If one follows news relating to the economy, they surely have come across certain mainstream rhetoric in support of the Federal Reserve System. Everyone is familiar with the typical claims that the Federal Reserve strives for maximized employment and low inflation, and that the Fed is the regulator of the banking industry. But king of them all is of the supposed political neutrality of the Federal Reserve.
Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot distinguish fact from fiction. It also isn’t creative or can create novel content but repeats, repackages, and reformulates what has already been said (but perhaps in new ways).
President Biden needs an economics lesson. Demonstrating his ignorance of economics, his recent State of the Union speech regaled us with a laundry list of legal business pricing strategies that he wants to see restricted or banned by federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”
While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?
One would guess the folly of rent control regulations needn’t be explained any further. If rents are held in place by government edict, landlords have no incentive to maintain apartment units to attract renters, the housing stock ultimately deteriorates, and homelessness increases. But, as Bloomberg reports, “Tougher rent control, returning worldwide, destroys $75 billion in property value.
One thing to be said in favor of the American conservative establishment is the fact that they at least pay lip service to the idea of a free market. They have also memorized the typical talking points in its defense, including the greater prosperity it provides, the morality of private property, and the impossibility of successful central planning. On this last point, however, mainstream conservatives generally fail to extend the logic to perhaps its most obvious modern example: the catastrophic effects of American foreign policy.
If we understand human rights as rights derived from the concept of self-ownership, it becomes clear that there is no such right as the right not to be discriminated against. I have a right to speak but no right to force others to listen to me or to “amplify” my voice. I am at liberty to go about my lawful business, but I have no right to force others to watch me or recognize me, much less to demand that anyone should take action to make me “feel seen.” I have the right to embrace my personal or cultural identity but not to force others to celebrate that identity.
In a recent article, we briefly summarized what it is that we today call artificial intelligence (AI). Whereas these technologies are certainly impressive and may even pass the Turing test, they are not beings and have no consciousness.
After the War to Prevent Southern Independence and the assassination of Lincoln the federal government was said to possess a “treasury of virtue.” The Republican Party, which was the federal government, with a decades-long monopoly of power rivaled only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, made sure that the government-run schools would preach this Virtuous State Philosophy to generations of school children.
