Topic: Economic Trends

How Liberalism Can Survive Left-Right Polarization

– February 19, 2020

We need to form in our minds a beautiful vision of the society and world we want to inhabit, not in its detailed operation like the central planners, and not as an end state like the socialist utopians, but in its ever-evolving institutions that serve human well being above all else.

Economic Trends

Your Pessimism Is Ridiculously Inaccurate

– February 17, 2020

The incessant drumbeat of negativity about the U.S. economy and about globalization – and the blinkered focus on problems (real and only apparent) divorced from the larger context of the economy’s successes and of Americans’ stupendous prosperity – gives us a dangerously inaccurate sense of the state of the economy and of ordinary men’s and women’s relationship to it.

Economic Trends

Are There No Alternatives to Labor Unions?

– February 11, 2020

Do worker-owned labor corporations not exist because they are economically unnecessary or because they have yet to be tried, perhaps due to the long fixation on labor unions?

Economic Trends

The New Totalitarians

– February 10, 2020

Like their Marxian and Nazi forbearers, these new totalitarians look at the world with a fanatical self-righteousness that they have the clear and correct vision of the “true” bases of society’s ills and the only answer for its healing.

Economic Trends

Helping San Francisco’s Homeless One Individual at a Time

– February 5, 2020

“Something must be done about the homeless.” That refrain seems to be the only thing people agree upon with respect to San Francisco’s tragic and intractable homelessness crisis. The city has lurched between the progressive and sometimes tolerant …

Economic Trends

The Mixed Economy Is a Mess

– February 4, 2020

Election years tend to polarize people’s views about political parties, proposed social and economic policies, and the candidates running for high governmental office. This presidential election cycle is not only no different, it is far more so. …

Economic Trends

The US Economy Urgently Needs Repression Easing

– February 3, 2020

Let’s fight the next recession today by ridding ourselves of the collected policy detritus of the past and allow human, financial, and physical capital to flow freely to their most highly valued uses.

Economic Trends

US vs. Denmark: Which Country Wins?

– January 31, 2020

Measured by GDP per capita, Danish-American living standards are 55% higher than their counterparts in Denmark.

Economic Trends, Policy

Maybe It Will Be the Battle of the Billionaires

– January 27, 2020

After many decades of trying to get payola out of politics, there is still no stopping the reality that a big state creates big stakes for which people are willing to pay.

Economic Trends

How Trumpism Swallowed Conservatism

– January 22, 2020

In the summer of 2015, Donald Trump came to FreedomFest in Las Vegas – an event for conservatives and libertarians – as an eccentric outsider. Almost a gate crasher. People wondered why he was there. He presented his message of protectionism and immigr …

Economic Trends, Education

The Academic Truce Has Crumbled

– January 21, 2020

In the late 1960s academia, and particularly the humanities, began to embrace a variety of political causes and incorporate them more overtly into their scholarship. This shift coincided with curricular and intellectual developments that re-envisioned …

Economic Trends

The Adverse Impact of Government Bureaucracy on Private Employment

– January 21, 2020

When I did this video about public-sector compensation almost 10 years ago, I focused on why it is unfair that bureaucrats get much higher levels of compensation than people working in the private sector. Today, let’s cons …