To your Bucket List, be sure to add a visit to The National Museum of Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which was one of the primary slave trading centers in the United States. (Please don’t call it the “Lynching Museum” as it is more commonly known.) As a non-racist Southern boy, I was certainly aware of the barbaric treatment of blacks by white people. …
No animal ever had an opinion on evolution. No plant was ever asked to vote on evolution. But, they changed over time — they evolved anyway. Originally, there was no study or discipline known as economics. It was a period of chaos, with extreme boom/bust and with harsh economic consequences during those inevitable downturns. Then, Austrian economics became the dominant economic philosophy, which said revenues…
No serious person thinks we should have zero border security – none! The political perspective is that (1) if you worship at the Republican altar, you must believe as instructed and (2) if you worship at the Democratic altar, you also must believe as instructed. Nonpartisan thinking cannot be tolerated! The religious perspective on immigration is . . . . . . . . .…
“Past performance is no guaranty of future performance” — how many times have we heard that? Standard & Poor’s just released a report on “persistence” or how long does a high performing mutual fund continue to perform so well. They looked at all 546 equity mutual funds that were in the top quartile (top 25%) of March 1st, 2017 and compared them to the same…
I had a roommate in college that was obsessed with women’s hair. If he met a nice girl in English class, he wouldn’t say that. He would say he met Brunette in English class. He never used their names. All women had just three names – Blond, Brunette, or Redhead. He was not interested in them as individuals. It was too easy for him to…
Years ago, my parents gave me a little “lockbox” with a key about the size of a loaf of bread, for my important papers and other treasures, like my collection of baseball cards. When I returned from the Army, the key was nowhere to be found. Drilling it open cost more than the original cost. The locksmith laughed at me, because thieves bring stolen lockboxes…
Raghuram Rajan recently wrote The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave Community Behind, and I attended the lecture he gave in Las Vegas. He explained a healthy society needs three strong pillars, i.e., government, economy, and community. He argued that we have a strong government and strong economy but community no longer exists for mobile Americans, especially those who further self-segregate themselves via the…
For my inner economist, the first Friday of each month is the most interesting, as that is when the monthly “jobs report” is released by the Bureau of Labor Standards or BLS. This morning’s report (it is always released at precisely 8:30 AM.) showed a slight uptick in the unemployment rate to 3.7 percent. More importantly, the number of jobs created in June far exceeded…
When I went to Hong Kong in 1984, that city-state was still governed by the British but long-coveted by China. I found that city to be a vibrant, exciting international financial center, with heavy traffic, crowded sidewalks, and excitement in the air. One day, when I went on my morning run, the city was suddenly quiet and eerily empty. It seemed like a different city.…