Our Constitution is explicit about who makes laws. Article 1 says: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress." One might think that the clause could not be misinterpreted or ignored, but it has been. An overwhelming number of federal laws are now made by administrative agencies under the executive branch. ...

Recently, Stanford economist John Taylor and I circulated a statement calling on Congress to require the Federal Reserve to choose and adopt a rule—a clearly stated way to make its decisions—that would permit anyone to predict its future actions. Several Nobel Laureates with longstanding interest in and contributions to economic policy have ...

After the unprecedented financial events of the past decade, several Congressmen and Senators recently proposed steps to rein in the Federal Reserve's broad powers over monetary policy and commercial bank regulation. Like many of their constituents, the authors and supporters of the new rules are fed up with both Fed bailouts of large banks ...

The enthusiastic response of college students to Senator Bernie Sanders' "democratic socialism" is one of the most surprising and dispiriting events of the current presidential campaign. Apparently students have not learned that, historically, all socialist systems—democratic and authoritarian alike—failed to satisfy public demands and ...

The United States and much of the developed world have been subjected to many decades of so-called Keynesian policy. These policies have left many of the countries, ours especially, with heavy debts and continuing budget deficits. Our current slow recovery has come on the heels of the Obama administration's 2009 Keynesian "stimulus" of nearly ...

No topic recurs in political discussions more often than income distribution. It came up frequently in Alexis de Tocqueville's book on our republic's early years, Democracy in America. And it was very much in James Madison's thoughts when he wrote about "factions" in Federalist No. 10 at the time the Constitution ...

Quantitative easing (QE) is the latest central bank fad. After years of QE by the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of China and the European Central Bank have adopted their versions of the policy. The immediate effect was a depreciation of each exchange rate and an increase in some measures of monetary growth. I will discuss the ...

This week, the Magna Carta turned 800 years old. All freedom loving people should pause to recognize how much we owe to the English barons who forced King John to accept restrictions on his arbitrary authority as a sovereign. It was the start of a series of events that eventually gave rise to popular sovereignty and, in the United ...

President Obama's administration, the Federal Reserve and independent economists have to answer the central question about this recovery: why did the enormous sustained monetary stimulus have so little effect on real output, employment and prices?My answer comes in two parts. First, the Fed's policy is based on major economic errors. It has ...

The Obama Administration, the Federal Reserve, and independent economists have to answer the central question about this recovery. Why did the enormous, sustained monetary stimulus have so little effect on real output, employment, and prices?

My answer is in two parts. First, the Federal Reserve's policy is based on major economic errors. It tried to resolve real economic problems by printing money. They should know that is not possible. Second, the real problems were created by the Obama administration. Its ...

This article is an excerpt from the foreword to the new book What Adam Smith Knew (Encounter, 2014).

Each generation in a democratic society must make decisions about the proper boundary between individual choice and collective responsibility. The degree of freedom and equality in a given society will follow from the kind of economic and social model it applies: ...

I avoid reading Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times because he often attacks people viciously. That is not a useful way to discuss ideas. If the Times were a better paper, like the Times of the distant past, it would refuse to publish his screed.On Friday, several friends told me that Krugman had criticized my published comments ...

Congress's vague laws give too much discretion to regulators. It's time to take its power back. Most of us learned in grade school that the Constitution parcels legislative, executive and judicial power into separate branches of the government. This separation of powers—the system of checks and balances—is to prevent tyranny and ensure that ...

Republicans could learn a lot from the election of Narendra Modi. Narendra Modi won an overwhelming victory in the Indian election. He avoided or minimized contentious issues, like Hindu nationalism. The Republicans can learn a lot by following a similar strategy on religion. Modi’s campaign emphasized growth, a better future, and a program ...

As Milton Friedman said, 'inflation is always and everywhere' a result of excessive money growth. The U.S. Department of Agriculture forecasts that food prices will rise as much as 3.5% this year, the biggest annual increase in three years. Over the past 12 months from March, the consumer-price index increased 1.5% before seasonal ...

Income redistribution will lead to high unemployment, crushing tax rates, and the end of innovation.

In advance of the 2014 election, the Obama administration has drawn the political discussion away from its unpopular and flawed healthcare plan, usually called Obamacare, to bring public attention and support for increased income redistribution. President Obama openly ...

The chart below from my book, Why Capitalism?, shows that income inequality declined in all countries during the early- and mid-20th century. Until 1930, the federal government in the United States ran budget surpluses in two-thirds of the non-war years. It spent no more than three or four percent of GDP. There was very little welfare state ...

Allan H. Meltzer, Carnegie Mellon University and Hoover Institution

With $2.5 trillion sitting idle on bank balance sheets and more than $2 trillion additional sitting on corporate balance sheets, we should expect the Federal Reserve to ask: What can more quantitative easing—QE—do that banks and corporations cannot do without it? The right ...

Two major flaws mean that the act doesn't address problems that led to the financial crisis of 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010, mandated hundreds of major regulations to control bank risk-taking, with the aim of preventing a repeat of the taxpayer bailouts of "too big to fail" financial institutions. These regulations are on top of ...

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a front-page article reporting that the monetary-policy “doves,” who had forecast low inflation in the United States, have gotten the better of the “hawks,” who argued that the Fed’s monthly purchases of long-term securities, or so-called quantitative easing (QE), would unleash faster price growth. The ...

Almost all recoveries from recession have included rapid employment growth – until now. Though advanced-country central banks have pursued expansionary monetary policy in the wake of the global economic crisis in an effort to boost demand, job creation has lagged. As a result, workers, increasingly convinced that they will be unable to ...

On a recent visit to Greece, French President François Hollande declared that Europe’s decline was over, and urged French companies to invest in Greece. Bad advice. French production costs are high, but Greek costs are higher. Despite the considerable decline in Greek (and Italian and Spanish) real GDP since 2007, adjustment is far ...

Washington has become a city of tactics, obsessed with finger pointing, fear mongering and political spin. These maneuvers—designed for temporary political or personal gain—have produced incoherent policies and left the nation's pressing problems unaddressed.

The country needs a long-term strategy to achieve its common goals of personal freedom, noninflationary prosperity, broad-based economic opportunity and mobility, and national security. With a good strategy as a foundation, sound economic policies will follow. ...

Concern over future tax rates is one of the main reasons for reduced investor confidence


Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to bring an economic recovery. Except for a few diehards who want still more government spending, and those who make the unverifiable claim that the economy would have ...