by Richard W. Rahn | Apr 10, 2018
If your employer gives you a 2 percent wage increase, and inflation is 3 percent, has your real income increased or decreased? Assume you bought a horse barn and 40 acres of land for $200,000 in 1988 for a riding school you operated. You have just retired from your...
by Richard W. Rahn | Apr 3, 2018
In 1914, just over a century ago, the average worker had to work about three hours to buy a bushel of wheat. Today it takes five minutes for the average American worker to buy that same bushel of wheat. The real (inflation-adjusted) price of aluminum is now about...
by Richard W. Rahn | Mar 27, 2018
There is some information that the government should never publish because it is so little understood by the political class and the media. A prime example is the trade deficit number. The trade deficit is of little importance, but as we now see, a focus on that...
by Richard W. Rahn | Mar 20, 2018
Is the just-fired Andrew McCabe (former number two and, at one point, acting director of the FBI) corrupt? I would argue yes, even though we do not know the full extent of his alleged transgressions. Corruption, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is...
by Richard W. Rahn | Mar 13, 2018
“Name the person and I will find the crime” is a statement attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the Soviet secret police. There are more than 4,000 federal felonies on the books of the U.S. government, not counting all of the felonies created by regulatory...
