Britain’s general election went horribly wrong, with the Conservatives forced into a putative coalition with the Democratic Ulster Party. Theresa May’s failure to secure a clear majority has provoked indignation, bitterness, and widespread pessimism. The purpose of this article is not to contribute to this outcry, but to take a more measured view of the situation faced by the British government with regards to Brexit, and the consequences for Europe.

In recent years, we’ve examined any number of ways of decentralizing the American political system. These step-by-step moves can include decentralizing the monetary system, decentralizing the military, decentralizing immigration policy, and decentralizing elections.

June’s FOMC meeting concluded today and the meeting announcement revealed an interest rate hike of .25% to bring the Federal Funds target to between 1 and 1.25%. Additionally, we also learned that the FOMC anticipates one more rate in 2017, 3 more in 2018, and the beginning of a balance sheet reduction effort starting this year. Of course, the balance sheet reduction is actually just a taper in the amount of reinvestment. Since they are simply slowing down how much in assets they are buying every month, the balance sheet will still be increasing. 

Steve Baker, a Conservative Member of Parliament, was announced today as junior Brexit minister under fellow libertarian David Davis.

Students are running out of reasons to pursue higher education. Here are four trends documented in recent articles:

Graduates have little to no improvement in critical thinking skills

The Wall Street Journal reported on the troubling results of the College Learning Assessment Plus test (CLA+), administered in over 200 colleges across the US.

Jeff joins John O’Donnell and Merlin Rothfeld to discuss the health of the US economy.

Trump’s $1-trillion infrastructure spending plan continues to be one of his less controversial proposed policies. In Washington, and even among many in the general public, there is a consensus that government spending on more roads and bridges is always necessarily a slam dunk. 

This is stated matter-of-factly in a recent CNN article about the president’s plan: 

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Human Action.]

In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, May 20-21, 2017 under the pretentious title “An Einstein for the Dismal Science,” Eric Maskin made extravagant claims for the significance of Paul Samuelson. For Maskin, himself a Nobel laureate in economics, Samuelson was one of the three “most important creative economists of the 20th century” (The other two were Kenneth Arrow and John Maynard Keynes.)

Ludwig von Mises dedicated a great amount of ink to the role that ideas play in shaping society. Not only does his analysis illustrate why it is so important to educate the public on topics such as economics, but also explains the enormous danger posed by widely accepted political myths.