There was a time, way back in the eighteenth century, and as recently as the nineteenth century in the United States, that a person who owned land possessed legal title (in so-called “fee simple,” the normal way people own land unless they lease it) to it from the “center of the earth to the zenith […]

It is simply too easy with a name like “Trump” when writing titles or headlines.  I am sure the late night talk show hosts are having a field day.  So, forgive my failure to resist the easy pun in titling this post.  The reality is, there is nothing very funny in the topic which I […]

Donald Trump (R-NY) is working his way toward the Republican presidential nomination. His opponents may still derail him, of course, but his sustained performance–he has been the front-runner since August–suggests there is a sizable portion of the Republican electorate that sees Trump as not only tolerable, but preferable. Exit polls reveal several possible explanations. Voters […]

So warns Mr. Obama in this year’s Economic Report of the President.  And the fear is that this accelerating automation will replace low-skilled jobs. It’s intuitive that automation will take low-wage jobs.But the White House, in its annual economic report of the president, has broken down just how much that is so. There’s an 83% chance that […]

I think I quoted this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, last year, but have enlarged the context.  Is this a description of the centralized command and control bureaucratic government that we [sic] have been creating over the past 100 years or so?  And is Tocqueville on to something?  Feel free to comment. […]

Colossians 1:15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Hebrews 1:3a He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. In a post on Monday February 15 I discussed the role of the Bible when analyzing […]

When all the institutions of public policy remain committed to Keynesian economic fallacy, what hope have we that we will have real recovery?  I’ve written before about my despair that public discussion of inflation/deflation is almost completely backwards, with inflation now a good thing and deflation something that will be very harmful.  The reality is […]

Donald Trump decisively won (33%) the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on Saturday, seizing the standard as the G.O.P.’s front-runner. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, as I write, are battling for second and third (with 22% each), while Jeb Bush (8%), John Kasich (8%) and Ben Carson (7%) rounded out the field. Given the results, […]

I have continued to read the comments on Jeff Haymond’s blog about progressive taxation, and my own complementary blog, and have decided I should make another foray into this subject to address in more depth the ethical theory of policies such as taxes (but, indirectly, others as well).  The question to begin is:  Is progressive […]

I have been reading with great interest not only my colleague Jeff Haymond’s posts over the past couple of weeks on progressive income taxation (1/29), income inequality (2/3), and a potential proportional income tax (2/9), but also the spirited discussion over the content of the posts. I have been thinking about biblical integration in economics […]