Why does liberty matter? It’s a fair question because, after all, not everyone thinks it matters very much, perhaps beyond some very basic point. If that’s an overstatement, we can safely say that for many people on the left and right, liberty is a lower priority than...
Economics
Exchanging the Rust Belt for Military Bases: Foreign Policy and Deindustrialization
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 9, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
While the benefits of trade liberalization in the postwar period have been abundant, readers may be surprised to learn how secondary (or even nonexistent) consideration of such possible benefits were to U.S. policymakers. Rather, trade liberalization following World...
Did Unions Kill America’s Oldest Trucking Business?
by Connor O'Keeffe | Aug 7, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles
On July 30, Yellow, one of the oldest and largest trucking businesses in the United States, ceased operations and moved to declare bankruptcy. According to reports, the final nail in the coffin of the ninety-nine-year-old business was a labor dispute with the...
Our National Debt Isn’t Bad, It’s Worse
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 1, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles
Those paying attention know the so-called “national debt” crossed the $30 trillion mark in late 2021 and has continued to steadily climb since. With trillion-dollar annual deficits having somehow been allowed to become the norm, less than two years later the number...
TGIF: What about Politicians?
by Sheldon Richman | Jul 28, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The best-selling social scientist and, it so happens, libertarian Bryan Caplan thinks politicians are immoral. Sounds promising. He's discussed this online and in one of his published blog-post collections, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. What are we...
It Is Just About Time
by Brice M. Vanhaelen | Jul 24, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism
Time is the most valuable resource owned by individuals. Indeed, the time available to an individual, being by essence limited, is an extremely scarce resource. One could argue that progresses in medicine contribute to increase the average lifespan, but it cannot be...
Defending the Defensible: Free Trade and Economic Liberalism
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Jul 13, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy
In 1989, the economist John Williamson introduced the phrase “Washington Consensus” to the politico-economic lexicon. It was shorthand for a set of interrelated policies that, taken together, would free trade within states and between them while boosting overall...
Vector Auto-Regression and Classical Economic Theory: Will the Keynesian Saga Ever End?
by Mike Steele | Jul 13, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles
Economists rely on Vector Autoregression (VAR) models to forecast macroeconomic time series that may infer the effects of structural shocks and estimate unobservable cyclical components of macroeconomic aggregates. A VAR model is made up of a system of equations that...