The US Savings Bond Scam
Remember savings bonds? They were popular before the central bank made sure that safe, low-interest investments became a thing of the past.
Remember savings bonds? They were popular before the central bank made sure that safe, low-interest investments became a thing of the past.
GDP fails to account for many measures of quality of life, such as personal safety, the local climate, leisure time, and more.
It makes sense that individual ethics can vary within a natural law framework: the nonaggression principle isn't so much a rule to be applied as a norm to be followed. It's the foundation that makes life among other people possible.
Useful goods and services, and the productive resources needed to create useful goods and services, are wealth. Money is not wealth, and creating more money without first creating wealth is a big problem.
It should be self-evident that a just and moral political regime can only exist in the long term if a sufficiently large number of people actually believe in it.
We are witnessing the governmentalization of private industry, the turning of supposedly private enterprises into state apparatuses, and the growth of the state through putatively private extensions of it.
"We’re already past any of these illusions about democracy or politics or constitutionalism. I would argue that we’ve reached the point where loving our country requires us to identify and begin to separate the various nations which are within it. I think there’s nothing more important today."
This victory is not of one candidate or party over another in this race or that, but rather a resounding ideological defeat of one of the most illiberal and menacing forces we face at the moment: technocracy.
The Japanese experience offers valuable lessons for the US and Europe. A loose monetary policy can stabilize a recession for the short term, but a persistent flood of cheap money paralyzes productivity gains and growth.
Strict lockdowns have devastated millions of families' incomes while failing to bring success in suppressing covid mortality.