John D. Mueller

Some hard figures help explain why the Reagan administration tax reforms were enacted with the support of so-called “Reagan Democrats” in Congress, while not a single Democrat voted for the 2017 tax reform.

The good news is that the rate of legal abortion has fallen by nearly half from its peak; the bad news is that this still makes the difference between a declining and growing population, both for the United States and for the whole world.

There have always been only three alternative solutions to the Triffin Dilemma–the inherent conflict of a reserve-currency country’s economic policy with international monetary order—and only one has ever worked in the real world.

Elbows are flying, and the situation seems ‘ominous.’ It’s beginning to look a lot like 1986.

Protectionism won’t cure the import-export imbalance. The solution lies in monetary policy.

The official reserve-currency system causes the domestic price level to rise in the reserve-currency country, relative to other countries, even when exchange rates remain (temporarily) fixed–a competitive disadvantage that tariffs can only worsen, and only proper monetary reform can fix.

By abolishing what had previously been a PhD requirement—mastering the history of economics—for more than a generation, economists have missed rediscovering and reintegrating the most important original element in economics: the one that explains our interpersonal relations.

A brief cultural catechism of America’s first principles — a presentation not just of what we are against but of what we are for.

The original Scholastic Economics differed from Adam Smith’s later Classical economic theory and today’s Neo-Classical Economics. An updated version, “Neo-Scholastic Economics,” is reshaping our understanding of secular economic theory and offering new policy solutions, and provides the analytical “toolkit” necessary to explain the much younger body of Catholic social doctrine.

What, according to Mueller, is wrong with economics? In the simplest terms familiar to economists, there is an ‘equation’ missing from the model—the one explaining the primary economic choice – the choices of persons.

It’s not that economists will draw back in horror at the moral implications of their current theory. Rather, having one more indispensable explanatory element, their new “neo-scholastic” theory will be both more comprehensive and empirically more accurate.

The more than tenfold difference between federal and state budget deficits under identical economic conditions suggests that the fact that state governments in the United States do not have the power to issue money is a more powerful curb on budget deficits than constitutional prohibitions.