Public Debt Got a Lot Worse from The Great Recession to The Great Lockdown
The 2020 recession, which many countries are still going through, now has an “official” name: the Great Lockdown. In economic terms, the public sector’s response in practically all countries has been very swift and bold (which is not necessarily a good thing).1 This
What Igbo Culture Teaches Us about Capitalism
The Igbos are one of many ethnic groups within Africa. They consist of about 43 million people, 40 million of whom live within Nigeria. They are widely successful in Nigeria and are considered by many to be the "Jews of West Africa," partly
Mises on Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Right of Self-Determination
For Mises, liberalism first emerged and expressed itself in the nineteenth century as a political movement in the form of “peaceful nationalism.” Its two fundamental principles were freedom or, more concretely, “the right of self-determination of peoples” and national unity
Biden’s Jobs Plan: How Some Jobs Destroy Wealth
It seems that every time something adverse happens in the labor market, it restarts the partisan battle between those currently in and out of power as to who is a better steward of the economy. That was illustrated by the Bureau
Monetary and Fiscal “Stimulus” Is Undermining the Global Recovery
Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies have gone into overdrive all over the world since the beginning of the pandemic. This raises the obvious question of how long they can last before another crash follows. In its latest World Economic Outlook, from
Walter Block on The Ethics of Liberty
Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty is a sweeping treatise which creates nothing short of a normative political philosophy of liberty. Contra Hume, Rothbard attempts to derive an "ought" from an "is," using natural law precepts and rigorous logic. Professor
These European Countries Beat Poverty and Increased Wealth with Low Taxes and Low Regulation
Social democrats love to denounce low-tax, probusiness regimes as "neoliberal" and as places with more poverty. But the reality is that parts of Europe that embraced markets most reduced poverty while making their citizens richer. Original Article: "These European Countries Beat
The Not-So-Golden Mean
Steven B. Smith in Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes (Yale University Press, 2021) gives us an excellent example of a fallacious way of arguing. Once we see how Smith, a Yale political science and philosophy professor who should
The Dystopian Future in Which Almost No One Owns a Car
Some advocates of self-driving cars argue that their adoption would mean that very few people would actually own a vehicle anymore. We'd all just rent rides on self-driving Uber cars. This would be a dream come true for advocates of
Why the Misuse of the Word “Efficiency” Is Such a Problem
An important impediment to understanding valuable insights economists have to offer is that they have trained people to ignore their pronouncements on efficiency. Economists’ common use of a standard of efficiency known as “potential compensation,” which is at odds with