Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, February 17, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . Richard J. Grant We see three different countries with three apparently different problems. But their problems have the same root. The Argentine government has announced a two-month price freeze on supermarket products and is reportedly trying to limit union wage increases to no more than 20 percent. Given forecasters’ predictions that Argentine price inflation will approach 30 percent this year, one wonders how politicians can expect to hold wages and other prices down without causing shortages and an expansion of the underground economy. This is what happens when policymakers treat symptoms rather than causes, but Argentina is way ahead of Japan in this regard. Japan is still trying to push up its inflation rate. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe became famous for the lengths to which he was willing to go to weaken his national currency, the yen. So far, the Bank of Japan has pumpe...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, February 6, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . Richard J. Grant President Barack Obama has already ensured that legitimate immigration reform is practically impossible during his reign. But this should be no surprise: he has made many things impossible. The president’s track record of disregarding, or failing to enforce, laws that he doesn’t happen to like give us anything but assurance that he or his successors would enforce the border security provisions that would be a necessary part of any immigration deal. He exemplifies the morally consistent progressive who studies the Constitution with the same detachment as the activist who studies the obstacles around which he wishes to maneuver. Skirting a mere statute is, comparatively speaking, a cakewalk. The president has not only refrained from enforcing the politically inconvenient aspects of immigration laws, but has obstructed their enforcement by other levels of government. O...