Populism was in the air this week as ranchers in the Western US opposed the spread of federally-owned lands, and reformers in Switzerland look to a referendum on fractional reserve banking.
Politicians can often be found saying that it would be bad to end a government program because it would unfairly punish those who benefit from the program. But what about those who are punished and disadvantaged by the unjust program in the first place?
The world waits to see if next week is finally the week that the Fed announces its rate hike. Can the economy survive whatever small bump the Fed deals out? Perhaps, but that won’t change the inherent instability of our current monetary regime.
Opponents of austerity have come out to denounce the idea that it’s bad for governments to borrow. They note that there are benefits to borrowing. The distinction they fail to make is that there’s a big difference between private borrowing and government borrowing.
The true lessons of Thanksgiving are that private property, the market economy, and personal responsibility lead to prosperity, while government intervention makes us all poorer.
Bernie Sanders and other advocates for more taxes like to note that income tax rates hit 90 percent in the 1950s. What they leave out is that few ever paid such rates and total tax revenues were about the same then as today.
