Jul 24, 2019
We can’t recover both economic localism and personalism to any significant degree and still maintain anything close to modern living standards.
Friday Roundup, August 9th
- Brian Domitrovic reviews The Battle of Bretton Woods in our Books section this week, and alerts us to a side of Keynes you may not have seen before. Domitrovic notes as well that the strength of the IMF only grows with each international financial crisis. The IMF never lets a crisis go to waste.
- Mark Tushnet at Balkinization tells us with regard to the Obamacare employer mandate delay that there is no dispensing power violation contra Michael McConnell’s claim. Tushnet says it’s just really complicated, the IRS issued an order for “transition relief” that most folks don’t know about. Comforting.
- Bradley Smith: The IRS and FEC collude against political participation in a democracy.
- Scrooge and Ropke collide over the limits of economics. Ropke, the Austrian economist, whose policies we’ve explored at some length at Liberty Law Talk, believed that economics emerged from a nation’s character, culture, and political philosophy. Economics was one of several goods within a free society that had to be balanced and weighed with various other commitments. This was common sense born from his experience in watching Germany go to war in World War I and his flight from Germany with the fall of the Weimar Republic. In both instances, Ropke believed, the economy had not reinforced the overall sense of independence of the people. Political economy would need better thinking to sustain it within representative democracy. Later, he returned to helped build the postwar West German miracle.
- Neuroscience studies: coming to an end?