One of the most interesting aspects of the “Green New Deal” is that its progressive proponents hardly mention taxes at all—even as some Republican economists continue to champion a carbon tax.

After two years of a lot of aggressive-sounding talk about reducing the Fed’s balance sheet and raising the target interest rate, the Fed in recent weeks has reversed  itself, and declared that now’s a time to take things more slowly.

At the January FOMC meeting, officials:

Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise and thus unusable because [the board is] too short except at the point where the saw first made its contact with the wood. As long as the set of the saw is not changed, the result will always be the same.-- Cornelius Van Til

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 authorizing military personnel to lock Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps that are often euphemistically called “internment camps.”

I. Introduction: Setting the Stage

“Roundaboutness” is a concept featured in Austrian capital theory. Homely stories about the bare-handed catching of fish are a prelude to a discussion of the economy’s capital structure. The outputs of some stages of production become inputs to others. Production takes time. The capital structure, broadly conceived, has a temporal profile — one that can be modified in response to changes in intertemporal consumption preferences and resource constraints. This was the central message of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1959).

When Ludwig von Mises noted that a manager is a “junior partner” of the entrepreneur, he did not mean to downplay the role of management in the economy. On the contrary, he wanted to make clear how the economic functions are different yet related.

Ever since Senator Bernie Sanders centered his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination on “Medicare for all,” it has attracted increasing support. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month, 56 percent of all respondents and 81 percent of Democrats backed “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for all,” which has been used to advance the assertion that its time has come.

Steven Kates is an Australian economist and the author of Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost Its Way and Free Market Economics: An Introduction for the General Reader, now in its third edition  He has long been a perceptive and unrelenting critic of current Keynesian-style macroeconomics and an unabashed defe