Alabama has been traveling down a fiscally unsustainable road. The burden of unchecked fiscal irresponsibility will ultimately fall on taxpayers, making Alabama an unattractive location for residency or business. This path has led Alabama to a crossroads, one where the choice is to continue down...

While the primary causes of the 2007-8 financial crisis are disputed, many economists hold that the monetary policy missteps played a role in causing or prolonging the financial crisis. In light of the perceived failure of monetary orthodoxy, monetary models are being theoretically refined and...

How has the impact of wars affected our historical understanding of U.S. economic performance? While most economists believe the Federal Reserve has improved performance, the existing literature fails to account for exogenous shocks such as periods of war. This paper compares U.S. economic...

Even notable free market scholars in the 20th Century lamented the inescapable decline in intimate social relations that would emerge from the wide-scale adoption of an extended market order. This paper challenges this view that markets erode social relations by challenging the concept that the...

An EF-5 Tornado struck Joplin, MO on May 22, 2011, leaving a twenty mile long path of destruction in its wake. An estimated 7,500 homes and over 500 businesses were damaged or destroyed, with damage estimated at up to $3 billion. Joplin has seen a rapid recovery despite the extensive damage. The...

We supplement the existing empirical literature on Fed independence with a contextualized episodic history to corroborate the empirical literature and inform future studies. We examine the postwar Fed to focus on the ability of the Fed to forge a monetary path independent of political influence...

Implicit in monetary models and policy prescriptions is the assumption that the Fed is independent of political and bureaucratic influence. We challenge this assumption. We consider three channels through which the independence of the Fed has been compromised over its 100-year history; debt...

Attempting to find the technically optimal monetary policy is futile if the Federal Reserve's independence is undermined by political influences. F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan each sought ways to improve the performance of the Federal Reserve. They each ended up rejecting the...

The failure of economic central planning in the Soviet Union is interpreted as evidence of the impossibility of efficient central planning. But the deficiencies of the Soviet economy might have resulted from other factors, such as Soviet history, culture, leadership, and/or unique circumstances,...