As a precursor to this October’s inaugural Economic Education Month, the Economic Education Group of the Federal Reserve held a virtual Q&A session between Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and a variety of students and teachers from across the country.
This education group includes over 50 subject matter experts who serve the outreach arm of the Fed. Their goal is to:
Today is Walter Block’s 80th birthday. The title of most famous book, Defending the Undefendable, best captures his way of looking at the world. He will take a libertarian principle and deduce consequences from it with iron consistency, often using imaginative examples while doing so. You may think he is wrong, but you will find it more difficult than you first suspect to show this. If you write to him with an objection, you will probably soon find yourself the co-author of a paper with him.
British Columbia’s supreme court recently upheld the province’s restrictions on privately funded healthcare, despite the pain and suffering inflicted on people who have been victimized by the government’s broken promise to provide universal healthcare. Justice John Steeves said his decision is supported by the economics of healthcare:
Question: Suppose the Fed doubles the supply of ”high-powered money” (monetary base) from around 15 percent to 30 percent of US GDP over a period of less than two years, then announces that the pace of increase will slow to just above zero within the next year providing that the economy remains “on course”; does this amount to a serious attenuation of monetary inflation?
Answer: No.
Leonard Read knew the problems of socialism and saw what a threat its growth was to Americans’ well-being as well as their liberties. He also saw that the attempt to improve things that cannot work well, as is true of socialistic efforts, could even tempt lovers of liberty into undermining what they believe in. Read made his case in “I Don’t Know,” Chapter 4 in his 1965 The Free Market and Its Enemy. It is worth reconsideration.
Roger Crisp is a well-regarded philosopher and has written important books on ethical theory and its history with a concentration on the British utilitarians. But in an article that appeared in the New Statesman on August 10, he presents one of the strangest arguments I’ve ever read.
