Libby Emmons and David Marcus at the New York Post put a spotlight on the ongoing crusade against the gig economy. They began by citing California Assembly Bill 5, which was designed to put the clamps on the gig economy.
Ostensibly marketed as a bill to reign in rideshare companies like Uber by forcing them to provide independent contractors the same benefits as employees, the law is now poised to harm freelance writers.
At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bob Prince, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, attracted attention when he suggested in a news interview that the boom and bust cycle as we have come to know it in the last decades may have ended. This viewpoint may well have been encouraged by the fact that the latest economic upswing (”boom”) has been going for around a decade and that an end is not in sight as suggested by incoming macro- and microeconomic data.
Capital accumulation and productivity growth are the outcome of free market investment and not of government spending. This is well known to Austrian school economists.
Following the Trump administration’s decision to assassinate General Soleimani earlier this month, many Americans began to fear that war between the United States and Iran was imminent. Tensions rose as the president and the Iranians rattled their sabers and taunted each other on social media.
[The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. By Christopher Caldwell. Simon & Schuster, 2020. 342 pages.]
Whenever there are signs that the economy is likely to fall into an economic slump most experts advise that the central bank and the government should embark on loose monetary and fiscal policies to counter the possible economic recession. In this sense, most experts are following the ideas of the English economist John Maynard Keynes.
Virtue is widely preached and admired. Most consider themselves virtuous. Yet in our society, virtue is being progressively crowded out by coercion. That suggests a need to give more consideration to the differences between social coordination based on virtue, which is voluntary, and that based on coercion, which actually degrades what we consider good and atrophies the muscles of virtue.
That Americans are in the throes of a crisis in democracy has become a commonplace refrain of late. I have noticed that almost all such commentary treats political democracy, implicitly or explicitly, as the ideal. Yet in truth it is a seriously flawed ideal. In fact, as F. A. Hayek noted years ago,
all the inherited limitations on government power are breaking down before…unlimited democracy…the problem today.
Everyone wants affordable housing, but how far will they go to attain it?
For some, housing affordability is such a pressing issue that they will entrust politicians with the duty of providing it through legislation. Rent control is one of the oldest tricks politicians can pull out of their magic hats to demonstrate to the public that they’re getting to the bottom of the housing affordability crisis.
[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in 2021.]
The ultimate purpose of this booklet is to give the reader a solid grasp of how money works in today’s world. Yet before diving into the particulars of central banks, repo markets, and LIBOR—all topics that will be covered in future chapters—we should first provide a general framework giving the basic theory or “economic logic” of money and banking.
