Milton Friedman

Monday

Travis Aaroe

Who did Bill Ackman think he was electing?

From our US edition

To take on America’s entire governing class and win, Donald Trump proved that he had an inhuman level of willfulness and sangfroid. Those are qualities that cut both ways, however, as the investor Bill Ackman is now discovering.  Wall Street has lost more than $5 trillion in value since the announcement of the new tariff regime last week, but Mr. Trump, speaking on Sunday on Air Force One, appeared deaf to all appeals. How big of a sell-off would the President be willing to endure, a member of the press pool asked. “I think your question is so stupid,” he replied. Many of Trump’s newfound admirers are panicking. Among them is Bill Ackman, manager of the hedge fund Pershing Square and a prominent Democrat defector in last year’s election.

Tuesday

Nick Macpherson

The costly legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s monetarism

Post-war British economic history is littered with failed policy panaceas. Keynesian demand management would solve the unemployment problem; the Exchange Rate Mechanism would provide an anchor for stability and end sterling’s perennial weakness; the Barber and Kwarteng budgets – separated by 50 years – would throw off the shackles of Treasury orthodoxy and put the country on a path to higher growth. On the face of it, monetarism – the theory that if you control the money supply, you control inflation – fits squarely into this paradigm. As soon as government sought to control the money supply, the historic relationship between money and inflation broke down.

Thursday

Lewis M. Andrews

The secret history of the school choice left

From our US edition

Because teachers’ unions play such an important role in today’s Democratic Party, it is widely assumed that school choice — the policy of letting families use taxpayer dollars to educate their children as they wish — is a Republican or conservative program. And while it's true that teachers’ unions will instantly turn on any Democrat who favors public funding of non-public schools, there is in fact a long history of prominent left-wing thinkers and activists supporting school choice. As far back as 1956, British Labour Party leader Anthony Crosland wrote a controversial book called The Future of Socialism, in which he observed that the bureaucratic management of England’s newly expanded welfare programs was turning out to be almost as bad as having no programs at all.

Wednesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Meet Maria Corina Machado: could she become Venezuela’s Margaret Thatcher?

From our US edition

In 2006, there was Manuel Rosales. In 2012, there was Henrique Capriles. In 2018, there was Juan Guaidó. All managed to capture the hopes of Venezuela’s opposition, but as hopes slipped away, so did their popularity. Now, there is a new opposition leader in town: Maria Corina Machado, an ideologically driven fighter and a woman who was not afraid to call former president Hugo Chávez a “thief” to his face. As Venezuelans often imprudently say, she “tiene las bolas bien puestas,” meaning that, although female, she “has her testicles in the right place.” That's something that millions of Venezuelans can’t say about the charming yet gutless men who have monopolized the country’s hopes in the past. In July, Dr.

maria corina machado

Monday

Teresa Mull

Inflation destroys the small town soul of America

From our US edition

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over. “Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.” Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream.

Saturday

Ashley Nunes

The winners and losers of a minimum wage hike

From our US edition

Millions of Americans could get a pay hike if a Democrat wins the White House. Most of President Trump’s 20-plus challengers have vowed to raise the minimum wage to $15, up from $7.25 today. Front-runner Joe Biden said the move was long overdue. Elizabeth Warren opined that doing nothing threatens the survival of the American family. And Bernie Sanders – who has long championed raising national pay standards – said it’s time companies pay their workers, 'a living wage.' The idea isn’t new. Wage hikes have already been approved by lawmakers in several blue states including California, Illinois and Massachusetts (Massachusetts’s minimum wage is set to always be higher than the federal average).

minimum wage