Should we care about inequality?

Donald Trump’s possible decision to end NASA’s funding of the International Space Station by 2025 brings up that age-old question of the proper role of government, although it is certainly not he who is bringing it up.

Plant-based diets, especially vegan diets, seem to be all the rage these days.

Based on the practice of eschewing animal products, veganism has attracted a broad coalition of interest groups — ranging from animal rights to environmental activists — who believe that veganism is the most ethical and sustainable way of promoting human health and animal welfare.

At first, these appear to be reasonable premises for an alternative lifestyle that challenges the dietary status quo.

Germany finally has a new government. After months of negotiating, a breakdown of talks between the Conservatives, Greens, and Liberals, and constant fighting between the Conservatives (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD), the two major parties reached an agreement yesterday.

America’s most famous Keynesian, economist Paul Krugman, predictably used his New York Times column to excoriate President Trump’s State of the Union infrastructure proposal. Yet ironically, Krugman’s own positions on the economy and climate change should lead him to applaud Trump’s ideas. This is just another episode where Krugman displays his partisanship, rather than fidelity to his ostensible goals for the public.

In the media and among pundits use of the term trickledown economics is common. Reportedly first used in the 1930s by Will Rogers, the expression was prominently adopted as a pejorative description of what is more appropriately called supply side economics, by those who opposed Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts.

Although most economists today favor stricter antitrust regulation, from the 1880s until the 1920s the economics profession expressed nearly unanimous opposition to antitrust.

A rigorous application of methodological individualism is perhaps what most separates the Austrian and Public Choice schools from most others. The idea that the individual should be the unit of analysis has spared public choice and Austrian economists from many of the mistakes of what might be called collectivist economics. The Austrians, for example, have exposed a great deal of macroeconomic nonsense due to the fact that Keynesian theory largely ignored aggregation problems.

In the early 1960s, Ronald Hamowy criticized the American conservative movement for degenerating into a movement defending “the rack, the thumbscrew, the whip, and the firing squad.” The movement had become, Hamowy concluded, a party of knee-jerk allegiance to the American state in the name of fighting foreign threats, both real and imagined. 

Whether or not the American right is on the road to rehabilitation on this matter remains an open question. 

According to bureaucrats at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, so-called tax havens are terrible and should be shut down.