“This used to be a hell of a good country, I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” said George Hanson in the movie “Easy Rider.” My old friend Joe Sobran (1946-2010) loved that line and quoted it often. Sobran, who worked alongside William Buckley at National Review during its heyday, was one of the […]
Laissez-Faire Today
The Fed’s Old Tricks in New Times
We’ve been telling anyone who will listen that the Fed has gone where the central bank has never gone before. Pre-crisis, the Fed’s available resource looked like it always had in the postwar period. Nearly overnight, thanks to its magical money creating powers of buying debt with funds it created, the Fed’s balance sheet shot […]
Jim Rogers and His Case for the Asian Century
What is the best single thing you can do for your children? Send them to Asia for school so they can get a good education and learn Mandarin. Or so says a thinker and investor Jim Rogers. Some investors achieve the status of being legends, their opinions on all matters of economics and politics sought […]
How Markets Fixed the Travel Problem
I was standing outside the hotel when a gigantic bus rolled up. It was a double-decker and seemed as long as a city block. One hundred-plus people poured out. Once empty, the bus drove on. I stood there right in the path of the exhaust fumes. It was a cloud of gray, bellowing like a […]
Student Loans Going the Way of Housing
Colleges are good at getting people enrolled. They get kids lined up with education loans. The money goes to pay exorbitant prices on textbooks. It pays for meal cards. Tuition is crazy high. Parents go along and shell out until their bank accounts are barren. What colleges are not good at is getting the kids […]
The Gas Price Story of Hurricane Sandy
For those schooled in economics, the gasoline shortage during Hurricane Sandy last November was no surprise. Demand for gas goes up. Supply lines are disrupted. It’s the old supply-and-demand thing. The price goes up. Higher prices attract new supplies from unconventional paths. Prices respond and fall back again. The market handles it just fine. All […]
How Digits Are Reinventing the World Order
Most people today use technologies without a clue to the larger picture of what is really happening to the structure of the world because of them. People are staring at the trees and not noticing the gigantic, growing, and ever expanding forest, much less considering the meaning of it all. This is an attempt to […]
The Patent Bubble and Its End
“Then they pop up and say, ‘Hello, surprise! Give us your money or we will shut you down!’ Screw them. Seriously, screw them. You can quote me on that.” Those are the words of Newegg.com’s chief legal officer, Lee Cheng. He was speaking to Arstechnica.com following a landmark ruling that sided with a great business […]
A Reliable Account of the Great Depression
For his U.S. economic history class at UNLV, Murray Rothbard gave us the assignment to write a 10-page paper. The paper could be on anything we wanted it to be. However, we had to clear the topic with him. When I proposed writing about the Great Depression, Murray was thrilled and rattled off a number […]
The American Story… Abroad
In 1881, Dakota Territory had never sold a bushel of wheat to anybody outside of Dakota. Six years later, it sold 62 million bushels. What happened? I recently read Garet Garrett’s The American Story, which came out in 1955. It is a well-written history of America, unusual because of its emphasis on the powerful economics […]