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AIER cuts through the noise of partisan shouting matches with objective, scientific research and principles that lead to sustained economic prosperity and human flourishing. Striving toward a world where all people enjoy the benefits of a truly free society.
Education Issue
The Harwood Economic Review for Fall of 2020. Education during a pandemic.
Housing Remains a Bright Spot for the Economy
“The housing market has become a bright spot for the economy, supported by low interest rates and rising demand as urbanites move to less dense living areas.” – Robert Hughes
Initial Claims for Unemployment Benefits Remain Stubbornly High
“Initial claims for unemployment benefits remain very high, suggesting a slow and uneven economic recovery.” – Robert Hughes
Don’t Be a Party to Parties
“Despite the Founders’ dislike of political faction, critics might retort, we have had political parties since the early 1790s and the economy has grown at modern rates ever since. That is right, but America has managed to grow despite slavery and tariffs and scads of other bad policies enacted by partisans. Think of how rich America would be today without those policy disasters.” ~ Robert E. Wright
Why So Much Science is Wrong, False, Puffed, or Misleading
“The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. ‘The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,’ he writes on the last page, ‘the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.'” ~ Joakim Book
The Fed Can Generate Higher Inflation
“A lack of concern for fiscal discipline by both the U.S. Treasury Secretary and a call for persistent, near zero rates by the Chairman of the Federal Reserve suggests that the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury will act in concert to make the new inflation target a reality. It is not a question of whether the inflation rate will pass 2 percent, but when.” ~ James L. Caton
Top Twenty Lessons I’ve Learned in 2020
“Governments are fully capable of doing the unthinkable, and doing so suddenly with no exit plan, little consideration of cost, and a callous disregard for individual rights.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
Household Net Worth Hits A Record While Government and Corporate Debt Pile Up
“Despite the pandemic, restrictive government policies, and recession, household net worth rebounded to a new record but excessive debt in other sectors is a risk.” – Robert Hughes
The Aristocracy of Pull
“The reader of Political Capitalism will be pulled away from blackboard models of perfect worlds we can imagine, but they will come away with a better understanding of the world we actually inhabit.” ~ Art Carden
The Banning of WeChat and TikTok Is Unbearably Dangerous Politics
“Ultimately what’s happening is irresponsible in addition to unreasonable. Let’s stop penalizing Chinese businesses for having the temerity to operate under less than ideal political conditions. They’re more like we are than most want to admit.” ~ John Tamny
We Must Choose: Liberty or Lockdown
“So let’s stop pretending that our policies have been rational and need to be phased out, as if they once had a purpose. They should have been reversed summarily in March and acknowledged to be a mistake, perpetrated by statisticians with erroneous computer models. Instead we were subject to six months of hell, all beautifully documented by Tucker.” ~ George Gilder
Disease Panic Put Us on a Dangerous Course
“Our civilization is threatened not by this virus, but by deeply flawed reasoning in how it ought to be managed. Unless we make clear to our politicians and our fellow citizens that they are wrong, and that our ability to engage in activities and pursuits that are critical to our well-being is not negotiable, we run the risk of leading this diminished existence for the remainder of our lives.” ~ Jenin Younes
Coase and Covid: The Spectrum
“When we take account of the full costs of lockdowns and related mandates, including the pernicious precedents these inevitably set, it’s clear that the lowest-cost – the best – source of protection against disease such as Covid-19 is personal responsibility.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux & Lyle D. Albaugh
Milton Friedman and the New Attack on Freedom to Choose
“If the paternalistic policies and the ideological arrogance and intolerance behind these counterrevolutionaries against freedom and the free market fully prevail, the liberty that we still possess will be even more greatly curtailed than at present, as those who call for the ‘social responsibility’ of business restrict our remaining freedom to choose.” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
News You Can’t Abuse
“A news outlet that posted a bond with a third party that would be forfeited if it insisted on publishing anything factually wrong, or crossed the line between journalism and punditry, could create the sort of trust that people once had in the New York Times and other papers of record, all of which essentially posted informal bonds backed by their reputations and expected future profitability.” ~ Robert E. Wright
Liberty or Lockdown
“The virus will vanish from the public mind as viruses do: inauspiciously as our clever immune systems incorporate its properties into our internal resistance codes. But we will have another struggle facing us in the years ahead concerning what precisely we are going to tolerate from our state officials and how much of a priority we are going to place on retaining our rights and liberties. This choice is something we must all face in our own lives, and then work to see instantiated in the legal structures of societies we hope can maintain their freedom.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
Free to Choose After Forty Years
“Free to Choose holds up very well even after forty years. Friedman’s analysis still holds, and it’s interesting to see (for example) how the rhetoric of the opposition to educational choice hasn’t really changed. Free to Choose does more than show that freedom works. It explains why, and it does so memorably.” ~ Art Carden
Witchcraft, Leprosy, and Covid: “Power to Harm” as Political Weapon
“Everyone is blaming everyone else for external behaviors — social disapproval eliminates the need for police enforcement — with a targeted goal of perfect compliance. This was set in motion when the government made a bald, difficult-to-disprove assertion — ‘together, we can stop death’ — and built-in a dissent-silencing mechanism: ‘we are trying to save lives, so anyone who disagrees with us is a killer.'” ~ Stacey Rudin
