Economists often warn about the perverse effects of the minimum wage. It is acknowledged this measure does not increase the salary of less productive workers. It reduces their employability, their ability to increase their skills and experience and thus constitute a powerful barrier to social mobility. But an effect is “perverse” only if consequences are unintended. The recent behavior of the French and German governments, however, leads one to believe that some recent effects of minimum wage laws are very much intended.

[This is Part One in a three-part series on policing. See Part Two and Part Three.]

Many people recoil from the idea of policing being done by private, for-profit enterprise. They imagine that such companies, in their attempt to maximize profit, would be even more abusive than government police. But what most fail to realize is that private ‘police’ already exist in America and to a large extent: there are an estimated 3 persons employed in private security for every public cop. These include a wide range of roles and skills, from the night watchman at a construction site to sophisticated cyber security experts ensuring that financial transactions are secure.

As several articles over the past few days have indicated (here, here, here and here), Italy is on the brink of a full-blown banking crisis.

Disenchantment with the democratic process is a common theme of contemporary politics. The major complaint behind this trend is the idea that “our” political institutions have been subverted by powerful interests that deny voters a meaningful voice in the decision process. Concern is likewise growing that democratic decisions do little to safeguard the rights of voting minorities.

Thomas Piketty´s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, on growing inequality in capitalism, has become a bestseller. Piketty offers much data claiming that inequality is rising and draws the conclusion that the state should fix that ‘problem’ with additional taxes on the rich.

In the end, whatever she did really didn’t matter. Had a bank camera captured footage of her robbing a bank at gunpoint, James Comey would have declared that while Hillary Clinton did a bad thing, no federal prosecutor would have indicted her. (This is to assume that the Clintons need to use weapons when extorting money for themselves while, in reality, a simple speech or a political favor couched in political threats will do just fine.)

The Forgotten Depression is a narrative history of the depression of 1920–21. Although it is informed by a very definite theory—the Austrian business cycle theory—it is not a standard work in applied economics. It does not first present the theory in a rigorous formulation and then move on to apply the theory by adducing pertinent qualitative facts and statistical data to explain a complex historical event such as a depression.

Abolition of the public sector means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations, cooperatives, or any other voluntary groupings of individuals and capital. The fact that all streets and land areas would be private would by itself solve many of the seemingly insoluble problems of private operation. What we need to do is to reorient our thinking to consider a world in which all land areas are privately owned.

The delinquency rate on loans is key in understanding banking. It answers one question: what percentage of loans is overdue for payment? The delinquency rate is by far the most useful indicator for “credit stress.” It seems, however, as if delinquency no longer counts. Few are paying attention to the quick and sudden rise of the delinquency rate. What does it tell us and is a new banking crisis imminent?