Monthly Archives: December 2018

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Year End Thoughts 2018 12 30

At 66 I am more inclined to accepts my flaws than work hard to correct them. Again, tipping to Churchill I would hope to limit my annoying virtues and be less ashamed of my admirable vices.

Read More

Utopian Fascists

Utopian political movements — and all totalitarian movements are basically utopian — love the world, except for all the people in it.”

Read More

The Crash of 1937 and the Rise of Keynes

William Trufant Foster, a former college president, and Waddill Catchings, an industrialist and financier wrote Profits in 1925 and The Road to Plenty in 1928. A decade before Keynes these amateur economists challenged the fundamental principle of Say’s Law that production generates its own supply. They reversed the principle to ‘consumption drives production.’

Read More

The Third Wave of Capitalism

Competition is both wasteful and efficient. Lots of ideas die, but the new ones that emerge more than make up for the loss. Central planning may restrict competitive ideas, but rarely leads to the emergence of great ideas because central planning is reacting to problems and needs that become obsolete before the ink is dry on the plan.

Read More

Green, Red, and Blue

In a democracy the administrative state will eventually become accountable; much to the dismay of the progressives who thought themselves insulated from the democracy they championed.

Read More

Corporatism is not Capitalism

Keynes suggested the use of government to make more efficient allocations of capital but was often critical of the incompetence of government officials.  He seems to unknowingly refute himself.  The weak accountability in government action is what distinguishes it from market solutions.  The worst solution is the pairing of select firms to partner with government actors.  When the results fail capitalism is faulted, bur corporatism is not capitalism.

Read More

The Cost of Virtue Signaling

How much would you bet on the price of oil in 30 years?  Or the price of corn or computer chips?  Yet we are willing to make an enormously costly bet on the climate, which is subject to far more uncontrollable and unknowable elements?  Why? Because we are playing with other people’s money.  The cost of virtue signaling is zero.

Read More

Bi Partisan Corporatism

“Left and Right alike are partly or wholly captive to the fantasies of managerial progressivism and neo-mercantilism, with the Left imagining that Washington can intelligently direct energy and labor markets and much of the Right falling in behind protectionism, “managed trade,” and corporate welfare for everybody from Boeing to Foxconn.”

Read More