The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances, according to Federal Reserve Governor Brainard, shows that the share of income held by the top 1 percent of households has risen from 17 percent in 1988 to 24 percent in 2015, and that the wealth held by that same group rose from 30 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2016.

November 10 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of someone the Mises Institute has named “one of the giants of the Austrian tradition” — Sylvester Petro. Since 2017 also marks the 100th anniversary of Petro’s birth and the 60th anniversary of his best-known book, The Labor Policy of the Free Society, described as “the definitive Austrian treatment of the topic,” it is very much worth remembering his wisdom.

A core tenant of the pledge taken by all physicians is their promise first and foremost to do no harm. A physician’s vow to care for patients in a manner which does not cause physical, mental, or emotional harm has guided treatment decisions since the days of Hippocrates. Recently, however, the National Health Service, known as the NHS, Great Britain’s socialized medical system, has seemingly trumped this aspect of the physician’s oath with a more pressing consideration: Do not waste limited resources.

In the mid-nineteenth century debates over the virtues and evils of slavery, the arguments from the pro-slavery southerners evolved from a claim that slavery was a “necessary evil” to arguments that it was a “positive moral good.” A large part of this evolution in perspective was a reaction to the growing moral antipathy toward slavery by the North, breeding the need — from the southern perspective — to find a defense of slavery that they could counter on moral grounds.

One of the favorite pastimes of leftists/progressives/liberals is lamenting the fact that some people have more while others have less. They say that life is just unfair in this respect. They want the government to “level the playing field” by using taxation to take money from those who have more and giving it to those who have less. Their ideal is a “level playing field” in which everyone has the same amount of wealth.

Fed policy makers are of the view that if there is the need to tighten the interest rate stance the tightening should be gradual as to not destabilize the economy.

The gradual approach gives individuals plenty of time to adjust to the tighter monetary stance. This adjustment in turn will neutralize the possible harmful effect that such a tighter stance may have on the economy.

Apologies for the pay-walled link, but this Wall Street Journal article documenting the cheery fortunes of the Swiss National Bank really is remarkable.

When unions are in their justifying-their-existence mode, they quickly turn to false claims, such as asserting that higher union wages benefit other workers. In fact, unions actually actually reduce the availability of union jobs, and force workers elsewhere, increasing labor supply and decreasing wages for those jobs. At a more basic level, though, they justify themselves as exemplars of the right of freedom of association, so that anything which restricts them violates freedom of association.