Essays & News

Left critics blame capitalism for what cronyism does. Right critics blame immigrants for what criminals do. The logic is the same — and it’s wrong in both cases.   Political debate has a remarkable capacity to produce mirror-image errors. Thinkers on opposite ends of the spectrum, convinced they have nothing in common with their opponents, […]

  For much of the postwar era, macroeconomic policy rested on an intuition famously formalized by the Phillips curve: Economic slack, typically associated with high unemployment, and inflation tend to move in opposite directions. Weak growth cools prices; overheating pushes them up. Monetary policy can therefore stabilize one variable by leaning against the other. Stagflation […]

  The nomination of Kevin Warsh to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chair has many people wondering: What makes a good Fed chair? The answer, it turns out, depends on the environment in which the chair will operate. The characteristics that matter most for running an independent central bank differ from those for a […]

  “Es ist nicht nötig, die Lehre vom Wert, wie sie sich bei Marx findet, weiter zu verfolgen. Was bisher angeführt wurde, genügt, um die Stellung zu kennzeichnen, welche Marx in der Geschichte der Wertlehre gebührt. Diesbezüglich wird man nicht zu verkennen vermögen, dass, so radikal und weitgehend Marx in seinen praktischen Lehren sein mag, […]

  America’s midterm congressional campaigns are now underway, marked by clamor over the so-called “affordability crisis.” Although driven primarily by Democrats, the hand-wringing narrative is prompting candidates across the political spectrum to propose all manner of government measures to correct purported market failures. But such interventions are, more often than not, the cause of higher […]