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"Tom Woods, Good Writer or Bad, I Ask You…Pat Buchanan!"

(Possibly obscure SNL reference…) Buchanan praises Tom Woods’ book Meltdown, and reminds us of the prior incarnation of the Fed: Of Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States, the great Andrew Jackson was eloquent. “It has tried to kill me,” he said. “But I will kill it.” And he did. Should not this creature from […]

Colbert Destroys Glenn Beck

Wow, I don’t know if I can take Glenn Beck seriously after this dismantling. I listen to him on the radio, but I don’t have a TV so I had never seen the antics below. Oh man. I suppose Beck would say, “Hey, I really do believe in the cause, but on TV you have […]

Other Branches of Government Push Back on Bernanke

In a previous post I recommended viewing Fed behavior as if Bernanke is another political actor who is trying to expand the power of his agency. (Economists have no problem deploying such “public choice” analysis to conventional politicians, but for some reason they think the Fed chief is guided solely by economic efficiency.) The Senate […]

Jobless Claims "Unexpectedly" Jump

Whoa, I don’t get it? Just because the government nationalizes the banks and car companies, flushes a few trillion down the toilet, and promises to raise taxes and take over the energy and health care sectors… All of that’s somehow supposed to adversely affect the productivity of labor? Apparently. It’s just so strange, because if […]

Social Security Is Already Broke

Tim Swanson sends this alarming article. While (almost) nobody was looking, the Social Security “surplus” disappeared in February. You know, the event that wasn’t supposed to happen for another ten years or so? And also, don’t reassure yourself with the existence of the “trust fund” to keep the Social Security deficit from affecting the rest […]

Hyperinflation?

Tim Swanson sends me this article saying hyperinflation is impossible. I’m not convinced. Let’s not forget, folks, that during 2008 the narrow M1 money supply rose by 17 percent. The public expanded its demand for cash balances and sopped it up, that’s true. But I think Bernanke has more than offset the “second order deflation” […]

Waxman-Markey: Staring Into the Abyss

One of the “joys” of my job with IER is that I have to comb through the actual bills that the great deliberative body in DC generates. For example, try sifting through the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill [pdf], a 648-page monstrosity that got dumped on us yesterday. If you open it, check out “SEC. […]

Physics and Government

Before reading this NYT article on Freeman Dyson, I had never really thought much about how close physicists and the government became during World War II. But it seems the physicists learned the subtleties of procurement quickly: Dyson has been hostile to the Star Wars missile-defense system, the Space Station, the Hubble telescope and the […]