The federal government’s program of supplemental unemployment benefits of up to $600 per week, as provided for in the CARES Act, is set to expire at the end of July. Whether or not to extend this program is setting up to become a contentious political battle mere...
In Economic Facts and Fallacies (2011), Thomas Sowell argues that housing regulation and zoning laws, not markets, are to blame for the modern scourge of unaffordable housing. Sowell is still right. Government housing regulations have exacerbated construction costs,...
Old coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard. I began collecting coins when I was eight years old in 1965, the year President Lyndon Johnson began eliminating all the silver in new dimes, quarters, and half dollars....
If the heads of the Federal Reserve are to be believed, Fed policies do not make wealth inequality worse. When asked recently if the Fed’s policies widen inequality, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly stated without reservation: “Not in my judgment.”...
[Review of Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020).] I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Stephanie Kelton—economics professor at Stony Brook and advisor to the...
In a sign that the Federal Reserve is growing increasingly desperate to jump-start the economy, the Fed’s Secondary Market Credit Facility has begun purchasing individual corporate bonds. The Secondary Market Credit Facility was created by Congress as part of a...
When an economic crisis hits, everybody from the Fed chairman to the man on the street knows that the Fed must print more money and reduce interest rates and that the government must spend more money and go deeper into debt. This is seen as necessary to “fill the gap”...
Defunding the police is only a small part of only one side of the equation. All anti-vice laws must be erased, and the people, individually and in voluntary combination, must be freed -- including freed from taxation -- to see to their own security, their own...
