September’s crisp air once carried the promise of new beginnings for students. Fresh notebooks, sharpened pencils, and the excitement of reuniting with friends painted an idyllic back-to-school season. But for an increasing number of students and families, this annual rite of passage now brings a complex mix of emotions: anticipation tinged with anxiety, hope shadowed...
Auburn University’s football team lost every game in 1950. As Bill Cromartie put it in his book Braggin’ Rights, a game-by-game account of the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, “Alabama fans laughed, poked fun at and cracked jokes about Auburn.” The Auburn Tigers got their revenge in 1955 when they beat the Alabama Crimson Tide 26-0 to...
Flying cars are used as a synecdoche for all of the 20th-century sci-fi dreams that never came true. But they shouldn’t be grouped with moon cities or Dyson spheres. Private, point-to-point aircraft as cheap as a Chevy Tahoe could have been available decades ago. We should have them by now and could have them soon...
It’s hard to imagine a starker difference in political visions than between Trump-Vance and Harris-Walz. This could get ugly, so now is a good time to remind ourselves of what it is that holds us together as a nation and a people. America is a nation of immigrants who had very different ideas about all...
In January, Axios reported a developing trend in corporate America: corporations across the United States were backing away from DEI, which had become a “minefield” for companies. Following a multi-year boom in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion space following the 2020 death of George Floyd, corporations were pulling back on DEI initiatives. The risks were...
August 5th was supposedly a “Black Monday.” Stock markets around the world suffered declines that were far greater than normal. The VIX Index, which measures the volatility of financial markets, reached a level not seen since March 2020. Financial turbulence always sparks criticism of speculation. John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) thought that investors often fall prey...
For at least half a century, we have been struggling with three health policy problems that never seem to go away: cost, quality and access to care. This is the case even though public policy has been actively trying to solve all three—with increasing aggressiveness through time. Over the past 50 years, medical science has...
To a man with an antitrust hammer, everything looks like a monopoly nail. In a recent Substack, antimonopoly campaigner Matt Stoller blames the rise in rents and anemic housing supply growth since 2007 on growing concentration in the home-building industry, rather than local land-use regulations, an explanation he attributes to “noisy” YIMBYs. Is he right?...
For the last few years at FEE and National Review, I’ve spent quite a bit of energy talking about student loan forgiveness. The reason for my persistence on this topic is that the era of Covid policy has completely turned the tables on how student loans are managed. Before Covid, student loan policies were relatively...
Northwood University is kicking off the new school year with a fresh lesson in the Philosophy of Free Enterprise, a free online course for anyone interested learning about the importance of freedom and free-market economics. “Northwood University is committed to deepening the understanding of free-market principles and their vital role in civil society. The latest...
The Northwood University Freedom Seminar kicks off this fall with the theme “Decision 2024: The Economic Issues of the U.S. Election.” “The Freedom Seminar is an annual series of lectures on the free enterprise system led by distinguished experts in business, government, and academia,” explained Dr. Dale Matcheck, Chair of Northwood’s Economics program. “This year,...
Big-box stores have long been an integral part of U.S. suburban life, offering better deals and selection. But they’re less common in cities. There is still no Walmart in New York, Boston, Detroit, San Francisco or Seattle. In the 2010s, Walmart experimented with a smaller-scale model targeted at urban neighborhoods, but the results have been...
There’s strong and growing evidence that the “next” US recession has begun — or will begin soon. Of course, many economists will remain unsure about it, having not forecasted it, or because they refuse to forecast, or because they don’t believe something’s real until it passes them by (perhaps not even then). Similarly tardy will...
Perhaps the most amazing fact in all of economic history is the unprecedented rise in wealth per person that has taken place in the last two centuries, following the Industrial Revolution. But it remains a widespread belief that these fruits of capitalism have only benefited the rich at the expense of the poor. This perspective...