A rancher* friend of ours—fancying himself a free man, self-sufficient, and disinclined to outsiders’ meddling—was stopped in airport security not too long ago, caught carrying a fancy pocketknife: the Mini Leatherman at right, in fact, a handy all-in-one tool just right for a working man. Not taking kindly to the suggestion that he give...
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States have been trying to collect sales tax on internet purchases for decades—since the beginning of internet commerce. The holdup has been a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that states cannot require businesses in other states to collect taxes for them. Now, legislation is moving through the U.S. Senate to facilitate internet sellers to collect...
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Making sense of economic fluctuations can be a daunting task. The economy comprises a gigantic set of interrelated assets, inputs, processes, transactions, and outputs, and its dimensions can be and have been measured in countless ways. If we are to speak sensibly about the economy as a whole—recognizing that almost anything we say about...
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Suppose you’re a small-business owner, and you’re unsure how to deal with the choices you face under the new healthcare reform law. Unless you employ mainly high-income people, your best option is probably to avoid providing health insurance altogether. The reason: your employees will be able to obtain insurance that is cheaper (for them)...
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Earlier this week, I posted about the recent Court of Appeals decision finding that Obama violated the Constitution when making “recess appointments” when the Senate was not in recess. Well, over at Breitbart, there is an article on the response from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). At base, the NLRB has decided to...
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Among the celebrants at the inaugural balls will be top contributors to the President’s reelection campaign, but their real celebration will be April 15, when they continue to be the beneficiaries of a “tax loophole” Obama pledged to close in 2008—but that remains gaping wide open despite his rhetoric about now making “the rich”...
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Despite the Fed’s breathtaking increase of base money since the autumn of 2008, the money stock as measured by conventional concepts such as M2 has not increased greatly, and hence, as ordinary quantity-theory-of-money thinking would lead us to expect, inflation as measured by conventional concepts such as the consumer price index (CPI) has been...
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The notion that the Second World War is responsible for ending the Great Depression has met growing skepticism among economic historians, thanks in no small part to the work of Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs. Beginning with an article that first appeared in the Journal of Economic History in 1992, Higgs has argued...
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Speaking of regime uncertainty, even distinguished mainstream economists get it. Here’s Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman: I think that the main thing keeping long-term interest rates low right now is cognitive dissonance. Even though the business community is starting to get scared — the ultra-establishment Committee for Economic Development now warns that ”a fiscal crisis...
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In Federalist 62, published in the Independent Journal, February 27, 1788, James Madison writes as follows: It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be...
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