No Matter Your Opinion on Iran, War Is Depression
War symbolizes economic decline like nothing else precisely because it’s defined by the extermination of the very people who create all the growth. The sad fact that economists near unanimously…
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Essays
Writing by John Tamny and Parkview contributors, from the latest commentary to the collected archive.
1299 essays · Newest first
Buy-and-Hold “Great Companies”: The Most Overrated Notion In Investing
My friend Michael Toth, director of research at the Civitas Institute, could perhaps be persuaded that he’s incorrect about capital gains taxes. While he’s correct that the long-term tax on capital…
Economic Growth Is the Cause of the National Debt, Not Its Solution
What’s your limit on a typical credit card in your wallet? And if your borrowing limit is higher today than it was when you turned twenty-one, ask yourself why. To say you can borrow more today…
Strait of Hormuz Could Not Care Less About Federal Reserve
On the matter of market prices, the Fed just doesn’t matter… Continue reading on Forbes.
If Immigrants Imported Failure, Then They Wouldn’t Be Immigrants
Immigrants, particularly immigrants from what President Trump has described as “Sthole Countries,” are rejecting those “Stholes.” That’s why they’re immigrants. Yet it’s long been the norm to assume…
Google/Meta Verdict: A Whole Lot of Nothing to Feed the Perpetually Alarmed
Cigarettes were referred to as “coffin nails” as early as 1906. That’s what George Will writes at the Washington Post. Will adds that the U.S. Surgeon General didn’t designate smoking as a possible…
Institutional Investors Are Asking To Do Your Worrying For You
An insufficiency of share supply was holding down Goldman Sachs shares not long after it went public in 1999. That’s why Goldman’s partners were given a chance to sell more of their shares in a…
If We Were Eager to Retire, We Would Have a Lot More Savings
Retirement is so last century. It’s the stuff of Bruce Springsteen songs about gallant Americans picking themselves up each morning to do work they can’t stand, but that they do with fantastical…
A $50 Trillion National Debt In 2030 Will Signal Opposite of Debt Problem
No individual, corporation, or government ever gets to choose how much money to borrow. Only in academic and pundit circles is such a fanciful notion accepted as realistic. A recent op-ed penned for…
Nvidia Is Credit Personified, While the Fed Is But a Distraction
The Fed can’t suffocate credit booms, nor can it instigate them. Continue reading on Forbes.
If This Is the New Addiction, Then Life Is ‘Unfair’
“Daddy, that’s not fair.” The late, great P.J. O’Rourke used to joke about one of his young daughters pulling out the “fair” card, only for the satirist to respond with how unfair it was that she was…
Ken Paxton Should Know That Government Can’t Lower Ticket Prices
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has teamed up with liberal New York AG Letitia James to reject a settlement negotiated by the Trump administration over Live Nation’s alleged antitrust violations.…
It's Time For Another Sermon From Your Miserable Wretch and Sinner
You know what’s the most important news item going on this week? The war in Iran? No. The TSA mess at airports? No. March Madness? No. The most important news of the week is old…
Book Review: John Malone’s Spectacular “Born to Be Wired”
I read Atlas Shrugged in 1994. It was also in 1994 that I first read about cable television visionary John Malone. He was in the news quite a bit thanks to the growing prominence of cable, but also…
The Bigger Meaning of a Potential Lyme Disease Vaccine
“I didn’t get better on his steady dose of antibiotics, the constant pain didn’t go away — while the advice to go off antibiotics entirely led to disasters, where I stopped the drugs and…
Defense Spending, and the 5% of GDP Fallacy
The idea that defense spending should somehow be a consistent percentage of GDP is as fallacious as it is wasteful. Consider a recent Washington Post editorial. It oddly asserted that “Throughout the…
The Real Debt Crisis Is That There Will Be No Debt Crisis
Budgetary experts have been promising us a future “crisis” related to the national debt for years, and in some instances, decades. If you’re reading this, you likely know some of their names:…
If Jerome Powell Is Wrong, Markets Will Correct His Mistakes
Any margin artificially created by the Fed looms as a huge opportunity for market actors with real access to credit. Continue reading on Forbes.
Wasn’t It Always the Plan for the Washington Post to Lose Money?
It’s Jeff Bezos’s money. And it wastes words to say that he has a right to not lose tens of millions annually on the Washington Post. At the same time, it seemed like Bezos knew he would lose…
Disagree With Me, But Don't Root Against the U.S. Troops
“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Words spoken by Robert E. Lee as he watched James Longstreet’s First Corps (Army of Northern…
Thomas Massie Is Right About Government Spending For the Wrong Reasons
Government spending is by far the biggest, most freedom and economy-sapping tax of all. While Larry Ellison, Elon Musk and Reed Hastings will work at all sorts of tax rates, they can’t innovate…
Why Is the Wall Street Journal Putting David Ricardo In Time Out?
The great Andy Kessler says it’s “crazy” that California imports oil extracted in Iraq. Or maybe not. As Kessler knows better than anyone reading this, rare does a week go by that some…
The Brilliant Existence of Oil and AI Is All That Matters
No individual or nation need ever worry about the supply of oil or Artificial Intelligence (AI). The latter holds true whether both are sourced across the street or on the other side of the world. …
“Trump Accounts”: An LBJ-Like Poverty Non Sequitur
Money doesn’t solve poverty. Say repeatedly what politicians don’t grasp. Republican politicians used to understand that money is unequal to poverty, but in modern times they’ve become as wedded to…