“Having to manage a complex home produces a deadweight loss to both society and the individual.” – John Tamny and Jack Ryan (2024)A man’s home is his castle, says the old adage, but John Tamny and Jack Ryan thumb their nose at the sacred “American Dream” of home ownership in their new book Bringing Adam Smith into the American Home. They are not the first to do so—the great Florence King derided it often and with pleasure—yet, to still do so, makes this book a rare breed. In this telling, one of the holiest of America’s cows is gored by pointing out that the housing emperor has no economic clothes.“The book isn’t so much a polemic against housing as it’s a call for reason,” the authors announce straight off. They don’t pull any punches, mocking “the emotional and

The world is full of scraps of paper today.- Benjamin Anderson, economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (1920 – 1939)April 1933 found America mired in a crushing economic depression, and newly elected president Franklin DeLano Roosevelt — who had declared the previous month he had a legal power derived from the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control of our monetary system — responded by taking America off the gold standard. That the Act, an unexploded legislative relic left over from the First World War, was completely irrelevant to the situation at hand (there was no “enemy” to speak of as the nation was at peace) proved an easily passed over quibble.During FDR’s famous first hundred days, a blizzard of unread legislation sailed through Congress and what they