Based Economics

 We all remember the very bizarre moment back in 2019 where Trump was speaking at that year’s CPAC and he was attempting to explain the Great Tariff Debate of 1888 and how his tariffs could, like those of the Republican Party’s back then, bring in so much revenue that the government would not know what to do with it. Needless to say, the much smaller federal budget as a percentage of America’s GDP, the much smaller debt to GDP ratio of America in 1888, nor even the fact that there was no income tax back then, did not enter the equation during this APUSH moment on the 45th’s part. That being said, 1888 is not a completely irrelevant year for Trump, as it was basically Grover Cleveland’s equivalent to the 2020 election. He lost to Benjamin Harrison that year, despite ironically losing the popular vote as a Democrat, but came back four years in 1892. He won that election and became the first President to serve two non-consecutive terms. He was thus the 22nd and 24th President in the s...

            One of the big international news stories of August 2023 was that a country usually seen as not particularly noteworthy on the global stage, Argentina, might be the first in the world to have a self-described libertarian President in the form of Javier Milei. He received a slight plurality of over 30% of the vote in a presidential primary that plays a key indicator of who is likely to win the election in October. Beyond just simple surprise at the fact that a libertarian who was not Ron Paul was getting attention, as well as the natural journalistic temptation to make a dubious comparison between Milei and Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, many were even more shocked by the results because of the long history of heavy government intervention in the Argentine economy and the rapid change in policy that the winning candidate was proposing, particularly in regards to trade. Really since the start of the Great Depression, but particularly since the...

 https://www-cnnbrasil-com-br.translate.goog/politica/na-abertura-do-foro-de-sao-paulo-lula-diz-que-ser-chamado-de-comunista-e-motivo-de-orgulho/?_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc On June 29, CNN Brasil released a video of a recent public appearance by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva during the opening of the 26 th Meeting of the Forum of São   Paulo, wherein he most memorably stated that he would be “proud” to be called a “communist” and that he would be offended to be called a “Nazi, neo-fascist, or terrorist”. Putting aside the obvious fact that being accused of any of those four terms would be cause for serious offense and no pride should be held for any in the slightest, due to the drastic harm to humanity they all have done to humanity, it is the “neo-fascist” slur that deserves the most attention in the case of Brazil. Sadly, the world’s seventh largest economy does indeed have a lot of resemblance to the fascist economies of o...

 Confirming the 2017 interpretations of economists Edward Glaeser, Rafael Di Tella, and Lucas LLac, none of whom are radical free market ideologues, and the latter two of whom are Argentines themselves, in their paper, Introduction to Argentine exceptionalism , there is a sort of historical revisionism among some students of Argentinian economic history regarding how prosperous the country really was and seemingly how much potential it really had. The go-to theory for subscribers of this approach is the idea that, despite being in the top 10 countries in the world as concerned GDP per capita rankings by 1913, Argentina was never actually that rich and it was because of the legacy of Spanish colonial land policy that this was still the case and the growth that did occur was because of an export boom. This is more or less the theory posited by left-wing YouTuber BadEmpanada in his 2021 YouTube video “Argentina Was Never ‘Rich’: The Myth of Economic Decline”. The basic premise of this...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZMxM7DdQUM In a recent video by the generally decent, economically liberal YouTube channel, Stephen Michael Davis, Davis reports that one of his previous videos was flagged for a copyright claim because it quoted from Bernie Sanders’ 2023 book It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. Davis unfortunately defended this decision by YouTube on the grounds that if he just posted the whole book or even portions of it, that that would ostensibly be “theft and a violation of property rights” and Penguin Random House would be perfectly within their rights to have the video taken down. The problem with this is that property rights and theft imply that scarcity of a given object exists and that scarcity has to be allocated in a just way. With words on paper, there is no scarcity and therefore no property rights and subsequently, there was no theft. Whether in the form of copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, or anything else, intellectual property i...

We often hear about how the Articles of Confederation were too weak for a sufficient national government for the newly created United States of America for a multitude of reasons, from being unable to collect taxes as needed to being unable to stop the states from adopting their own trade policies, and perhaps most famously, to prevent events like Shays’ Rebellion that Massachusetts managed to put down on its own from re-occurring. It is because of this, we are taught in American history, that the 1787 Constitutional Convention convened and the U.S. Constitution was adopted. What often goes unexplained in this simplistic narrative is if the Congress of the Confederation were so weak, how did they manage to pass sweeping legislation that effectively nationalized the large swath of land that Virginia had claimed after the British cession of said territory with the 1783 Treaty of Paris, as with the Land Ordinance of 1784, or create an entirely new government, as with the Northwest Ordinan...