Economics

California Needs a Recession

tenderloin-district-murals.jpg

Nowhere is better suited for flights of fancy than California, a place of miraculous growth and remarkable innovation. A backwater barely a century ago, with just over 3 million residents compared to nearly 40 million today, the Golden State has established pre-eminence over everything from agriculture and film to space travel and the internet.  read more »

What COVID Hath Wrought

COVID-impact_small-business.png

Glenn Ellmers’s analysis of COVID and Trump represents a classic, and effective, account of the situation from the perspective of declining liberty and adherence to traditional values.  read more »

California's Economy May Seem Healthy, But Just Wait for the Next Recession

silicon-valley_sunset.jpg

The California economy may seem healthy on the surface, with home prices soaring, Silicon Valley booming and the state government posting big multi-year state budget surpluses thanks to a massive surge in capital gains tax revenues and income tax revenues from tech stocks.  read more »

We're Telling the Wrong Story About Race in America

buffalo-ny-downtown.jpg

It's been a week since a mentally ill racist murdered 10 people, most of them Black Americans, in a Buffalo supermarket. In the intervening days since this horrific tragedy  read more »

How the Boomers Robbed the Young of All Hope

alex-motoc-sAhHyQiQKT8-unsplash.jpg

"Young people do not degenerate; this occurs only after grown men have already become corrupt." - Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1748.

The great test of a generation is whether it leaves better prospects for its descendants.  read more »

America's Two Housing Markets

america-2-housing-markets.png

Imagine that, on top of all our other problems, the United States had a shortage of pickup trucks. While many pickups are purchased for recreational purposes, they also play vital roles in construction, farming, forestry, and other industries.  read more »

Why We Want Our Own Home

real-estate-open-house-home-property.jpg

The nation is witnessing a surge in interest and demand for individual homes around the country. Home inventory is now quite low and even with higher interest rates looming, demand remains high and bidding wars are still common.  read more »

Do We Need a Capitalist Civil War?

pay-workplace-satisfaction.jpg

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a thoroughly modern people — living proof of what, with enough toil and grit, the rest of the free world can one day hope to be. And yet for all our progressivism and idealism, America’s political culture finds itself unable to escape the past. We may be living in a 21st century democracy, but that “democracy” increasingly resembles something that could have been plucked out of feudal Europe or, perhaps more accurately, feudal Japan.  read more »

Subjects:

Paying the Poorly Educated

metzgar-educationandjobs.png

Joe Biden was right to propose free Pre-K education for 3- and 4-year-olds and free community college in his initial legislative package, rather than pushing for free public university education and the cancellation of college debt.  read more »

America is Quietly Reinventing Itself

austin-downtown.jpg

The future shape of post-Covid America is beginning to emerge. As demographic trends and surveys indicate, the pandemic has helped accelerate large, epochal changes in the nation’s geography.  read more »