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Sep 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s murder was a tragedy. “Vital few” (Reuven Brenner) doers on the left, right and in between make the world go ‘round, and Kirk was a member of...
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Sep 16, 2025
The $37 trillion national debt will not be paid for by America’s middle class. How we know this is the $37 trillion in debt itself, along with the accepted truth that soon...
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Sep 15, 2025
Money in circulation is a mirror into production precisely because without production there’s no money circulating.
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Sep 13, 2025
People drive economic growth. Which means President Trump’s problem isn’t the Fed, it’s his own administration’s deportations. Trump wants economic growth,...
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Sep 12, 2025
Doctors are now happening upon ways to regenerate a brain compromised by stroke. Stop and think about that and perhaps read the opening sentence once again. This is quite the...
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Sep 11, 2025
Americans consumed just as much Arab oil during the 1973 OPEC “embargo” as they did before it. By some accounts, they consumed more.
Which is a reminder that if...
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Sep 10, 2025
People are not a burden, nor are they a job taken. See Detroit, MI. The continuous arrival of automotive jobseekers over 100 years ago didn’t shrink work options for...
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Sep 9, 2025
$37 trillion in total debt is a loud, bullish sign that the U.S. is the world’s richest country…by far. But don’t misread what you’ve just read.
The total...
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Sep 8, 2025
Government intervention or central planning that never works during the good times hardly takes on growth-oriented virtue during the supposedly bad.
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Sep 6, 2025
Vaccines are a miracle. Consider maladies like Polio that used to stalk young people if you're skeptical.
Just the same, the miracle of vaccination makes it hard to understand...
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Sep 5, 2025
The Fed can’t increase so-called “money supply.” If what you just read weren’t true, rest assured a never independent Fed would have all manner of programs to...
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Sep 4, 2025
The Marshall Plan was an abject economic failure. And that’s not just because Japan rebuilt itself after WWII without one. The more important truth is that central planning of...
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Sep 3, 2025
“It’s not about driving down the cost of labor.” Those are the words of Lorenzo Pautasso, general manager of RobCo’s U.S. office.
Pautasso conveyed them to...
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Sep 2, 2025
What’s the bigger generational burden: small amounts of annual borrowing to pay for small governmental overages in a nation full of 20 percent taxed middle earners (governments...
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Sep 1, 2025
Saving is not the same as devaluation, contra the conspiracy-addled neo-Austrians.
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Aug 30, 2025
Basic income guarantees won’t define the future, opposite the predictions of more than a few AI visionaries. That’s because what replaces human effort does so by...
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Aug 29, 2025
Quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country? One more quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country populated not just by your own family...
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Aug 28, 2025
The Calendar section in the Los Angeles Times used to be thick Monday through Saturday, and then near book-length on Sundays. So many ads promoting released and soon-to-be-released...
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Aug 27, 2025
What’s firstly puzzling about the right’s Ivy League and Ivy League-adjacent hatred, and the belief that so much of what ails us is an effect of what "they're teaching"...
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Aug 27, 2025
Success doesn’t just happen, and it’s certainly not an effect of governmental decree.
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Aug 26, 2025
California’s debt, currently around $1.6 trillion, is poised to soar in the coming years. Bank on it, though don’t be so simplistic as to blame the debt surge on Governor...
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Aug 25, 2025
Mysticism about the Fed's ability to grow the economy is rooted in a myth that won't die about the Fed causing the Great Depression.
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Aug 23, 2025
“Up north is where we’ve gotten the money for everything – to build houses, to take care of families, to sow in the fields. If they don’t send money, the town...
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Aug 22, 2025
Harvard professor Jason Furman says E.J. Antoni “is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner.” Furman’s view is the consensus, though the latter is frequently...
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Aug 21, 2025
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane long advised staffers to read the New York Times, including me. Many would give him quizzical looks owing to the newspaper’s left lean, but...
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Aug 20, 2025
Donald Trump did it. Did what? He panicked in 2020 over the coronavirus, and downtown D.C. has yet to recover.
More than a few Trump-loving locals (yes, there are more than a few)...
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Aug 19, 2025
It’s August 19, 2025. On August 19, 2035, yields on U.S. Treasuries from the shortest to longest maturities will be lower relative to today. I’ll gladly welcome $1,000...
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Aug 18, 2025
“I want you to know what the risks are, because I still want to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work.” That’s what Jeff Bezos said to Jacklyn and...
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Aug 16, 2025
“High-skilled immigration is key to America’s success.” That’s what Richard Hanania writes at the Cato Institute’s excellent Human Progress page....
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Aug 15, 2025
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane turns 81 today, which is a good time to talk about him and how he has helped to shape how we think, view policy, and ideally how we will vote in...
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Aug 14, 2025
It’s a wealth-losing shame of enormous proportions that Social Security will never go insolvent. It will cost the typical American millions in retirement wealth.
Yes, the...
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Aug 13, 2025
How to get rich? The single best way is to live a long time, ideally working much of that time while amassing savings that compound, and compound some more. The vast majority of...
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Aug 12, 2025
The federal debt will soar in the coming decades. The previous truth can be found in the monolithic nature of the proposed debt solutions.
Harvard’s Greg Mankiw is hardly alone...
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Aug 11, 2025
Economists are most effective at being irrelevant.
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Aug 9, 2025
“Recession” is a relative concept. For instance, when the U.S. economy contracts such that Americans merely tighten their belts, hundreds of millions around the world...
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Aug 8, 2025
Of course the Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) is wrong about levels of employment or lack thereof. How could it be right? Precisely because employment figures are valuable within the...
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Aug 7, 2025
Taxes are routinely awful, and annually unearth dread in all of us as we cower before Congress’s outsourced tax collector (the IRS). We do so while trying to grasp the meaning...
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Aug 6, 2025
Kevin Warsh is married to the daughter of Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire. Warsh himself earns enormous sums on the speaking circuit, he’s got a top designation at one...
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Aug 5, 2025
Human beings are inputs, but birthrates don’t matter. The latter is evidence that two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time.
Economists and politicians fear...
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Aug 4, 2025
The idea that Jerome Powell, his lieutenants, and hundreds of egghead economists under them could engineer “price” anything is too silly for words.
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Aug 2, 2025
“We are living in a moment of existential dread and alienation caused by the savagery of social media, the ugliness of our politics, the AI takeover, our melting planet, a...
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Aug 1, 2025
I was living at 537 W. Deming in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago in the summer of 1995. The address and city rate mention because that summer Chicago suffered one of those brutal...
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Jul 31, 2025
GDP is a worthless calculation. It goes down as imports increase, it goes up as government spending does, and it increases not due to productivity, but if production of any kind has...
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Jul 30, 2025
Silicon Valley VC legend Don Valentine purchased a 33% stake in Cisco decades ago for $2.5 million. Cisco is one of the many great investments made by the VCs at Sequoia Capital, and...
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Jul 29, 2025
“First, and most obviously, the U.S. government’s fiscal situation is very bad, getting worse, and driven mainly by unsustainable entitlement programs that...
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Jul 29, 2025
Responding to me, Duke professor Michael Munger writes that, “If the real hawks like John Tamny get their way [full SALT deduction], with the cap going up to $100,000 or more,...
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Jul 28, 2025
Americans don’t require their government to secure them investment. The world lines up to invest in U.S. genius not because presidents or Commerce Departments enter deals with...
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Jul 28, 2025
While they’re no longer at the central bank, their ideas about inflation remain.
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Jul 26, 2025
Americans loathe lines. See their disdain for the gasoline lines of the 1970s, and that were an effect of price controls naively meant to contain the cruel effects of a devalued...
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Jul 25, 2025
I’ve never been a fan of Paris. To read about Paris is to read about its beauty, charm and sophistication, but when I first visited in 1998, it struck me as rundown, dirty, and...
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Jul 24, 2025
The Illinois Policy Institute’s Brad Weisentein wrote at RealClearMarkets last week that there are at least 32,000 former government workers in the state of Illinois who can...
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Jul 23, 2025
Nvidia’s valuation reached the $4 trillion mark recently, and co-founder Jensen Huang’s shares are now worth something like $143 billion. Present and future retirees...
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Jul 22, 2025
Do Bagladesh, Haiti and Peru have Medicare-style programs soon to cost $1 trillion annually? Hopefully the question quickly answers itself.
Ideally it also answers Washington Post...
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Jul 21, 2025
Watch out for individuals so willing to say anything to attain status and rank.
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Jul 19, 2025
Remember “costless” credit? Neither do I, neither do you the reader, neither does Elon Musk. As Walter Isaacson’s biography of the world’s richest man makes...
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Jul 18, 2025
Charlie Munger famously said, “It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be...
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Jul 18, 2025
The Trump administration’s expressed desire to “beat” China in the AI race was the path to the U.S. falling hopelessly behind. That’s why the meeting...
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Jul 17, 2025
Government spending amounts to the central planning of precious resources by politicians. Worse, it amounts to the warping of the people and businesses on which it's spent precisely...
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Jul 16, 2025
There’s no retirement crisis. Those promoting the notion that Americans don’t have enough money to retire will eventually regret their expressed pessimism.
Contemplate...
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Jul 15, 2025
Money is ruthless. The genius of compounding confirms the previous truth. This rates mention as economists Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray promote the fiction that U.S....
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Jul 14, 2025
The critiques of dollar-price stability are more than simple to dismiss.
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Jul 12, 2025
“She was never some algorithm trying to give us more of what it thinks we want, or something driven by A.I. She was a person who judged and decided based on her own haughty...
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Jul 11, 2025
“Without broader hiring reforms, proto right-wing employees will continue to control big business. Several states are trying to dictate what conservative executives should and...
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Jul 10, 2025
Texas should institute a state income tax. So should Florida and Tennessee, along with all U.S. states that presently don’t have an income tax. Please read on.
This is...
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Jul 9, 2025
What keeps the CEOs of financial institutions awake at night? One or two errant employees out of tens of thousands can bring down the franchise.
What robs financial institution...
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Jul 8, 2025
“This is clearly a shift in budget accounting that will clear the path to ballooning the debt now, but will also create a precedent that will be used over and over and over...
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Jul 7, 2025
The Fed is an outsourced creation of Congress whose officials are appointed by presidents and confirmed by Congress. Of course it’s political. It can only be political.
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Jul 5, 2025
It's so easily forgotten that people aren’t a cost. They’re an input, always and everywhere, and this truth won’t lose any validity as robots proliferate. Quite the...
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Jul 4, 2025
A show about a charismatic chef? Who would watch that? Those are two questions formerly asked by studio executives far more than most will ever realize.
Evidence supporting the above...
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Jul 3, 2025
West Virginia must be rich, right? All that federal money that flows there year after year. Hopefully readers see the obvious flaw, or contradiction.
Government spending saps...
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Jul 2, 2025
If Zohran Mamdani could “ruin” New York City, then it wouldn’t be worth saving. And New York City doesn’t require saving, except to the willfully blind.
What...
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Jul 1, 2025
“You can spin your political base, but you cannot spin the economy or the bond market. Those two are unforgiving – and eventually voters might be too.” Those are...
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Jun 30, 2025
Markets are powerful, and to say they can overcome central plans insults understatement.
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Jun 28, 2025
Immigration to the U.S. is by its name a wage positive. It’s tautological. Higher wages are what instigate immigration, so to pretend as some do that the arrival of immigrants...
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Jun 27, 2025
"You know, people think that because I'm Mike Nichols, I don't need praise. I need a lot. Nobody gets that." The previous quote comes from Mark Harris’s excellent 2020...
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Jun 26, 2025
Orforglipron is an oral drug from Eli Lilly that’s in trial stage. The New York Times reports that in a trial of over 500 patients, those “who took the highest dose lost...
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Jun 25, 2025
Let’s start with the obvious, now and in the future Social Security payments aren’t remotely imperiled. It’s said here over and over again, but rates saying once...
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Jun 24, 2025
“Balanced budgets” have nothing to do with limited government. Neither does a budget surplus. As with most notions crafted by economists and the budgetary scolds...
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Jun 23, 2025
Money in circulation mirrors production. Reduced money in circulation didn’t cause the 1930s, rather it was an effect of awful policy.
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Jun 23, 2025
The C grade Fred Smith received from a Yale professor about his vision for an overnight delivery service is much less remarkable than is assumed. Naturally Smith got a C. Rest...
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Jun 21, 2025
Central planning fails, always and everywhere. Leo Tolstoy wasn’t the first to see this, but he provided readers with one of the best articulations of the previous truth in War...
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Jun 20, 2025
Buc-ee’s, the creator of the world’s greatest gas/charging stations and accompanying convenience stores that are beyond football field length, doesn’t need a law to...
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Jun 19, 2025
Donald Trump’s policies aren’t what won him a majority of voters in the most recent election, or a majority of electoral votes in 2016. More realistically, it was Donald...
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Jun 18, 2025
Temu is a low-cost online marketplace that has had the temerity to achieve popularity with American buyers while also being Chinese. In response to Temu’s achievements in the...
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Jun 18, 2025
Do you take Amazon or Walmart dollars? In the question it’s easy to see the problem with bitcoin, and other well-known speculations. People aren’t prone to storing their...
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Jun 17, 2025
It’s easy to forget that individual saving in no way shrinks consumption. Short of placing money saved into a coffee can, to save is to shift consumptive ability to someone...
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Jun 16, 2025
Great companies drive equity returns, and the world's savings follow great companies.
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Jun 14, 2025
Most – including the writer of this opinion piece - listen to music in the way they watch football. They don’t hear the important, truly cerebral things in music in much...
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Jun 13, 2025
Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has always been of the view that “democracy” must be extraordinarily limited. It should be a device for removing highly objectionable...
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Jun 12, 2025
Lots of people think Vladimir Putin is a detestable human being, but not all who disdain Putin think the U.S. should side with Ukraine in its war with Putin’s Russia.
Sen....
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Jun 11, 2025
Maya MacGuineas has been crying wolf for years, and likely decades. She’s always been wrong not because she’s evil, or because she isn’t bright, but because she...
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Jun 11, 2025
The New York Times reported last week that Legend Biotech has developed a potential cure for the incurable and brutally painful disease known as multiple myeloma.
It raises a...
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Jun 10, 2025
Amid the worst stretch of the global political panic over the coronavirus, the U.N.’s World Food Program estimated that 285 million of the world’s poorest were on a rapid...
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Jun 9, 2025
Why does the towering conceit of central bankers routinely get a pass?
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Jun 7, 2025
Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse writes that “the nation’s top private universities remain delusional about the dozens of reasons a large and growing share of the public...
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Jun 6, 2025
The rain was heavy for parts of last weekend in the Washington, D.C. area. Seeing it coming down in sheets, it got me thinking about how people used to live. How awful it must have...
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Jun 5, 2025
Social Security is not going insolvent. Not now, and not in ten years. Write it down and do so confidently.
The surest sign insolvency in no way looms in Social...
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Jun 4, 2025
New York Times reporters Ben Casselman and Colby Smith wrote on A1 yesterday that “There is a basic rule of thumb when it comes to the federal budget. The government should...
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Jun 3, 2025
Government spending saps economic growth, which is no insight. Instead, it’s just a comment that the centralized and politicized allocation of goods, services and labor in...
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Jun 2, 2025
The Fed is being treated as the adult in the room relative to Trump’s much-ridiculed child. Why?
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May 31, 2025
Taiwan Semiconductor founder Morris Chang is known to be skeptical about the TSMC plant in Arizona. Not only will it be incredibly challenging to reproduce stateside what TSMC has in...
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May 30, 2025
The world becomes more amazing by the day. The surest evidence of the previous assertion is that wealth inequality continues to soar.
Yes, you read that right. Inequality is a...
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May 29, 2025
Do you prefer to lend to those who will pay you back? No need to answer.
As repeated with great regularity in my upcoming book, The Deficit Delusion, money is ruthless. It must be...
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May 28, 2025
Who was Norm Peterson? You’re aging yourself if you know the answer to the question. More realistically, you aged yourself by clicking on an opinion piece with “Norm...
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May 28, 2025
Quick, how many right-wing or populist MAGA types got their news from CNN during the Biden administration? Tick tock, tick tock?
Quick, how many left-wing or Biden types got their...
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May 27, 2025
Debt is an effect of wealth, not desperation. That’s true for individuals and corporations, but also governments. The power of compounding vivifies this truth, and explains why...
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May 26, 2025
Oh, the conceit! Oh, the empty, information-bereft commentary.
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May 24, 2025
The more that kids can cheat thanks to AI advances, the better education will become. Yes, you read that right. No need to read it again. AI-enabled cheating on homework, term papers...
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May 23, 2025
In Men at Work, George Will observed that “The history of baseball is littered with stories of failures by players who thought that their natural physical endowments would be...
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May 22, 2025
People in Texas pay taxes too. So do workers in Florida, Tennessee and other states that don’t impose an income tax. This has seemingly been forgotten in the ongoing debate...
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May 22, 2025
Meta used to be Facebook. Why state the obvious? The answer is that what’s obvious very much calls into question the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta, the corporation...
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May 21, 2025
“Rising yields on the back of the U.S. credit downgrade is indicative of what will occur if Washington does not curb its appetite for unsustainable spending and low...
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May 20, 2025
Low and falling birthrates are not an economic threat. Not remotely. The latter is not a Malthusian or Paul Ehrlich-ian statement as much as it’s a statement about production....
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May 19, 2025
Letting an objective, market measure of the dollar tell the inflation tale of Presidents Trump and Biden.
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May 17, 2025
Immigrants are almost monolithically poor, but they have the mindset of a rich person. That's why they're immigrants. They want better, and will do what it takes to get...
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May 16, 2025
It’s so easy to forget that Congress taxes us not so that it can stare at our money, but to spend it. Which means every dollar Congress extracts in taxes is an extra dollar of...
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May 15, 2025
“We wouldn’t be where we are without Mike.” The Mike referenced was the one and only Michael Milken, but what was said about Milken could have realistically been...
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May 14, 2025
Reps. Nick LaLota, Andrew Garbarino, Elise Stefanik, and Michael Lawler, four House Republicans, are holding up the extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Good for...
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May 13, 2025
“What will you say about Trump and his tariffs if he gets high-tariff countries to zero?” Trump supporters have asked the previous question endless times since...
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May 12, 2025
No president will elude the agony of a weak dollar.
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May 10, 2025
“A couple employees left for the rest of the day. They were pretty rattled.” Those were the words of multi-restaurant owner and Georgetown Events Hospitality Group...
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May 9, 2025
From the minute the money is spent, government spending slows economic growth. That’s because central planning of resources is central planning of resources.
That government...
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May 8, 2025
“You better let me take this. They’d never believe it coming from you.” That’s legendary New York Times editor R.W. Apple at the end of a particularly...
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May 7, 2025
He may still turn things around, but it’s a shame about President Trump and the economy. All he had to do was nothing, and what they refer to as "the economy" would be soaring...
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May 6, 2025
"Macroeconomics” purpports to break “economies” down to cities, states, and countries. Remember this as economists react with horror to President Trump’s...
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May 5, 2025
Markets just are. They’re a mirror.
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May 3, 2025
Noah Smith led off his recent “apology” to libertarians with a truncated list of things he’s long disagreed with libertarians about. For instance, he claims...
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May 2, 2025
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a worthless number. The previous truth isn’t a defense of Donald Trump after the 0.3% Q1 GDP decline. Instead, it’s a defense of reason...
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May 1, 2025
“For as long as cancer treatment has existed, ‘cutting it out has been the best way to cure it.’” Those are the words of Washington Post reporter Kim...
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May 1, 2025
Politicians regularly find themselves looking, and "solving," backwards. Think Rep. John James, and his newly introduced App Store Accountability Act. As opposed to a solution...
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Apr 30, 2025
“It took four decades for the top 0.00001% of Americans’ share of total U.S. household wealth to grow from 0.1% in 1982 – when 11 households made up that rarefied...
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Apr 29, 2025
Particularly amid the economic difficulties brought on by President Trump’s tariffs, there’s growing urgency within the Republican Party to mitigate the tariff damage...
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Apr 28, 2025
The EU is soon to intimately understand a truth too often lost on politicians and regulators: the only closed economy is the world economy. This will become apparent in the aftermath...
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Apr 28, 2025
For Powell to give the Fed a role in mitigating Trump’s expressed economic ignorance reveals Powell as Trump’s equal on the matter of economics, and equally delusional.
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Apr 26, 2025
There are no sacred cows in Las Vegas. That’s the source of the city's immense prosperity. The past and present are relentlessly pushed aside to make room for the future.
In...
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Apr 25, 2025
In their recent Wall Street Journal essay, George Gilder and Gale Pooley called for a “time-price index, or TPI.” They crucially reminded readers that “while we buy...
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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
Alabama’s politicians are arrogantly substituting themselves for Alabama’s parents.
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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 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...
Sep 17, 2025Charlie Kirk’s murder was a tragedy. “Vital few” (Reuven Brenner) doers on the left, right and in between make the world go ‘round, and Kirk was a member of...
Sep 16, 2025The $37 trillion national debt will not be paid for by America’s middle class. How we know this is the $37 trillion in debt itself, along with the accepted truth that soon...
Sep 15, 2025Money in circulation is a mirror into production precisely because without production there’s no money circulating.
Sep 13, 2025People drive economic growth. Which means President Trump’s problem isn’t the Fed, it’s his own administration’s deportations. Trump wants economic growth,...
Sep 12, 2025Doctors are now happening upon ways to regenerate a brain compromised by stroke. Stop and think about that and perhaps read the opening sentence once again. This is quite the...
Sep 11, 2025Americans consumed just as much Arab oil during the 1973 OPEC “embargo” as they did before it. By some accounts, they consumed more. Which is a reminder that if...
Sep 10, 2025People are not a burden, nor are they a job taken. See Detroit, MI. The continuous arrival of automotive jobseekers over 100 years ago didn’t shrink work options for...
Sep 9, 2025$37 trillion in total debt is a loud, bullish sign that the U.S. is the world’s richest country…by far. But don’t misread what you’ve just read. The total...
Sep 8, 2025Government intervention or central planning that never works during the good times hardly takes on growth-oriented virtue during the supposedly bad.
Sep 6, 2025Vaccines are a miracle. Consider maladies like Polio that used to stalk young people if you're skeptical. Just the same, the miracle of vaccination makes it hard to understand...
Sep 5, 2025The Fed can’t increase so-called “money supply.” If what you just read weren’t true, rest assured a never independent Fed would have all manner of programs to...
Sep 4, 2025The Marshall Plan was an abject economic failure. And that’s not just because Japan rebuilt itself after WWII without one. The more important truth is that central planning of...
Sep 3, 2025“It’s not about driving down the cost of labor.” Those are the words of Lorenzo Pautasso, general manager of RobCo’s U.S. office. Pautasso conveyed them to...
Sep 2, 2025What’s the bigger generational burden: small amounts of annual borrowing to pay for small governmental overages in a nation full of 20 percent taxed middle earners (governments...
Sep 1, 2025Saving is not the same as devaluation, contra the conspiracy-addled neo-Austrians.
Aug 30, 2025Basic income guarantees won’t define the future, opposite the predictions of more than a few AI visionaries. That’s because what replaces human effort does so by...
Aug 29, 2025Quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country? One more quick question: would you order the bombing of an enemy country populated not just by your own family...
Aug 27, 2025What’s firstly puzzling about the right’s Ivy League and Ivy League-adjacent hatred, and the belief that so much of what ails us is an effect of what "they're teaching"...
Aug 27, 2025Success doesn’t just happen, and it’s certainly not an effect of governmental decree.
Aug 26, 2025California’s debt, currently around $1.6 trillion, is poised to soar in the coming years. Bank on it, though don’t be so simplistic as to blame the debt surge on Governor...
Aug 23, 2025“Up north is where we’ve gotten the money for everything – to build houses, to take care of families, to sow in the fields. If they don’t send money, the town...
Aug 22, 2025Harvard professor Jason Furman says E.J. Antoni “is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner.” Furman’s view is the consensus, though the latter is frequently...
Aug 20, 2025Donald Trump did it. Did what? He panicked in 2020 over the coronavirus, and downtown D.C. has yet to recover. More than a few Trump-loving locals (yes, there are more than a few)...
Aug 18, 2025“I want you to know what the risks are, because I still want to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work.” That’s what Jeff Bezos said to Jacklyn and...
Aug 16, 2025“High-skilled immigration is key to America’s success.” That’s what Richard Hanania writes at the Cato Institute’s excellent Human Progress page....
Aug 15, 2025Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane turns 81 today, which is a good time to talk about him and how he has helped to shape how we think, view policy, and ideally how we will vote in...
Aug 14, 2025It’s a wealth-losing shame of enormous proportions that Social Security will never go insolvent. It will cost the typical American millions in retirement wealth. Yes, the...
Aug 13, 2025How to get rich? The single best way is to live a long time, ideally working much of that time while amassing savings that compound, and compound some more. The vast majority of...
Aug 12, 2025The federal debt will soar in the coming decades. The previous truth can be found in the monolithic nature of the proposed debt solutions. Harvard’s Greg Mankiw is hardly alone...
Aug 11, 2025Economists are most effective at being irrelevant.
Aug 9, 2025“Recession” is a relative concept. For instance, when the U.S. economy contracts such that Americans merely tighten their belts, hundreds of millions around the world...
Aug 8, 2025Of course the Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) is wrong about levels of employment or lack thereof. How could it be right? Precisely because employment figures are valuable within the...
Aug 7, 2025Taxes are routinely awful, and annually unearth dread in all of us as we cower before Congress’s outsourced tax collector (the IRS). We do so while trying to grasp the meaning...
Aug 6, 2025Kevin Warsh is married to the daughter of Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire. Warsh himself earns enormous sums on the speaking circuit, he’s got a top designation at one...
Aug 5, 2025Human beings are inputs, but birthrates don’t matter. The latter is evidence that two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time. Economists and politicians fear...
Aug 4, 2025The idea that Jerome Powell, his lieutenants, and hundreds of egghead economists under them could engineer “price” anything is too silly for words.
Aug 2, 2025“We are living in a moment of existential dread and alienation caused by the savagery of social media, the ugliness of our politics, the AI takeover, our melting planet, a...
Jul 31, 2025GDP is a worthless calculation. It goes down as imports increase, it goes up as government spending does, and it increases not due to productivity, but if production of any kind has...
Jul 30, 2025Silicon Valley VC legend Don Valentine purchased a 33% stake in Cisco decades ago for $2.5 million. Cisco is one of the many great investments made by the VCs at Sequoia Capital, and...
Jul 29, 2025Responding to me, Duke professor Michael Munger writes that, “If the real hawks like John Tamny get their way [full SALT deduction], with the cap going up to $100,000 or more,...
Jul 28, 2025Americans don’t require their government to secure them investment. The world lines up to invest in U.S. genius not because presidents or Commerce Departments enter deals with...
Jul 28, 2025While they’re no longer at the central bank, their ideas about inflation remain.
Jul 26, 2025Americans loathe lines. See their disdain for the gasoline lines of the 1970s, and that were an effect of price controls naively meant to contain the cruel effects of a devalued...
Jul 24, 2025The Illinois Policy Institute’s Brad Weisentein wrote at RealClearMarkets last week that there are at least 32,000 former government workers in the state of Illinois who can...
Jul 23, 2025Nvidia’s valuation reached the $4 trillion mark recently, and co-founder Jensen Huang’s shares are now worth something like $143 billion. Present and future retirees...
Jul 22, 2025Do Bagladesh, Haiti and Peru have Medicare-style programs soon to cost $1 trillion annually? Hopefully the question quickly answers itself. Ideally it also answers Washington Post...
Jul 21, 2025Watch out for individuals so willing to say anything to attain status and rank.
Jul 19, 2025Remember “costless” credit? Neither do I, neither do you the reader, neither does Elon Musk. As Walter Isaacson’s biography of the world’s richest man makes...
Jul 18, 2025The Trump administration’s expressed desire to “beat” China in the AI race was the path to the U.S. falling hopelessly behind. That’s why the meeting...
Jul 17, 2025Government spending amounts to the central planning of precious resources by politicians. Worse, it amounts to the warping of the people and businesses on which it's spent precisely...
Jul 16, 2025There’s no retirement crisis. Those promoting the notion that Americans don’t have enough money to retire will eventually regret their expressed pessimism. Contemplate...
Jul 15, 2025Money is ruthless. The genius of compounding confirms the previous truth. This rates mention as economists Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray promote the fiction that U.S....
Jul 14, 2025The critiques of dollar-price stability are more than simple to dismiss.
Jul 12, 2025“She was never some algorithm trying to give us more of what it thinks we want, or something driven by A.I. She was a person who judged and decided based on her own haughty...
Jul 10, 2025Texas should institute a state income tax. So should Florida and Tennessee, along with all U.S. states that presently don’t have an income tax. Please read on. This is...
Jul 9, 2025What keeps the CEOs of financial institutions awake at night? One or two errant employees out of tens of thousands can bring down the franchise. What robs financial institution...
Jul 8, 2025“This is clearly a shift in budget accounting that will clear the path to ballooning the debt now, but will also create a precedent that will be used over and over and over...
Jul 7, 2025The Fed is an outsourced creation of Congress whose officials are appointed by presidents and confirmed by Congress. Of course it’s political. It can only be political.
Jul 5, 2025It's so easily forgotten that people aren’t a cost. They’re an input, always and everywhere, and this truth won’t lose any validity as robots proliferate. Quite the...
Jul 4, 2025A show about a charismatic chef? Who would watch that? Those are two questions formerly asked by studio executives far more than most will ever realize. Evidence supporting the above...
Jul 3, 2025West Virginia must be rich, right? All that federal money that flows there year after year. Hopefully readers see the obvious flaw, or contradiction. Government spending saps...
Jul 2, 2025If Zohran Mamdani could “ruin” New York City, then it wouldn’t be worth saving. And New York City doesn’t require saving, except to the willfully blind. What...
Jul 1, 2025“You can spin your political base, but you cannot spin the economy or the bond market. Those two are unforgiving – and eventually voters might be too.” Those are...
Jun 30, 2025Markets are powerful, and to say they can overcome central plans insults understatement.
Jun 28, 2025Immigration to the U.S. is by its name a wage positive. It’s tautological. Higher wages are what instigate immigration, so to pretend as some do that the arrival of immigrants...
Jun 26, 2025Orforglipron is an oral drug from Eli Lilly that’s in trial stage. The New York Times reports that in a trial of over 500 patients, those “who took the highest dose lost...
Jun 25, 2025Let’s start with the obvious, now and in the future Social Security payments aren’t remotely imperiled. It’s said here over and over again, but rates saying once...
Jun 23, 2025Money in circulation mirrors production. Reduced money in circulation didn’t cause the 1930s, rather it was an effect of awful policy.
Jun 23, 2025The C grade Fred Smith received from a Yale professor about his vision for an overnight delivery service is much less remarkable than is assumed. Naturally Smith got a C. Rest...
Jun 21, 2025Central planning fails, always and everywhere. Leo Tolstoy wasn’t the first to see this, but he provided readers with one of the best articulations of the previous truth in War...
Jun 20, 2025Buc-ee’s, the creator of the world’s greatest gas/charging stations and accompanying convenience stores that are beyond football field length, doesn’t need a law to...
Jun 19, 2025Donald Trump’s policies aren’t what won him a majority of voters in the most recent election, or a majority of electoral votes in 2016. More realistically, it was Donald...
Jun 18, 2025Temu is a low-cost online marketplace that has had the temerity to achieve popularity with American buyers while also being Chinese. In response to Temu’s achievements in the...
Jun 18, 2025Do you take Amazon or Walmart dollars? In the question it’s easy to see the problem with bitcoin, and other well-known speculations. People aren’t prone to storing their...
Jun 17, 2025It’s easy to forget that individual saving in no way shrinks consumption. Short of placing money saved into a coffee can, to save is to shift consumptive ability to someone...
Jun 16, 2025Great companies drive equity returns, and the world's savings follow great companies.
Jun 14, 2025Most – including the writer of this opinion piece - listen to music in the way they watch football. They don’t hear the important, truly cerebral things in music in much...
Jun 12, 2025Lots of people think Vladimir Putin is a detestable human being, but not all who disdain Putin think the U.S. should side with Ukraine in its war with Putin’s Russia. Sen....
Jun 11, 2025Maya MacGuineas has been crying wolf for years, and likely decades. She’s always been wrong not because she’s evil, or because she isn’t bright, but because she...
Jun 11, 2025The New York Times reported last week that Legend Biotech has developed a potential cure for the incurable and brutally painful disease known as multiple myeloma. It raises a...
Jun 10, 2025Amid the worst stretch of the global political panic over the coronavirus, the U.N.’s World Food Program estimated that 285 million of the world’s poorest were on a rapid...
Jun 9, 2025Why does the towering conceit of central bankers routinely get a pass?
Jun 7, 2025Former Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse writes that “the nation’s top private universities remain delusional about the dozens of reasons a large and growing share of the public...
Jun 4, 2025New York Times reporters Ben Casselman and Colby Smith wrote on A1 yesterday that “There is a basic rule of thumb when it comes to the federal budget. The government should...
Jun 3, 2025Government spending saps economic growth, which is no insight. Instead, it’s just a comment that the centralized and politicized allocation of goods, services and labor in...
Jun 2, 2025The Fed is being treated as the adult in the room relative to Trump’s much-ridiculed child. Why?
May 31, 2025Taiwan Semiconductor founder Morris Chang is known to be skeptical about the TSMC plant in Arizona. Not only will it be incredibly challenging to reproduce stateside what TSMC has in...
May 29, 2025Do you prefer to lend to those who will pay you back? No need to answer. As repeated with great regularity in my upcoming book, The Deficit Delusion, money is ruthless. It must be...
May 28, 2025Who was Norm Peterson? You’re aging yourself if you know the answer to the question. More realistically, you aged yourself by clicking on an opinion piece with “Norm...
May 28, 2025Quick, how many right-wing or populist MAGA types got their news from CNN during the Biden administration? Tick tock, tick tock? Quick, how many left-wing or Biden types got their...
May 27, 2025Debt is an effect of wealth, not desperation. That’s true for individuals and corporations, but also governments. The power of compounding vivifies this truth, and explains why...
May 26, 2025Oh, the conceit! Oh, the empty, information-bereft commentary.
May 24, 2025The more that kids can cheat thanks to AI advances, the better education will become. Yes, you read that right. No need to read it again. AI-enabled cheating on homework, term papers...
May 22, 2025People in Texas pay taxes too. So do workers in Florida, Tennessee and other states that don’t impose an income tax. This has seemingly been forgotten in the ongoing debate...
May 22, 2025Meta used to be Facebook. Why state the obvious? The answer is that what’s obvious very much calls into question the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta, the corporation...
May 20, 2025Low and falling birthrates are not an economic threat. Not remotely. The latter is not a Malthusian or Paul Ehrlich-ian statement as much as it’s a statement about production....
May 19, 2025Letting an objective, market measure of the dollar tell the inflation tale of Presidents Trump and Biden.
May 17, 2025Immigrants are almost monolithically poor, but they have the mindset of a rich person. That's why they're immigrants. They want better, and will do what it takes to get...
May 16, 2025It’s so easy to forget that Congress taxes us not so that it can stare at our money, but to spend it. Which means every dollar Congress extracts in taxes is an extra dollar of...
May 14, 2025Reps. Nick LaLota, Andrew Garbarino, Elise Stefanik, and Michael Lawler, four House Republicans, are holding up the extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Good for...
May 13, 2025“What will you say about Trump and his tariffs if he gets high-tariff countries to zero?” Trump supporters have asked the previous question endless times since...
May 12, 2025No president will elude the agony of a weak dollar.
May 10, 2025“A couple employees left for the rest of the day. They were pretty rattled.” Those were the words of multi-restaurant owner and Georgetown Events Hospitality Group...
May 9, 2025From the minute the money is spent, government spending slows economic growth. That’s because central planning of resources is central planning of resources. That government...
May 6, 2025"Macroeconomics” purpports to break “economies” down to cities, states, and countries. Remember this as economists react with horror to President Trump’s...
May 3, 2025Noah Smith led off his recent “apology” to libertarians with a truncated list of things he’s long disagreed with libertarians about. For instance, he claims...
May 2, 2025Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a worthless number. The previous truth isn’t a defense of Donald Trump after the 0.3% Q1 GDP decline. Instead, it’s a defense of reason...
May 1, 2025“For as long as cancer treatment has existed, ‘cutting it out has been the best way to cure it.’” Those are the words of Washington Post reporter Kim...
May 1, 2025Politicians regularly find themselves looking, and "solving," backwards. Think Rep. John James, and his newly introduced App Store Accountability Act. As opposed to a solution...
Apr 30, 2025“It took four decades for the top 0.00001% of Americans’ share of total U.S. household wealth to grow from 0.1% in 1982 – when 11 households made up that rarefied...
Apr 28, 2025The EU is soon to intimately understand a truth too often lost on politicians and regulators: the only closed economy is the world economy. This will become apparent in the aftermath...
Apr 28, 2025For Powell to give the Fed a role in mitigating Trump’s expressed economic ignorance reveals Powell as Trump’s equal on the matter of economics, and equally delusional.
Apr 26, 2025There are no sacred cows in Las Vegas. That’s the source of the city's immense prosperity. The past and present are relentlessly pushed aside to make room for the future. In...
Apr 25, 2025In their recent Wall Street Journal essay, George Gilder and Gale Pooley called for a “time-price index, or TPI.” They crucially reminded readers that “while we buy...
Apr 24, 2025It 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...
Apr 23, 2025Alabama’s politicians are arrogantly substituting themselves for Alabama’s parents.
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,...
Apr 22, 2025The 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...
Apr 21, 2025While 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...
Apr 21, 2025Markets are powerful, they always speak, and they’ll overrun central bankers including those at the Fed.
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...
Apr 18, 2025When 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...
Apr 16, 2025The 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...
Apr 15, 2025With 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...
Apr 15, 2025Jobs 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....
Apr 14, 2025What's constant and that reflects reality for it being constant can't be adjusted on the assumption of inconstancy.
Apr 12, 2025There’s foolish and then there’s macroeconomics. Macroeconomics insults foolish. Was “economics” always this dense? Acknowledging that there’s no...
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...
Apr 9, 2025Rationalizing 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,...
Apr 8, 2025Before 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...
Apr 7, 2025To hide behind “economists” as a reason for disliking anything is to frequently misunderstand your argument and to kill your argument before you’ve begun.
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...
Apr 4, 2025Debt 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...
Apr 3, 2025President 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...
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...
Mar 31, 2025Markets work around government stabs at price controls, and invariably tell the truth.
Mar 29, 2025Right 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...
Mar 27, 2025History 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...
Mar 26, 2025They 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...
Mar 25, 2025Microsoft 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...
Mar 24, 2025Money is an effect of wealth. Nothing else.
Mar 22, 2025On 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...
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...
Mar 18, 2025It’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...
Mar 18, 2025Google 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...
Mar 15, 2025When 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...
Mar 14, 2025Businesses 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...
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...
Mar 12, 2025A 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...
Mar 11, 2025Milton 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...
Mar 10, 2025How can these private monies replace the dollar when their value is measured in dollars?
Mar 8, 2025When 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...
Mar 7, 2025In 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...
Mar 6, 2025Panicky 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...
Mar 5, 2025Apple 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...
Mar 4, 2025A 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...
Mar 3, 2025Prices are how a market economy organizes itself, and as such are not meant to be tamed by government.
Feb 25, 2025100% 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...
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...
Feb 21, 2025Roughly 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,...
Feb 19, 2025When 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...
Feb 18, 2025The 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,...
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...
Feb 14, 2025If 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...
Feb 12, 2025Price 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...
Feb 11, 2025Amazon 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...
Feb 10, 2025With 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.
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...
Feb 7, 2025Despite 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...
Feb 6, 2025Ten 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...
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...
Feb 3, 2025If the Fed could prop up stocks, stocks wouldn't be worth buying.
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...
Jan 31, 2025Compensation 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...
Jan 30, 2025Highly 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...
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...
Jan 28, 2025Oil 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...
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...
Jan 23, 2025North 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
Jan 22, 2025Washington 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...
Jan 21, 2025Jack 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...
Jan 20, 2025Production is a tautological signal of money in circulation, not the existence of central banks, mints, Treasuries or monetary authorities more broadly.
Jan 18, 2025Writing 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...
Jan 17, 2025Government 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...
Jan 16, 2025It 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...
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...
Jan 11, 2025Adam 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...
Jan 9, 2025To 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...
Jan 8, 2025It’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...
Jan 7, 2025Economist 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...
Jan 4, 2025The 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...
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...