One of Donald Trump’s gravest sins in the eyes of financial punditry has been his willingness to openly criticize the actions of the Federal Reserve. According to the Serious People in Washington and New York, the President voicing his opinion on monetary policy is a dangerous challenge to the independence of the central bank.
In countries under heavy US influence or occupation, the US government has a habit of pushing political programs that would be too unpopular to implement in the United States.
In Japan, for example, the US occupation after World War II offered an opportunity for American bureaucrats to push abortion policies they couldn’t win support for in the United States.
One could hope that the recent acrimony in Presidential politics might engender a reappraisal of the inauspicious power granted that office.
Unless your primary news feed is Facebook, you’ve probably been exposed to the fact that public pensions are in pretty big trouble with funding.
In his recent Reason magazine article, senior editor Brian Doherty assures readers that “cultural Marxism” is nothing but mere “paranoia” conjured up by the “conspiratorial right” to provide cover for their hate of “multiculturalism and gay rights and radical feminism.”
He openly mocks the idea that the unmistakable uptick in identity politics these last few decades has anything to do with “sinister machinations of commies striving to enslave us.”
The California Legislature’s 201–2018 session just ended with an ocean of new laws inflicted upon its citizens. It’s actually difficult to discover how many new laws were passed. There were about 2,100 bills passed and signed by the governor, but many of them were bills supporting things like National Arbor Day or the Ritchie Valens Memorial Highway or Cinco de Mayo Week or Persian New Year.
We hear plenty about tech entrepreneurs not finishing college, notably Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. Clearly, success in business does not require a college degree. In the case of Kirk Kerkorian, high school wasn’t required.
According to modern economics, various ideas that we have established about the world of economics emanates from historical data. By inspecting the data, an economist forms a view regarding its behavior. As long as the theory seems to explain the data, it continues to be regarded as valid. Once it fails to adequately explain the data it is replaced by a new theory. Note that on this way of thinking a theory is derived from the data.
This week is the 35th anniversary of one of the biggest antiterrorism disasters in American history. President Reagan sent U.S. troops to Beirut in the chaotic aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion. 243 Marines were killed on October 23, 1983 when a lone terrorist drove a truck bomb past the poorly-guarded perimeter and detonated his vehicle in the lobby of the Marines’ headquarters. That debacle helped spur Reagan to withdraw U.S. troops from Lebanon. Unfortunately, Reagan and subsequent presidents later blundered more deeply into Middle East quagmires.
