Nearly twelve years ago, on October 24, 2005, this column reviewed the potential runners for Fed Chairman and came to the conclusion that the worst possible choice would be Ben Bernanke. Needless to say, President George W. Bush appointed Bernanke the following week. Since Donald Trump bids fair to be a considerably better President than […]

Since I am away this week, I am republishing a “classic,” in this case a review of Robert Skidelsky’s third volume of his Life of Keynes. The review was written and published by UPI in March 2002; it therefore takes no account of the frightening renaissance in Keynes’ reputation since the 2008 crisis. In reading […]

When I first looked at Bitcoin, I thought it was a badly constructed Millennial scam. Its vaunted “blockchain” had clear design problems, as Kevin Dowd and I pointed out in a Cato Institute paper. I now realize that this was a failure of imagination. I should have seen Bitcoin for what it was: the first […]

President Trump’s tax plan removes the deduction for state and local taxes, but leaves in place a much worse policy, the charitable tax deduction. As tax policy, the charitable tax deduction is execrable, targeted primarily at the very rich and enabling such atrocities as the Clinton Foundation. However, it has a subtler undermining effect: it […]

New technology disrupted working life as never before. A large percentage of the workforce seemed likely to lose its job and maybe never work again. Poverty threatened the displaced workers, who succumbed to addiction and disease. It sounds like a dystopian prediction on the introduction of robots – but it is actually a description of […]