Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute

Home Ownership Crisis: How the Fed Creates a Financial Underclass

by Thomas Eddlem | Jan 23, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles

Both of the Federal Reserve Bank’s stated policies of under-market interest rates and generating a minimum of two percent general price inflation are creating a permanent financial underclass in America by keeping home ownership perpetually out of reach for struggling lower-middle class American workers. The goal of general price inflation—among many other impacts that disparately impact the poor—makes it much more difficult for people to save up for a down payment on a mortgage, especially during those fairly frequent times when the Fed exceeds its target level of inflation. And the tighter...

Millionaires No More: Social Security is Impoverishing Our Seniors

by Thomas Eddlem | Sep 28, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles

Imagine you win your state lottery for $1.1 million. You have the option of collecting the cash prize of $1,100,000 or taking $55,000 per year in twenty annual installments. Your financial advisor will always tell you the smart move is to take the full cash payout and invest the money in a stock index fund earning interest and dividends. If you do that, you can take out seven percent after taxes in perpetuity with adjustments upward for inflation and on average never lose any principal. But what if the state lottery came in and changed the terms of the deal? Instead, you have to wait a few...

We’re Primed for a Spark

by Thomas Eddlem | Sep 7, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics

In the final Monday pre-dawn moments of every city, you can see the work vans and work trucks turn noisily onto the highway on-ramp of the city’s suburbs and exurbs, ladders rattling over every bump. They’re city-bound, heading toward work in wealthy people’s homes within the suburbs, city businesses and crane-adorned high-rises. If you listen carefully, you can hear the drone of sports radio, country music, or―in full cabins―the compromise “classic rock” music on the construction tradesmen's radio. And except for the scent of second-hand marijuana smoke unashamedly lingering along the...

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...

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