Economics Articles at Brownstone Institute feature opinion and analysis of the global economy including impacts on social life, public health, free trade, liberty, and policy. All Brownstone Institute Economics articles are translated into multiple languages.
What AI cannot do is incorporate into a single entity all of the specialized skills that the entrepreneur has; the abilities to calculate, plan, and execute, the personal acceptance of profit or loss, and the continued span of consciousness over time which makes the pursuit of wealth purposeful.
The same dynamic that Jesus encountered in Nazareth held true today; bringing “glad tidings to the poor” is a popular slogan but very often those who embrace it most quickly care little for being called out for their own sins which prevent delivery of these glad tidings. Sadly, this is precisely what has happened to those whose political history has been tied up with what was once called the labor movement.
The administrative state is horrible and it deserves to be called out. The next President can and should cut the administrative state in half (one could do so with no loss in services). But reading When McKinsey Comes to Town I realized that management consultants likely make up a larger share of the deep state than bureaucrats.
All of the “Covid Relief” numbers are far too big to understand unless one has a good numbers sense and sits quietly in a room with some blank paper and does some ciphering. People thought it was a good idea to spend limitlessly and futilely on Grandma without considering the costs to her adult children and grandkids. Hey, Grandma used to make us cookies; she’s worth whatever we’ve got. And even what we don’t got. Even if we can’t, through the full range of “mitigation,” keep her alive for another two months in a nursing home, where she’s seldom visited. If she has to live in isolation and die alone to “stop the spread,” so be it.
For those who are researchers, writers, academics, or just curious people who want to understand the world better – even improve it – to have one’s intellectual operating system so profoundly disturbed is an occasion of profound disorientation. It is also a time to embrace the adventure, recalibrate, and set about correcting and finding a new path.
Let there be no mystery as to why the public has lost trust in government, public health, media, and virtually every other official institution. Even as Americans have been pillaged and had their foundational rights violated by governments, the people on the inside have done very well for themselves within this tangled web of graft and corruption. They have every intention to forever block curious journalists from knowing more.
The US economy is freighted down with debt and it is also short of labor, riddled with non-productive speculation and financial engineering and starved for productive investment. Taken together, those malign forces were more than enough to slow the underlying growth of the US economy to a crawl.
The proposed Nature Restoration Law, one of the main components of the European Commission’s “Green Deal,” would require 20 percent of allegedly degraded EU land and sea to be “restored” by 2030. A modified version of the proposal which was already rejected in the parliament’s Environment Committee would have raised this figure even to 30 percent.
While natural neighborhoods can be wonderful supportive safe places, unnatural neighborhoods will exacerbate the problems that do occur in more tightly knit communities. Self-surveillance (if not actual real surveillance) and a sense of trepidation about leaving the comfortable confines can lead to a feeling of isolation from the larger world. In an FMC, that isolation could be seen as being not organic but ordered from on high, creating a mental box that can dwarf intellectual and emotional growth – in other words, a captive personality.
Recent history and current events clearly demonstrate that it is no longer a question of “is this possible” but a question of “when.” We the People must hold our public servants accountable. We must not let them strip us of our freedoms by complying when asked, “Papers, please.” We must not let division creep in under the guise of public health when We the People are healthier together. Vax passes must not pass.
With no commensurate increase in the demand for money, the expansion in money supply created by American money-printing leads to all existing dollars buying fewer goods than before the money-printing. Nobody sends a bill: the tax just happens, with every clank of the government printing press. Doubling the amount of money in circulation via the printing press, and then giving the printed money to the government to buy stuff with, is basically the same as the government taxing half of private-sector income and buying stuff with it.
Banks would then become instruments of political persecution and totalitarian groupthink instead of institutions devoted to the provision of banking services to the citizenry at large. The price of political dissent would become far too high for many citizens. The public square would quickly degenerate into an echo-chamber of opinions approved by the banking establishment.
