Townhall Review | Commentaries

I recently interviewed the Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, on my podcast Meeting of Minds, about his groundbreaking insights in economics, including his findings about the formation of bubbles. He suggested that bubbles are created when we buy things with the hope of reselling them for more money in the future. 

But he also found that easy money injected into the market also drives bubbles and he gave housing as an example of a bubble-prone asset. 
 
Professor Smith has found that bubbles and bursts in the housing market don’t stay in the housing market, but that both the exuberance and the collapse tend to pull the rest of the economy along with them. 

Whether Americans remember the lessons of 2008-9, is debatable, but our central planners clearly do not. 

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People of faith and fans of liberty have good reason to cheer the new decision from the Supreme Court. Their unanimous decision in a fight between the city of Philadelphia and Catholic Social Services restores the ability of the faithful to participate in public life.  

This Catholic charity has served for decades as one of several agencies for certifying foster homes for the city. They follow Catholic teaching in determining suitability, requiring that applicants be traditional married couples, not single, cohabiting, or in a same-sex union. Even though they routinely referred such households to other agencies for certification, Philadelphia demanded that they certify same-sex couples regardless. CSS either had to violate their religious tenets or end their service to the community. 

This unanimous decision re-sets the primacy of the First Amendment and the free-exercise clause over political correctness. 

It reminds us that the Framers intended to defend true tolerance and diversity—protecting us from those who would drive people from the public square over their beliefs.

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Comedian Jon Stewart defied media orthodoxy when he declared that he believed that COVID-19 came from a lab leak. Until a few weeks ago, that opinion would have resulted in a Facebook block and castigation of Stewart by the media as a conspiracy theorist, or perhaps even a racist. 
 
But one high-ranking scientist has repeatedly insisted that the lab-leak hypothesis be taken seriously all along: Former CDC director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists for a CNN interview in March, when he called for a thorough investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only a few days later, the head of the World Health Organization also demanded a proper look at the lab in the epicenter of the pandemic, vindicating Redfield.
 
Redfield’s defiance is no mere footnote. The media and political establishment repeatedly quashed scientific inquiry in service to diplomatic expediency for China’s benefit. Redfield’s defense of true science must prevail over those enforcing convenient orthodoxies.

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Inflation is not a problem. So says our monetary central planners. Well, I guess it’s not much of a problem unless you want to buy a home, drive a car, or eat food. Home prices are up over 20 percent in the past year. Home prices under $300,000 were almost half of all sales a year ago, now they’re only about a fourth. 

We’re seeing the death of the starter home right before our eyes. 
 
But don’t blame the builders: Lumber prices are shooting up much faster than home prices, squeezing the profit margin of the building industry. 
 
In his presidential debate against Jimmy Carter, the GOP nominee Ronald Reagan said: “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.” 

Well, we’ve got a repeat of Carternomics. 

We’re going to need a repeat of Reaganomics. 

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Congressman Ilhan Omar came to America by way of a Kenyan refugee camp, after fleeing civil war in Somalia. Given her history, you’d think she would treasure this country for all that makes it so unique and special.

Apparently not. In a recent tweet, Omar equated the United States to Hamas—a registered terrorist organization. It’s remarkable:  that a sitting member of Congress—and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee—can’t distinguish between a country that operates under the rule of law and a group that targets innocent civilians and tells people to “cut off the heads of Jews.”

Despite objections from Jewish Democrats to Omar’s ugly remarks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been careful to make it clear she herself is not “rebuking” Omar.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is reportedly preparing a resolution to remove Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It will be interesting—and oh-so-revealing—to see how many Democrats support it.

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The IRS has a new scandal—and both progressive Democrats and one media outlet couldn’t be happier. An anonymous IRS bureaucrat stole tax returns of the wealthiest Americans and sent them to ProPublica, a non-profit whose proclaimed mission is to investigate abuses of power. The returns didn’t show any lawbreaking, but instead were leaked to promote changes in the tax code. 

ProPublica published the private information to push an agenda of tax changes, ignoring the obvious abuse of power that this leak represents. The embrace of this criminal leak continued in Congress. Senator Ron Wyden, while paying lip service to the privacy violation, declared that the returns justified his long-desired agenda of imposing a radical wealth tax. 

Joe Biden announced that he wants to spend $80 billion to expand the IRS. Instead, we should find ways to have fewer bureaucrats access the private data of citizens. This agency keeps proving itself unworthy of trust—and so do media outlets and politicians who exploit their abuses of power for their own agendas.

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In William Faulkner’s classic redemption tale, “Requiem for a Nun,” Gavin Stevens tells Temple Drake, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Indeed: Past events have staying power in the present and influence on future decisions.

This certainly applies to America’s geopolitical and domestic responses to COVID. 

Ascertaining the virus’s origin is important to our present relationship with China and China’s role in the world’s future.  

An accounting for the domestic response—primarily, the lockdowns—is equally important.

The evidence is mounting here too.

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan recently published a study concluding, “workers have been 4-5 times less safe outside their workplace than inside it. While stay-at-home continues to be pushed as promoting public health, nobody is checking the data which say the opposite.” 

Research by statisticians at the University of Munich similarly concluded there was “no direct connection” between falling infection rates and the national lockdown imposed last November.

America’s COVID redemption story starts with an acknowledgement that lockdowns were counterproductive and a commitment to apply that present understanding to future pandemics.

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Sometime next year, the Supreme Court will decide whether to continue to find the right to abortion in the Constitution or give up on its deeply misguided, half-century-long effort to do so. 

The court will have before it the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that banned abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. 

The court will also be deciding on whether or not to uphold a poor decision made at the intellectual low ebb of its postwar era.

The court made law in Roe v. Wade—and Justice Blackmun’s opinion was simply awful in its reasoning. In fact, I would argue that 1973 was the point of origin of the “culture wars,” because in Roe the court seized territory reserved for the state legislatures. 

Will the Court let us have peace at the cost of admitting that its ambition to rule was the real spark for the fires long burning? Wisdom—and the express language of the Constitution—counsels it to quit the field.

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In a recent ruling, the Supreme Court angered the left by denying illegal immigrants the ability to become lawful permanent residents of this country—even if they had gained temporarily protected status.

For a case this controversial, it’s worth noting the decision was 9-0 and authored by Justice Kagan—an Obama appointee. This is the seventh unanimous holding in less than a month. Was the Court trying to send a message?

After all, Democrats have been threatening to pack the Supreme Court in order to get outcomes more to their liking. Seeing the Supreme Court’s institutional credibility in jeopardy from this threat, it seems likely the justices are speaking through their decisions—quietly emphasizing that the Court isn’t as divided as Democrats claim.

Good for them. The Constitution established three co-equal branches of government. Democrats shouldn’t be trying to bully anyone in the judicial branch to get outcomes they favor. Doing so is a slap in the face to the rule of law.

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I argued earlier this year that inflation was on the near horizon, while the Fed and its enablers in the press were in denial. It’s not about who is the smartest; it’s about fixed principles of economics. Too much money chasing too few goods causes inflation. Our central bank is enabling colossally high spending and borrowing levels by creating new money supply. This didn’t start with Biden, but it has certainly reached new orders of magnitude with him. 
 
The last report shows that inflation ran at over 4 percent over the past year… well over the historic average. That includes a brief bout of deflation during the worst of the shutdowns. If we look at year-to-date, we see that on a monthly basis, inflation has been accelerating rapidly. 
 
There’s only one remedy. Government needs to cut spending and the Fed needs to stop “printing.” Nothing else … price controls, scapegoating business, etc… will work.

Stop printing money.

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