On August 13, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing predecessor Joe Biden’s July 2021 executive order “Promoting Competition in the American Economy.” The Biden order called for greater enforcement of antitrust laws and other efforts to...
Economics

TGIF: Trump and the Separation of Powers
by Sheldon Richman | Sep 5, 2025 | Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The U.S. Court of Appeals' rejection last week of the Trump administration's global "emergency" tariff program was a welcome affirmation of the separation-of-powers doctrine. Next stop: the U.S. Supreme Court. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a 9-0 ruling that Trump...

Washington’s Fiscal Doom-Loop
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 4, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles
With U.S. gross debt now at a staggering $37 trillion—roughly equivalent to the combined debt of all other major advanced economies—Washington is trapped in a fiscal doom loop of its own making. Decades of bipartisan overspending have pushed the nation to a point...

Capitalism Isn’t Responisble for Society’s Flaws; You Are
by Joseph Klein | Sep 2, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism
“Capitalism is killing the planet—it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction.”- The Guardian The more disordered modern society becomes the more loudly we hear a common diagnosis: capitalism wanted this. Blaming capitalism has long been the status quo for the...
TGIF: The Chicanery Behind Inequality Data
by Sheldon Richman | Aug 29, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, TGIF
If self-described progressives decry anything more fiercely than poverty, it is income and wealth inequality. Some have even suggested that they would prefer low-income equality to inequality, regardless of how affluent the lowest level was. What counts is the gap....
TGIF: The Poverty of Poverty Data
by Sheldon Richman | Aug 22, 2025 | Economics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
"Poverty has no causes; prosperity has many. As history attests, poverty is humanity’s default condition.... But prosperity is not natural; it does not just happen." —Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux To hear some people tell it, America is in the grip of a vast...
The Federal Reserve Cuts Growth, Increases Economic Chaos
by Thomas Eddlem | Aug 21, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles
The same cohort of Democrats who championed the slogan “save democracy” this past year, fresh from having their national party tank the process of "fair" primaries for the third presidential election in a row, are now in a snit over Donald Trump trying to impair the...
The Myth of European Plunder
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 14, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
Among a certain species of “critical” historian, it is an article of faith that Europe’s remarkable economic ascent was built not on its institutions, not on liberty, not on commerce, but on the systematic looting of the rest of the world. In this telling—descended...