Economics

In-depth articles on economics exploring key policies in healthcare economics, agriculture subsidies, trade tariffs, government subsidies, and monetary systems — with critical examination of their broader impacts on public health, individual liberty, free markets, economic freedom, and the urgent need for policy reform.

Brownstone Institute provides alternative perspectives on how economic interventions affect society, from farm subsidies distorting food systems and health outcomes to monetary policy enabling control, tariff effects on global trade and liberty, and pathways to restore free-market principles and personal freedoms.

All economics articles are translated into multiple languages to support global readers, open international dialogue, and promote evidence-based reform worldwide.

market-loves-you

The Market Still Loves You

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

The theme is meaning. Not big meaning but meaning in small things. The meaning of everyday life. Finding friendship, mission, passion, and love in the course of working out one’s life in the framework of a commercial society, which should not be narrowly construed as only a way of paying bills but rather should be seen as the instantiation of a life well lived. We were not doing a good job of that, so my thinking was to inspire people to come to love what we take for granted.

The Market Still Loves You Continue Reading

A World on Fire

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

There is a moment in the day when the work is done and perhaps a cocktail comes out or the dishes are washed and the kids are in bed and the room falls silent. At this moment, millions and billions of people the world over know it. Disaster is all around us. We are just pretending otherwise, simply because this is what we have to do. 

A World on Fire Continue Reading

Coercion on Campus Stops When Students Say No

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

What can you do as an individual against a multi-million dollar institution full of important people with doctorates? What if you get cancelled? What if you lose everything you have worked for? These are important considerations. But remember this, 21st-century universities are commercial enterprises and you are their customers. They don’t exist without you.

Coercion on Campus Stops When Students Say No Continue Reading

How Lockdowns Broke Human Capital

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Politicians, policymakers, and experts who would never miss a paycheck or a meal suddenly decided that workers not like them were no longer essential. In making this choice for others, they robbed human beings of years of investment of self in certain industries while also bluntly telling these others that their livelihood could be taken from them near overnight.

How Lockdowns Broke Human Capital Continue Reading

I Weep for My Profession: Letter to the American Economic Association

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Your announcement ensures that I will not attend the meetings under such absurd restrictions. Furthermore, it makes me weep for my profession, for it is strong evidence that today’s leaders of the world’s most prestigious organization of professional economists are unaware of basic facts about covid and, worse, ignorant of basic tenets of economics. 

I Weep for My Profession: Letter to the American Economic Association Continue Reading

life expectancy

US Life Expectancy Down Three Years in Two Years

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

In the name of pandemic planning, the elites turned a manageable pathogen into a killer policy that sliced three years off the average life expectancy in the US, with costs that are truly incalculable. All the cover-ups, political propaganda, and excuse-making cannot cover up the vital statistics, which are among the most difficult to disguise. And they are looking ever more grim. 

US Life Expectancy Down Three Years in Two Years Continue Reading

Covid Invoked for More Redistribution from Workers to Doctors and Lawyers

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Approximately 43 million student loan borrowers in the United States owe a collective nearly $1.75 trillion in federal and private student loan debt as of August 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. But when you look at the average amounts owed, the case is crystal clear: Student debt is overwhelmingly an investment in professional credentialization that should never have been a obligation of the taxpayers in the first place.

Covid Invoked for More Redistribution from Workers to Doctors and Lawyers Continue Reading

How To Tame a Bureaucracy? Get Rid of It 

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

There needs to be a to-be-abolished list and any federal government institution with the word agency, department, or bureau needs to be on it. The last few years have shown us the power of these institutions and the devastation they can cause. The only sure way of preventing it from happening again is to put a hard stop on all the bureaucracies that caused our suffering. Society itself, which is smarter than bureaucracy, can manage the rest. 

How To Tame a Bureaucracy? Get Rid of It  Continue Reading

Join the Brownstone Community
Get our FREE Journal Newsletter