The European Commission is a legislative body in the European Union with regulatory authority over digital technology. The EC’s eIDAS Article 45, a proposed regulation, would deliberately weaken areas of internet security that the industry has carefully evolved and hardened for over 25 years. The Article would effectively grant the 27 EU governments vastly expanded surveillance powers over internet use. The rule would require all internet browsers to trust an additional root certificate from an agency (or a regulated entity) from each of the national governments of each one of the EU member...
Stimulus Is Not the Answer to Your Economic Woes
Congress is hard at work on a stimulus bill. Doubtless their efforts will pay off. Does anyone stop to ask what it is about stimulus that stimulates? And what, exactly, does it stimulate? Start by spending a lot of money that the government does not have, borrow the difference, and the central bank prints the difference and buys up the debt. But does that increase the production of useful things? To answer this, we look at an unlikely friend, Keynes and his General Theory. The British Austrian school economist William Harold Hutt penned a devastating critique of the new economics, The...
The Cult of Keynes and Its Origins
The British Austrian economist W.H. Hutt was a great critic of Keynes’s economic theories. However, his speculations on why the New Economics revolution happened are even more fascinating. Hutt shows it to be a fundamentally dishonest undertaking. Keynes held a long-standing belief in inflation and public spending. His General Theory was the culmination of his search for an intellectual foundation on which to support his belief. Yet it was an unstable foundation. Had he stated his thesis in clear terms, it would have been seen as noncontroversial in some parts and in the rest untrue. The...