As the United States approaches yet another debt ceiling fight, an interesting idea has surfaced that might allow the whole mess to be circumnavigated altogether–the minting of a trillion dollar super coin. There are a few things to examine with regard to this proposal–why are we considering it, can it be done, what consequences would it have, and what are the possible alternatives?
Tag: politics
How to End Corruption
It is often said that corruption is just a part of politics, that nothing can be done about it, because all people are vulnerable to corruption. Power, it’s said, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. These notions are bandied about, but not, in my view, well-considered. It is not as if one day a perfectly wholesome individual gains political power and then, as if by some dark magic, corruption ensues. There are factors that bring corruption about, sources of it, if you will. If we were to target these sources, I venture to say that we could, if not end corruption, substantially reduce its incidence.
The Fiscal Cliff: Stepping Back From the Abyss
A couple days later than perhaps would have made a decent show, Congress managed to slap together a stop-gap and avert the economic catastrophe that the CBO projected would have resulted from the fiscal cliff. So let’s get to business–what does the cliff deal do, and where does this leave us going forward?
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Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s
If you argue long enough about economics, you are bound to run into the stagflation argument. The stagflation argument claims that the big state and stimulus caused high inflation, high unemployment, and poor growth during the seventies. Usually this argument is not fully argued by those who believe in it–it is merely asserted, and the rest of us are expected to accept that it is simply the case that the seventies happened that way. Today I’d like to endeavour to illustrate what actually happened in the seventies, what the real causes of stagflation were, and what sort of lessons might be pulled from it.
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Rise of the Machines: The Robot Economy of the Future
My attention has been drawn to a rather interesting phenomenon by Paul Krugman–that of a gradual shift in the distribution of wealth from labour to capital. As a percentage of the economic total, workers are earning less and less over time, and more and more of our output is landing in the hands of people who own capital–the land, the buildings, the tools, the machines that make things tick. This has interesting implications, and, if I might be permitted to speculate today, those implications may demand changes in how we view what we produce.
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Benjamin Studebaker 