The great Ron Paul is associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and is well known for wishing to abolish one of the least effective government entities: the Federal Reserve. As the Department of Education and other hallowed government entities become one with Nineveh and Tyre, Paul’s question should be asked, whose answer bears on the whole question of U.S. and global monetary policy: Should we End the Fed? After the last two decades, I believe the Fed’s overall track record is now bad enough that the answer to Paul’s question is “Yes”. This column will suggest why and how. Continue reading →

Before President Donald Trump’s substantial re-election, Elon Musk had promised to head a “Department Of Government Efficiency” that might cut $2 trillion from the Federal budget, and even floated the idea of bringing in the great Dr. Ron Paul, who at 89 is an encouragement to us all. That seems an eminently attractive goal, entirely in line with traditional Republican policy, although traditional Republicans (at least since President Ford) always turned out weak and backsliding when it came to implementing spending cuts. In the hope that Musk means it (his success in cutting waste at X/Twitter is at least encouraging) I thought it worth presenting some ideas of activities that could be axed. I focus here on cash savings rather than quality improvements; even in agencies one might keep (such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency from recent news) there are clearly many “bad apples” and an appalling management ethic; these must also be remedied. Continue reading →

The Conservative Party, of which Kemi Badenoch has just been elected leader, has been betraying its supporters since 1834. The new Reform party has not yet begun betraying its supporters, but undoubtedly will if it selects parliamentary candidates centrally. Those Brits wishing to achieve the distant miracle of having their country competently governed therefore have a choice to make. Either they must try to reform the Conservatives to become more Tory, in the tradition of the fine 1783-1830 governments, or they must Toryise the Reform party. Both appear difficult, but the difficulties are different, and deciding which Matterhorn to attempt will set the history of the next decade. Continue reading →

No less an authority than Mohamed El-Erian, former CEO of the $2 trillion bond giant PIMCO, has now said in the Financial Times that we should pay attention to the rise in the gold price above $2,700, up around 40% over the past year. El-Erian is a former advisor to President Obama and perennial bond bull, so his change of view is akin to a stopped clock suddenly registering a new time. We should pay attention when this happens. In a world of fiat currencies and unreliable governments, gold or its equivalent is the only sound monetary basis. Let us hope that after almost a century of monetary folly, world leaders are re-learning this lesson. Continue reading →

President Trump has proposed a general tariff for the United States if he is re-elected. This is traditional Republican policy; the GOP was highly protectionist from 1860 until 1932, with the 1862 Morrill Tariff being the first major assault on Britain’s attempt to move to a free-trade world. However looking back, the Republican tariff policy of the 19th Century, when combined with free immigration, produced prosperity mainly for “robber barons” who became unprecedentedly wealthy, and not for ordinary people. It is a poisonous mixture, which Trump should avoid. Continue reading →

The recent assaults on property rights by abusive governments and law-enforcement agencies, the “lawfare” against President Trump and his associates, in which the same misdeed is treated quite differently depending on the perpetrator, and the shenanigans and double standards surrounding U.S. elections all show that U.S. constitutional protections are increasingly being eroded. To defend them, more than just legislation is needed, because legislation can be reversed with every short-term swing of the electoral pendulum. We need a 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I would like to explore herein what such an Amendment should contain. Continue reading →

Jamie McGregor of McGregor Metal in Springfield OH. openly welcomed the opportunity to employ Haitian refugee immigrants for wages far below what he would pay domestic labor. In that, he is typical of the cheap labor lobby ever since Sir Robert Peel (1750-1830), father and son. The low wage lobby is destroying our societies and their economies; it must at all costs be defeated. Continue reading →

In my youth, the British automobile company British Leyland was an iconic example of what was wrong with Britain before the advent of Margaret Thatcher. It had merged most of the British automobile industry with government encouragement, only to achieve zero economies of scale, ever-worsening product quality, ever-increasing losses that caused it to enter public ownership in 1975 and about three new wildcat strikes a week. Post-Thatcher, it appeared that such paragons of management ineptitude had disappeared. However, in the United States today, several companies have entered at least the early stages of British Leylandization; the future of the U.S. economy and the prosperity of its people depends on this being reversed. Continue reading →

Keir Starmer has announced that he will introduce legislation to remove the last remaining voting rights of the 92 hereditary peers remaining in the House of Lords after Tony Blair’s 1998 massacre. In terms of legislative quality, this is a travesty. The innumerable “life peers” pushed into the Lords by Blair and his successors are prey to every fashionable delusion and serve no useful purpose. Conversely, hereditary peers, all 805 of whom should be included in a Second Chamber shorn of its corrupt Life Peers element, are an essential part of democratic governance, that could usefully be copied by the United States. Continue reading →