Free Republic

The year 2017 is a milestone in both economic history and the history of economics. The Marx-inspired Red October coupe d’état took place in Russia one century ago. The 1st volume of Marx’s Capital, a Critique of Political Economy was published 150 years ago. David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was published 200 years ago. Death Blow to Mercantilism The bicentennial of Ricardo’s book is worth commemorating because this book finished a crucial debate over the merits of international trade. 18th Century Mercantilists believed that a nation could become wealthier through trade surpluses- by having exports greater than...

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Market doomsayer Marc "Dr. Doom" Faber has launched a racially charged diatribe in his latest newsletter, alleging that the U.S. is great primarily because it is ruled by white people. The eccentric Gloom, Boom & Doom report author, who often speaks on CNBC and other financial media, generally forecasting some type of market downturn, focused his latest comments on the racial conflicts happening around the country. (A CNBC spokesperson said it will not book him in the future.) "And thank God white people populated America, and not the blacks. Otherwise, the US would look like Zimbabwe, which it might look...

snip According to an interview in Bloomberg Businessweek, Steve Bannon and Henry Kissinger have had several meetings and are preparing a project to sound the alarm about what Bannon views as the primary economic threat to America: If we don’t get our situation sorted with China, we’ll be destroyed economically. The forced technology transfer of American innovation to China is the single biggest economic and business issue of our time. Until we sort that out, they will continue to appropriate our innovation to their own system and leave us as a colony — our Jamestown to their Great Britain, a...

n this city, a petri dish of progressivism, a prevailing theory is that when you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it, except when they do not. A related theory is that constitutional and statutory texts should be construed in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche: There are no facts, only interpretations. The city council has voted to impose a tax, effective next year, on sugary soft drinks, raising the price of a 2-liter bottle of soda about $1.18. Presented as a public health measure to combat obesity, the tax is projected to generate about $15 million...

FINDING THE PATTERNS   Tax breaks worth $3 billion draw a giant Foxconn plant for up to 13,000 workers to make display screens. But economists question the math of an arms race for jobs, and say it advantages big firms at the expense of startups. If all goes to plan, a giant Taiwanese-owned electronics factory will break ground next year in southeastern Wisconsin. The $10 billion plant is supersized: at 20 million square feet, it would be five times the size of Boeing’s main plant in Everett, Wash., and would employ up to 13,000 workers to make screens for devices...

According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) 2017 report, illegal immigrants, and their children, cost American taxpayers $135 billion annually—the most in this nation’s history. These costs are only partially offset by taxes, which total a mere $19 billion. Therefore, the next cost of illegal immigrants to taxpayers is $116 billion annually. This estimate is similar to those found by the National Economics Editorial.

With our national debt passing the $20 trillion threshold this week, let’s look at some figures that will help us wrap our mind around this unfathomable amount of money. To make 20 trillion one dollar bills, it would require commandeering every cotton field in the United States for 19 years (the dollar is actually 75 percent cotton) and 30 years for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to stamp out the notes. The price tag for printing this vast quantity of bills would cost taxpayers another $2 trillion. Our mountain of 20 trillion George Washingtons would weigh in at a...

Phil Keating reported that in Miami-Dade County people are rushing to get gas for their vehicles and generators, but many gas stations are out.

Beijing (China) is attempting to “trigger” President Trump’s internal neo-con and militaristic opposition. Stay frosty, avoid emotional reports demanding military engagement, and remain steady with a high altitude perspective. Multiple reports now confirming that North Korea has conducted a missile test. The flight path escalates the issues by crossing over part of Northern Japan. In essence, Beijing China just threw an elbow at President Trump. [The likely “Why” follows breaking report] "TOKYO (Reuters) – North Korea fired a missile that passed over northern Japan early on Tuesday, the Japanese government said. The government’s J-Alert warning system advised people in the...

Evverybody knows by now that President Trump is a fascist. He's a Nazi just like the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12. We know this because the mainstream media, a host of dimwit celebrities, various Democratic politicians and the highly reputable antifa tell us he is. What we really know, though, is these groups don't know anything except how to shriek louder and longer than everyone else. A few also well know how to break other people's property and set things that don't belong to them on fire. But they don't know their history, and therefore...

Older smokers are usually more set in their ways, but a dollar increase in cigarette prices makes them 20 percent more likely to quit, a new Drexel University study found. The study, published in Epidemiology, used 10 years of neighborhood-level price data to determine how it affected nearby smokers, focusing on those who skewed older. “Older adult smokers have been smoking for a long time and tend to have lower rates of smoking cessation compared to younger populations, suggesting deeply entrenched behavior that is difficult to change,” said Stephanie Mayne, PhD, the lead author of the study who is a...

"According to research compiled by Robert Rector, The Heritage Foundation’s senior research fellow on domestic policy, the RAISE Act could save America trillions of dollars in welfare, healthcare, and other social services over the coming decades. The RAISE Act would manage this ending chain migration, which could reduce overall immigration levels by up to 50%, and by prioritizing immigrants who have economically valuable skills, which would be determined according to an objective points-based system."

It must be weird for the ordinary person around the world to view U.S. politics through the prism of the American MSM lügenpresse.  We’re often left wondering if international observers realize how much deception and fraud exists in media broadcasts of President Trump. However, that said, a few days ago CTH predicted via twitter that Friday would bring a “breaking news” revelation that President Trump’s administration had been in ongoing negotiations with North Korea.  Today, exactly that happened. [...] These back-channel discussions were/are entirely predictable because negotiation is the forté of President Trump’s entire life’s repertoire.  It’s just how he rolls.  Negotiation is what gets Donald Trump’s autonomic...

Last week, a dear friend of Accuracy in Academia, author M. Stanton Evans (1934-2015), would have turned 83. Although he focused most of his energies in his later years on researching and writing about the history of espionage and internal security in the United States, he had quite a background in economics as well, much to the benefit of his readers over the course of his career. Indeed, he studied under the noted Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. On at least half a dozen occasions, I heard him outline what he saw as five essentials for a functioning economy. They...

It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it has become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged with politics, but only because they want to beat the other side, not understand it. This means scholars have a greater responsibility than ever to help ordinary citizens understand how the people with whom they disagree think, and what their political opponents are actually doing. Most scholars get this. For example, political scientists and historians, who tend to range from the political center to the left wing, have written extensively about the origins and...

In the first decade of the 21st century Western economic growth entered the doldrums. The question was why. Former Harvard president Larry Summers noticed that something changed after the 2008 financial meltdown. The economic spring which had always bounced back had lost its elasticity. He diagnosed it as secular stagnation. .... Most observers expected the unusually deep recession to be followed by an unusually rapid recovery .... Had the American economy performed as the Congressional Budget Office fore­cast in August 2009—after the stimulus had been passed and the recovery had started—U.S. GDP today would be about $1.3 trillion higher than...

In my opinion, there is no economist alive today who has done more to eloquently, articulately, and persuasively advance the principles of economic freedom, limited government, individual liberty, and a free society than Thomas Sowell. In terms of both his quantity of work (at least 40 books and several thousand newspaper columns) and the consistently excellent and crystal-clear quality of his writing, I don’t think any living free-market economist even comes close to matching Sowell’s prolific record of writing about economics.

The fact that it’s being proposed by Republicans doesn’t make it any more economically palatable. Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule — Friedrich Nietzsche ‘Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” Barack Obama declared after Democrats’ disastrous losses in the 2010 midterm elections. That shellacking finally killed off the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. From it was born the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and the Obama administration’s war on coal, in turn a contributory factor to Donald Trump’s election and Republicans’...

Venezuela descends into chaos. Its people, once the wealthiest in Latin America, starve. Even The New York Times runs headlines like "Dying Infants and No Medicine." My Venezuelan-born friend Kenny says his relatives are speaking differently. Cousins who once answered "Fine" or "Good" when asked, "How are you?" now say, "We're eating." Eating is a big deal in the country that's given birth to jokes about a "Venezuelan diet." A survey by three universities found 75 percent of Venezuelans lost an average 19 pounds this year. So are American celebrities who championed Venezuela's "people's revolution" embarrassed? Will they admit they...