Civil Disobedience (Continued)
It seems like Charles Murray’s call for conservative civil disobedience is garnering more interest. An interview of Murray by a somewhat skeptical Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic magazine has just … Read More
Month: June 2015
Causes of the 2007-2008 U.S. Financial Crisis
Although we discussed some of the reasons why the U.S. economy has not recovered very robustly from the 2007-2008 financial crisis, we have not looked at exactly why the crisis happened. … Read More
The Debilitating Effects of Obamacare
So now the Supreme Court has ruled that it does not matter what the plain language of a legislative bill is. They claim to be able to sense what the … Read More
Echoes of the Great Depression: Japan
I was expecting “Japan’s lost decades” to be an easy story to tell. However, when I started researching for this post, I discovered a controversy existed on whether a lost decade … Read More
Echoes of the Great Depression: Europe
For all of my life the nations of Europe have been very much to the left of center. I suppose this condition is the legacy of dirigisme and socialism in France, Bismarck’s … Read More
Echoes of the Great Depression: America, Europe, and Japan
Although we are technically no longer in a recession, the rate of economic growth is so low that the economy for many people seems like it is in recession. Below … Read More
Why Did the Great Depression Last So Long?
Because of the complexity of the Great Depression, there are several different ways in which you can date the beginning and ending of this immense event. Many people date the … Read More
Iran: the Present and Future Enemy
There are times when I get an almost surreal feeling that we are hurtling toward Armageddon. In the midst of American negotiations with Iran on limiting their nuclear program, international … Read More
The Long Arm of the Federal Government Monster
This morning I read something immensely disturbing on the Wall Street Journal opinion page (access requires subscription). It reconfirms for me (as if I were ever in doubt) how controlling the … Read More
What If They Threw a Recession and Nobody Came?
Rich Danker in the Weekly Standard writes in the guise of a book review about a favorite conservative theme: How a distressed economy in recession, left to its own devices … Read More
Beware BEPS!
The acronym BEPS stands for “Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” and the BEPS project is an effort by the OECD to study perceived flaws in international tax rules. The perception that multinational … Read More
The Keynesian- Neoclassical Ideological Conflict (2)
When we left this discussion, we had found that a Keynesian economist believes government stimulus spending must be used to kick-start (pump-prime?) the economy out of recession.
Neoclassical economists on the other hand believe care must be taken not to damage an already distressed economy further.
The Keynesian- Neoclassical Ideological Conflict (1)
Quite possibly the most consequential ideological conflict within Western nations today is the battle of economic ideas between Keynesian and neoclassical thought. Since Keynesian ideas mandate greater power and a larger … Read More
The Federal Reserve: What It Is
Flag of the Federal Reserve Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons The Federal Reserve System is one of those government organizations that most people hear about from … Read More
Should We Fight ISIS? (4)
In the very first post in this series I asked how can ISIS challenge the mighty west? And the answer is that they really cannot so long as we are willing to … Read More
Should We Fight ISIS? (3)
Before we seriously engage ISIS in combat (which we haven’t yet), we should think a bit about our capability to do so. My own experiences as a junior artillery officer … Read More
Civil Disobedience
This morning Michael Barone passed on a suggestion from Charles Murray: Government has become so intrusive in our lives and limits so much of our personnel freedoms, particularly economic, that … Read More