For most analysts, if the gross domestic product (GDP) data shows an increase, then this is perceived as good economic news. Conversely, if the GDP data shows weakness, then this is regarded as a possible deterioration in economic conditions. Most analysts are data-driven. The reality for them is what they see.

To the Mogambo Guru—pen name of financial analyst Richard Daughty who passed away in 2022—the Federal Reserve were a gang of drunken arsonists locked inside the nation’s monetary basement, ecstatically spraying gasoline on the future while court economists in bespoke suits assured the public there was nothing to worry about. His style developed over the years from pointedly critical, no-words-wasted prose to theatrical, hyperbolic, hilarious, manic, and impossible to ignore alarm. To Mogambo, Fed monetary debasement was a five-alarm fire no one hears.

Time is the one resource that no economic model can manufacture, and every serious theory of human action must eventually confront it. Yet mainstream economics has chosen, almost without exception, to treat time as an objective variable that is measurable, uniform, and expressible in equations. This is not merely a methodological shortcut but a foundational error, and the distinction that exposes it was drawn not by an economist but by a philosopher: Henri Bergson.

Consider what Appalachia gave America before America returned the favor in pill form.

One of the reasons why we fall for the erroneous idea that patents are good for society is because we greatly overestimate the importance of the specific individual or company making a discovery while being unaware of how the market process—via its various mechanisms like prices, the profit motive, and economic competition—plays a key role in innovation.

Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) was an editor of National Review, though he later broke with the magazine’s founder and editor, William F. Buckley, Jr. Murray Rothbard devoted critical attention to him, and I have sometimes written critically about him myself.