Tag: economy

Consumer Protection Laws: Unconstitutional Controls That Hurt the Very People They Claim to Help

From rent caps to “price-gouging” laws, a new wave of so-called consumer-protection laws is sweeping state capitols. These measures are marketed as compassion in a crisis — or “fairness” in housing — but their substance is the same: command-and-control price fixing that violates the Constitution, tramples private-property rights, and sabotages the free market’s ability to allocate goods and services when people need them most.

Three recent bills illustrate the trend. Alabama’s House Bill 528 (HB528) and Virginia’s House Bill 1301 (HB1301) expand anti-gouging controls to more transactions and longer periods after emergencies. New Jersey’s Assembly Bill 3361 (A3361) imposes rent control on manufactured-home sites. Nebraska’s Legislative Bill 266 (LB266), however, is a rare bright spot, preempting local rent control and affirming property rights. Together, these bills spotlight the central question: Will states defend a constitutional, republican system rooted in liberty and voluntary exchange, or drift toward administrative despotism under the banner of “consumer protection”?

Protecting Property and Contract Rights

America’s Founders understood what modern lawmakers too often forget: Price controls are a form of compelled exchange that violates liberty. The U.S. Constitution safeguards that liberty in multiple places:

  • Fifth Amendment: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Price ceilings that force owners to sell below market value are regulatory takings in substance, if not in name.
  • Article I, Section 10: “No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.” When a legislature dictates the permissible price, term, or escalation of a private lease or service, it impairs the parties’ agreed-upon obligations.
  • Ninth and 10th Amendments: The people retain unenumerated rights, and powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. These clauses limit government; they do not license it to control every transaction.
  • 14th Amendment (due process and equal protection): Arbitrary economic edicts that single out owners for special burdens invite due-process and equal-protection concerns.

Consumer-protection statutes also collide with first principles. The Declaration of Independence identifies unalienable rights — life, liberty, and property — and charges government to secure them. Free exchange is a peaceful exercise of those rights, and upholds one’s pursuit of happiness. Substituting bureaucratic fiat for voluntary exchange undermines the moral basis of self-government.

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Food Lines Are Already Growing Longer All Over America

It is already happening.  There has been a lot of talk that there will be a surge in demand at America’s overwhelmed food banks once funding for the food stamp program ends in early November, but the truth is that we are already witnessing a surge in demand.  So what is going to happen if the current government shutdown persists for an extended period of time?  On one recent evening, the line at a food bank in downtown Kansas City “snaked through the parking lot, down a driveway and into the street”…

On a recent Thursday evening, the line of cars waiting to pick up food at Redemptorist Social Services Center in midtown snaked through the parking lot, down a driveway and into the street.

Demand for free food is soaring across Kansas City, as job cuts increase, food inflation remains persistently high and federal food assistance is slashed by the Trump administration.

Julie McCaw, executive director at Redemptorist, called the situation “alarming.” Families with working parents, senior citizens and people who simply cannot find work increasingly are turning to food pantries like hers for help.

Sadly, this is just the beginning.

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The Hidden Architecture Of Debt: How Private Banks Captured The Global Economy

Introduction: Why Money Power Matters

Most people graduate school knowing trigonometry but not how money is created. We learn to vote for parties but rarely examine who shapes the economic terrain those parties must walk on. Yet for more than a century, the power to create money as interest-bearing debt has quietly concentrated economic and political control in private hands. The result is a world where nations strain under compounding obligations, public debate revolves around the margins of policy, and whole societies become dependent on a credit system they neither designed nor fully understand.

This essay distills key arguments and quotations (historical and contemporary) about how modern banking actually works, why debt has become the engine of governance, and what that means for sovereignty, prosperity, and even our moral compass. The aim is not to recycle slogans but to clarify mechanisms: how money enters circulation, who benefits first, who bears the risks, and why the system almost always demands more growth, more extraction, and more debt.

1) The Core Mechanism: Money as Debt, Not as Value

A century of central banking and commercial credit has normalized a simple but profound fact: most new money is created when banks make loans. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson put it in 1959, when a bank issues a loan, it credits a deposit that did not exist the moment before; the new deposit is “new money.” In practice, this means the money supply expands primarily through private lending, not public issuance.

That mechanism is turbocharged by fractional-reserve banking and today by capital-based banking rules: banks do not lend out pre-existing savings one-for-one; they expand deposits by creating credit. Interest is attached to that credit, meaning the system requires continual new borrowing to service past borrowing. If credit creation slows materially, defaults rise, asset prices wobble, and political pressure mounts to “stimulate” again. In short, we live inside a treadmill that is far more credit-driven than most civics textbooks admit.

Critics from Henry Ford to John Scales Avery have argued that this arrangement is structurally unjust because it privatizes the seigniorage (the profit of creating money) and socializes the fallout (inflation, asset bubbles, austerity). Whether or not one accepts every claim these critics make, the underlying math is hard to ignore: when money arrives as interest-bearing debt, the system has a built-in bias toward ever-expanding leverage.

2) From Private Credit to Public Power: How We Got Here

Modern banking’s political leverage grew alongside institutions like the Bank of England and, later, the U.S. Federal Reserve (established in 1913). Whatever the intention of their founders, central banks now sit at the junction of state and finance: they are publicly mandated yet operationally insulated (and privately owned), coordinating liquidity to stabilize the system while commercial banks originate most money-like claims.

This hybrid design has real consequences. It allows a small circle of decision-makers to set the price of money (interest rates), backstop private balance sheets in crises, and influence fiscal choices by making some policies financially easy and others expensive. Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan once emphasized the institution’s independence; the flip side of that independence is low democratic visibility over choices that shape every mortgage, job market, and public budget.

Beyond national central banks lies the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — often called the “central bank of central banks.” Through standards (Basel accords) and coordination, it helps align global banking rules. Critics argue this produces a technocratic layer of control over national economies with little public oversight. Whether one views that as prudent stewardship or as democratic deficit, it underscores a theme: the architecture of money governance is largely opaque to the public it governs.

3) Debt as an Organizing Principle: Nations on the Hook

If money is introduced mainly through borrowing, then borrowers become the gearwheels of the system. This is true of households, firms, and crucially governments. National debts have exploded over decades. Interest on those debts is neither a schoolbook abstraction nor a harmless line item: it diverts tax revenue from public goods to creditor claims year after year.

Concrete examples illustrate the point. Countries such as Ireland have paid billions annually in debt interest, amounts that can reach a significant share of national profits in strong years. Canada has spent tens of billions per year on interest at various points. The United States services hundreds of billions annually. The deeper the debt stock and the higher the rates, the more fiscal space narrows — and the easier it is for outside creditors and institutions to demand policy concessions as the price of liquidity.

International lending reinforces the pattern. When a country is pulled into a crisis, the usual medicine involves austerity and privatization in exchange for financing — effectively transferring public assets and future cash flows into private hands. Even when such programs stabilize a currency, they often leave a legacy of reduced sovereignty and social strain. Either way, the organizing principle remains: service the debt first.

4) Why Perpetual Growth Feels Non-Negotiable

Once you grasp that interest-bearing credit is the dominant source of new money, the politics of “growth at any cost” make more sense. If economies must expand to service past obligations, then policymakers are incentivized to chase GDP even when the ecological or social returns are negative. This is why governments of every stripe tend to converge on similar policies when growth stalls: tax incentives to borrow and invest, financial repression to keep rates low, deficit spending to plug holes, and pressure on central banks to ease again.

Critics like Roy Madron, John Jopling, and John Scales Avery have argued that this growth-dependency crowds out other goals: equitable distribution, environmental stewardship, and cultural stability. It also explains why mainstream debates often avoid the root structure and instead focus on the speed of the treadmill. We argue about 2% vs. 3% inflation rather than who issues money, who captures seigniorage, and who eats the losses when cycles turn.

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We Have Not Properly Reckoned with the Economic Insanity of 2020

It’s been nearly six years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread into the United States, ushering in the pandemic that would come to define the first quarter of this decade.

Considering how recently it occurred and how much it affected every facet of American life, it is somewhat remarkable how absent the pandemic and the government’s response are from today’s news cycle, the daily political fights online and in the media, or in popular culture and fiction.

Even when the pandemic is brought up and re-examined, the focus is usually on the necessity and nature of the government measures put in place to control the spread of the virus or the public’s level of compliance.

That is, to be sure, a worthwhile debate. But the government’s economic response is often left out, which can give the impression that—as controversial as the lockdowns or vaccine mandates might have been—the quick and extensive mobilization of the government’s considerable fiscal and monetary powers was one uncontroversial success story of the covid years.

It wasn’t, and the lack of controversy surrounding it is disturbing.

For most of American history, there had been a fairly consistent understanding that it’s wrong for the government to step in and help a company when it was suffering economic losses or facing bankruptcy.

Beyond that being an avenue for cronyism and corruption, economic theory has also made it very clear for hundreds of years that economic losses are a necessary element for economic growth.

The economy is, after all, a process. And specifically, it’s a process for producing goods and services that people want to consume. In a market unhampered by government, every part of every line of production is geared towards eventually making something that people value enough to pay for. That’s the whole point.

For an economy to grow and everyone to become wealthier, some people need to take on the role of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs reallocate resources to new lines of production or refine existing lines to account for factors that are constantly changing—things like technology, capital availability, and consumer preferences.

In our role as consumers in a truly free market, we can opt out of any exchange for any reason. So entrepreneurs can only make profits if they offer a good or service consumers’ value enough to pay more for than the business had to pay to produce it. When they don’t, they are stuck with the losses. Economic losses are a very motivating signal that the resources used in a line of production would be better used elsewhere. They are crucial for reorganizing the economy to better meet the needs and wants of the end consumer—which, remember, is the entire purpose of the economy in the first place.

To be clear, the federal government has been intervening in the economy since it was founded. And especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, government officials have been using state power to warp the economy in ways that benefit themselves and their well-connected friends in various industries.

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Western Union Reports Fewer U.S. Dollars Being Sent Home by Migrants

In another example of the Trump effect, money transfer giant Western Union is reporting that its revenue from cash transfers to locations outside the U.S. has seen a 12 percent decline this year.

Migrants living in the U.S. both legally and illegally have traditionally been the greatest source of U.S. dollars flowing out of America and into foreign nations, even dwarfing the amount of foreign aid lavished on the world by the U.S. government. But with Donald Trump’s focus on immigration, Western Union is seeing far fewer customers needing their services.

Last week, Western Union CEO Devin McGranahan told investors that the company had seen a huge decline in cash transfers to Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, and Ecuador, according to CPR News.

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‘Something has to give’ watchdog warns as national debt climbs rapidly toward $39 trillion

Awatchdog group is warning that “something has to give” as the U.S. national debt climbs rapidly toward $39 trillion.

The national debt grew faster than at any time other than the COVID-19 pandemic to $38 trillion this week, in part, due to the lifting of the debt ceiling under the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Before the bill was signed in July 2025, the debt ceiling was $36.2 trillion.

In a detailed press release, The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFP) predicted that the U.S. would “likely hit the next milestone in just a matter of months.” The CRFB estimated that the deficit would likely reach $2 trillion for fiscal year 2026. 

The deficit was $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 2025, which just concluded on September 30.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the deficit was under $1 trillion.

In fiscal year 2019, the deficit was $984 billion and the national debt was $22.7 trillion, according to Treasury Department data. 

The road ahead: $1 trillion for interest payments will be needed

“We’re on course to spend $1 trillion just on interest payments on the national debt this year, exceeding our spending on our national defense,” Maya MacGuineas, president of the CRFB said in the statement. 

“Something has to give – and eventually it will, whether we are prepared for it or not,” she added.

According to the Joint Economic Committee, the total U.S. national debt has increased by $69,713.82 per second over the past year.

“The reality is that we’re becoming distressingly numb to our own dysfunction. We fail to pass budgets, we blow past deadlines, we ignore fiscal safeguards, and we haggle over fractions of a budget while leaving the largest drivers untouched,” MacGuiness said.

“Social Security and Medicare, for example, are just seven years from having their trust funds depleted – and you don’t hear anything from our political leaders on how to avoid such a disaster,” she added.

The CRFB said current law “calls for deep across-the-board cuts in benefits” when the trust funds are depleted. 

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German Economy Unravelling: Hospitality Crisis, Jobs Vanishing & Industrial Decline

While the federal government is desperately waiting for the start of the multi-billion euro debt package, the real economy is burrowing ever deeper into the ground. The numbers from the hospitality sector speak a clear language: things continue to go downhill.

On Monday, Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited the six-day congress of the trade union IG BCE (Industrial Union for Mining, Chemicals, Energy). There he emphasised the high importance of social partnership between workers, employers and politics and assured the union that he was well aware of the increasingly difficult situation of many people in the country.

In these days Merz would have done better to visit the German hospitality industry. There, without the glamorous distraction of a functionary congress, he could have seen first-hand the reality of the German economy: The interest in uplifting speeches by the Chancellor among restaurateurs, hoteliers and caterers is likely vanishingly small — business is simply too bad.

Cold shower in the holiday season

The Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) delivered catastrophic figures for August for the entire German hospitality industry, i.e., both gastronomy and hotels: Even in the most important vacation month, restaurants, hotels, caterers and snack bars lost a real turnover volume of 3.5 per cent compared with the previous year. Nominally there was still a minus of 0.6 per cent in the overall balance. Also compared with the previous month, July, the hospitality sector lost real turnover of 1.4 per cent.

Such a poor development, of all times in the high-volume holiday months, is a fatal proof that nothing seems to be running smoothly anymore in the German economy — exactly now you would have had to cash in. Here, the until now weak year with a minus of about 4 per cent at least should have offered a small glimmer of hope. Pfft. The summer months turned into a disaster. 

Consumers are suffering under the political framework conditions, the high energy prices, inflation and the labour market, which has long since entered rough seas.

Those who take a look into the engine room of the German economy will quickly find the causes for this crisis. It is the expression of an economic disaster that remains insufficiently described in media and politics. The industrial core of the German economy could not permanently withstand the shockwaves of the Brussels eco-regulators and the gnawing attacks of interest-driven NGOs such as the Deutsche Umwelthilfe.

General decline 

And so it came to pass, as it had to. Starting from its best year 2018, German industry across sectors lost a production volume of almost 25 per cent — an indescribable exodus of firms abroad, countless insolvencies: an economic knockout, delivered by a self-inflicted uppercut. 

Large parts of the economy hang on this industrial foundation as if on an umbilical cord — once it is severed, the service providers, the suppliers, the hospitality industry, tourism plunge too. Roughly 1.3 million jobs in the private sector have disappeared to date.

The German economy is in a veritable clearance sale — in a spiral of deindustrialisation. From July 2024 to today, more than 270,000 jobs have been lost in the manufacturing industry, the metal, electrical and steel industries. At the same time, the public administration expanded by almost 50,000 new jobs this year.

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Carney urges Canadians to ‘make sacrifices’ ahead of record deficit

Prime Minister Mark Carney forewarned future challenges to Canada’s economy, which he suggested was performing “reasonably well” in a pre-budget address to the nation.

Carney warned on October 22 at the University of Ottawa that economic transformation would require “some sacrifices” and time, a message tied to the November 4 budget.

“Our government will work relentlessly to cut waste and drive efficiencies,” he claimed, “and when we have to make difficult choices.”

“We will be thoughtful, we will be transparent, we’ll be fair, we will work collaboratively with our colleagues across the aisle to build, protect, and empower Canadians.”

The upcoming budget is projected to include a “substantial” deficit, according to Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon. While specific program cuts haven’t been announced, the Liberal government states key support programs like national dental and childcare will continue.

Carney’s government plans to balance the “operating deficit” in three years by reducing “wasteful government spending,” such as initiatives to reduce red tape. He noted that federal spending has grown over 7% year-over-year for the past decade, exceeding economic growth, a trend that must change.

The Liberal government plans to separate daily spending from capital investment in future budgets. While they claim this provides a clearer picture and prioritizes major projects, the Conservatives accuse them of attempting to “bury the deficit.”

On May 18, the former central banker delayed the spring budget, promising a “comprehensive, effective, ambitious, prudent budget”, to address the impact of U.S. tariffs.

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Big Government Locks Young People Out of the American Dream

Last Thursday’s debate among the New York City mayoral candidates highlighted an issue that is among young Americans’ top concerns today: affordability. Democrat candidate Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunner, stated that affordability was the city’s most important problem. Independent candidate Andrew Cuomo and Republican hopeful Curtis Sliwa concurred, arguing the socialist Mamdani’s proposals are impractically expensive.

Mamdani’s emphasis on the affordability issue has benefited him politically, as young people in the city struggle to find decent, affordable housing and are increasingly willing to consider his agenda of greater government intervention and control.

That would be an awful mistake because socialism, regulation, and other government policies are what have caused the affordability crisis that has arisen across the United States. The current U.S. economy is anything but free, and the problems of today’s American economic system are caused almost exclusively by government. Young Americans’ struggles in achieving home ownership reflect the decline of economic freedom in the United States.

Government regulations directly increase the cost of housing, accounting for $93,870 of the $394,300 average price of a new home in the United States in 2021, about a quarter of the home’s cost, notes Paul Emrath, Ph.D., in a study for the National Association of Home Builders.

University of Central Arkansas professor Jeremy Horpedahl observes that “in 2023 it took 31 percent more hours of work to buy a square foot of the median home, compared with 1971.” That has its greatest effect on young households: with housing prices increasing rapidly, those who already have mortgages or fully own their houses gain an ever-greater economic advantage over the young. U.S. home sales in 2024 and 2025 are at their worst in 30 years, Fortune reports.

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The GOP’s ‘Capitalism’ is Central Planning with MAGA Branding

When House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) lashed out at last weekend’s “No Kings” rallies soon to arrive on Washington’s National Mall, he reached for an old conservative refrain: “They hate capitalism. They hate our free enterprise system.”

I am sure he’s correct about some of the protesters. But the message rings hollow coming from a party leader that stands by as President Donald Trump does precisely what Johnson rightly decries: substituting political control for market choice and ruling by executive order.

Indeed, what began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control. Take a look.

Recently, the Trump administration quietly converted CHIPS Act subsidies into an $8.9 billion equity purchase in Intel, making Washington a 10 percent owner of one of America’s largest technology companies. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists “this is not socialism.” That’s semantics.

Socialism is government control of the means of production. When the government becomes your largest shareholder, that’s a strong first step.

The Intel case offends two basic economic truths. First, no group of officials can ever know enough to guide a complex industry better than millions of private investors, engineers, and consumers spending their own money. Second, the power to “partner” with business is the power to control it.

The more political capital the government invests, the more it demands in return. It’s only a matter of time until politically favored locations, suppliers, or hiring quotas shape Intel’s decisions. That isn’t capitalism.

The administration has taken shares in companies before, and it likely will again. In July, the Pentagon became the largest shareholder in MP Materials, considered the only fully operating rare-earth mine of scale in the U.S. The deal guarantees a 10-year price floor for MP output at nearly double the current market rate. MP competitors were rightly shocked.

Yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently told CNBC that Washington will continue to “set price floors” and “forward-buy” commodities “across a range of industries” to encourage more investments into U.S. production and away from China.

While this may encourage more U.S. investments in the short term, guaranteeing an unfair advantage over competitors by setting a minimum price reduces American companies’ long-run incentives to innovate and produce better output. Economists have understood for more than a century what happens when the government fixes prices above their market level: Buyers purchase less, sellers produce more, surpluses pile up and waste follows. It’s the logic of failed farm-price support in the 1930s.

There are far better options than schemes like these. As for those rare-earth minerals, the U.S. sits on billions of dollars’ worth, yet MP is almost alone in extracting them. That’s in part because excessive regulation keeps the potential locked underground, deterring investment in innovative mining solutions, processing plants, magnet factories, and the skilled workforce needed to turn our geological abundance into economic value. Deregulation is the free-market way. Mimicking the Chinese model isn’t.

If that’s not enough, the administration has nationalized all but in name the company called U.S. Steel. To approve its market-driven purchase by Nippon Steel, Trump required a “golden share,” giving him veto power over plant closures, production levels, investments, even pricing. The White House effectively dictates how U.S. Steel can operate inside the United States.

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