One of the most obnoxious stories in America the past year has been the controversy over players protesting during the national anthem. While I personally sympathize with both concerns from athletes about police brutality in minority communities, as well as the desire of most football fans to simply not have any sort of political advocacy mixed into their sports, the resulting media coverage - from both political and sports outlets - has been largely nauseating.

Not a day goes by when the liberal media don’t telegraph to the world that a “Trumpocracy” is destroying American democracy. Conspicuous by its absence is a pesky fact: Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy.

To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.

One of the ways in which the republic was destroyed was through the slow sundering of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. The 10th was meant to guarantee constitutional devolution of power.

Most economists concur with the view that what keeps the economy going is consumption expenditure. Furthermore, it is generally held that spending, rather than individual saving, is the essential condition for production and prosperity.

Savings is seen to be detrimental to economic activity as it weakens the potential demand for goods and services.

The world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of Sweden (or Sveriges Riksbank), today celebrates its 350th anniversary by organizing a conference on the theme “The role of central banks then, now, and in the future.” While the bank is probably best known for sponsoring the faux Nobel Prize in economics (it’s not one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s will), how it came about is a story that is as enlightening as it is em

[Reprinted from Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, compiled by Bettina G. Greaves.]

[Reprinted from Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, compiled by Bettina G. Greaves.]

Our economic system—the market economy or cap­italism—is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the neces­sity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the con­sumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A busi­ness operation is a manifest failure if the proceeds from the sales do not reimburse the businessman for all he has expended in producing the article.

On the fourth of July we pay homage to our Founding Fathers — the men who gave us our freedom. One of the greatest of these 18th century “giants” was our Nation’s first economist, Pelatiah Webster.

Webster was more than an economist. He was also an ordained minister, a preacher, a teacher, a merchant, and statesman. He understood, more than most men of his day and most men since, the interrelationship of moral and economic law.