On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was made available to the general public, and the world was forever changed. While many had prophesied about the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for years, ChatGPT gave us the first glimpse into an AI-powered future. The novelty of OpenAI’s creation propelled interest in AI into the stratosphere, while at the same time reigniting concerns about the impact of AI on the economy.
A study from The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco claims that most of the price inflation that plagued the US economy over the past few years was due to global supply chain disruptions, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Is this a valid study, or an attempt by the Fed to evade responsibility for our recent economic troubles?
The central problem with government economic policies is that many bad economic policies are politically advantageous. Hence, politicians enact policies that many of them know don’t work just to stay in power. Price controls are bad economic policy. Democrat Presidential candidate Kamala Harris wants to empower the Federal Trade Commission to stop “food price gouging” with what would amount to price ceilings.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model, a think tank headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania, recently released a study claiming former President Donald Trump’s economic plans would add about four trillion dollars to the national deficit over ten years while Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plans would add about two trillion dollars.
Ludwig von Mises was a champion of an ideal of liberty in an age of central planning and socialism. In his book Liberalism, the state is “the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion that induces people to abide by the rules of life in society,” and the function that Mises assigns to the state in the liberal doctrine is the protection of property, liberty, and peace. Then there is the law, which consists of the rules according to which the state proceeds.
If one has the patience or the curiosity to go down certain conservative rabbit holes in social media, one will encounter a small corner of the movement in which one finds a latent or explicit desire to somehow rehabilitate Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists (i.e., the “Nazis.”)
In a recent interview with CNN, Kamala Harris said that Bidenomics is working and that she is “proud of bringing inflation down.”
However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published the latest CPI at 2.9%, despite annual inflation being 1.4% when she took office. Inflation is a disguised tax and accumulated inflation since January 2021, when the Biden-Harris administration started, has increased more than 20%.
I recently had the opportunity to attend a homeschool resource fair at a small local school for the arts in my hometown. Every classroom and corridor was filled with tables covered in information about homeschool co-ops, clubs, private classes and teachers. Everything from ballet to robotics, art, woodworking, and every conceivable academic approach were represented by eager adults, excited to share their particular interest and expertise, and most of it free.
Conventional wisdom has it that the Federal Reserve system (the “Fed”) and the US Treasury Department are two separate entities. Congress created the Fed in 1913 as a legally and financially independent federal agency, privately owned by its member banks, with no funding from the federal budget. The US Treasury, on the other hand, is an Executive-branch cabinet-level department reporting directly to the President, with funding appropriated in the federal budget.
