Getting the Great Depression (Almost) Right — And Totally Wrong

2024-02-24

There are many arguments against secession. Some of them are quite prudent, such as those that simply contend that national separation may not be a good idea at this time. 
Many others are premised on the refusal to acknowledge the human right known as self-determination. This argument is wrong and immoral, and is nothing more than the traditional imperialist-colonialist argument repackaged for modern audiences. 
Perhaps the worst "argument" against secession is the use of the phrase "we tried it before and it didn’t work." I put "argument" in scare quotes because the statement isn’t an argument at all. It’s simply a claim that, because a political strategy failed in the past, it can never be tried again. Ever. 
We can see how simplistic this claim is when we imagine explaining it to a

2024-02-23

Prices will always increase, some small banks will fail, and the Fed was asleep at the switch when the run on Silicon Valley Bank occurred. Fed chair Jerome Powell admitted those three things in response to Scott Pelley’s questions on 60 Minutes.
“But the overall price level doesn’t come down. It will fluctuate. And some . . . goods and services will go up, others will go down. But overall, in aggregate, the price level doesn’t tend to go down except in fairly extreme circumstances,” Powell said.
Of course, what Powell is referring to doesn’t exist. Murray Rothbard wrote,
There is no such thing as a single, scientific index of the movement of general prices. All such indexes are strictly arbitrary, and there are a huge number of possible indexes, all of which create insuperable economic

2023-11-29

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the problems with Joe Manchin’s argument that Congress needs to reject the “extremism” in its ranks if it’s ever going to solve the many problems facing Americans.
I argued that the opposite is true. That Congress is almost entirely unified behind a specific pace of progressive interventionism where the predictable consequences of previous interventions are perpetually used to justify more intervention. In this cycle, the government grows, the economy sputters, and the politically connected grow rich.
Then last week, as if to prove my point, Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Republican senator Mike Braun (R-IN) sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) imploring the agency to address one of the consequences of Obama’s

2023-11-27

The leviathan does not rest in pursuing free universities, creeping ahead unchecked by either reason, law, or accounting principles. Why is student assessment of their federal-debt-financed degrees so low? Why are 26 percent of past payments delinquent? More than 50 percent of students agree that they either studied the wrong major or wasted time and money. Less than half have found work in their major field of study.
Public dialogue is lured into discussing forgiveness amounts, rationalizations, plans, and terms, without specifics about monthly costs or other options, thereby distracted from asking the following question: How have graduates—assertively promised increased income, personal satisfaction, and positive impact on society—now become a new dependent class?
The Department of