Robert Shiller wrote a recent New York Times editorial, suggesting that the United States Government sell shares of the gross domestic product (GDP), similar to how corporations sell stocks. Mr. Shiller is obviously a very smart person. He is an economics professor at Yale University and authored various books on finance and the economy. He [...]

Many decades ago, George Orwell wrote a book called Animal Farm. It used a farm as a metaphor for society and depicted the transformation of a productive enterprise into a totalitarian regime. The progress toward dictatorship took small steps that were held to be in the best interests of “the people.” Equality of conditions was [...]

What’s A Trillion Dollars?
Economists are anticipating that the federal budget deficits will be in the trillions of dollars for a number of years. There are estimates that, with all federal efforts combined, the bailout and stimulus packages will be upwards of $7 trillion. I wonder if politicians who are so cavalier about using [...]

A few years ago, Arnold Kling, an economics professor at George Mason University, presented an interesting description of the type of health care system that Congress is planning to impose on all Americans. With Medicare’s unfunded liabilities in the multiple tens of trillions of dollars, it is like the Titanic sailing full speed ahead [...]

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.” That celebrated quote by long gone philosopher George Santayana is familiar to most people because it is so true. Sadly, people and nations choose to forget.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. is a stark reminder of a not-so-distant history, a grim [...]

The existence of unalienable rights of individuals is an honored tradition in America, rooted in the philosophy of the classical liberal thinkers. The rights to life, liberty and property mean that nobody has the authority to take the life, liberty or property of anyone else. They apply to any person in any social [...]

Socialism is alive and well. In America, as elsewhere, however, the socialist movement isn’t and never has been a worker’s movement, as it has been made out to be. Socialism has been, from the start, a movement of intellectuals. It festers on college campuses. It is a framework constructed by very [...]

June 5th is the birthday of John Maynard Keynes, a brilliant economist whose influential work during the 1930’s changed the course of history. He has had a great deal of influence on generations of economists, including advisers to our current president and congress. It’s too bad he was wrong in virtually all of [...]

“We don’t need a bigger army, but rather a smaller foreign policy.”

The choice that we need to make is whether we want to move in the direction of freedom or in the direction of slavery.