The beltway Republicans are scrambling now that it seems the Obamacare replacement package put forward for Paul Ryan and endorsed by Donald Trump can’t get enough support to get through the House. The failure of the American Health Care Act should surprise no one, as it is a piece of legislation that managed to please no one.
In the 1950s, Corsican gangsters such as Lucky Luciano created a mafia empire by smuggling morphine base from Turkey to Sicily, where it was refined into heroin, then shipped to France and finally to the United States. This was the infamous “French Connection” that supplied the bulk of the heroin supply that the United States received through the early 70s.
35 years ago, I was worried. I was working at a free-market think tank at a university, and I could see that Austrian economics was becoming less and less influential.
Who would speak for untrammeled freedom and capitalism? Sound money and no central banking? Would economics entirely betray its great advocates of liberty from Menger to Mises, in favor of monsters like Keynes and Marx?
Who would teach students the truth, and inspire them never to give up or give in? To dedicate their lives to the ideas that build civilization, and fight the left-wing destructionists?
The supply of US dollars has slowed during early 2017 with February’s year-over-year percentage increase hitting a 17-month low of 7.7 percent. Monthly year-over-year growth rates in the money supply have been falling each month since October.
Over the past eight months or so, money supply growth rates have become somewhat volatile with the growth rate surging from 6.7 percent in late 2017 up to 11.3 percent by late 2016, and down again to under 8 percent by February of this year.
Keynesian economics has witnessed a remarkable resurgence since the crisis of 2008. The inability of mainstream economics to predict or explain the crisis led many economists to become skeptical of its core macroeconomic tenets. Several have turned the clock back to the ideas of Keynes to make sense of the housing bubble and the ensuing recession.
In a recent interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Neel Kashkari explained his dissenting position on the March rate hike. His position was that there is not yet enough inflation. In fact, he thinks that the Fed’s 2% inflation target shouldn’t be seen as a hard ceiling. He even stated that predictions of coming inflation worries are baseless:
Government’s meddling in the healthcare business has been disastrous from the get-go.
As the immigration debate goes on, many commentators continue to sloppily ignore the difference between the concept of naturalization and the phenomenon of immigration.
Over the course of approximately six hours, the Left in the United States made a spectacular, 180 degree turn on federalism and states’ rights without even recognizing it. Although this lack of self-awareness shouldn’t be particularly surprising coming from the modern Left, which seems to have missed the irony when it goes about shutting down debates on free speech.
