Policy and Government

At Fox Business, Director Kudlow says 5G will be a huge job creator.

Jon Schweppe, the director of policy and government affairs of the American Principles Project, writing at the Daily Caller explains why Conservatives Need To Support Labor As Much As They Support Capital Formation.

In the Sunday NY Times, a profound reflection by Prof. Jonathan Kirshner on the centenary of the publication of young John Maynard Keynes’s debut work, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” appears.

Keynes argued that the brutal and humiliating terms imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty at the conclusion of the “Great War,” would evoke a spectacularly horrible reaction.

Pullquote:

“One strong push would send it all tumbling down, and the 1931 global financial crisis, worsened by France’s search for political advantage as Austria and Germany’s banks teetered, did just that.

“As Keynes noted at the time, ‘The shattering German crisis of 1931, which took the world more by surprise than it should, was in essence a banking crisis, though precipitated, no doubt, by political events and political fears.'”

“Those politics meant that the crisis was not contained. It spiraled out of control, sending the world economy tumbling into the depths of the Great Depression, and contributing directly to the rise of fascism in Germany and Japan.

“Men will not always die quietly,’ Keynes warned in “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” and ‘in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself.”

David Brooks, in The New York Times, writes in possibly his best column ever:

I Was Once a Socialist. Then I Saw How It Worked. Two cheers for capitalism, now and forever:  

If you’ve been around a little while, you’ve noticed that capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history. In 1981, 42 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, it’s around 10 percent. More than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty.

You’ve noticed that places that instituted market reforms, like South Korea and Deng Xiaoping’s China, tended to get richer and prouder. Places that moved toward socialism — Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela more recently — tended to get poorer and more miserable.

You’ve noticed that the environment is much better in capitalist nations than in planned economies. The American G.D.P. has more than doubled since 1970, but energy consumption has risen only modestly. America’s per-capita carbon emissions hit a 67-year low in 2017. The greatest environmental degradations are committed by planned systems like the old Soviet Union and communist China.

The Fraser Institute is a free-market think tank that ranks nations according to things free-market think tanks like: less regulation, free trade, secure property rights. The freest economies in the world are places like Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Denmark, Mauritius, Malta and Finland. Nations in the top quartile for economic freedom have an average G.D.P. per capita of $36,770. For those in the bottom quartile, it’s $6,140. People in the free economies have a life expectancy of 79.4 years. Those in the planned economies have a life expectancy of 65.2 years.

Over the past century, planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What’s worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption. When things are scarce, you have to bribe government officials to get them. Soon, everybody is bribing. Citizens soon realize the whole system is a fraud. Socialism produces economic and political inequality as the rulers turn into gangsters. A system that begins in high idealism ends in corruption, dishonesty, oppression and distrust.

And movingly concludes:

Today, the real argument is not between capitalism and socialism. We ran that social experiment for 100 years and capitalism won. It’s between a version of democratic capitalism, found in the U.S., Canada and Denmark, and forms of authoritarian capitalism, found in China and Russia. Our job is to make it the widest and fairest version of capitalism it can possibly be.

Monetary

At Forbes.com, Nathan Lewis says “The World Gold Standard System Will Rise Again — But, Not Yet.”

Tax

On Fox Business, Andy Puzder credits the Trump tax cuts for the strong jobs report.