In recent years, the Fed has felt the need to step up efforts to defend its governing structure and its agenda. Thanks to the the success of the anti-Fed rhetoric of the Ron Paul campaigns of 2008 and 2012, combined with the financial crisis of 2008, the Fed has directly engaged the public more and more:
As the Trump administration takes shape, it may be helpful to remind ourselves of some of the steps that can be taken in the direction of economic policy that better allows private citizens to be free and flourish. Given his expressed views, there’s no reason to believe he plans to radically re-orient the federal government in the direction of freedom and free markets. However, any one of these steps below — even partially implemented — would be a step in the right direction.
“Fake news” emerged as a dominant theme of the 2016 US presidential election campaign and has been in the public eye ever since. To now-president Trump, the term refers to CNN, the New York Times, and other outlets that portray him unfavorably; to Democrats, it means politically incorrect websites, blogs, and social media accounts.
One of the ways Donald Trump has been an outlier in Presidential annals is the speed with which he has started living up to campaign promises. His pace is so far beyond that of recent history that one political wag suggested Americans will need to switch to dog years to keep up.
From the perspective that campaign promises are contracts with the electorate, moving expeditiously to act on what was promised is honorable. Of course, from the perspective of Americans’ welfare, it matters more whether what was promised is sensible policy.
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 91st birthday. It’s impossible to convey fully what he was like to those who did not know him; but here are a couple of stories about my unforgettable mentor and friend. In the fall of 1979, Murray gave a talk on the origins of World War II. He was not a specialist in European diplomatic history, but in his talk he displayed a detailed knowledge of the many twists and tums in the negotiations among Britain, Poland, and Germany in 1938 and 1939. Murray’s range of knowledge was immense.
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 19, no. 4 (Winter 2016)
Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong
Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016
Cohen and DeLong are well-known economists, but they indict their fellow economists for an overemphasis on theory. Away with models that have little relation to reality, our authors say. Instead, we need to grasp a simple lesson about the source of America’s prosperous economy.
