We now have the announcement that Ben Bernanke’s Fed will buy $45 billion a month in treasuries, QE4, until unemployment reaches 6.5% or his version of inflation exceeds 2.5%. What a surprise!
Last September, when Bernanke announced the third phase of the government’s program of borrowing from itself by creating new money and using it to buy government bonds, I wrote:
The Stockholm syndrome is a psychological phenomenon whereby hostages develop irrational sympathy toward their captors even to the point of defending their captors in subsequent investigations and criminal trials. While this applies to individuals or small groups, the Oslo syndrome applies to whole national populations.
In this very thoughtful book, Brian Leiter calls our attention to a paradox. In most liberal democracies, including the United States, religious believers often are exempt from laws that violate the tenets of their religion. By contrast, parallel claims of exemption on non-religious grounds tend to receive less consideration.
Editor’s Note: Business scandals often lead to calls for greater regulation. Yet, as economist Mark Thornton shows, in so many recent scandals, regulators have been among the chief culprits.
“It had come to be accepted that the pigs, who were manifestly cleverer than the other animals, should decide all questions of farm policy, though their decisions had to be ratified by a majority vote.”
Orwell, G. (1989 [1945]), Animal Farm, S. 34.
Editor’s Note: President Obama’s “Fiscal Cliff” message to the American public is essentially this: “Either Congress lets me soak the ‘rich’, or you yourselves will get soaked when across-the-board tax hikes automatically kick in at year end. It’s you or them.” The American people should not yield to this thuggish demagoguery. Not only does soaking the rich lead to capital consumption and all-around impoverishment, but it can contribute vanishingly little toward eliminating the federal deficit.
It is a nice classroom example of how welfare keeps people in poverty.
Deck the Halls with Macro Follies For the holiday from our friends at EconStories.
