The Friday file: To paraphrase Milton Friedman, a society that puts equality of outcome ahead of freedom will have neither. Using force to achieve equality will destroy freedom and the force will end up in the hands of self-serving persons.…
A great international currency possesses three characteristics. It’s used to settle a substantial amount of international trade and commerce, it floats freely and is used as global reserve currency, meaning it’s held in large quantities by central banks and financial…
While total hours worked have declined over the past century, until recently the poor worked more hours than the upper classes. In 1965, college-educated men enjoyed more leisure than those with a high school diploma. Now, college graduates work 10…
In 2012, 437,000 people were murdered, thus the average person had a one-in-sixteen-thousand chance of being murdered. In Singapore, the safest country, your chances of being knocked off were 1/480,000 while in Honduras, the most violent, your chances were a…
Rather than waiting to pass housing finance reform, which is impossible, why not merge Fannie and Freddie in the meantime? Both firms do the same things — buy loans and securitize them — are regulated by the same agency, are…
The Friday File: A recent study that tracked 500,000 women for five years found that the chances of being in a car accident vary during pregnancy. When not pregnant and during the first month of pregnancy, the chances of being…
With unemployment at 11.8%, GDP growth barely positive, inflation at a microscopic 0.7% and the ECB balance sheet a trillion euro smaller than it was in 7/12, Mario Draghi will finally engage in stimulative monetary policy. While buying sovereign bonds…
In January 2008, the number of working Americans totaled 138,365,000. By the end of this month, that total will be surpassed, and while that’s great news, it’s 77 months later! To keep the unemployment rate from rising due to new…
The recently proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner by Comcast should be allowed. Combined competition from Verizon, AT&T/Dish, Netflix, DirectTV, Aereo, Google, Amazon, Apple and others should be enough. And while having 30 million households would give Comcast an…
Last week Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker died. He was the first to use economics to explain social phenomena including discrimination, crime, divorce and family size. Based on observations over time and across cultures he concluded that the less…