Intellectual Capital

CNBC recently released its annual ranking of states for “quality of life,” crowning Tennessee dead last in the country. Even worse than Alabama. Don’t panic and start planning a move from East Tennessee to somewhere truly idyllic, like Detroit or Baltimore. The CNBC piece says much more about CNBC than it does Tennessee. CNBC scored states across the following categories: crime, air quality, healthcare, childcare, worker protection, inclusiveness and reproductive rights. Perhaps I’m a tad cynical, but this survey seems it might be a conclusion in search of supporting data. My quality-of-life survey would have also included factors like nature … Read More

The recent high-profile victories of socialist candidates in New York and Colorado have caused concerns among defenders of capitalism, with some worried that figures like Zohran Mamdani reflect the growing movement away from free markets and toward greater government control. I was a proponent of capitalism long before I became a beneficiary of it. And I’m not terribly worried about this latest generation of would-be central planners. We’ve been down this path before. Like herpes, bad ideas have a way of lying dormant for years before unexpectedly returning. A hundred years ago, the Socialist Party of America was the forerunner … Read More

It’s fairly common for travelers to remark about the relative youth of the United States, especially compared to Old World countries like France, Italy, German and the United Kingdom. Knoxville has four buildings that are more than 200-years-old. London (England) has more than ten thousand, with portions of some structures more than 1,800 years old. Italy’s recorded history can be traced back to at least 500 B.C. Europe certainly has much older buildings, and countries whose names have endured more than a thousand years. But as an institutional construct, the United States is actually a much more seasoned and stable … Read More

In 2025, more than two dozen US CEOs received total compensation exceeding $100 million, including a record number above $200 million. I’m guessing that the Elon Musk haters didn’t see that story in their Tik-Tok feeds. I know that people sincerely believe otherwise, but I have genuinely never understood the notion that a person could be too wealthy, or that someone else’s net worth increases came at my expense. As a child, I lived in a trailer park that is now a Walmart retention basin. Howard Hughes was the Elon Musk of my youth. There was certainly a great deal … Read More

The 1968 best seller “The Population Bomb” warned that the worldwide population had irreversibly outgrown the earth’s ability to produce enough food to sustain its 3.5 billion inhabitants. Author Paul Ehrlich confidently forecast that overpopulation would cause hundreds of millions of deaths in the 1970s and force food rationing in the U.S. by the 1980s. I’m guessing that Knox County Schools Superintendent Dr. Jon Rysewyk probably doesn’t wish those dire predictions had materialized, but he might prefer that Ehrlich had not been so wildly incorrect. When Dr. Rysewyk warned that the Knox County system expects enrollment to decline about 900 … Read More

The confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors has, unsurprisingly, reenergized some Federal Reserve conspiracy theorists. And while I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy (I’m probably somewhere between Bill Maher and Alex Jones on the Tinfoil Hat Index), there’s a different aspect to the Fed’s origin that I find more interesting: legislative incompetence isn’t exactly a recent phenomenon. Back in 1910, a small group of politicians and private bankers met under the cover of a South Georgia duck hunting trip to draft what became known as … Read More

For decades, Washington politicians have selfishly and foolishly enjoyed a luxury: they could ignore the looming insolvency of Social Security. The senators elected this fall will not have that same privilege. By 2033, the assets in the Social Security Trust Fund are projected to be depleted, and incoming payroll taxes will only fund about 80% of scheduled benefits. At that point, kicking the can down the road will no longer be an option. The basic facts have been familiar for years to anyone paying attention. When Social Security began in 1940, there were about 159 workers paying into the system … Read More

In the past quarter century, the segments of consumer prices that increased most had one glaring commonality: they were all government subsidized. By contrast, the products and services that experienced the least price inflation (or outright price declines) were those items that consumers directly purchase with their own money, transparent transactions with competing sellers and no intermediary “help.” Each year, economist Mark J. Perry produces his “Chart of the Century,” comparing changes in consumer prices to overall inflation and average hourly wages. The chart confirms a familiar bias among free-market supporters, but is still shocking in its degree. Since 2000, … Read More

Watching Zohran Mamdani spar with New York’s largest taxpayers and employers has been humorous, revealing the political naivete of Big Apple’s freshman mayor. I’m trying to imagine Indya Kincannon or Glenn Jacobs running television ads criticizing Jim Haslam, Jim Clayton, or Randy Boyd for not paying their fair share to make Knoxville a functioning community. It is safe and easy to find the New York situation amusing, as long as it stays in New York. But it raises a fair question: is there any issue that could cause a similar “budget hole” in Knoxville? My growing concern about a potential … Read More

For those who see a politician as the cause of everything that goes wrong in life, the failure of Spirit Airlines was clearly the result of Joe Biden’s Department of Justice blocking the airline’s proposed 2024 acquisition by JetBlue. Or Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran driving up jet fuel prices. Reality is less convenient. Spirit Airlines was a poorly run business competing in the most price-sensitive segment of an unforgiving industry. Its collapse was not the product of any single presidential administration, regulatory decision or geopolitical event. Elizabeth Warren, Donald Trump and Joe Biden were at most supporting actors … Read More