For religions throughout the world, established rules, studies, and practices are instrumental for their legitimacy. Established religious institutions throughout the world train theologians to study the nature of God and their belief system. For the Sunni Muslims, theologians in the Hanafi school consist of legal studies in line with Islam, while others like the Murji’ah sect focus on moral teachings of work and faith. Catholics too prescribe specialized areas of study to theologians, whether that be social teachings on leading a moral life or supernatural studies of God.Whatever the case, each of these studies offers legitimacy to the faith and to the clergy, so the state, in all its omnipotence, follows suit. The late German jurist Carl Schmitt held that the
Read More »Articles by John Kennedy
The new Iranian president sets the stage for negotiations
August 7, 2024From Mullah to ProgressiveOn May 19, 2024, the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash in the mountains of Iran. He was a Shi’ite cleric and lawyer who won the presidency in 2021. After his death, a man by the name of Masoud Pezeshkian won the following presidential election. Pezeshkian is a polar opposite of the previous president Raisi; he has been called a reformist by Western and Middle Eastern media outlets.The New York Times has reported that, “Mr. Pezeshkian has said he wants to steer Iran toward becoming more prosperous, more open socially, and more engaged with the West.” Other media outlets, such as CBS, have stated that Pezeshkian has no plan to “reshape Iran’s theocracy,” but only to moderate the morality police that enforce
Read More »The Regime No Longer Wants Biden
July 15, 2024After the first presidential debate on June 27, 2024, the media did something no one suspected: they began running headlines questioning President Biden’s mental capacity. CNN named its first analysis, titled “Biden’s disastrous debate pitches his reelection bid into crisis.” The author claimed that “objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960.”In the same analysis, the author claimed that “there has been no public sign that Biden is unable to perform the duties of the presidency.” While anyone can watch Biden speak over the last four years to know this is untrue, a special counsel’s report in February 2024 on the President’s handling of classified material claimed
Read More »Connecticut’s Housing Shortage Is Rooted in Government Policies
March 18, 2024There is no shortage of experts that the government is willing to hire to gain public favor for a particular policy. For Connecticut, that expert is a man named Cameron Rifkin, a policy associate for the National Council of State Legislatures. On December 4, 2023, at a legislative roundtable discussion on housing, Mr. Rifkin spoke of the grim reality of the housing situation in Connecticut, stating, “Sixty-eight percent of renters in Connecticut with extremely low income are severely cost-burdened, spending 50 percent of household income on rent. About 13 percent of middle-income households are spending 30 percent or more on rent. An income of $66,000 is needed to afford a two-bedroom rental.”Other problems presented at the roundtable included a deficit of
Read More »Strikes Always Have Economic Consequences and the Latest UAW Strike Is No Exception
September 25, 2023The UAW’s strike against US automakers will do long-term damage to the domestic auto industry. Unfortunately, unions and their advocates will learn nothing from this debacle.
Original Article: Strikes Always Have Economic Consequences and the Latest UAW Strike Is No Exception
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Read More »Censorship through the Centuries: Free Speech Suppression by the Government and the Mainstream Media
July 17, 2023The United States government, which prides itself in being the leading force in defending freedom throughout the world, has a history of putting a muzzle on news organizations and individuals throughout its history. From the early colonial period to the beginnings of the internet, the state has consistently silenced its critics, which seems to be its true nature.
The Sedition Act of 1798
Signed into law by the Federalist Party president John Adams on July 14, 1798, the Sedition Act made it illegal to print, utter, or publish any false, scandalous, and malicious writing about the government. Section 2 of the Sedition Act outlines the punishment for violating this new law: “Such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having
The Failure of Public Works and Public Funding
May 16, 2023State projects are funded by your money, either through taxation or by inflation, most times both. Money is either taken directly from you or you lose purchasing power. The result is the same, as you will lose the ability to buy or produce as much as you wanted because of these projects. However, this is the alleged cost of living in a “civilized society.” Without these projects, we would be driving on dirt roads, living in shacks, and working for pennies a day.
However, these projects usually make the country poorer. Henry Hazlitt, in Economics in One Lesson, noted the unseen aspect of public works, such as a bridge project, writing:
If the bridge costs $1,000,000 the taxpayers will lose $1,000,000. They will have that much taken away from them which they would
The World War Boom and ’46 Bust: Why War Does Not Keep Us Out of Recessions
April 11, 2023When I took my high school’s twentieth-century world history class, both the teacher and workbooks claimed repeatedly that World War II took us out of the Great Depression. Why would anyone question this? After all, unemployment went down. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics measured the unemployment rate from 1929 onward. In 1939 the unemployment rate stood at 17.2 percent. By 1942 it was at 4.7 percent, and by 1944 it was at 1.2 percent.
Professor Friedrich Hayek wrote in his essay “Full Employment, Planning, and Inflation” about the phenomenon of full employment and the reason behind it. Professor Hayek stated:
Full employment has come to mean that maximum of employment that can be brought about in the short run by monetary pressure. This may not be the original
The Reichsbank: Germany’s Central Bank Lays Foundation of Monetary Disaster
December 23, 2022Long before there was the infamous German inflation of 1923, the Reichsbank created the scenario of monetary debasement.
Original Article: "The Reichsbank: Germany’s Central Bank Lays Foundation of Monetary Disaster"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.
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Read More »How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now
July 10, 2022The Federal Reserve was supposed to prevent recessions that people blamed on the lack of central banking. Not surprisingly, the post-Fed recessions have been worse.
Original Article: “How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now”
With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have been printed, from $4 trillion in January 2020,
Read More »How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now
July 1, 2022With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have been printed, from $4 trillion in January 2020, to $20 trillion in October 2021.
This is always how recessions start: the expansion of easy money, the creation of bubbles, and heightened prices caused by the devaluation of the currency supply. But recessions occurred long before the Fed’s establishment