“In 1936, after FDR helped raise the top income-tax bracket to 79 percent, the revenue collected from income taxes dropped to $674 million, as rich investors withdrew their capital from taxable investments. The excise taxes, which hit the middle- and lower-income groups with full force, were over $1.5 billion. These new excise taxes, much more than income taxes, were helping fund the New Deal programs.”
Read More
Not only is the growth of central government power antithetical to the founding principles, it has proven as short of necessary competence as it is short of legitimacy. As economics has rivaled politics for our attention new scholarship has observed the dispersed nature of knowledge that separates knowledge from power at the federal level.
Read More
Can America survive Trump? Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway commented that a business that can not withstand a little bad management is not that great a business.
Read More
“Putting markets under economic discipline is where progressivism, socialism, fascism, and nationalism all intersect, each of those ideas being based on the superstition that the nation has interests distinct from those of the people who compose the nation.”
Read More
“In Liberty alone do the economic cells have the motivation and stimulation to action; repression kills them. And we should distinguish between economic wounds and economic disease. And above all we must beware of economic hypochondriacs.”
Read More
FDR expressed a willingness to experiment his way out of the Great Depression. But experimentation requires recognizing failures, and the self preserving dynamics of government bureaucracies laced with political cronyism is reluctant to confess failure.
Read More
Deficits do matter, but like the stimulus it also matters how they are spent. Stimulating demand is less effective than stimulating investment. Demand stimulus is only effective briefly under certain conditions. Stimulating investment pays dividends (pun intended) much longer.
Read More
by Henry Oliner “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Friedrich August von Hayek The difference between a liberal and a conservative is often just
Read More
from The City Journal, Trump and the American Divide by Victor Davis Hanson: As the nation became more urban and its wealth soared, the old Democratic commitment from the Roosevelt era to much of rural America—construction of water projects, rail, highways, land
Read More
I attended a Hillsdale College Free Market Forum in Atlanta last week. I was able to meet Don Boudreaux from Café Hayek, one of my daily go to blogs, and Ronald Pestritto, a history professor at Hillsdale. Ron authored three
Read More
George Will wrote an excellent piece in National Affairs, The Limits of Majority Rule. My very brief summary and a few comments: The Progressive pivot of about 1890- but reached in full bore under FDR is when democracy superseded liberty
Read More
Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama
Read More
John Cochrane writes in The Grumpy Economist, Are recoveries always slow after financial crises and why, 10/17/12 Excerpts: Here’s my tentative view: Sure, recessions are worse and longer after financial crises…because governments go completely haywire and screw things up after
Read More
John Cochrane writes in his excellent blog, The Grumpy Economist, Should the Fed Risk Inflation to Spur Growth, 8/22/12. Excerpt: Tight monetary policy is not the source of our problems. Monetary policy is loose by any measure. Anti-growth policies are
Read More
The Editors of the National Review wrote The Logo- Centrist, 6/16/12: Excerpt: The telling fact is that the president apparently is unable to discern the difference between what is his fault and what is his responsibility. The 1980 recession and the legacy
Read More
Phil Gramm and Michael Solon write The ‘Financial Recession’ Excuse – Why did the U.S. recover faster from the Panic of 1907 than from the 2008 recession and the Great Depression? in the Wall Street Journal, 2/2/2012 Excerpt: Under President Franklin
Read More
The default belief of our economic history of the last 100 years has been an acceptance of the dynamic growth of capitalism punctuated by excesses of market greed that have to be corrected by the singular wisdom of government regulation.
Read More
Thomas Sowell writes Best Way to Aid Economy? Just Do Nothing in the Investors Business Daily, 9/14/11. Excerpts: The grand myth that’s been taught to whole generations is that the government is “forced” to intervene when there is a downturn
Read More
Virginia’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has won the right to have his state challenge the health care bill. He insists that the federal government has no right to require the purchase of health insurance, or any product. It is unprecedented
Read More
From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “In short, many things that the Federal Reserve, Congress and the two Presidents did (during the market crash of 1929) were counterproductive. Given these multiple failures of government policy, it is by no means
Read More
Inherited Dilemmas
Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama