Economics professor Bernard Malamud made the local paper today as he is retiring after teaching at UNLV for 50 years. I had Professor Malamud for a class, but darn if I can remember what the class was.

Malamad showed up in 1968 when UNLV was but a dream. “The campus was a desert; there was nothing here,” he told the R-J “There were rabbits running around and coyotes running around, and what Tom [White] described was a big-city university. That’s what we’ve become.”

It’s been three short months since the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead , and America has suffered from yet another school shooting. This time in Santa Fe, Texas, where 10 people were gunned down on Friday.

Today in stupid lawsuits we have two Florida men suing McDonalds for not giving them a discount for asking for a Quarter Pounder with Cheese without the cheese. They are asking for $5 million in damages. 

As the Miami Herald reports:

One of the most obnoxious stories in America the past year has been the controversy over players protesting during the national anthem. While I personally sympathize with both concerns from athletes about police brutality in minority communities, as well as the desire of most football fans to simply not have any sort of political advocacy mixed into their sports, the resulting media coverage - from both political and sports outlets - has been largely nauseating.

Not a day goes by when the liberal media don’t telegraph to the world that a “Trumpocracy” is destroying American democracy. Conspicuous by its absence is a pesky fact: Ours was never a country conceived as a democracy.

To arrive at a democracy, we Americans destroyed a republic.

One of the ways in which the republic was destroyed was through the slow sundering of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. The 10th was meant to guarantee constitutional devolution of power.

Most economists concur with the view that what keeps the economy going is consumption expenditure. Furthermore, it is generally held that spending, rather than individual saving, is the essential condition for production and prosperity.

Savings is seen to be detrimental to economic activity as it weakens the potential demand for goods and services.

The world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of Sweden (or Sveriges Riksbank), today celebrates its 350th anniversary by organizing a conference on the theme “The role of central banks then, now, and in the future.” While the bank is probably best known for sponsoring the faux Nobel Prize in economics (it’s not one of the prizes in Alfred Nobel’s will), how it came about is a story that is as enlightening as it is em

[Reprinted from Free Market Economics: A Basic Reader, compiled by Bettina G. Greaves.]