Free Republic

With COVID back, censorship is back, and now it's taken a particularly dangerous form, not just on social media, but on leading academic exchanges. The huge Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN), run by Netherlands-based publishing house Elsevier, is not a site most people know about, but it is a behemoth in academia, extremely important to professors for getting their work out there and advancing within the academic community. That's where censorship on COVID is happening, which could have far-reaching consequences for public policy and the free exchange of ideas. SSRN's plain, bare-bones front page on its site describes itself this...

Who's miserable and who's happy?The human condition lies on a vast spectrum between “miserable” and “happy.” In the economic sphere, misery tends to flow from high inflation, steep borrowing costs, and unemployment. The surefire way to mitigate that misery is through economic growth. Comparing countries’ metrics can tell us a lot about where in the world people are sad or happy. Hanke’s Annual Misery Index (HAMI) gives us the answers. My version of the misery index is the sum of the year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank-lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita....

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's blundering is becoming more breathtaking with each passing week. At the end of March he rolled out a grand plan to crown the Federal Reserve as the nation's new financial stabilizer. The Fed a stabilizer? That's who created the financial mess we're in. If this wasn't bad enough, Secretary Paulson then donned his cheerleader's uniform and encouraged Beijing to let the Chinese yuan appreciate against the greenback. All the while favoring in this fashion a debasement of the U.S. currency, Paulson proclaimed that we should remain calm and confident because the economic fundamentals are sound....