Last week, Jerome Powell & Co. met to issue an immediate decision regarding the status of the federal funds rate for March, and to provide some insight into the trajectory of monetary policy for the rest of 2024 and into 2025. As with the past few inflation...
Economics
Beware: The Government Is People
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 25, 2024 | Blog, Economics
Nearly everyone complains about capitalism's defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that...
Washington, We Have a Problem
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 22, 2024 | Blog, Economics, Libertarianism, Politics
Centralized power has a problem: the individual. Every person is a potential disrupter of The Plan, and disruption must be forbidden. Otherwise, why have a central plan? This applies regardless of whether the planning is economy-wide or for particular sectors, such as...
Dollar Debasement as A Matter of Policy
by MN Gordon | Mar 19, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles
Michelle Mack thought she had it made. The suburban mom was living the high life with her husband and kids in their $3 million mansion in northern San Diego County. But that was before December 6, 2023. This was the day police raided her home, put her in handcuffs,...
Biden’s Myth of ‘Price Gouging’
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Mar 12, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles
In recent times, accusations of "price gouging" have become prevalent, often targeting producers utilizing strategies like dynamic pricing and “shrinkflation.” Such accusations, echoed by political figures including President Joe Biden, overlook the intricate dynamics...
Environmentalists Want to Doom the Developing World
by Owen Ashworth | Mar 5, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles
Climate change and the environment are becoming top issues in most developed countries. People know that humans are contributing to climate change, so they demand action with more done to preserve our very fragile planet. In the United Kingdom, politicians are pushed...
TGIF: Immigration in an Nth-Best World
by Sheldon Richman | Mar 1, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
We live in an nth-best society. It's neither fully libertarian (though libertarians disagree over exactly what that would mean) nor totalitarian like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Maoist China, or North Korea. It's somewhere in between, closer to...
And the Winner Is…Not You
by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Feb 22, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles
Of all the government or quasi-government institutions, there is perhaps none as openly opaque in its operations and unaccountable for its failures as the Federal Reserve. For, unlike its top rivals for this most dubious of distinctions, like the CIA, NSA, or DOD,...