Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute

Are Police Inherently Less Competent Than Citizens?

by Thomas Eddlem | May 31, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles

Qualified immunity says some people should be held to a lower legal standard than everyone else under Anglo-American common law, mostly government officials in their formal duties—but also stock holders for decisions made by their companies. The idea behind it is that stockholders and government officials generally don’t have management control over policy decisions and usually shouldn’t be held responsible for those general policies. Qualified immunity for police is fundamentally different. It says that police aren’t responsible enough to be held to the high legal standard which we hold...

Jack Teixeira, the Deep State, and ‘Captured Media’

by Thomas Eddlem | May 25, 2023 | Criminal Justice, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering U.S. intelligence assessment of Ukraine's prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can't win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed several dozen U.S. soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known...

Empirically, Interest Rate Manipulation Doesn’t Work

by Thomas Eddlem | Dec 19, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

It’s an economic article of faith among almost every school of economic thought that central banks raising interest rates curtails economic growth and lowering interest rates stimulates short-run economic growth. The problem with this assertion by nearly every economist is that the data backs up the inverse proposition. Lower real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates are statistically associated with slower short-term and long-term economic growth as well as short-term higher prices for housing. Low interest rates are also the regular and ongoing policy of the Federal Reserve Bank. Both...

Inflation Cheats the Working Man

by Thomas Eddlem | Sep 14, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

What would the political left (and for that matter, the right) do if they found that one of the biggest factors in income inequality was not top income tax levels, but inflation? It might lead to a revolution and a grand coalition among people of ideologies across the political spectrum against the political establishment. Income inequality is clearly a complex phenomenon, subject to many variables. But the intuition behind the rich getting richer from lower tax rates is probably a little easier for people to accept at face value than the argument that the rich are getting richer from...

Inflation Doesn’t Pay

by Thomas Eddlem | Sep 8, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

One of the most unexamined—and almost unmentioned—economic realities of post-gold standard America is the change in America's economic growth rate since the gold window closed in 1971. Does inflation change the rate of economic growth? The Federal Reserve Bank claims on its website that “inflation that is too low can weaken the economy.” Therefore, the Federal Reserve Bank claims it wants permanent inflation as policy: “The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation of 2 percent over the longer run, as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption...

It’s 1979, Not 2009

by Thomas Eddlem | Jun 7, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

Break out your mom's bell-bottoms and dad's leisure suit from your parents' attic. It's 1979 again (at least economically) Don't listen to the perpetual doomsayers who claim this is the beginning of the big crash. It's not. Yes, the American economy is a huge mess, and the economy is going to get a lot worse. But no, it's nothing like the housing crisis of 2008 or the 1929 stock market crash that began the Great Depression. It's not even remotely similar. There Won't Be a Housing Crash It's true the housing crisis of 2008 was created by some of the same factors we have in our economy today:...

Capitalism Puts the Poor First

by Thomas Eddlem | Mar 22, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles

The socialist left says the evidence capitalism oppresses the poor is that free markets relocate factories to the poorest nations in order to pay the lowest wages. And when wage rates rise in poor nations like South Korea and Japan, they move their factories over to new poor nations like China and Indonesia, and then again likewise on to the next poor nations like Vietnam and Bangladesh. I see that as evidence of the opposite; it's evidence of free markets bringing jobs to the poorest-of-the-poor, raising their living standards to humane levels over a generation or two, and then moving on to...

A Four-Step Guide to the Cancel Culture Playbook

by Thomas Eddlem | Mar 14, 2022 | Featured Articles

Cancel Culture only has a total of four plays in its playbook: Accuse of misinformation/fringe opinion Accuse of racism Accuse of sex abuse Accuse of national security threat/threat to democracy After that, they're out of plays. And Cancel Culture nearly always uses each of these plays in order. Play #1 -Misinformation The first play, the claim of misinformation, is usually enough to get most normies canceled on social media. The psychology behind it is fairly powerful; most people don't like liars. Even among those who are disposed to treat inaccurate speech with other speech that's...