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Archive of posts published in the tag: George Gilder

The Catastrophe of Student Debt

“The only way to undo this “vast blunder,” says Mr. Gilder, is to forgive student loans across the board and “extract the money from all the college endowments and funds that were used to just create useless departments and political campaigns.”

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The Volatility of Velocity

Milton Friedman’s basic theory was MV=PT. The supply of Money times its Velocity or turnover equals the Price level times the number of Transactions.  Milton assumed the Velocity was relatively fixed and that therefore the control of the supply of

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The Buyer of Last Resort

So there we have it. The unicorn buyer of last resort will be the Fed. The “lender of last resort” for the financial system, the governmental guarantor for all the big banks and other “systemically important financial institutions,” the backup

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It’s The Velocity, Stupid

Depending on the measurement,  inequality (rise in the % of wealth in the top 10%) has increased more under Obama- in spite of policies designed to counter this trend.  These policies have been counterproductive, favoring larger industries, stock shareholders, and

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The Hypertrophy of Finance

George Gilder explains how the management of our money system has increased inequality. While the trade in goods and services has remained stagnant the volume of trade, and the ensuing profits, in currency trading and financial instruments has grown substantially,

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Capitalism Updated

Progressivism can be viewed as socialism lite, paying homage to the great progress of capitalism while acknowledging some of the limitations of a free market. Social and economic theories develop, mature and evolve as they face the hard tests of

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The Primary Cause of Economic Stagnation

State control of money has become a force for government economic centralization, wreaking havoc on economies around the globe, whether capitalist or socialist. By controlling money supplies, central banks and their political sponsors determine who gets money and thus who

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Velocity is Freedom

The big prize at Freedom Fest was George Gilder, most famously noted for his Wealth and Poverty. His new book is The Scandal of Money. Gilder wrote of travelling to China with Milton Friedman and respectfully challenges many of Friedman’s

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Obsession with Debt

“Nothing is more advantageous to the socialists in our midst than a futile and confusing preoccupation with debt. Thomas Babington Macaulay provides some useful historical perspective in his discussion of Britain’s fiscal straits at the end of the twelve-year War

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The Real Forces of Decline

“It is perverse and self-defeating for conservative CFOs to focus on the federal government’s profit and loss statement as if it were some test of fiscal virtue and the path to national revival. The key issue is not the prodigal

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Indistinguishable from Bribes

“Crony capitalism feeds on campaign finance laws that give union and corporate political action committees the power of unlimited spending while individual citizens are restricted to $2,500 per campaign. The famous “occupiers” of Wall Street actually got this right. Corporations

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The Great Error of Keynesian Economists

“Or is all that just pie in the sky? Economists are usually pessimists. They believe in the intractability of existing conditions, whether the inflation of the 1970s or the deficits of today. But here again, a glance at history is

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Rational Choice in the Face of Massive Ignorance

“And governmental interventions in the economy are distractions—“noise on the line”—that nearly always retard expansion. Failing to see the centrality of entrepreneurial creativity, economists everywhere have counseled governments to attend to the money supply, aggregate demand, consumer confidence, trade imbalances,

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The Racism of the Intelligentsia

There is something, evidently, in the human mind, even when carefully honed at Oxford or the Sorbonne, that hesitates to believe in capitalism: in the enriching mysteries of inequality, the inexhaustible mines of the division of labor, the multiplying miracles

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Debauchers of Wealth

A pot of honey attracts flies as well as bears. Bureaucrats, politicians, bishops, raiders, robbers, revolutionaries, short-sellers, managers, business writers, and missionaries all think they can invest money better than its owners.  Owners are besieged on all sides by aspiring

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Creating New Expertise

An economy can continue to grow only if its profits are joined with entrepreneurial knowledge. In general, wealth can increase only if the people who create it control it. Divorce the financial profits from the learning process and the economy

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Bad Luck

Whatever the state of inequality of incomes, it is dwarfed by the inequality of contributions to human advancement.  Robert Heinlein wrote, “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances that permit this norm to be exceeded- here and

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The New Frontier

In the United States today we are facing the usual calculus of impossibility, recited by the familiar aspirants to a master plan.  It is said we must abandon economic freedom because our frontier is closed; because our biosphere is strained;

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The Perverse Feedback of Free Goods

The most obvious rule of social science is that people will abuse any free good. Regardless of what politicians promise to gullible voters, government services cannot ultimately escape the constraints of supply and demand.  A price of “free” evokes unbounded

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The Destruction of Entrepreneurial Knowledge

Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to the man who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work. It is these capitalists,

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