Robert Blumen

The EU Wants to Spy on Europeans’ Internet Use

by Robert Blumen | Jan 11, 2024 | Featured Articles

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

by Robert Blumen | Jun 16, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

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

by Robert Blumen | Jun 8, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles

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...

Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes about economics and politics. You can contact him at robert@robertblumen.com

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Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War

by Gary Vogler

From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...

Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism

by Keith Knight

Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...

Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...

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