Interest Rates Are Rising, but the Fed Continues to Be Reckless
The crushing issue of high inflation caused by central banks can no longer be downplayed. Public displeasure at the increasing currency devaluation has now forced monetary policy makers to act.
The US Federal Reserve (Fed) has raised its key interest rate to 1 percentage point. Many other central banks have also reacted—such as the Bank of England, the Central Bank of Australia, and the Central Bank of Sweden. Even the ponderous European Central Bank (ECB) now plans to raise interest rates at the beginning of the third quarter.
The Fair Tax Is the Tax That Will Not Die
Rep. John Linder (R-GA) has retired from Congress and radio talk show host Neal Boortz has been silent for years, but their tax plan just will not die.
Writing in the New York Sun, billionaire businessman and Republican Party donor John W. Childs makes the case for replacing the current income tax system with a national sales tax. He writes:
Debt-Fueled Demand and Oil Price Inflation Brings Airfares Roaring Back
If you’ve purchased any airline tickets lately, you’ve probably noticed that prices are up. It’s quite a reversal from the days of covid lockdowns, when airline tickets could be had for half the price of 2019 fares. Or even lower, in many cases.
But those days are apparently over, and as Yahoo Finance notes this week:
Are Technology Shocks Responsible for Business Cycles? In a Word, No.
In their writings, Finn Kydland and Edward C. Prescott (K-P), the 2004 Nobel laureates in economics, had hypothesized that a major cause behind boom-bust cycles is technology shocks. In order to assess the importance of this claim, which they labeled the theory of real business cycles, K-P employed the Solow growth model (after Robert Solow, the 1987 Nobel laureate), which in turn is based on the Cobb-Douglas production function of the following type:
Y = A*K(1–a)*Na,
Hazony on the American Tradition
In last week’s article, I discussed some of the arguments Yoram Hazony gives in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery in favor of an empiricist procedure in ethics that supports working within a particular national tradition and against the rationalist deductive method of those who without empirical evidence defend the supreme value of freedom by postulating it arbitrarily as an axiom. I tried to show that one could support the self-ownership principle by an empirical argument that appealed to human nature.
