Donald Trump wants to create a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). It's a bad idea if your standard is freedom, free enterprise, and free markets. That's not Trump's standard, but we already knew that. A sovereign wealth fund is a government-run investment program. Where...
Economics
Contra Krugman (Redux)
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Mar 12, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles
In a recent conversation with the Libertarian Institute’s Keith Knight, we broke down a 2012 article by everyone’s least favorite economist, the former New York Times pundit Paul Krugman. In it, Krugman makes all the familiar and mistaken arguments about why we...
What I Learned from Ross Perot
by James Jones | Mar 12, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics
In 1992, I was just a kid sitting in front of the TV, flipping through channels, looking for something—anything—to watch. No cartoons. No sitcoms. Just golf on one channel and an old businessman sitting at a desk on another. He had that Southern drawl, the kind that...
TGIF: A New Washington Post?
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 7, 2025 | Economics, Featured, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
If Jeff Bezos is as good as his word, the advocates of full liberty will owe him a standing ovation. As everyone knows by now, Amazon.com founder Bezos, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time—a man whose profit-making activities have benefitted mankind...
The Lofty Goals and Harsh Realities of DOGE
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Mar 5, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles
When President Donald Trump announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the initiative was met with both enthusiasm and skepticism. The prospect of cutting $1-2 trillion from the federal budget...
Let’s Not “Run after a Share in the Trouble”
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 3, 2025 | Blog, Economics, Foreign Policy
Of course “principles,” phrases, and catch-words are always invented to bolster up any policy which anybody wants to recommend. So in this case. The people who have led us on to shut ourselves in, and who now want us to break out, warn us against the terrors of...
Plutocratic America’s War on the Working Class
by Thomas Eddlem | Mar 3, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles
Establishment Democrats have long whined that working people pay a higher rate of combined income and payroll taxes than billionaires. They’re not wrong. Income from labor is taxed three times (payroll taxes, income taxes, and inflation) while income from capital is...
TGIF: The Aim of Classical Liberalism
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 28, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
These are dark days for liberalism. I mean full, across-the-board, laissez-faire free-market, classical liberalism, otherwise known as libertarianism. While some budget-cutting and bureaucracy slimming will probably go through, those steps, though necessary to advance...