With another Sunday come and gone, the sports media has noticed that ratings for NFL football are slumping. This is a problem not just for the NFL but for TV stations who have long depended on live sports — and NFL games in particular — as something to hang over the heads of viewers who are increasingly abandoning cable and satellite TV in favor of services like Netflix.
Today is Ralph Raico’s eightieth birthday. He is the greatest living historian of classical liberalism and a leading libertarian theorist. He was a member of Murray Rothbard’s legendary Circle Bastiat and one of Murray’s closest friends. Ralph has been my friend for more than thirty-five years, and his learning, analytical abilities, and devotion to liberty have always inspired me. He is also extremely funny and a master of the sarcastic put-down.
Since 1993, the federal government has levied a gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. State governments also set and levy their own gas taxes. All considered, Americans pay an average of 54.21 cents per gallon of gas in taxes. That’s quite a shocking number, especially in comparison to what shop owners, the people who are actually providing this essential good, are making. That number is just an average, too. Some state taxes on gasoline are drastically higher.
As an economic term, “inflation” is shorthand for “inflation of the money supply.”
The general public, however, usually takes it to mean “rising prices” which is not surprising since one of the common effects of an increase in the money supply is higher prices. However, supporters of government policy often say, “If quantitative easing (QE) and its terrible twin, fractional reserve banking, are so awful, why have we got no inflation?”
To address this conundrum, there are six related factors that are noteworthy:
Janet Yellen continues to be an inflation dove, and last week, she suggested that the FOMC keep interest rates low, even if unemployment continues to fall and official inflation rates increase.
The world monetary order is changing. Slowly but steadily, global trade and currency markets are becoming less dollar-centric. Formerly marginal currencies such as the Chinese yuan now stand to become serious competitors to U.S. dollar dominance.
Could gold also begin to emerge as a leading currency in world trade? Over time, it certainly could. But the more immediate implications for gold’s monetary role center on its increasing accumulation by central banks such as China’s.
As the 2016 election draws near, the elephant in the room — whether the candidates and the public know it or not — remains the central bank and its continued power over both the domestic and global economy. There is good reason to believe, of course, that the Fed is actively crafting policy to avoid any economic crises before the election, in order to benefit the Clinton campaign.
It is possible that there is no term more abused in modern political discourse than “liberalism.” Originally meant to describe the ideology of free trade and limited government, the anti-capitalist left adopted the term in the 1930s and changed its meaning to the opposite of what it meant in the 19th century.
