Intermediate

David Gordon reviews Paul C. Graham’s Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation, examining Lincoln's logic and finding it wanting.

Paul Krugman claims that the real factor determining inflation is the rate of unemployment, not increases in the supply of money. As usual, he is wrong.

It is not surprising that some US states are facing large deficits between budgeted spending and incoming revenues. However, state bankruptcies occur when states cannot meet their bond obligations, which have little to do with operating expenses.

The Fed-launched real estate bubble did not just create havoc in residential markets, but also has distorted the commercial real estate market, too. And it is getting worse.

Few economists—even the free-market advocates—understand what caused the Great Depression. No, the Fed didn’t cause the Depression by failing to inflate the currency. Instead, it was the Fed’s inflation that led to the disastrous early events.

As Murray Rothbard has noted, there is an important distinction between nation and state. The former is a voluntary association of people while the latter is coercive and predatory. Progressives, of course, claim the opposite.

Many of the high-flying businesses that received massive publicity turned out to be the creation of a bubble economy. Not all businesses are flashes in a pan; many of them continue to serve as the backbone of our economy.

Collectivism isn't a dangerous ideology just because of bad economics. It also is dangerous because its practitioners realize the only way to implement it is through outright violence, and they have no qualms about employing it to get their way.

Many economic think tanks espouse that national defense spending benefits Americans at large. It doesn’t. The notion that military spending "bolsters" the economy is yet another Keynesian fable.

While G.K. Chesterton and libertarian thinking were not always a match, Chesterton did make some libertarian contributions in his novel Manalive. Connor Mortell dives into that work.