We’ve lived through another election season, and as with every election year, the candidates competed to tell us about all the ways they were going to use the power of government to make our lives better. Unfortunately, many voters appeared quite sympathetic to the idea that government action can improve living standards and generally make markets work better.
Literary criticism is a field that mystifies many people. Although its goal of evaluating and commenting on works of literature is straightforward enough, the theories that inform the work of many critics often muddy the waters. Some employ arcane terminology that makes them inaccessible to the uninitiated. Others make assertions that defy common sense, e.g., that an author’s intent has no bearing on how a reader should interpret his work, or that a laundry list has as much intrinsic literary merit as a Shakespearean play.
Today is the 22nd anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s death. His influence continues to grow, as new generations of students, at the Mises Institute and elsewhere, discover his thought. Many besides Rothbard’s acknowledged followers have been influenced by him, but one striking example must here suffice. One of the most important books of twentieth-century American philosophy has been Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Automation has become a huge concern in recent years. With computer algorithms getting more and more sophisticated, machines are becoming increasingly able to do jobs that are many people’s bread and butter.
The supply of US dollars accelerated during late 2016 with October’s year-over-year percentage increase in the money supply hitting a 46-month high of 11.2 percent. The YOY growth rate fell slightly to 10.3 percent in November.
This comes after a long period of relatively sedate growth in the money supply through most of 2013, 2014 and 2015.
The recent surge in money supply growth suggests that the likelihood of an economic contraction in the near future has been reduced, with the next downturn being pushed out further into the future.
What does 2017 have in store? Our attention will be directed toward the Fed and other central banks, as the world’s financial elites try to navigate through increasingly volatile waters. Central bankers don’t have a strong track record for seeing bubbles, but it’s hard for them to ignore growing skepticism from both the public and even their own governments.
In the fall semester of 1980 I discovered the word libertarian. One of my dorm mates knocked on my door and told me to come see what was on his television. It was a Ed Clark for president advertisement in which Clark said that he was the Libertarian candidate for president and gave a description of what that meant.
One of the most debated issues right now is Obamacare, and specifically whether and how the new republican-dominated Washington DC apparatus will repeal it — and when. Democrats are expectedly up in arms and fear any change to the policy, the suggested legacy of President Obama. Republicans are considering their options: whether to repeal parts of it or the whole thing, how to best do it, if it should be replaced by something else (perhaps Romneycare?), and how to deal with a repeal’s “millions of people losing insurance” (to paraphrase Paul Krugman).
