Canada’s Alcohol Laws Are Stuck in the Past
Alcohol sales in Ontario are stuck in a morass of price-fixing and other government controls.
Alcohol sales in Ontario are stuck in a morass of price-fixing and other government controls.
Niall Ferguson’s new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe is timely. But Ferguson may just be telling the reader what he wants to hear.
We should be quite skeptical when states impose the opinion of minority groups on the majority through special programs in schools and elsewhere. Such programs likely involve “positive discrimination” against particular groups, consistent with state objectives.
Because of past easy-money binges, the pool of wealth may be declining just as prices are increasing. And we're likely to see upward pressure on interest rates. This is bad news, and shows the limits of the Fed's power.
Fannie and Freddie were long quasi-government corporations that typified the corrupt union between the feds and corporate America. But now it looks like both companies are just full-on government corporations.
The Fed says rate hikes are at least two years away. A lot can happen in two years, and since when is forecasting a couple rate bumps two years from now considered hawkish to the point of making the dollar pop and gold flop?
Although it conjures up scary imagery, shadow banking is simply a term for banking operations that occur through financial intermediaries that are not traditional commercial banks.
It's already clear that after an initial sugar high caused by stimulus funds, there's now hardly any "bang for the buck" from stimulus funds. In fact, governments are spending millions for each job "created" by stimulus.
Interventionism does not work because it misallocates resources in the economy. More importantly, it disturbs, distorts, and destroys the corrective process whereby market actors reallocate resources back into a sustainable framework.
Local governments now control child adoption in America. A recent Supreme Court ruling highlights just how political and capricious local officials can be in exercising this power.