Germany’s voters last week produced a massive demand for greater freedom, with the nationalist AfD’s share of the vote more than doubling to 20.8%. The outgoing government parties all did badly, the SPD losing 9% of the vote, the Greens 3% and the free-market FDP damaged so badly by its participation in the socialist coalition that it fell out of the Bundestag entirely. Yet the likely incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz promptly ignored the will of the voters and announced his intention to coalesce with the SPD, thus condemning Germany to another half decade of explosive immigration and climate change mania economic collapse. Learning from history is not a German skill and nor is responsiveness to voters. Continue reading →

President Trump wants lower interest rates. That is natural; he is by profession a real estate developer and low interest rates make real estate developers’ lives easier and more profitable. However, when the Fed’s inflation target is 2% and actual inflation is 3%, interest rates below 5% or so wreck the economy in the long-term. There is one way for President Trump to get his wish of interest rates around 2% without wrecking the economy: he should bash the Fed until it replaces Ben Bernanke’s idiotic 2% inflation target with a zero target that means fully stable prices over decades. Real estate developers can then have low interest rates. And the rest of us can prosper, free from the fear that the inept Fed will wipe out our savings and condemn us to an impoverished old age. Continue reading →

Fifteen hundred of the participants in the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the U.S. Capitol, almost all of them non-violent, were imprisoned through a disturbing use of modern surveillance technology. Twenty years earlier, no such universal punishment would have been possible, even had the government, then far less authoritarian, wanted to impose it. Numerous people with non-violent disagreements with the prevailing regimes in Britain and the United States have been debanked, and the Central Bank Digital Currency, enthusiastically backed by many central banks, could make it impossible for such people to live at all by de-moneying as well as de-banking them. Leftist governments have become totalitarian, because new technology has enabled them to be so. We need anti-surveillance technology and an AI Bill of Rights to reverse this Orwellian process. Continue reading →

Editor’s Note: The Bear’s Lair is happily continuing for the foreseeable future as we were never dependent on USAID funding. Our sincerest condolences to our suddenly impoverished fellow writers.

President Trump has had a very successful first few weeks in office, issuing a blizzard of Executive Orders that not only reversed much of the damage of the Biden administration, but also made some changes that had been needed for decades. Inevitably, there were also a few mis-steps. However, both Trump’s temperament and belief system could lead to damaging errors in the future, and the delicate and infuriating process of passing legislation through Congress may worsen matters further. There are thus many things that could go wrong and turn what should be a stellar Trump second term into a disappointment, or even a fiasco. Continue reading →

Just as Oscar Wilde said it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell, so one cannot help giggling that a Chinese inventor with a small team and modest resources has by his open source DeepSeek AI system outsmarted the behemoth “geniuses” that came up with the $500 billion Stargate announcement. Large bureaucracies subtract value, government subtracts even more value and ivory-tower HR wokery subtracts most of all. Small scale entrepreneurialism, fiercely independent of conventional pieties, is necessary not merely to “beat China” but to produce Industrial Revolutions. Continue reading →

Western civilization has declined a long way since its 1991 triumph with the fall of most of Communism. The hard left bears little responsibility for this decline; they have had only a modest share of power. Even the center-left does not bear all the responsibility, their tenure has included some decent governments such as that of Bill Clinton in the United States, and even bad center-left governments, such as Tony Blair’s or Joe Biden’s, offered hope of redemption through an opposition victory. Most of the damage, which has ranged from decline almost to cataclysm, came from governments of the center-right. It is the slimy center-right, opportunistic and unreliable, who must be fought for civilization to succeed. Continue reading →

This column has written several times on recommended policies for President Donald J. Trump, who will be inaugurated today. However, Trump is erratic, and the people around him are often more so. Not only do we need good policies over the next four years, but we must avoid some superficially attractive bad ones, some of them truly destructive. Today, on this day of huge rejoicing for Trump supporters, I though it worth submitting a checklist of policies that Trump might be tempted to adopt but shouldn’t. Continue reading →

The Trump Presidency will be a race between two gigantic opposing forces. On the one hand, the lunatic asset prices that now prevail, both in stocks and real estate, have a very long way to fall – in the Austrian economic sense, there is a gigantic amount of malinvestment that must be liquidated. This fall will be a huge drag on the general economy. There will also be a modest deflationary force from ending the absurdly bloated government spending and handouts of the Biden years. Protectionism will raise prices and produce positive economic effects only in the long term. Only deregulation offers big short-term gains. The key question is whether those gains will be sufficient to ensure that the electorate grants us a further term of sound economic management after 2029. Based on the Biden-era experience, the alternative would be true long-term disaster. Continue reading →

H1B visas are not slavery. However, they place their recipients in an inferior, immobile tier of the labor force that by preventing them from moving freely between employers, allows employers to exploit them at wages below the U.S. market level. In this respect, they serve the same economic function as antebellum slavery, providing a non-market rent to their users, reducing employment opportunities for the domestic “free” population and incidentally raising the capital values of the properties where they are used. Whatever one’s views on the optimum overall level of immigration, the H1B program should be abolished, as should its H2 and H2B sisters. President George H.W. Bush, who introduced them, was an economic illiterate. Continue reading →

Emerging markets were huge beneficiaries of the fall of Communism and the globalization trend that followed it in 1991-2008. Since then, the story has been much darker for poor countries in all regions of the world, with many “emerging markets” ceasing to emerge and relapsing back into long-term poverty. With President Trump’s advent, more protectionism seems likely, and emerging markets may become collateral damage in what will mostly be a battle between the rich. There are however ways forward to prosperity, which emerging market governments must follow, as they have notably not done recently. Continue reading →