Oil prices headed upward more rapidly this week, hitting $68 per barrel (WTI), which is the highest price since December 2014.
Even if adjusted for inflation (according to the CPI), oil prices are still near a four-year high.
In his ABC interview last Sunday, former FBI chief James Comey boasted endlessly of his devotion to truth, which he said “has to be central to our lives.” Touting his role in bringing down Martha Stewart, he declared, “The truth matters in the criminal justice system.” But, when he was FBI boss from 2013 to 2017, his agency duped the American public whenever convenient.
On April 13, the United States launched a missile attack on Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack using chlorine gas by the Syrian government on the town of Douma. Was this attack justified? One way to answer this question appeals to the “just war” tradition, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and further refined by Vitoria, Suarez, Hugo Grotius, and other thinkers. The criteria for a just war are stringent, and the missile attack violates a number of them.
In March, growth in the supply of US dollars increased at the highest rate seen in ten months. This comes after a year-long period of falling growth rates, at the end of which money-supply growth fell to a near-ten-year low of 2.6 percent, year over year.
In August 1971, President Richard Nixon enacted comprehensive wage-and-price controls in a misguided effort to contain inflationary pressures. (Contrary to the faulty memories of some Americans, this initial round of controls wasn’t due to the OPEC oil embargo, which didn’t occur until 1973.) Free-market economists like to use the long lines at the gas pump as a great teaching example of the problems with price controls.
Article 1, Section 10, Clause 2 in the Constitution of the United States has been instrumental in making the US economy the powerhouse that it is today. How so, you say? It did so by curbing individual states’ ability to impose tariffs on goods and services coming from or going to other states. This has made the United States a free trade area from its founding in 1789.
Many times, when a social problem is closed to being solved or has a positive dynamic that signals that the end is near, it is usually when a great part of the population realizes the mere existence of the problem and organizes politically to end it. The great stories of poverty left by Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist) and Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) contrast with the substantial improvement of living standards of the population in the industrial age.
This week, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending was heading upward, thanks in part to the strongest sales in six months for automobiles.
For the automobile industry, that’s reassuring, but the larger trend points to a period of stagnation.
Students of free enterprise usually trace the origins of pro-market thinking to Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723–90). This tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nation was published the year of American independence from Britain.
