Whether it’s the hype about the MoMo Challenge, the Jussie Smollett hate-crime hoax, the Fyre Festival swindle, or politicians scaring us to blazes about this or that emergency, it’s hard to distinguish fact from fiction and prudent ideas from rash action. We live in a time when too much of our news resembles something between the Pravda and the Onion.…
Although the United States government has run up a national debt that exceeds the Gross Domestic Product, two spendthrift United States senators have the temerity to lecture American corporations about how the latter should manage their balance sheets. Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) recently proposed forthcoming legislation that aims to prevent corporations from buying back their own…
There’s a perception of millennials as quirky (and problematic) young adults who haven’t quite bought into the system that has built America into the most robust economy the world has ever seen. But millennials are now in their 20s and 30s, and they make up the largest share of laborers in the workforce. Despite millennials’ much-publicized embrace of socialism, millennials…
Nothing in 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) brief work history as a bartender qualifies her to direct a massive transformation of society. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is the co-author of a bill popularly called “The Green New Deal.” The dubious premise of the bill is that the world as we know it will end in 12 years if we don’t take immediate and…
The world is changing at dizzying speed. Blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning, the Internet-of-things, and 3D printing are disrupting the economy and the labor market. The changes are so epic that some say we are living in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It has been estimated that 73 million existing jobs will be eliminated by the year 2030 due to automation.…
We are living in an exciting time where technological innovation is changing the way we live, work, do business, and fall in love. The economy is changing, but does this mean that “economics” itself will change? Some futurists say so. Writers like Kevin Kelly suggest that artificial intelligence and machine learning are inexorably leading us toward the end of work. With the…
The free market is the economic foundation of a free, pluralistic society. Laissez-faire economics stands for the idea that the government should stand aside and let individuals do what they want or need to do. In America, we celebrate our democracy. But, the free market is often a more fitting way to way to deal with the decisions in daily life. Democracy…
Conservatives and classical liberals face a challenge today similar to that faced by William F. Buckley Jr. at the founding of National Review as he stood athwart history yelling, “Stop!” Socialists of Buckley’s day spoke of dialectical history inevitably advancing toward a socialist order. Today, progressives warn of the imminent death of capitalism at the hands of disruptive technologies. Critics…
President Trump often says our trade partners treat us unfairly. Yet one of his first acts as president was to withdraw from a trade pact agreement designed to give favored treatment to its signatories. On Dec. 30, 2018, that pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (known as TPP), went into effect without the United States. The TPP is a…
After protracted smashmouth negotiations, the United States, Canada, and Mexico agreed to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”) with the new United States Mexico Canada Agreement (“USMCA”) on November 30, 2018. The new USMCA is largely NAFTA with certain positive elements drawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“TPP”). Unfortunately, certain new protectionist provisions unnecessarily take the USMCA in the wrong direction. Now, a new trade…