Daily Articles

Right Policy, Wrong Reason

by Laurence M. Vance April 6, 2020

Before Donald Trump indicated his support for the current coronavirus-relief program, he broached the idea of a payroll-tax cut. In addition to the money withheld from paychecks for income tax, there are, thanks to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), two payroll taxes: Social Security and Medicare. The Social Security tax rate is 12.4 percent (split equally between employer and employee) ...

The Lesson of a Crash that Cured Itself

by Wendy McElroy April 3, 2020

If a government wishes to alleviate, rather than aggravate, a depression, its only valid course is laissez-faire—to leave the economy alone. Only if there is no interference, direct or threatened, with prices, wage rates and business liquidation, will the necessary adjustment proceed with smooth dispatch. — Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression The economic disruption caused by ...

What Comes After the Coronavirus, Freedom or Despotism?

by Richard M. Ebeling April 2, 2020

Chinese The coronavirus crisis that has enveloped the world has brought about calls for society and economy-wide action on the part of governments that has been matched by the imposing of radical shutdowns and compulsory mass quarantining as tens of millions of people are told to not to go to work and to stay at home ...

Preventing Liberty from Becoming a Coronavirus Fatality

by Ted Galen Carpenter March 30, 2020

Public attitudes about the coronavirus outbreak increasingly exhibit features of a collective panic. That development creates the danger that government measures designed to deal with a very real public health problem may lead to enormous collateral damage both to the economy and the freedoms that Americans take for granted. Governments at all levels have taken ever more extreme (even outrageous) ...

The Wrong Solution to Welfare Marriage Penalties

by Laurence M. Vance March 27, 2020

The typical wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Although all of it may be paid for up front, soon afterward, or during the first year of marriage, some couples continue to pay throughout their married life because of the marriage penalty in the tax code. A marriage penalty or bonus results when the combined ...

Leaving People Alone Is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus

by Richard M. Ebeling March 24, 2020

The world has rapidly moved into a seemingly aggressive paternalistic planning mode in the face of the Coronavirus crisis. Many voices are heard to say that personal and economic liberties must be restricted or even temporarily banned. At the same time, many of those same voices are saying that at a moment like this government spending, for all intents ...

How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak

by John W. Whitehead March 20, 2020

“Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, ...

To Kill Markets Is the Worst Possible Plan

by Richard M. Ebeling March 19, 2020

Momentous events usually leave strong memories on those who have lived through them, and those memories often become passed on to later generations in the form of historical interpretations of why and what had happened in the past. This has certainly been so in the cases of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement, the ...

The Money-Printing Gods Have Failed

by David Stockman March 17, 2020

Hooray! Finally even the robo-machines and day traders are puking, not BTFDing. Today’s 3,000 Dow Point Dump says even they have had enough of the craven dolts who occupy the Eccles Building. You do not need an PhD in economics—or even a night school survey course—to see that COVID-19 is temporary supply side shock which 0.05% money market rates are powerless ...

Tradition and Why the Russians are Who They Are

by Richard M. Ebeling March 13, 2020

It is often said to be misplaced and inappropriate to use stereotypes when talking about people or entire nations. To do so is unfair to the wide diversity that exists among the individual citizens of any country over time or during any particular period of time. And this is no doubt true, but, nonetheless, there are such things as ...

Closing Time

by Laurence M. Vance March 12, 2020

The Democratic National Convention — where delegates of the Democratic Party choose their party’s nominees for president and vice president — will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Fiserv Forum (where the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks play). This will be the first time that a major political party convention has been held in Milwaukee, which was among ...

Right, Bernie! We Are All (Ersatz) Socialists Now

by David Stockman March 12, 2020

In 1971 Nixon famously said “we are all Keynesians now” as he ash-canned the Bretton Woods gold exchange standard, thereby unleashing fiat central banking on the world economy. At the time, the Keynesian part wasn’t viewed as such a big deal by enlightened opinion. It was supposedly just the Republican Right catching-up with the Great Depression and shedding its vestigial ...