Free Republic

The World Economic Forum recently published its annual Global Competiveness Report. Our continual slide from first in 2008 to fifth worldwide has received some coverage by the press, but no one has written about the underlying causes for the drop or given any meaningful insight into who the WEF is and how the rankings are compiled. The mainstream press has completely missed the story. The WEF describes itself as an independent international organization committed to “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” The rankings...

The World Economic Forum recently published its annual Global Competiveness Report. Our continual slide from first in 2008 to fifth worldwide has received some coverage by the press, but no one has written about the underlying causes for the drop or given any meaningful insight into who the WEF is and how the rankings are compiled. The mainstream press has completely missed the story. The WEF describes itself as an independent international organization committed to “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.” The rankings...

Dennis Prager discusses a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed article regarding minimum wage entitled: "Leaving for Las Vegas: California's minimum wage law leaves businesses no choice" (http://tinyurl.com/hcnjzkq). Here is the bottom line: _______________________ Here's what the math looks like: I pay my employees $10.50 an hour, plus productivity bonuses. In addition, I pay payroll taxes and one of the highest worker compensation rates in the state. Even still, I could likely absorb a minimum wage as high as $11.50 an hour. But a $15-an-hour wage for my employees translates into $18.90 in costs for me — or just under $40,000 a...

An essential element of the “unorthodox” doctrines, advanced both by all socialists and by all interventionists, is that the recurrence of depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the very operation, of the market economy. But while the socialists contend that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism can eradicate the evil, the interventionists ascribe to the government the power to correct the operation of the market economy in such a way as to bring about what they call “economic stability.” These interventionists would be right if their antidepression plans were to aim at a radical abandonment of credit expansion policies....

Dr. Thomas Sowell the world famous economist has decided to finally hang up the pen. He wrote in his farewell column, “Even the best things come to an end. After enjoying a quarter of a century of writing this column for Creators Syndicate, I have decided to stop. Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.” Few people have had as big of an impact on economics and political theory as Dr. Sowell over the last 40 years. He received his Ph.D....

Tyler DurdenDecember 21,2016 Millennials finally get to claim a trophy for an achievement they actually earned (no participation medals here)...that's right, Millennials have officially set a 75-year record for highest percentage of young adults living at home with mom. At just under 40%, Millennials are barely shy of the all-time record of 40.9% set in 1940, after the end of the Great Depression. For once, we have every confidence that our young snowflakes will excel in crushing this longstanding record. Per the Wall Street Journal: Almost 40% of young Americans were living with their parents, siblings or other relatives in...

During the second official debate in the Conservative Party’s leadership race Tuesday night, candidates found themselves straining to separate themselves from the pack. And of course, nothing brought the candidates together like their common hatred of the Liberals. Scheer, for one, said he “can’t let Justin Trudeau do to my kids what his father did to our generation, and that’s leave us with a legacy of debt and deficits.” Trudeau’s “sunshine and unicorns and Care Bear economics” aren’t working, he said.

The argument that I make below against the economic case for “buying local” has almost certainly been made by others – perhaps, in some variety, even by me. So I here claim no originality. Still….Many advocates of “buying local” insist that buying local is good for the local economy and, hence, economically good for each person in the local economy. For a number of reasons, the economics on which the “buy local” movement rests is remarkably weak. (Just as it is a sure sign that someone has no sound grasp of economics if he or she believes that protectionism is...

American presidential elections are a patchy time for the use of facts. It turns out presidential transitions are, too. Donald Trump as president-elect has triggered a slew of comments and articles about China’s pending leadership of the world economy. Journalists and pundits may value words over money; economists should not. There are data, grounded in real-world calculations, that show China’s economic importance falling -- not rising slowly, nor staying stable, but falling. The most important indicator is net private wealth, which is the single best measure of a country’s economic size and of the pool of resources available to its...

In fact, 2016 tax receipts were up in mountain towns now that the bicycle race is gone. Aspen, Steamboat, and Breckenridge all saw increased tax collections in August, a year after the race shut down their towns for a few hours. So it turns out it was all spin by PR hacks and the the state’s tourism office, who bragged about how “amped” that Coloradans were to have this bike race – so “amped” that the race went out of business and failed to deliver any tax boost to the communities it impacted.

The dollar hit a 14-year high against a basket of currencies on Wednesday as a post-U.S. election sell-off resumed across global bond markets, lifting Treasury yields and attracting investors to the U.S. currency.

Paul Krugman has already had to walk back his prediction of a global recession following Donald Trump’s presidential victory last night. His initial post on the New York Times’ website was confidently apocalyptic about the prospects of Donald Trump plunging the world into a depression: “If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” He concluded by saying, “So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight. I suppose we could get lucky somehow. But on economics, as on everything else, a terrible thing has just happened.” Markets rebounded in...

Tyler Durden November 9, 2016 "The world's "intellectual yet idiot" class just took another blow to the chin, but who really got buried? Nassim 'black swan' Taleb explains..." "Simply put, as Taleb recently explained via Medium.com, The "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class..." What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how...

It is especially painful for me, as an economist, to see that two small cities in northern California — San Mateo and Burlingame — have rent control proposals on the ballot this election year. There are various other campaigns, in other places around the country, for and against minimum wage laws, which likewise make me wonder if the economics profession has failed to educate the public in the most elementary economic lessons. Neither rent control nor minimum wage laws — nor price control laws in general — are new. Price control laws go back as far as ancient Egypt and...

Communism, socialism, progessivism -- it's really just 'cronyism'. And so is Keynesian economics -- just the same trick with a different name. Famines are the most brutal kind of math and nearly impossible to hide. And the mathematics of famines proves something time and again: If you don't have a merit-based economy then your natural resources rarely mean anything. If you don't know about the Pilgrims' communism-induced famine just tune into Rush Limbaugh before Thanksgiving. Venezuela is the most recent example. Up until very recently its farms were privately owned. Not anymore. Recent headlines [*a*] 1. Venezuela Is Collapsing and...

It’s a new term for the old leftist dream of redistribution over wealth creation. President Obama has finally stopped blaming George W. Bush for America’s current economic mess. Now it’s Ronald Reagan’s fault. Obama didn’t use those exact words or make that explicit claim in his Knox College speech last week, but that’s the gist of it. The Great Recession and its slow-growth, high-unemployment aftermath are really just the culmination of three decades of pro-market economic policies that favored the rich at the expense of the middle class. Here’s how Obama rewrites economic history: The shared national purpose of World...

From:hms@sandlerfoundation.org To: ses@sandlerfoundation.org, james@sandlerfoundation.org Date: 2015-06-22 18:26 Subject: FW: PICO: Vatican Visit I thought you might find this of interest. From: Knaebel, Sergio Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 12:58 PM To: Sandler, Herbert Subject: FW: PICO: Vatican Visit Herb, In case you did not get this from Steve. Sergio Knaebel Grant Director Sandler Foundation sknaebel@sandlerfoundation.org From: Scott Reed [mailto:sreed@piconetwork.org] Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2015 8:39 AM To: Knaebel, Sergio Subject: PICO: Vatican Visit Hi Sergio: I just sent a note to Steve with this summary of our visit to the Vatican. I look forward to talking soon. PICO sent a...

A FRiend recently pointed out that the opposite of 'trickle down' economics is 'trickle up'. How true! In any banana republic [such as the 'U' SA] the tyrant tops the economic food chain -- that's where the economy trickles up. And sometimes the minions are even more dangerous, such as Obama's 'subordinate', Hillary. View what she achieved already and then imagine her in the Oval Office [with her husband's experience to guide her] ... 1. Watered down AIDS medication [*a*] which should come as no surprise after their ... 2. Tainted prison blood scandal. [*b*] Anyone greedy enough to infect...

In 449 B.C., the Roman government passed the Law of the Twelve Tables, regulating much of commercial, social, and family life. Some of these laws were reasonable and consistent with an economy of contract and commerce; others prescribed gruesome punishments and assigned cruel powers and privileges given to some. Other regulations fixed a maximum rate of interest on loans of approximately 8 percent. The Roman government also had the habit of periodically forgiving all interest owed in the society; that is, it legally freed private debtors from having to pay back interest due to private creditors. The Roman government also...

Robin Hood is dead. Or at least seriously ailing. The politics of taking from the rich and giving to the poor -- the politics that philosophers from Aristotle to James Madison dreaded -- just doesn't seem to be working as it used to. That's not to say that the United States is about to give up on progressive taxation. With its graduated income tax, the American tax system is by some measures the most progressive in any advanced country. For a generation, the jousting between Republicans and Democrats has been waged within a pretty narrow range. The former want a...