I first met Aram Bakshian in the fall of 1961. We were both Washingtonians. He was a senior at Woodward Prep, a Washington day school about one block west of the White House. I was a senior at a simply…
The Wall Street Journal published an article Friday titled “It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child.” The calculation came from a study at the Brookings Institution, which in turn relied on data gathered by the Department of Agriculture. Three…
Another week, another reminder that heavy-handed government industrial policy is in fashion. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence recently endorsed it as embodied in the newly passed CHIPS legislation, an attempt to bolster America’s semiconductor industry. The endorsement, like so many,…
Politicians, the Federal Reserve, and Fed and administration apologists like to claim that the inflation we face is caused by supply constraints. This claim goes against the facts on the ground. According to the World Trade Organization, even though there…
I am writing this in a large but dreary hotel room in Orlando, Florida. I’m about to give a speech to a large group of retired people. These are well-to-do retired persons. That means they are smart. They have the…
As the greatest inflation spike of the last 50 years occurs, the utter failure of economists, their models, and many pundits to foresee what was coming is worth highlighting. Of course, the biggest malfunction in the story was that of…
BRIMFIELD, Mass. — “We are living in a throwaway culture,” Pope Francis observed this summer. “What is useless is discarded.” The pope speaks of people, specifically the elderly, the unborn, and the disabled, i.e., the inefficient. Disposable, however, seems an…
President Trump sent the D.C. establishment into hysterics by running on industrial policy, national economics, immigration restriction, and skepticism of globalism. But Trump’s economic worldview is not new; its core tenets were put forth by the Republican Party at its…
In December 2009, the Global Language Monitor, a language-tracking company based in the U.S., declared that the “Rise of China” was the single biggest news story of that past decade. At the time, China’s GDP was barely over $5 trillion,…