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Blog postPhoto by RKO/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock (5885689l) Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers Shall We Dance – 1937 Director: Mark Sandrich RKO USA Scene Still Musical L’entreprenant M. Petrov There seems to be a fashion this season for new approaches to men’s formalwear, and I’ve been getting questions about it.
Is this proper or tacky? Exactly what are the limits here? Here is my answer.
This is probably the third round of such experimentation in my adult life. It’s as if people s -
Blog postFor some decades now, economists have assembled data measuring “economic freedom” in order to create an index that can be tracked over time. The idea of an index of economic freedom is to measure the extent to which individuals are free to pursue their self-interest and how secure are the fruits of this pursuit. Some 400 articles have been written using this index.
A substantial share of those articles deals with the relation between prosperity and economic freedom. Most o -
Blog postThe labor market showed remarkable resilience in November, posting sharply higher job gains and solid upward revisions for the second consecutive month. The November report was boosted by the return of General Motors workers who were on strike in October. Nevertheless, job gains were widespread and job creation over the past few months appears significantly stronger than in the first half of the year. However, the pace of gain is still somewhat slower than the strong gains in 2018. Overa
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Blog postImagine for a moment, the following: In an industry with global demand there is one organization that has the following advantages. It has the lowest cost of production for its product, exported and used by every country on the planet, and is part of a publicly recognized and accepted price fixing cartel that can counteract swings in supply and price.
In 2018 this organization generated profits of over $111 billion on revenues of almost $356 billion, outstripping profits of mark -
Blog postAmity R. Shlaes presents “On the Legacy of American economist and former Chair of the US Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns, during the Keynesian Revolution” at the American Institute for Economic Research Annual Meeting of Voting Members 2019.
Current Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, famously claimed Marriner S. Eccles “had created a central bank able to make decisions in the long-term best interest of the economy without regard to political pressure.”
The role of the -
Blog postThe economics discussion would be greatly enhanced if it were better understood that underlying all spending, selling, saving, lending, borrowing, and investing is an exchange of products, services or labor. Real things are always and everywhere being moved around when “money” changes hands.
It cannot be stressed enough that “money” is just an agreement about value that only has use insofar as there’s already wealth. Money does not instigate despite what economists, pundits and politi -
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Blog postOne of the many unsettling features of Donald Trump is his deep-seated antipathy to the time-honored doctrine of free trade. Even as early as 2016, Trump devoted a substantial portion of his Republican Convention speech calling for the adoption of protectionist tariffs and other trade restrictions against “any country that cheats.”
He proceeded to blame NAFTA for a litany of largely-imagined economic woes in the industrial sector; reiterated his support for an import-substitution regi -
Blog postThe impeachment proceedings against President Trump have fueled all manner of conjecture regarding the proper discharge of foreign policy, hidden motives behind both Trump’s phone call and the ensuing investigation, and everything from the dead-cat bounce of the Mueller Report to the Kurdish policy shift.
But there are a number of questions that, while they should be asked, haven’t been. (Obligatory disclaimer: None of these questions are intended to either excuse or indict the -
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Blog postIt’s time for a retrospective on Bitcoin, released 11 years ago this January. What have we learned? What are the prospects for the future?
I was a slow convert to the very idea that Bitcoin could work. This is because I had seen so many failed attempts in the 2000s to create an independent money for the Internet. I had concluded that it could not work, so when Bitcoin came along I had already ruled out the idea that it would amount to something. What I had overlooked is that pre -
Blog postThe Institute for Supply Management’s nonmanufacturing composite index fell to a reading of 53.9 from 54.7 in October (see top chart). For this index, 50 is neutral, with readings above 50 suggesting expansion for the sector and readings below 50 suggesting contraction. The November result is the 118th consecutive month above 50 suggesting expansion for the services sector.
Historically, readings above 48.6 have suggested expansion of the overall economy and November was the 123rd con -
Blog postI can’t remember a nuttier weekend in the history of Bitcoin than this one. That’s because the action gets more exciting by the day, with deeper plots, more options, growing complexities, and financial and personal drama all around. You know why? Because this technology matters enormously for the future of the world. It’s Day One in the birth of a new way of doing business. It’s extremely hard to write about this for the uninitiated without seeming to speak Klingon, but here is my attempt. My
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Blog postIf you read on the topic of money’s history from any mainstream textbook, you will already know the drill. In the past, money took many forms. It was shells, pelts, salt, and various metals. Finally we got paper money, credit institutions, then central banks. At this point, we are told, history was complete. The final and best form had arrived. The state would be in charge of money forever. All that was left was to have it managed in a way that better served our needs. People argued about sys
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Blog postPeople were stunned when the Trump administration unilaterally bailed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty in January 2017. It seemed like a deadly blow to this treaty that would have lowered tariffs among 12 nations. What is downright humiliating for Americans is that the treaty became better only after the US withdrew from it. What did this move portend for the cause of free trade? Some despaired that it would signal a new trend toward protectionism, not only for the US
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Blog postThere he was dropping off packages in the mail room. I picked up mine and walked away. Then I did a double take. The patch on his shoulder was not USPS, FedEx, or UPS. It was the familiar lower case “a” of Amazon. “Wait, do you actually work for Amazon?” “Yes, sir.” “The company that sells things online now has its own warehouse-to-doorstep delivery service?” “Yes, it’s been around for a year, but expanding by the day. I love my job. It’s a great company.” I am pretty sure I knew this, but it
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Blog postAlmost every small and medium-sized town has what are called farmers markets. We love them. Some are seasonal. Some open only on weekends. People shop under tents and pay vendors cash. It’s all very charming, a nice alternative to superstores. I just returned from one. I came home with a 4-pound Red Snapper, oversized Brussels Sprouts, beautiful red potatoes, fresh cheese made in the Mexican style, and tubs of spices – all for less than half what I would pay at a regular grocery store. Plus I
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Blog postAs a kid, people were always trying to get me to listen to the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. The adults decided they were good. I wasn’t buying it. To my kid ears, there was just too much happening in them. I had no context to understand them. They seemed long and pompous and had no real way to get where they were coming from or why they existed. Not for me. Not yet. I just listened again to the entire cycle, one through nine. It takes about six and a half hours. I felt transported, eac
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Blog postAt long last, with the end of “net neutrality,” competition could soon come to the industry that delivers Internet services to you. You might be able to pick among a range of packages, some minimalist and some maximalist, depending on how you use the service. Or you could choose a package that charges based only on what you consume, rather than sharing fees with everyone else. Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces. With market-based pricing finally permitted, we could see new en
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Blog postThis morning, I was sitting at a stop light and heard a terrifying screeching. A black sedan headed my direction from the oncoming lane was careening across six lanes of traffic, with squealing brakes and tires, through the intersection, flying forward some 75 or so yards and finally landing against a pole with a mighty impact. Terror shot through everyone in the vicinity. Green means go. The problem was that there were cars in the way. What happened? The woman behind the wheel had
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Blog postOne time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, y
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Blog postOne of the most exciting books of 2017 is James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale 2017). It deals with all the salient questions (that I care about in any case). In prehistoric times, how did human beings discover how to feed themselves? How did we decide to become settled in one spot rather than move around as hunters and gatherers? And the biggest question: where did the state come from and why? Scott is properly seen as a critic of the modern state, if
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Blog postThe classic criticism against the gold standard is that it was too costly. Why are these guys wasting resources to suit up, dig into mountains, desperately seeking a finite resource, and slogging the results all the way to Treasury Department?
There is a reason that Bitcoin is being called Digital Gold. This is all just silly. We know how to make money: you print it. It’s far cheaper to print than mine. A paper standard will save a tremendous amount of resources that can go to other p -
Blog postSome people on the left are starting to worry about getting trolled by the alt-right. This is because the alt-right has become aggressively anti-capitalist, pro-welfare state, and in favor of a government that specifically promotes white interests, not a free market that offers no privilege to anyone.
“The alt-right is looking to expand its ranks,” declares Salon, “and prominent leaders of the notorious white supremacist movement apparently believe that leftists are an ideal target fo -
Blog postA century ago, having electric indoor lighting was a luxury of the rich. It was a dangerous technology at the time – one thing goes wrong and the whole house is up in flames – but people took the risk. 150,000 years of lighting rooms with wax and oil was just too much. The future would be about glass bulbs and electric filaments. If you were rich and believed in the future, you had your home wired.
If we did not learn to dominate nature, our existence on earth would be short -
Blog postJeffrey A. Tucker, who is the Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), has published the book Right-Wing Collectivism: The Other Threat to Liberty in September. Last week, Kai Weiss talked with him via Skype about the book and the threat of right-collectivism.
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Kai Weiss: Let’s start off with an easy question. What was the purpose of writing this book? W -
Blog postNow that the special election is over, the mainstream press can stop reporting on Alabama as if it were Mars. Have some sympathy with the voters in this state, please. Not for the first time, a populist demagogue snagged the Republican nomination. His opponent had all the predictable views of the Democrats, which is to say similarly attached to an old-world model of political control.
Those who held their nose and voted for the Republican didn't like his antics or views; they simply o -
Blog postThe opportunity is to live every dream you have ever had. Now. The problem is that for every dream you realize, you have to relinquish some of your property. And every bit of that property is hard to come by, extraordinarily lucrative, and the single most in-demand thing on the planet earth.
Among the crypto rich, it’s hip to be poor. You must be tight. Stingy. No signs of wealth. So, yes, you could be living it up. Instead, you have become addicted to seeing your net worth rise -
Blog postThis year has been one of the greatest of my life, full of amazing changes that point to a bright future for all the things I care about. This year has also made me most grateful for life itself. Two dear friends have recently announced potentially life-threatening diseases, and I suffer to think of their turmoil and pain, and pray for their recovery. Both have been enormously valuable people in my life, and their suffering is my suffering.
Also this year, a man who had a profound inf -
Blog postAfter Bitcoin hit $10,000, it, at last, seemed to dawn on the mainstream financial press that this thing matters. There has been a panic rush to catch up on the meaning of it all. Some have doubled down on the claim that the whole thing is a hoax. Others dismiss it as a bubble (indeed, all financial models would suggest that a correction is needed). Some bigshots have called for it to be banned as if it is even possible to ban a mathematical protocol.
So much confusion out there! Havi -
Blog postIn Internet slang, they are called the HODLers, the people who are clinging to their Bitcoin and refusing to spend it. Instead, they just refresh their wallet apps, feeling richer by day while deferring consumption. Many of these burgeoning millionaires live like paupers. I’ve met many of them: all over the U.S., in Israel, in Brazil. They believe that every dollar they spend today is two dollars they won’t make in a few months. Probably they are right.
There is nothing selfish, stra -
Blog postSometimes a commercial appears that both shatters a paradigm and creates a popular meme that truly sticks. The genius is undeniable but extremely hard to manufacture from a formula. It just works. Think of “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” “Where’s the beef?”, “Mikey likes it!”, and “Do you have any Grey Poupon?” All these were huge cultural moments that managed to achieve what advertising is supposed to achieve: brand recognition, pride in consumption, affirmation of cultural identity.
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Blog postThe Washington Post is outraged. The New York Times even more so.
Commentators are going nuts.
“Using a tax bill to abolish the individual mandate amounts to a backdoor way of sabotaging Obamacare,” writes John Cassidy.
“Republicans, and Donald Trump, have counted on that (as well as your limited outrage bandwidth) in slipping an Affordable Care Act mandate repeal inside their insidious tax bill,” writes Bridget Read.
Obamacare’s much-despised individual manda -
Blog postRandal K. Quarles, a Trump administration appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Vice Chair for bank supervision, has given a lengthy speech (“Thoughts on Prudent Innovation in the Payment System”) that directly targets Bitcoin as a danger to the monetary and financial system.
To reiterate, an official speaking for the nation's central bank that manages the global reserve currency – the institution that has long bragged about its power to bail out the entire world wit -
Blog postWe tend to think of the past as settled. There is nothing we can do to change it. But this is not entirely true. How we think about the past – the good guys and bad guys, the justice and injustice, the causes and effects – has a profound effect on our perceptions of the present. Our understanding comes to be revised based on new information as it comes to light. In this sense, the past is not settled. It is a living reality.
Big thoughts, right? They come to me courtesy of an an -
Blog postIt’s beyond me why the Disney short showing before the new movie Coco (which itself is fantastic) is getting such terrible reviews. It might have something to do with an aspect of Internet culture.
Tradition anxiety is prompted by the depth of the history associated with the winter holiday. You can make a bigger splash on social media by brutally criticizing something than by praising it. Then the tipping point arrives and everyone somehow has to agree something is terrible even when -
Blog postIn a strange blast from the past, the Trump administration has rejected an uncontroversial vertical merger proposed by AT&T and Time Warner. Oh sure, it’s petty. It’s arbitrary and capricious. It’s economically unjustified. The principal players are right to object. Still, it’s nothing new. Antitrust has always been this way, from Standard Oil to Microsoft. It’s always been about power, not economics.
Vertical mergers haven’t been controversial in a long time. But this one is dif -
Blog postOne of the most exciting books of 2017 is James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale 2017). It deals with all the salient questions (that I care about in any case). In prehistoric times, how did human beings discover how to feed themselves? How did we decide to become settled in one spot rather than move around as hunters and gatherers? And the biggest question: where did the state come from and why?
Scott is properly seen as a critic of the modern st -
Blog postOne time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did.
Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a -
Blog postThis morning, I was sitting at a stop light and heard a terrifying screeching. A black sedan headed my direction from the oncoming lane was careening across six lanes of traffic, with squealing brakes and tires, through the intersection, flying forward some 75 or so yards and finally landing against a pole with a mighty impact. Terror shot through everyone in the vicinity.
Green means go. The problem was that there were cars in the way. What happened? The woman behind the wh -
Blog postAt long last, with the end of “net neutrality,” competition could soon come to the industry that delivers Internet services to you. You might be able to pick among a range of packages, some minimalist and some maximalist, depending on how you use the service. Or you could choose a package that charges based only on what you consume, rather than sharing fees with everyone else.
Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces.
With market-based pricing finally permitted, we -
Blog postAs a kid, people were always trying to get me to listen to the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven. The adults decided they were good. I wasn’t buying it. To my kid ears, there was just too much happening in them. I had no context to understand them. They seemed long and pompous and had no real way to get where they were coming from or why they existed.
Not for me. Not yet.
I just listened again to the entire cycle, one through nine. It takes about six and a half hours.
-
Blog postAlmost every small and medium-sized town has what are called farmers markets. We love them. Some are seasonal. Some open only on weekends. People shop under tents and pay vendors cash. It’s all very charming, a nice alternative to superstores.
I just returned from one. I came home with a 4-pound Red Snapper, oversized Brussels Sprouts, beautiful red potatoes, fresh cheese made in the Mexican style, and tubs of spices – all for less than half what I would pay at a regular grocery store -
Blog postThere he was dropping off packages in the mail room. I picked up mine and walked away. Then I did a double take. The patch on his shoulder was not USPS, FedEx, or UPS. It was the familiar lower case “a” of Amazon.
“Wait, do you actually work for Amazon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The company that sells things online now has its own warehouse-to-doorstep delivery service?”
“Yes, it’s been around for a year, but expanding by the day. I love my job. It’s a great company.”
-
Blog postPeople were stunned when the Trump administration unilaterally bailed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty in January 2017. It seemed like a deadly blow to this treaty that would have lowered tariffs among 12 nations.
What is downright humiliating for Americans is that the treaty became better only after the US withdrew from it. What did this move portend for the cause of free trade? Some despaired that it would signal a new trend toward protectionism, not only fo -
Blog postIf you read on the topic of money’s history from any mainstream textbook, you will already know the drill. In the past, money took many forms. It was shells, pelts, salt, and various metals. Finally we got paper money, credit institutions, then central banks. At this point, we are told, history was complete. The final and best form had arrived.
The state would be in charge of money forever. All that was left was to have it managed in a way that better served our needs. People argued a -
Blog postI can’t remember a nuttier weekend in the history of Bitcoin than this one. That’s because the action gets more exciting by the day, with deeper plots, more options, growing complexities, and financial and personal drama all around.
You know why? Because this technology matters enormously for the future of the world. It’s Day One in the birth of a new way of doing business.
It’s extremely hard to write about this for the uninitiated without seeming to speak Klingon, but here
Books By Jeffrey Tucker
A bela anarquia: Como criar seu próprio mundo livre na era digital (Portuguese Edition)
Jun 22, 2018
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$97.97
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$0.00 Free with Audible trial
$13.24
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$2.99
$7.95
Liberty.me: Freedom Is a Do-It-Yourself Project
Jan 27, 2014
$9.99
$952.95
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