Recently, when asked ifintervention by the White House into private enterprise was presidential, President-elect Trump responded,“I think it’s very presidential. And if it’s not presidential, that’s okay … because I actually like doing it.” Writing for the Library of Law and Liberty, Greg Weiner asks, “On what authority is the President of the United States pressuring, which is to say intimidating, the leaders of private enterprise to determine where goods are made and sold? Answer: sheer personal will. ‘I actually...

“Don’t forget, this is called the Republican Party,” said Donald Trump in an interview justifying his opposition to free trade, “it’s not called the Conservative Party.” When Trump made that statement six months ago it was still possible to believe a distinction could be made between traditional Republicanism—which tends to be pro-Big Business—and traditional conservatism—which has generally been pro-free markets. But a recent poll finds that both Republicans and conservatives are more skeptical of free markets than are liberals(!). The...

The 2016 American Family Survey was designed to understand the “lived experiences of Americans in their relationships and families” andprovide “context for understanding Americans’ life choices, economic experiences, attitudes about their own relationships, and evaluations of the relationships they see around them.” Here are seven figures you should know from this recently released survey: 1. When asked what specific challenges are making family life difficult, one-third (32 percent) said the costs associated with raising a family, one-fourth (27 percent) said...

When most literature students are asked about literature inspired by World War I, they typically respond with such names as Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Richard Aldington. As well, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are included by extension as both “The Waste Land” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” are largely informed by the 1914 to 1918 conflagration. Largely forgotten is David Jones, a writer of many sensibilities that are all synthesized and informed by his Roman Catholicism. In Parenthesis,...

Don’t retire this book! Although Arthur Koestler’s The Age of Longing was published in 1951 – officially making it 65 this year – it’s far too invigoratingly fresh to remove from the anti-Marxist workforce. In fact, the message delivered by Koestler in this novel couldn’t be more relevant than in our contemporary political environment. Koestler’s penultimate endeavor in literary fiction and the final entry in his quartet of political novels on the inherent dangers of collectivism, The Age of Longing...

Note: This is post #12 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. Why do taxes exist? What are their effects? In this video by Marginal Revolution University, economist Alex Tabarrok explainshow taxes affect consumer surplus and producer surplus. He also discusses the concept of deadweight by considering a real-world example from the 1990s: taxing luxury yachts. (If you find the pace of the videos too slow, I’d mend watching them at 1.5 to 2 times the speed. You can...

Are you better off than someone who has a million dollars in the bank? Probably not—at least pared to a millionaire today. But chances are you consider yourself better off than someone who was a millionaire in an previous era—and you may even be better off than someone who had a million dollars in the bank in the 1970s or 1980s. Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself this question: How much is [technological advance X] worth to me? That’s not...

“Gregg lays out a careful and detailed argument for the proposition that, done well, financial endeavors can serve mon good,” says Adam J. MacLeod in a review of Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg’s most recent book For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good. MacLeod’s review at The Public Discourse, gives praise to Gregg’s book saying that anyone who feels called to the finance industry “can get quite a lot straight by reading this fine...

During a season such as Christmas, where hyper-consumerism and hyper-generosity converge in strange and mysterious ways, it’s a question worth asking: How much of our gift-giving is inefficient and wasteful? For some, it’s a buzz-kill question worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge. For an economist, however, it’s a prodthat pushes us to createmore value and better align our hearts and hands with human needs. In a new video at Marginal Revolution, economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrock explore this at length, asking...

Consumption is arguably the first (or maybe second) economic concept mentioned in the Bible. After creating Adam and Eve and giving them the cultural mandate (“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”), God says to them, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all...