William F. Buckley once defined a conservative as “Someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” With apologies to Buckley, we might define an economist as someone who stands athwart the contemporary public policy conversation, yelling, “This time isn’t different!”
It is no secret that the state and local governments make California a very difficult place to do business. The Golden State maintained its perennial position of the worst business climate in the country in Chief Executive magazine’s annual “Best and Worst States for Business” survey of hundreds of CEOs from across the nation. (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee once again topped the list.) But things are particularly bad for restaurant owners, and substantial increases in the minimum wage are only making them worse.
There are some big signs that the people of Las Vegas and the state of Nevada are getting genuine buyer’s remorse over the Oakland Athletics.
2023 was a good year for the stock market. CNN reported the year’s performance stats for the three most well-known U.S. stock market indices.
I am generally a fan of Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s sparring with the Biden administration over the collapse of the southern border. As noted by the House Oversight Committee, “The Biden Administration sparked the worst border crisis in American history and placed Americans’ lives at risk by abandoning deterrent-focused immigration policies and proven border enforcement tools.” Estimates differ, but at least 10 million illegal aliens have entered the United States during Biden’s term in office. As I have pointed out elsewhere, although we assume the federal government is constitutionally entitled to superintend immigration matters, the Constitution is—at a minimum—murky on this matter.
“Jobs Growth Defies Expectations” blares a WSJ headline on the front page of the paper’s first-weekend edition of February 2024.
Sustaining the U.S. national debt has become very expensive thanks to rising interest rates. The annual cost of paying the gross interest on the national debt now exceeds one trillion dollars. That cost has almost doubled during the last three years.
Single-use plastic bag bans have been all the rage for the past 20 years or so, but, as is often the case with environmental laws, proponents have vastly overstated the benefits of doing so and understated the costs. It is another example where doing something is considered better than doing nothing—even if the results end up being more harmful in the end.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is reputed to be a powerful force in world energy markets, and recently Russia has conspired with OPEC to raise energy prices. The OPEC cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, tried to exploit its monopoly power in 2023 by reducing production. It enjoyed temporary success as its revenue increased from selling a lower quantity of oil at a higher price. However, non-OPEC competitors reacted to the new profit opportunity with such a vigorous supply response that the costs of crude oil and energy substitutes were lower at the end of 2023 than at the beginning of the year. Competition dominated monopoly.
In 2019, during the Parliamentary Press Gallery Dinner, Justin Trudeau spoke about media bias:
You sometimes hear about liberal bias in the media these days—how they’re constantly letting our government off the hook for no good reason. Frankly, I think that’s insulting. It’s clear that they let us off the hook for a very good reason: Because we pay them $600 million. You don’t get stellar headlines like these without greasing the wheels a bit.
