Economics

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 »

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 »

"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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Here’s a followup to the post from earlier this week about my experience at a “Restoring the Urban Middle Class” conference in Houston a couple weeks ago.  read more »

Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them.  read more »