The government's attraction to borrowing is hardly a mystery. If the politicians had to extract every dollar they wanted to spend directly from the taxpayers, they might have a revolt on their hands--a bad career move for sure. Borrowing tends to make people more...
Economics
Can Bitcoin Fix America’s Economic Woes?
by Avik Roy | Oct 22, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have few fans in Washington. At a July congressional hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that cryptocurrency "puts the [financial] system at the whims of some shadowy, faceless group of super-coders." Treasury secretary Janet Yellen...
Down With Fraudulent ‘Fair’ Trade
by Jim Bovard | Oct 21, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles
The Biden administration is embracing the same flawed “fair trade” mantra that previous administrations used to sanctify protectionist policies. Biden’s team has “largely dispensed with the idea of free trade as a goal in and of itself,” the New York...
TGIF: Inflation Is Evil
by Sheldon Richman | Oct 15, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
When will Americans demand that the government denationalize money and free the market to do what it does better than anything else: serve the general welfare rather than the special interests? It's hard to know what it would take to bring this about, but inflation...
TGIF: Looking for the Green New Deal
by Sheldon Richman | Oct 8, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I'm behind the news curve.) The Green New...
That Time I Swiped the U.S. Tariff Code
by Jim Bovard | Oct 8, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles
"Nothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy,” as Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1967. As a journalist, I have battled federal agencies for decades to try to discover the sordid details of how Americans’ rights and liberties are being shafted. Most government...
What’s Worse: Murder vs. Traffic Fatalities
by Walter E. Block | Oct 6, 2021 | Criminal Justice, Economics, Featured Articles
The murder rate in 2020 was at an all time high, and commentators are in a tizzy about this. It turns out that there were 21,570 homicides in the United States. This is an unprecedented increase of almost 30% compared to 2019. An additional 4901 people were murdered...
What We Have to Gain from a National Default
by Ryan McMaken | Oct 6, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles
The Biden administration's rhetoric on the debt ceiling has become nothing short of apocalyptic. The Treasury Department has announced that a failure to increase the debt ceiling "would have catastrophic economic consequences" and would, as NBC news claims, constitute...