Many of Maynard Keynes’ dreams were destructive to civilization. The euthanasia of the rentier, which central bankers worldwide are still trying to achieve, has hopelessly corrupted the capital allocation process and brought productivity growth to a halt. But perhaps his most destructive vision was that of a universally leisured society, in which only a few […]

Ever since Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1965 immigration legislation, both Republican and Democrat efforts to reform immigration policy have been marked by sentimentality and bad faith with American workers. This column pointed this out in January 2004, when President George W. Bush’s proposed reform promised to immiserate further workers who had already gained nothing from the […]

Depending on the method of calculation used, the average Chief Executive Officer makes some 300 times the remuneration of the average worker. That multiple is up from 26 to 1 in 1978. Yet CEO performance has deteriorated, if we measure the economy in terms of productivity and so forth. It is thus clear that most […]

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 […]

Janet Yellen has said that she wants to consider raising the Federal Reserve’s target inflation rate from 2% to a higher level. By doing so, she hopes to impose more steeply negative real interest rates without the difficulties of abolishing cash or conducting state roundups of savers. Morally as well as economically, her call must […]

On June 8, Theresa May’s Conservatives came close to losing an election they should have won easily. The commentariat, all of whom like the Brussels bureaucrats and love the Brussels restaurants, claimed she had lost because of her firmness on Brexit and the Tories’ excessive devotion to fiscal austerity. Actually the Tories, not notably devoted […]