Thomas Sowell used to ask his students to imagine a government bureaucracy that had two functions. One function was to provide medicine to sick children, and the other function was to construct statues of Benedict Arnold. He would then ask his students that if the bureaucracy suffered budget cuts, which function would the bureau stop funding?
When crafting Obamacare, the top priority for policy writers was not identifying the best ways for patients to receive the medical care they needed, but instead to identify ways to reduce the costs of care.
President Donald Trump is pushing for a wall to be built built to prevent immigration through the southern border of the United States. It was a signature issue of his successful campaign to become president and has stated that he is willing to shutdown the federal government in order to get what he wants. Indeed, a large majority of Americans are opposed to paying taxes in order to provide welfare and free education for foreigners, but is a wall the right solution?
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. ~ Macbeth
Our limited time, our brief candle as Shakespeare’s Macbeth had it earlier in the soliloquy quoted from above, may count for very little in the grand scheme of things, but is of the utmost importance to each of us personally. Unlike the other dimensions, height, breadth and depth, the fourth is almost infinite, but individuals enjoy only a small part of it, our three-score years and ten. Time moves on. What really matters is not wasting it.
On December 14, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Obamacare unconstitutional because its individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power,” since the tax that enforced it is now gone. Progressive leaning critics quickly called it bad jurisprudence and assured people that Obamacare remained constitutional.
A growing chorus of alarmist voices decries the rising economic inequality in the Western world and especially in the United States.1 Surprisingly enough, the same mainstream analysts complain about the anemic growth of labor productivity without seeing the correct link between the two.
“Everything is happening, nothing has changed,” Alex Massie wrote over at CapX last week, perhaps summing up best the political situation in the UK right now. What has happened in the Brexit debate in the last few months, but in the last week in particular, has caused much astonishment around the globe — indeed, it has left almost everyone with the question of what in the world is going on in Britain.
Although some capitalists and defenders of free markets believe that Ebenezer Scrooge has much to teach us about good economics, I have long found him to be less than inspiring in this respect.
In a market economy, a major service that money provides is that of the medium of exchange. Producers exchange their goods for money and then exchange money for other goods. As production of goods and services increases, this results in a greater demand for the services of the medium of exchange (the service that money provides). Conversely, as economic activity slows down the demand for the services of money follows suit.
