Economics and Ethics publication

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.

Especially in context of the 2016 presidential election, in which ‘Inequality’ has emerged as perhaps the foremost issue, we must recast James Carville’s 1992 trope, ‘The Economy Stupid.’ Whether at the global, national, state or local community levels, even on the economy, ‘It’s Marriage, Stupid.’

Legal abortion is the main cause of family breakdown, in not just the United States but the world, including specifically rises in rates of divorce, illegitimacy and crime, and entry of most developed nations–now including the United States–into ‘demographic winter.’

Now, as in 1929 and 2008, Americans need real protection from economic harm. But this harm is not caused by immigrants or foreigners, but by the reserve currency scheme of John Maynard Keynes, and the currency wars which his scheme has caused for a century.