No less an authority than Mohamed El-Erian, former CEO of the $2 trillion bond giant PIMCO, has now said in the Financial Times that we should pay attention to the rise in the gold price above $2,700, up around 40% over the past year. El-Erian is a former advisor to President Obama and perennial bond bull, so his change of view is akin to a stopped clock suddenly registering a new time. We should pay attention when this happens. In a world of fiat currencies and unreliable governments, gold or its equivalent is the only sound monetary basis. Let us hope that after almost a century of monetary folly, world leaders are re-learning this lesson. Continue reading →

President Trump has proposed a general tariff for the United States if he is re-elected. This is traditional Republican policy; the GOP was highly protectionist from 1860 until 1932, with the 1862 Morrill Tariff being the first major assault on Britain’s attempt to move to a free-trade world. However looking back, the Republican tariff policy of the 19th Century, when combined with free immigration, produced prosperity mainly for “robber barons” who became unprecedentedly wealthy, and not for ordinary people. It is a poisonous mixture, which Trump should avoid. Continue reading →

The recent assaults on property rights by abusive governments and law-enforcement agencies, the “lawfare” against President Trump and his associates, in which the same misdeed is treated quite differently depending on the perpetrator, and the shenanigans and double standards surrounding U.S. elections all show that U.S. constitutional protections are increasingly being eroded. To defend them, more than just legislation is needed, because legislation can be reversed with every short-term swing of the electoral pendulum. We need a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I would like to explore herein what such an Amendment should contain. Continue reading →

Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal in Springfield OH. openly welcomed the opportunity to employ Haitian refugee immigrants for wages far below what he would pay domestic labor. In that, he is typical of the cheap labor lobby ever since Sir Robert Peel (1750-1830), father and son. The low wage lobby is destroying our societies and their economies; it must at all costs be defeated. Continue reading →

In my youth, the British automobile company British Leyland was an iconic example of what was wrong with Britain before the advent of Margaret Thatcher. It had merged most of the British automobile industry with government encouragement, only to achieve zero economies of scale, ever-worsening product quality, ever-increasing losses that caused it to enter public ownership in 1975 and about three new wildcat strikes a week. Post-Thatcher, it appeared that such paragons of management ineptitude had disappeared. However, in the United States today, several companies have entered at least the early stages of British Leylandization; the future of the U.S. economy and the prosperity of its people depends on this being reversed. Continue reading →

Keir Starmer has announced that he will introduce legislation to remove the last remaining voting rights of the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the House of Lords after Tony Blair’s 1998 massacre. In terms of legislative quality, this is a travesty. The innumerable “life peers” pushed into the Lords by Blair and his successors are prey to every fashionable delusion and serve no useful purpose. Conversely, hereditary peers, all 805 of whom should be included in a Second Chamber shorn of its corrupt Life Peers element, are an essential part of democratic governance, that could usefully be copied by the United States. Continue reading →

Kamala Harris has proposed a 25% “Kamala Tax” on unrealized capital gains, applicable to all those with more than $100 million net worth, while removing the differential between income tax and capital gains tax rates for the rest of us. Since the inflation her policies will inevitably cause would push us all into the $100 million net worth bracket in 4-5 years, I thought it worth examining the economic effects of her new policy, yet another attack on capitalism by a party that no longer believes in it, which will not yield significant net revenue. Continue reading →

Democracy is an imperfect form of government – no question. As the 1784-1830 Tories successfully demonstrated, a property franchise with a low qualification is a much better way of selecting representatives, but since that is not one-man-one-vote, it is not technically a democracy. Yet genuine democracy, while it often leads to sub-optimal economic policy, nevertheless contains intrinsic safeguards that prevent property and other rights from being too egregiously violated. Those rights are now in severe danger worldwide in several states that are still nominally democracies; I would like to explore where the line should properly be drawn. Continue reading →

The Tokugawa shogunate which ruled Japan from 1603 to 1868 is popularly thought of as a period of extreme national introversion, during which Japan closed itself off from the outside world in a feudal state for 250 years and stagnated economically. This is inaccurate. The period of shogun rule was one of sustained economic advance for the Japanese people, albeit at a modest pre-industrial pace. By the time the U.S. Navy’s Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853, Japan was fully comparable to mid-18th century Britain in both technology and living standards, albeit with different capabilities. The greatest credit for that success should go to the innovative reforming shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684-1751) who during his rule from 1716 to 1745 reoriented the Japanese economy in a way that has lessons for us today. Continue reading →