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The government tells you that your taxes are being cut. What you may not have heard is that you may soon be drafted into an entirely separate tax system that receives very little public attention outside publications for tax accountants. The name of the second tier of tax is the AMT, the alternative minimum tax.  If you work too hard, are too

Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General . By Richard Cantillon. (Transaction Publishers, September 2001, 194 pages) $24.95. This just-released edition of Richard Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Commerce in General  is to be hailed as an important event. The book, originally published in 1755, long has been recognized as the first systematic

I was making my first airplane trip after the September 11 attack, and boy was I afraid. I was headed right up through Terrorist Alley—from Montgomery, Alabama, through Memphis, Tennessee, to St. Louis, Missouri, and back again. Old Bin Laden himself could not have designed such a daredevil adventure. The first thing you notice about the new and

As we await the release of George Lucas’s second Star Wars prequel, The Attack of the Clones, speculation builds on whether Lucas can return to the glory of the original Star Wars trilogy. While critics attacked Lucas for his leading-boy character, his young-girl queen, and his politically incorrect characters (Jar Jar Binks and the admiral with

Terrorists killed nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001, but that figure is swamped by the number of people who die each year while waiting for an organ transplant. More than three thousand died in the year 2001 waiting for a kidney transplant. Thousands also died waiting for livers, hearts, and other vital organs, and the number of

If people are pro war, they are referred to as “hawks”; if they are pro peace, they are called “doves.” Interestingly, these monikers are also used to describe viewpoints on monetary policy, especially when it comes to members of the Federal Reserve Board’s Open Market Committee. Monetary doves tend to follow an “easy money” policy, while hawks

For a few billion dollars you might expect to be able to bribe some small third world country into cleaning up its act, to defend the property rights of its citizens, to provide a stable currency, and to establish a non-interventionist economic and foreign policy. With little Switzerlands and industrial revolutions developing around the globe, the

What is money? This is a question for the ages. Humanity has risen into complex society and experienced tremendous economic development and high cultural achievement through the use of money. It has foundered or even been destroyed when money has been undermined. Ignorance of the nature of money should therefore be the central economic issue for

In the Austrian school’s theory of the business cycle, the “boom”—even though it sounds good—is the cause of the business cycle and all its attendant problems. The “bust”—even though it sounds bad—is the recovery where all the problems of the business cycle are put right. The Austrian view is shared by many economy and stock market professionals

During the 1960s, when Keynesian economics came to truly dominate the economics profession, there was a large influx of these “new economists” into government. The disastrous results included the “keynesianisation” of the economy and what is best described as an economic depression lasted throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Like the