Smith was scarcely the founder of economic science, a science which existed since the medieval scholastics and, in its modern form, since Richard Cantillon. But what the German economists used to call, in a narrower connection, Das AdamSmithProblem, is much more severe than that. For the problem is not simply that Smith was not the founder of economics.
"It is a great comfort to every administration to be able to make its citizens happy by spending. For public opinion will then attribute the resulting boom to its current rulers."
Dan Beard used to be commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation. Now he's calling for the Bureau of Reclamation — the government agency that built dams throughout the west and controls water allocation to this day — to be abolished.
Vineer Bhansali at PIMCO argues that negative-yielding bonds act more like insurance policies than financial assets:
Indeed, negative-yielding bond markets tend to behave more like insurance policies than as investment assets. This is because, with a negative zero-coupon bond, a fixed income investor, like an insurance policy buyer, pays up front for protection-- in this case a premium-- for expected principal return in the form of a return of less principal at the negative rate.
It is hardly a relief for British households that £100 worth of consumer goods will now cost them around £99.90, when other prices in the UK economy are experiencing a rapid inflation.
On calls for protecting Fed "independence" in the name of controlling inflation: "This is the Johnny-one-note of the Fed’s defense of its unbridled power."
Uber, Lyft, and similar rideshare companies represent a direct threat to state-controlled taxi cartels and their (increasingly unsellable) medallions.
Judge Napolitano points out that if government is spying on everyone, it's not spending it's time on spying on those who are most likely to actually use violence against others.
Contemporary supporters of an expanded role for government are increasingly moving away from calling themselves liberals toward referring to themse
Medicine has gone the way of economics in preferring aggregates to specifics, although such methods do little to explain the needs of individual patients. On the other hand, the turn toward large-scale aggregation does help the government to centrally plan health care policy.
