a broken leg
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Feb 22, 2025
“I keep a button on my desk that says ‘Life?’ Of course I have a life. It’s a life filled with books.” Those are the words of Michael Dirda, Pulitzer...
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Feb 21, 2025
Roughly a fifth of Apple’s iPhones are sold in China. Repeat the previous anecdote over and over again, and ideally convey it to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Matt Pottinger,...
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Feb 20, 2025
Laments about the state of education are arguably as old as education is, or close to it. And they’ve always been a waste of time.
That’s because knowledge isn’t...
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Feb 19, 2025
When Donald Keough took over as President and COO of Coca-Cola in 1981, one of the first things he did was walk the halls of the company’s headquarters to get to know the...
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Feb 18, 2025
The U.S. has a massive budget and eye-popping debt precisely because Congress annually fleeces the rich. To believe otherwise is to believe in Santa Claus, ferociously dumb markets,...
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Feb 17, 2025
Objective measures of the dollar's value remind us that the higher prices of 2021-22 had nothing to do with inflation.
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Feb 15, 2025
“He’s not going to play Division I football.” That’s what a Division I coach told Chris Cox, the defensive coordinator at Chris Jones’s high school...
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Feb 14, 2025
If leaders of other countries ever really want to weaken the United States, they should embrace collectivism. It's that simple.
Which is but a small reminder that imports never hurt...
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Feb 13, 2025
"They have treated us very unfairly on trade." That's one of President Trump's most frequent economic themes, and he has a point. So do "they."
To see why, it's easy to forget that...
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Feb 12, 2025
Price controls will suffocate a much more robust housing recovery in the Los Angeles area. What’s sad is that it was all so unnecessary.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Greg...
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Feb 11, 2025
Amazon and Google are fighting gallantly to remain relevant. Whether or not they will remain relevant is a question that hundreds of billions worth of investment will answer.
To...
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Feb 10, 2025
With or without a Fed acting as a full employment act for economists, economic growth and money will take care of themselves simply because they're one and the same.
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Feb 8, 2025
“How much do their leaders believe in communism?” That was the first question Ronald Reagan asked Suzanne Massie, the recently passed Soviet and Russia expert, during...
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Feb 7, 2025
Despite what Fed officials, economists, and their media enablers tell you, there’s no such thing as costless credit. This is important simply because economists and pundits who...
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Feb 6, 2025
Ten days ago the shares of Nvidia corrected 17 percent. How could this have happened to such an “owned” and analyzed company? The answer, at least as of now, is that...
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Feb 5, 2025
“Please take into consideration when you want to come after us down the road for something that Bear Stearns did, that J.P. Morgan was asked to do this by the federal...
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Feb 4, 2025
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has always said that freedom is the answer to any question about economic growth. If people are free they’ll have all the prosperity they...
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Feb 3, 2025
If the Fed could prop up stocks, stocks wouldn't be worth buying.
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Feb 1, 2025
“Since he was a kid, Randy Miod wanted to be at the beach. Once he got there, he never left.” That’s what the Wall Street Journal’s Chris Kornelis wrote about...
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Jan 31, 2025
Compensation in the United States is very good. How you know this without knowing it is that most of the best, most valuable businesses in the world are American.
It brings to mind...
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Jan 30, 2025
Highly emotional members of the left have been known to bemoan immense wealth. Possessing a fixed pie, zero sum view of the world, they imagine that wealth is taken as opposed to...
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Jan 29, 2025
“We have access to information that you don’t have.” That’s one way Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009) explained a Vietnam War that not everyone...
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Jan 28, 2025
Oil is the most important commodity in the world when it comes to human flourishing, and nothing else comes close. Stop and think about how intensely inconvenient and impoverished...
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Jan 27, 2025
Higher prices aren't necessarily inflation. We have higher prices since the coronavirus not because of monetary error, but due to tragic lockdowns.
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Jan 25, 2025
In his 2023 book The Art Thief, author Michael Finkel crucially observed (my book review here) that “art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure of all.” So...
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Jan 24, 2025
“The world is being swamped with Chinese goods, and the United States, Europe and Japan are right to worry about it.” Those are the opening words of a recent Washington...
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Jan 23, 2025
North Carolina’s legislature recently passed a Congressional Term Limits resolution in bipartisan fashion. The Tar Heel state is the third one in 2024 (joining Louisiana and Tenness
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Jan 22, 2025
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell writes that Scott Bessent “is using all the budget high jinks at his disposal to produce a pseudoscientific plan that’s...
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Jan 21, 2025
Jack Kemp (1935-2009) always felt Republicans should do well with minorities and immigrants. He saw the Republicans as the party of opportunity, and felt his message of growth should...
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Jan 20, 2025
Production is a tautological signal of money in circulation, not the existence of central banks, mints, Treasuries or monetary authorities more broadly.
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Jan 18, 2025
I was first introduced to David Lodge’s endlessly great novels when a college girlfriend gave me her copy of Nice Work. The book was assigned to her in a senior-year English...
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Jan 18, 2025
Writing about antitrust law recently, the excellent Holman Jenkins observed that “At best it’s a criminal waste of talent. At worst, it’s deeply worrisome that any...
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Jan 17, 2025
Government spending never enhances economic growth precisely because governments only have money to spend insofar as they have taxable access to private economic activity. In other...
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Jan 16, 2025
It turns out back-scratching is a profession. And a well-paid one at that. So is sleeping, videogame playing, and college sorority consulting. As automation and globalization...
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Jan 15, 2025
Central banks don’t “supply” dollars to cities, states and nations, rather dollars are an automatic effect of production in cities, states and nations. Contrary to...
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Jan 14, 2025
“Congress Didn’t Ban TikTok.” That’s the title of Mike Gallagher’s latest column in the Wall Street Journal. The former congressman from Wisconsin is...
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Jan 13, 2025
Monetarism and neo-Austrian thought aren’t rejections of Keynesianism, rather they’re variants of it.
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Jan 11, 2025
Adam Smith’s observation that “the sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods” cannot be repeated enough. It explains so much, and in particular it explains...
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Jan 10, 2025
They’re libertarians and they don’t know it. That’s long been the view of Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane. It’s what he expressed decades ago to recently...
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Jan 9, 2025
To this day it’s said that mark-to-market (MTM) accounting rules are what caused existential troubles for banks and investment banks back in 2008. It sounds so compelling at...
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Jan 8, 2025
It’s been said before by many inside and outside of science that so-called “global warming" is a good thing. Usually it’s pointed out that warming associates with...
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Jan 7, 2025
Economist Gordon Tullock (1922-2014) once quipped that there was an easy way to create safer conditions on American roads: rather than install seatbelts and air bags, attach a rather...
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Jan 6, 2025
Rules or no rules, what the Fed does really doesn’t matter.
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Jan 4, 2025
The view here is that mass deportation of Mexicans from the United States will ultimately result in quite a few more Mexicans searching for a way to get to the United States than...
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Jan 3, 2025
“The federal government owns a little more than one-fourth of the total land area of the United States. The time is long overdue to consider whether that is the best economic...
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Jan 2, 2025
If you ever want to learn economics, just purchase books about entertainment and sports. It’s that simple. Considering antitrust alone, the whole profession could be put out of...
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Jan 1, 2025
“The greatest fever of all was aspiration, a belief in the sheer possibility to remake a life.” That’s what Evan Osnos wrote in Age of Ambition, his remarkable 2014...