The philosopher Karl Popper devoted considerable attention to Karl Marx in Volume 2 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, originally published in 1945, and in this week’s column, I’d like to consider some of his insights.
Popper’s most fundamental criticism of Marx is expressed in this paragraph:
According to a woefully outmoded law of the United States, the American government must account for the more than 8,100 tons of gold it owns at the now completely irrelevant price of $42.22 per ounce. In the precise language of the 1973 Act to Amend the Par Value Modification Act, still in force, the legally stipulated price is “forty-two and two-ninths dollars per fine troy ounce.” (That “two-ninths” is interesting.) But the real value, the market price of gold, has now traded over $3,000 per ounce, about 71 times the statutory price.
‘A ceasefire is when the Israelis fire and we cease.’ ~ Refaat Al-Areer, RIP
The median elapsed time between an American official opposing anything Israel does, and then dropping out of history is getting shorter.
While the financial press is attempting to cover Trump’s frenetic bipolar tariff policy, the ponderous commercial real estate market continues to deteriorate. Bisnow.com reports, citing CoStar, “US banks reported delinquencies hit 1.57 percent at the end of last year, a rate not seen since the fourth quarter of 2014.”
The seventeenth President of the United States, Andrew Johnson, is perhaps an unlikely figure which proponents of free markets would be inclined to consider. Upon assuming the role of Chief Executive after Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson inherited the crony economic arrangements which had developed during the Civil War period, and which would characterize much of the following Gilded Age.
This essay examines the enduring relevance of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson in analyzing contemporary economic and social issues. It first applies Hazlitt’s lesson to three prominent contemporary issues: protectionism, technophobia, and the economic fallacies surrounding war. The essay then shifts focus to the Danish welfare state (velfærdsstat), often celebrated as a paragon of the Nordic model of social democracy.
