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One of my more memorable exchanges with a student came in a principles of economics class. Part of the assignment for that week was chapters from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley compared the living standards of an average worker today with those of The Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1700. Some of my more ahistorical students were incredulous at Ridley’s description of the grinding poverty of the average person just a few centuries ago. The King had an opulent lifestyle compared to others. Louis had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living...

Wherever one looks, socialism leaves behind a legacy of suffering and death on a mass scale, and Bangladesh’s socialist experiment was no exception. In 1971, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led his country, Bangladesh, to independence from Pakistan. Afterward, he ruled as a brutal tyrant, turned to communist economics, and starved to death over one million people. Then he was assassinated. However, his surviving daughter, Sheikh Hasina, later rose to power in Bangladesh, establishing a cronyist, leftist dictatorship. Her regime never reinstated her father’s communist economic policies, but it did create a personality cult of Mujibur Rahman, commonly known in the region...

A Dundalk restaurant visited by US President Joe Biden during his trip to Ireland last year has closed its doors. In a post on Facebook, McAteers The Food House said that it has ceased trading as of today. The business said that it was “impossible for us to continue trading”, and that, after a difficult few years, it had become “harder by the day to keep the ship afloat”. The restaurant cited numerous factors, including high costs, as being behind its decision. …

In December 2022, early into what he now describes as his political journey, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave a speech warning his fellow Democrats that they were ignoring a crisis staring them in the face. For over a year, President Biden and his allies had been promoting data showing an economic miracle, as friendly pundits described it — a record-setting stock market, low unemployment and G.D.P. growth outpacing that of almost every other Western nation. But very few voters believed the story those metrics were telling. In poll after poll, they expressed a bleak view of the economy —...

Left-leaning media outlets like MSNBC are doing their best to protect Vice President Kamala Harris from scrutiny. As Ben Shapiro has been so keen on pointing out these last few weeks, it’s been nearly 30 days since Harris became the de facto Democrat nominee, and not once in that time has the media asked her an adversarial question. The media, which once loathed Harris, has provided nothing but glowing coverage of her. It hasn’t pushed her to lay out her policy proposals or explain how her new administration would be any different than the disastrously unpopular one she is currently...

Two new surveys say most Americans think the recession has already begun. This must come as a shock to our mendacious media sacrificing fresh mountains of newsprint to gaslight Kackles over the 50-yard line come November. Meanwhile, nearly 70% of Americans report that inflation—which that same media told us was long gone —continues making life a struggle, with little prospect of saving for the future or getting out of debt. The numbers come from two surveys by left-wing Guardian-Harris polling, and another from payment network Affirm, who sampled 2,000 Americans. Nearly 60% say we’re already in recession, and on average,...

We have to hope that the Federal Reserve realizes that today’s stock market weakness is unlikely to be a passing fad given the poor underlying world economic and political fundamentals. Maybe then the Fed will do the right thing and start cutting interest rates aggressively to provide long-overdue support to a weakening U.S. economy.

Business Insider's Monica Humphries spent two weeks traveling around America's west in a camper van. Around every corner, she discovered hidden costs like paying for showers and eating out. Before embarking on a two-week van trip, Monica Humpries had romanticized the lifestyle. She pictured waking up in breathtaking places, spending weekends isolated in nature, and seeking out spontaneous adventures. She also pictured a full bank account. Humphries naively assumed that once you had your van and shed unnecessary possessions and the burden of monthly rent, there wouldn't be many other costs to consider. So when she picked up her rental...

The private debt crisis is becoming apparent in America after car repossessions jumped 23% during the first half of 2024. Data shows that 1.6 million Americans will have their car repossessed by the bank before the end of the year, a slight increase from the 1.5 million autos repossessed in 2023 and a drastic upturn from the 1.1 million in 2021. Obviously, the cost of purchasing a car have drastically risen with inflation, interest hikes, and supply chain shortages. Americans simply cannot afford new autos and car dealerships can do nothing to entice purchases. New car inventory in the US...

Larry Chavis is clinical professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC. He has taught there for 18 years on a renewable contract. He has now been told that his contract will not be renewed this year. The university has apparently acted in a totally legal way, but Chavis and his supporters are upset: Because of his long service, which seemed to promise some job security. Because a few of his lectures were apparently recorded, by built-in security camera. This arrangement is also apparently legal, though it seems tacky. As far as I know, the faculty...

Weekly jobless claims rose slightly to 238,000, above the 235,000 forecast. May housing starts dropped 5.5% to an annual rate of 1.27 million, below expectations. Building permits fell 3.8%, the lowest in four years. ... Economic data released Thursday morning revealed slightly higher-than-expected weekly unemployment claims, sharp contractions in housing starts and building permits, and a drop in a business outlook survey within the Philadelphia Federal Reserve District. Thursday’s Economic Releases: Key Highlights.. The number of people filing for jobless claims in the U.S. fell by 5,000 to 238,000 in the week ending June 15, slightly exceeding market expectations of...

NBC 5 learned more about how leaders at the state's largest power grid think it will perform during upcoming hot Texas summers. ERCOT and Public Utility Commission leaders updated lawmakers in Austin Wednesday morning after a striking new report issued by the grid operator. They've long known that ERCOT, the state's largest power grid, is most vulnerable on hot late-summer nights as the sun goes down. That's when the big chunk of energy generated by solar power goes offline. It gets worse if the wind goes down as well, and wind generators don't run. According to a report delivered to...

The Romans Invented Trains....... Almost | 15:28Paul Whitewick | 117K subscribers | 204,600 views | November 19, 2023

The New York Times Bidenomics apologist Paul Krugman took a detour from regurgitating his usual awful economic takes — AGAIN— to throw another fit over climate change “denial.” Krugman decried the “Stench of Climate Change Denial” in his latest May 27 screed. Krugman drummed up scare-porn over an alleged “emerging sewage crisis” along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts and claimed it was due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. “In short, it’s not hard to see some terrible outcomes in the not-too-distant future, even before full global catastrophe arrives. Bad stuff is coming, and we’re already starting...

Artificial intelligence scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI,” is urging the British government to enforce a universal basic income (UBI) to cope with the impact of AI technology. Universal basic income is a social welfare system in which the government provides every citizen with a standard minimum income. These payments are unconditional and transferred to citizens on a regular basis without any pre-qualification. The concept is in keeping with the Marxist ideal of wealth redistribution and has been proposed by socialist figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a universal basic income...

– Contents of this video ---------------------------- 0:00 A Century of Underachievement 4:11 The Land of Silver 9:29 The Power Vacuum 11:16 The Pampas 14:42 As rich as an Argentine 19:30 The Decline of Liberalism 23:46 The Infamous Decade 27:20 The Rise of Populism 29:49 Isolation & Favoritism 36:31 Dynamic Stagnation 42:25 Fear, Secrecy and Sweet money 49:40 Democracy & Depression 57:33 A Nation Trapped by History

While the Fed is cleaning up some of the messes it made by printing money for 15 years, people on the Left want to make those messes even worse.A recent viral video receiving millions of views online explains why millions of American families continue to struggle with “Bidenflation.” Well, perhaps “explain” is too strong a term.In the video, an excerpt from the new leftist documentary Finding the Money, Jared Bernstein, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, discusses modern monetary theory—the idea that the federal government could eliminate the national debt simply by printing money. To say Bernstein’s...

On Wednesday, the government put out disappointing inflation statistics that show that inflation has accelerated to four-tenths of a percent last month. But that number seems unrealistically low to me. In the numbers, bureaucrats claimed that gasoline prices only went up 1.7% last month, which would be only five cents per gallon. On the New York mercantile exchange, gasoline has risen from around $2.10 per gallon in early January to around $2.75 on March 31st; that is up 30% in three months. Crude oil has risen from around $72 at the end of the year, to $83 at the end...

Nathan Frederiksen is doing pretty well for himself. He turns 40 this year and is on track to retire by 60. It takes some sacrifice — he drives the “unsexiest car ever,” takes a DIY approach to home repairs and doesn’t eat out much — but he’s able to save 10% of his income for retirement and maintain an emergency savings fund while supporting his wife and four children in the suburbs of Boise, Idaho. “I understand that I’ve been lucky with some of my job prospects, but I don’t make a crazy amount of money,” he told CNN. “I...

The kerfuffle over the relative merit of forcing “viewpoint neutrality” in history classrooms puzzles me. No wonder: Although an historian by Ph.D., I have taught mostly economics for almost three decades! Historians, and I daresay others teaching the human sciences, could learn much from what I call “econogogy,” specific pedagogical techniques employed by many, though by no means all, economists. Students pay tuition or incur debt to develop independent analytical-thinking skills (and to have some fun), not to learn the political opinions of professors that they could see for free on X or Facebook. Dramatic current events, from terrorist attacks...