With every Keynesian trick having failed to bring the economy out of its post-meltdown Great Recession, and having apparently concluded that there’s no more conjuring they can do to improve it before the election, President Obama’s re-election strategists look to be latching firmly onto social issues. Really? In an era of continuing depression-level unemployment...
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On May 8th, five economists, including our Research Fellow Peter Klein, appeared in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, chaired by Congressman Ron Paul. The panelists included two economists from the Austrian School, two Keynesians, and one monetarist: Peter G. Klein, Research Fellow, The Independent...
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The United States has a long history of population growth and concomitant labor force growth. As the chart below shows, the number of men in the civilian labor force (men either working in paid employment or actively seeking work) increased fairly steadily over the past half-century—at least, until the onset of the current recession. For the...
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Many commentators have noted in recent years that Americans have been leaving the labor force. Their departure has made interpretation of unemployment statistics more difficult, and because the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes six variants of the unemployment rate, considerable debate has occurred about the “real” rate of unemployment. Much of this confusion can...
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As the most widely reported rate of unemployment (U-3) has fallen in recent months, people with a political agenda served by painting a rosy picture of the recovery have made considerable noise about this decrease. Their political opponents have responded that one reason for the decline is that the labor force has fallen as more people have...
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After the headline rate of unemployment (U-3) reached 8.5 percent in December 2011 ( the most recent month reported), some commentators began to talk as if the employment situation is now improving rapidly. Some have gone on to suggest that those of us who have emphasized the role of regime uncertainty in retarding the...
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Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed here by Thomas Woods on “The Peter Schiff Show.” Dr. Higgs discusses how the federal government prolonged and deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s that lasted until after World War II when such policies were either ended or radically reduced. Moreover, the current attempts at central-government planning...
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An article in a recent issue of The Economist (“Sweet Land of Subsidy,” December 3rd to 9th, 2011, p. 42) tells the story of Iuka, Mississippi, a small community (2000 pop. 3,059) in Tishomingo County, where the local economic development foundation “invested” an unreported sum of the taxpayers’ money in the mid-1990s to build...
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While last week’s news of the unemployment rate falling to its lowest in more than two years was very welcome, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out: ...the main reason for the big drop in that number and the fall in the jobless rate wasn’t more people working, but fewer people looking for work.......
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The following was nationally distributed in the United States by the Associated Press and appeared in the New York Daily News on Friday, November 4, 1949. The measures being referenced are those in the Fair Deal, the cradle-to-grave welfare state proposal of President Harry S Truman to follow up on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal...
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