In the 1930s and 1940s, when the modern system of national income and product accounts (NIPA) was being developed, the scope of national product was a hotly debated issue. No issue stirred more debate than the question, Should government product be included in gross product? Simon Kuznets (Nobel laureate in economic sciences, 1971), the most important American contributor to the development of the accounts, had major reservations about including all government purchases in national product.

Numerous studies have found that government spending multipliers have a very low value. Indeed one recent study found that in a country with characteristics like the U.S., it was significantly negative.

Grant defeated Lee, the Confederacy crumbled, and the idea of secession disappeared forever, or at least that’s what the conventional wisdom says. Secession is no historical irrelevance. Quite the contrary, the topic is integral to classical liberalism. Indeed, the right of secession follows at once from the basic rights defended by classical liberalism. As even Macaulay’s schoolboy knows, classical liberalism begins with the principle of self-ownership: each person is the rightful owner of his or her own body.

From one of his Newsweek Business Tides columns: “The favorite demand of most tax “reformers” is that we must “close the loopholes.” But what is a loophole? Those who invoke the catchword never refer to the exemptions and deductions that apply to the low-bracket incomes. They use it only to stigmatize the deductions that those who earn high incomes are permitted to take, implicitly or explicitly, by the law. They do not stop to ask whether a deduction is fair or unfair. Do a few abuse it? Then it should be denied to everybody.