One of today’s pivotal questions is the ability of the economy to cope and adapt in the face of mandatory and voluntary social distancing. Real GDP in the second quarter of 2020 fell at an annualized rate of 32.9 percent, an unprecedented drop. It has become commonplace (and bipartisan) to assume that economic vitality...
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The FDA has granted MDMA breakthrough therapy status to expedite the approval process by making it easier for drugmakers to begin clinical trials.

In his latest column for the New York Times, “Our Lefty Military,” the iconic “liberal” commentator Nicholas D. Kristof has now come clean on the reality of his own collectivist views that military means and organization embody the “liberal ethos” (“progressivism”), an admission that liberals rarely face up to. While numerous liberal and conservative...
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In a new article for the Gannett newspapers, “Is this any way to run a government?”, Chuck Raasch interviews Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and author of the book, Depression, War, and Cold War. With Congress debating a possible shutdown of the federal government, Dr. Higgs discusses why: “The government can...
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First performed publicly last week in New York at The Economist‘s conference, The Buttonwood Gathering, here is the sequel to the sensational rap video pitting the economic ideas of Austrian School economist F.A. Hayek against those of interventionist John M. Keynes. The original video, “Fear the Boom and Bust,” has had more than 1.5...
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Regime uncertainty has gained increasing recognition as the current economic troubles have persisted with little or no improvement since the economy reached a cyclical trough early in 2009. As described in my 1997 paper, regime uncertainty pertains to the likelihood that investors’ private property rights in their capital and the income it yields will be...
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Senior Fellow Robert Higgs is interviewed here by Scott Horton on Antiwar.com Radio, warning those who long for total governmental and economic collapse to be careful what they wish for. Higgs also explains why federal spending cannot continue at the current record levels without a failure of the bond market. He further compares the...
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What has this gargantuan statute wrought? To this question, there can be only one answer: Nobody knows. I am being quite serious: no single human being knows ― no one can know ― what provisions the statute’s more than 2,000 pages contain. Even if someone had the power to read and remember everything in...
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Here is a splendid and insightful, new rap video pitting the ideas of Nobel Laureate, Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek against those of Lord John Maynard Keynes. As Hayek has shown, economic crises of boom and bust are created by governments that expand credit through central banks, creating unsustainable bubbles that ultimately crash....
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In a November 3 article, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate cash holdings have reached extraordinary levels: Stung by the financial crisis, companies are holding more cash—and a greater percentage of assets in cash—than at any time in the past 40 years. In the second quarter, the 500 largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, by...
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