How can Americans overcome record government spending and debt, escalating healthcare costs, intrusive federal surveillance, endless wars, ongoing economic malaise, high unemployment, failing schools, and increasing abuses of civil and economic liberties? In this superb, new video from the recent, sold-out event sponsored by The Independent Institute and The Smith Center for Private Enterprise...
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The Challenge of Liberty Student Seminars are returning for another exciting season! Thanks to the generous support of donors, we will hold two seminars for college students—one at the University of Denver (June 16–20) and one at the University of California, Berkeley (July 7–11)—and one seminar for high-school students at the Independent Institute’s headquarters...
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President Obama has recently promoted inequality as a fundamental threat to our way of life, saying, “The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.” You can read the rhetoric here. Let’s look at...
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The winter 2014 issue of The Independent Review is hot off the press! This edition of the Independent Institute’s 160-page scholarly journal includes a stimulating mix of timely topics and enduring themes, including a symposium on Nobel laureate economist James M. Buchanan and classical liberalism. Read it and gain a deeper understanding of the...
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I taught Money and Banking for 40 years at Ohio State and before that at Boston College, and never once used a movie in class. However, after viewing Jim Bruce’s new documentary, Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve last night at the Museum of American Finance, I would not hesitate to use this...
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The Senate hearings to confirm Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve Board Chairwoman are likely to be held next week, according to news reports. Here are some Questions that I hope the Senators will ask her, along with what I regard as the Wrong Answers and the Right Answers. I expect that her actual answers...
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Further to Bob Higgs’s earlier post, Thinking Is Research, Too!, down in Texas, the Chairman of the Dallas Fed has the odd practice of looking beyond government stats and actually (gasp!) asking real people how they think the economy is going. From a profile of the President and CEO of the Dallas Fed, Richard...
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Despite enjoying impressive economic growth over the past century, Americans have also been the victims of scores of stupid government mistakes that have made them poorer. For many the blunders led only to temporary setbacks, but for others the errors created life-altering disasters from which they never recovered. In the new book The Terrible...
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We recently got a glimpse of what will happen to Latin America once the Federal Reserve stops printing money like crazy. Ben Bernanke’s mere suggestion, back in May, that he might begin to slow the purchase of securities (“tapering,” in financial parlance) was enough to cause $1.5 trillion to evaporate in emerging markets as...
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The world probably would have been much better off had macroeconomics never been devised. Although I have in mind Keynesian macroeconomics above all, I include other types of macro models as well. I even include, somewhat reluctantly, the whole quantity theory approach descended from David Hume to the Friedmanites, now known as monetarism. One...
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