A is for Alzheimer’s Disease. If you eat lots of vegetables and floss your teeth, you will live a long time and get this condition as your reward. B is for Baconator. If thou shouldst ever eat one, thou shalt surely die. C is for Crumbling Infrastructure, an incantation government officials mutter when they...
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The populist reaction against Europe’s crisis continues to move south, as exemplified by the astounding success of the Five Star Movement led by comedian Giuseppe Grillo, which became Italy’s largest single party in the recent general elections. An organization that has been in existence for three years, the Five Star Movement has capitalized on...
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A man goes to his doctor for a routine checkup. The doctor performs a perfunctory examination and informs him that unless he receives an experimental treatment the doctor has devised, he will soon become disabled. “What’s it cost, Doc?” the man asks. “Well, unfortunately it’s not cheap, Mr. Smith, and I can’t tell you...
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Funny, isn’t it? When federal spending was accelerating like a race horse bolting out of a burning barn in FY 2008 and FY 2009, Congress did not encounter any insuperable problems in appropriating the huge amounts of additional funds (and running up the public debt rapidly to pay for its sudden extravagance), but now...
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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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A bottle of Jack Daniels is sitting on our kitchen counter, the result of a fire in our microwave oven. The oven was destroyed so we ordered a replacement, which was supposed to be installed a few days ago, but the installers who showed up couldn’t get the new oven into the spot where...
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Two months ago, I wrote about the extraordinary increase in the demand for money during the past five years, noting in particular the substantial decline in the velocity of the M2 money stock. I also noted that M2 has increased about 38 percent since late 2007. In the present post, I call attention to...
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In 1958, Leonard E. Read wrote “I, Pencil”—a short, brilliant essay about how markets coordinate the countless steps that go into making an ordinary pencil. In addition to its insightful substance, the essay is also noteworthy for Read’s clever literary device: the story is told from the perspective of a pencil. The piece ran...
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Go to the website of the Detroit Medical Center and you will learn that its facilities are ranked among the “nation’s best hospitals” by US News & World Report and that they have won other awards. The Detroit Medical Center has some of the “best” heart doctors, it is “tops” in cancer care, and...
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This “no surprise here” story in the San Francisco Chronicle shows that Silicon Valley, broadly defined as four Bay Area counties, has now surpassed New York City as the top source for Obama campaign contributions, providing a staggering $14,703,167 to his current reelection campaign, as against New York City’s “mere” $14,529,760. If we, as...
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