Category Archives: Global Economy
Anakin Greenspan’s turn to the Dark Side
Before Alan Greenspan’s almost 19-year reign as Federal Reserve Chairman (economic sith?), and before his appointment by Nixon as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Greenspan was a private sector economic consultant and a critic of fiat money or a government manipulated monetary system. In fact, he penned ”Gold and Economic Freedom” (a short [...]
Romer, new theory of economic growth theory, and patent wars
One contender for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics is Stanford economist Paul Romer, son of a Colorado governor. You should note that Romer is the developer of “Aplia,” a homework, quizzing, and practice software system that he sold a few years ago to Cengage. Aplia is the homework and quizzing software that is currently [...]
Maintaining the ability to price discriminate by changing property rights
Once you buy something, is it really yours? If it were yours, wouldn’t you be able to resell it if you wanted to? These are questions at the heart of a new case before the U.S. Supreme Court that you can read about here. The case involves something that many college students should be able [...]
The rich leaving France in the face of a huge tax hike–who would have seen this coming?
If you take a look at this recent article from France24.com, you will see that many French businessmen are puting their houses on the market to leave France, trying to avoid being hit with a stinging 75% marginal tax rate (the rate on their highest earnings, their “marginal” earnings). Leaving a high tax region was [...]
Mess in Disposable Diapers
Disposable diapers have almost completely replaced cloth nappies in the U.S. and in many other developed nations. There seems to be a high likelihood of a price increase in these convenient diapers after a recent explosion in Himeji, Japan, shut down a Nippon Shokubai chemical plant as we see in this article from ABC. [...]
Baptists and Bootleggers, Damon and the UAE
Matt Damon has proven over and over to be a talented actor and screenwriter. In December, he will be coming out with a pro-environmental movie about fracking to extract natural gas and petroleum from certain rock structures, a movie titled Promised Land. No doubt, Matt Damon is an environmentalist–he believes in this new project. A [...]
UN considers global taxation
Yesterday I posted a comment on the World Health Organization’s attempts to place a global tax on cigarettes here. Today, I read here that the UN is attempting to tax billionaires, carbon, airline flights, minerals, currency trading in dominant currencies (the dollar, the pound, the euro, the yen), and in financial transactions. In yesterday’s posted [...]
Profit, loss, bailout and fiat
Take a look at this story about the bailout of Chrysler Motors. Notice that Chrysler will not be able to pay back the federal government. While the authors seem to make a big thing about this company now being foreign owned, I do not think that is such a big deal, that is not the [...]
The French exodus continues
The evidence of France’s wealthy and their wealth fleeing that country is mounting. Take a look at this article from Britain’s The Telegraph. Could it be time to invest in real estate in Ontario and Montreal? -MC
Breaking windows, destroying cars and creating jobs
Bastiat, in one of his best-known essays points to the lack of logic of those who suggest that we can become better off through destruction, a fallacy that has come to be called the “broken window fallacy.”. In 2006, in this inaugural post on Bastiat’s Bastions, Norbert Michel and I suggested that the notion that [...]