Beware the Pundits Who Think They Speak For Us
“We are living in a moment of existential dread and alienation caused by the savagery of social media, the ugliness of our politics, the AI takeover, our melting planet, a winner-take-all economy…”…
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Essays
Writing by John Tamny and Parkview contributors, from the latest commentary to the collected archive.
1308 essays · Newest first
You're Missing Out on America When Driving If SiriusXM Is Your Sound
I left Richmond headed up I-95 to New England. Final destination: Newport, Rhode Island. I’m an old-school radio dial guy. No SiriusXM or podcasts for me. I’m constantly…
Book Review: Salvatore Basile’s “Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything”
I was living at 537 W. Deming in the Lincoln Park section of Chicago in the summer of 1995. The address and city rate mention because that summer Chicago suffered one of those brutal and nationally…
A Worthless Number (GDP) Rises Not Due to Growth, But Because It’s Worthless
GDP is a worthless calculation. It goes down as imports increase, it goes up as government spending does, and it increases not due to productivity, but if production of any kind has happened. In…
No, Jerome Powell Is Not the Hero of Today’s Economy
Silicon Valley VC legend Don Valentine purchased a 33% stake in Cisco decades ago for $2.5 million. Cisco is one of the many great investments made by the VCs at Sequoia Capital, and it’s worth…
Replying to Michael Munger Replying to John Tamny On SALT, Debt
Responding to me, Duke professor Michael Munger writes that, “If the real hawks like John Tamny get their way [full SALT deduction], with the cap going up to $100,000 or more, the loss in tax revenue…
The Fatal Conceit of National Debt “Hawkery”
“First, and most obviously, the U.S. government’s fiscal situation is very bad, getting worse, and driven mainly by unsustainable entitlement programs that grow faster than the economy and inflation,…
Forced Foreign Investment Is the Most Embarrassing Aspect of Trump’s Trade Deals
Americans don’t require their government to secure them investment. The world lines up to invest in U.S. genius not because presidents or Commerce Departments enter deals with other countries, but…
Ben Bernanke & Janet Yellen’s Inflation Mystification Ails Fed
Fed officials don’t grasp what inflation is. If they understood what it is, they wouldn’t be so worried about the Fed’s so-called independence. For background, contemplate a recent New York Times…
Americans Don’t Hate Immigrants, They Hate Central Planning
Americans loathe lines. See their disdain for the gasoline lines of the 1970s, and that were an effect of price controls naively meant to contain the cruel effects of a devalued dollar. What’s funny…
Book Review: David Chandler's "The Binghams of Louisville"
This is a “Did He Do It?” Book, David Chandler's The Binghams of Louisville . Did Robert Worth Bingham drug his wife, Mary Lily Keenan Flagler, to get her to sign a last-ditch…
Book Review: Simon Kuper’s “Impossible City: Paris In the 21st Century”
I’ve never been a fan of Paris. To read about Paris is to read about its beauty, charm and sophistication, but when I first visited in 1998, it struck me as rundown, dirty, and way too touristy.…
$100,000+ State Retirees In Illinois Speak to the Urgency of a SALT Credit
The Illinois Policy Institute’s Brad Weisentein wrote at RealClearMarkets last week that there are at least 32,000 former government workers in the state of Illinois who can claim $100,000+ income…
Soaring Wealth Inequality Is the Greatest Retirement Gift of All
Nvidia’s valuation reached the $4 trillion mark recently, and co-founder Jensen Huang’s shares are now worth something like $143 billion. Present and future retirees should rejoice the rapidly…
Without Billionaires, There Would Be No Medicare and No Debt
Do Bagladesh, Haiti and Peru have Medicare-style programs soon to cost $1 trillion annually? Hopefully the question quickly answers itself. Ideally it also answers Washington Post columnist Catherine…
Hassett Wants To Be Fed Chair. That Is What’s So Dangerous
In his classic book Lombard Street, 19th century financial writer Walter Bagehot observed that due to the unwarranted prestige attached to central banks, posts within tend “to be desired by vain men,…
Jerome Powell’s Critics and Supporters Alike Beclown Themselves
Remember “costless” credit? Neither do I, neither do you the reader, neither does Elon Musk. As Walter Isaacson’s biography of the world’s richest man makes very apparent, Musk was so desperate for…
Applying the 'Bedford Falls Rule' to the Federal Reserve
At heart, I’m a confederate. Rather than centralizing power in omnipotent institutions, I favor a confederation of smaller entities bound together by culture rather than coercive…
Book Review: Mark Shupe’s “The Moneyball Method”
Charlie Munger famously said, “It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Were he…
Excessive Federal Taxes Foist California and New York Onto All of the U.S.
Government spending amounts to the central planning of precious resources by politicians. Worse, it amounts to the warping of the people and businesses on which it’s spent precisely because no one…
There’s No ‘Retirement Crisis,’ LeBron James Shows Why
There’s no retirement crisis. Those promoting the notion that Americans don’t have enough money to retire will eventually regret their expressed pessimism. Contemplate the happy fact that LeBron…
If the U.S. Ever Needs the ‘Printing Press,’ It Will Have No Debt
Money is ruthless. The genius of compounding confirms the previous truth. This rates mention as economists Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray promote the fiction that U.S. “cannot default on debt…
Economists: The Only Barrier To Return To The Gold Standard
At least 66 countries peg their currencies to the dollar. The previous number undercounts the actual number. Figure that the growth of cryptocurrencies is largely a dollar peg story (think…
Anna Wintour Is a Brilliant Reminder That the Customer Is Always Wrong
“She was never some algorithm trying to give us more of what it thinks we want, or something driven by A.I. She was a person who judged and decided based on her own haughty sense of what was best.”…