Song Dynasty China was a model of intellectual advance, that might well have started the Industrial Revolution half a millennium early. After a destabilizing century of foreign Mongol rule, China’s next dynasty, the Ming, was thoroughly intellectually retrograde, closing China off from the world, imposing a rigid Confucian orthodoxy and shutting out ideas that questioned […]

Free trade economists are very fond of quoting David Ricardo’s (1772-1823) principle of Comparative Advantage, first expounded in his “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” in 1817. Ricardo was one of our greatest economists, but his principle of Comparative Advantage, like much of modern mathematical economics, rested on shaky assumptions and thus had […]

President Trump’s announcement last week that the fee for H1B visa applicants would rise to $100,000 should be welcomed. The much-abused and abusive temporary worker H1B, H2A, and H2B visa programs, greatly expanded by the late unlamented President George H.W. Bush, have been artificially wrecking the living standards of ordinary Americans for decades. This is […]

The collapse of Tricolor, a $1bn subprime private credit lender making loans to those without Social Security numbers, is a rather small canary in a very large coal mine: the $3 trillion private credit industry. That industry has been fueled by “funny money” credit availability and represents a poisoning of the existing global credit system, […]

President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is […]

President Trump’s firing of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has caused anguished squawking about the loss of Fed independence. Yet experience since 1998 has shown that Bank of England independence has produced worse outcomes than before, and the world’s independent central banks’ overall performance has been thoroughly third-rate. Central bank independence without firm policy guidelines […]

President Trump’s decision to take a 10% share stake in Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) as part of the deal for the Biden administration’s excessive handouts to a failing company was arguably a good one. However, the original CHIPS Act was economically damaging while suggestions by NEC Chairman Kevin Hassett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that there might […]

It is a long-standing view of the Left, for which there is a depressingly large amount of evidence, that the tide of History heads in only one direction — towards an authoritarian socialism that might as well be Communism. Less than three years ago I believed that in Latin America at least, authoritarian socialism had […]

When looking at industrialization in Austria-Hungary, I was struck by how little its governments used the superb “Austrian School” cadre of economists its universities were then producing – surely results could have been better than the sluggish bureaucratized industrialization the country actually achieved. Yet other societies, notably 18th and early 19th Century Britain, used their […]

President Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer attracted much criticism, as government statistical agencies are claimed to be impartial. Such claims of impartiality should always be regarded with deep suspicion, as they generally conceal a noxious political agenda. When you look at the BLS’s statistical methods, its agenda becomes apparent. […]