Over the years, I’ve been pretty hard on the European Union. Both as an editor and a writer, I’ve published articles criticizing its central bank and its unelected, bureaucratic central government. Especially objectionable is the EU ruling class’s propensity for cynical politics built around threatening and intimidating voters and national governments who don’t conform to Brussels’ wishes.
Recall, for example, how the EU threatened the United Kingdom with retaliatory tariffs and legal action designed to dissuade the British from voting to pull the UK out of the EU.
Many within the EU continue to push petty anti-British policies to this day.
Moreover, the Brussels government has taken steps to force into line various EU member states that don’t conform to EU edicts

After three months in a row of hitting new all-time highs, money supply growth slowed in March, dropping to a 10-month low.  This slowdown, however,  does not suggest any significant departure from the past year’s high growth in money supply—which came in the wake of unprecedented quantitative easing, central bank asset purchases, and various stimulus packages.
During March 2021, year-over-year (YOY) growth in the money supply was at 34.1 percent. That’s down slightly from February’s rate of 39.1 percent, and up from the March 2020 rate of 11.3 percent. March’s data confirms we’re now twelve months in to the current trend of remarkably high money-supply growth.
Historically, the growth rate has never been higher than what we’ve seen over the past year, with the

The Treasury department has issued its spending and revenue report for April 2021, and it’s clear the US government is headed toward another record-breaking year for deficits.
According to the report, the US federal government collected $439.2 billion in revenue during April 2021, which was a sizable improvement over April 2020 and over March 2021. Indeed, April 2021’s revenue total was the largest since July of last year when the federal government collected 563.5 billion following several months of delays on tax filing deadlines beyond the usual April 15 deadline. (Not surprisingly, in most years, April tends to be the federal government’s biggest month for tax collections.)
In spite of April’s haul, however, the federal government managed to spend much more

In any given year during the past decade in the United States, more than 2.5 million Americans have died—from all causes. The number has grown in recent years, climbing from 2.59 million in 2013 to 2.85 million in 2019. This has been due partially to the US’s aging population, and also due to rising obesity levels and drug overdoses. In fact, since 2010, growth rates in total deaths has exceeded population growth in every year.
In 2020, preliminary numbers suggest a jump of more than 17 percent in all-cause total deaths, rising from 2.85 million in 2019 to 3.35 million in 2020.
The increase was not all due to covid. At least one-quarter to one-third appear to be from other causes.

Excess Mortality during Covid-19, Jan 2020 – Mar 2021 – Click to enlarge
In

The US state with the fastest growing covid-19 caseload is a state that has experienced some of the harshest and longest lockdowns and covid restrictions: Michigan.
As of April 20, the seven-day moving average for new covid cases in Michigan was 790 per million. This is higher than any other US state, and it is several times higher than the case rate for Michigan a year ago. It is comparable to what it was at the beginning of cold and flu seasons last fall, when Whitmer issued orders for a new round of business closures.
In other words, if Whitmer were using the same metrics she was using to justify lockdowns in the past, she absolutely would be imposing very strict lockdowns now. Frankly, the case numbers in Michigan are terrible by the standards of those who use

Last week, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb vetoed a bill that would limit gubernatorial authority in declaring emergencies. The bill would allow the General Assembly to call itself into an emergency session, with the idea that the legislature could then vote to end, or otherwise limit, a governor’s emergency powers. Although both the legislature and the governor’s office are controlled by Republicans, the legislature has apparently wearied of the governor’s repeated renewals of the state’s emergency status in the name of managing the effects of the covid-19 virus.
The legislature could still override the veto. In Indiana, an override requires only a majority vote.
If the legislature does so, it won’t be the first state to override a governor’s veto on this front.

The reality of federal spending under Donald Trump did much to put to rest the obviously wrong and long-disproved notion that Republicans are the political party of “fiscal responsibility.” With George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, it was pretty much “full speed ahead” as far as federal spending was concerned. Under George W. Bush, some of the biggest budget-busting years were those during which the Republicans also controlled Congress.
Trump, of course, carried the GOP’s spendthrift tradition far beyond any old levels in dramatic fashion, calling for untrammeled deficit spending, money printing, and a series of multitrillion-dollar bailout and “stimulus” packages.
This time around, there’s little reason to assume the Democrats will depart from the GOP trend. After

Like nearly all US states, Georgia imposed a stay-at-home order in March 2020 in response to demands from public health officials claiming a stay-at-home order would lessen total deaths from covid-19.
But unlike most states, Georgia ended its stay-at-home order after only five weeks, and proceeded to lower other restrictions quickly.
The legacy media responded with furious opposition. For example, an article in The Atlantic declared the end of Georgia’s lockdown to be an “experiment in human sacrifice.” The Guardian approvingly quoted one Georgian who insisted the end of the stay-at-home order was “reckless, premature and dangerous.”
A few weeks later, other states began to end their stay-at-home orders and to end other restrictions as well. Florida was the

Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop discuss five reasons why Rothbard’s work is so memorable. From his fearlessness in the face of opposition, to his commitment to peace and decency, Rothbard provides us with a model of principled scholarship.

Additional Resources
“Nations by Consent”: Mises.org/RR_54_02
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature, and Other Essays: Mises.org/RR_54_03
“A Strategy for the Right”: Mises.org/RR_54_04
A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II: Mises.org/RR_54_05
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume 1: Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: Mises.org/RR_54_06
Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

In many school districts across the nation, public school teachers still don’t want to go back to work. Private sector workers have long been hard at work in kitchens, at construction sites, and in hardware and grocery stores. Meanwhile, from Seattle, to Los Angeles, and to Berkeley, California, Teachers’ Union representatives insist they simply can’t be expected to perform the on-site work in the expensive facilities that the taxpayers have long been paying for.
This week, for example, some schoolteachers in Colorado’s Jefferson County turned out to protest the district’s plan to return to limited in-person learning later this month. These protestors still insist it’s unsafe, even though the very institutions these people have long parroted in favor of endless

Dominion Voting Systems is suing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell for $1.3 billion. This comes in the wake of other Dominion lawsuits against Trump advisors Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. All are accused of lying about Dominion’s supposed complicity in using the company’s vote-counting software to favor presidential candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
The company claims Lindell’s accusations “have caused irreparable harm to Dominion’s good reputation and threatened the safety of our employees and customers.” In the case of Giuliani, the company claims: “For Dominion—whose business is producing and providing voting systems for elections—there are no accusations [other than Giuliani’s claims of fraud and election fixing] that could do more to damage

The threat of “nuclear proliferation” remains one of the great catch-all reasons—the other being “humanitarian” intervention—given for why the US regime and its allies ought to be given unlimited power to invade foreign states and impose sanctions at any given time.
We saw this at work during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was said that nuclear weapons were among the “weapons of mass destruction” being developed or harbored by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Thus, it was “necessary” that the United States invade Iraq and enact regime change.
It is now very clear, of course, that the Bush-Cheney administration was lying and there was no credible evidence that Iraq’s long-defunct nuclear program had been revived.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that

Opposition to American secession movements often hinges on the idea that foreign policy concerns trump any notions that the United States ought to be broken up into smaller pieces.
It almost goes without saying that those who subscribe to neoconservative ideology or other highly interventionist foreign policy views treat the idea of political division with alarm or contempt. Or both.
They have a point. It’s likely that were the US to be broken up into smaller pieces, it would be weakened in its ability to act as a global hegemon, invading foreign nations at will, imposing “regime change,” and threatening war with any regime that opposes the whims of the American regime.
For some of us, however, this would be a feature of secession rather than a bug.
Moreover, the

The Left long ago figured out how to get ordinary people interested in economic policy. The strategy is two pronged. The first part is to frame the problem as a moral problem. The second part is to make the fight over economic policy into a fight over something much bigger than economics: it’s a fight between views of what it means to be a good person. The Left knows how to make the war over economics into a war over culture.
Yet when it comes to economic policy, some opponents of the Left’s economic views—views which are, of course, very wrong—don’t seem to understand the rules of the game. For example, a typical left-wing economic scheme might call for a higher minimum wage, declaring this policy to be a matter of simple decency, and by extension, the moral

After decades of financialization and government favors, Wall Street now has little to do with free, functioning markets anymore and has largely become an adjunct of the central bank. Today, entrepreneurship is out, and bailouts are in.

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

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Politics and Ideas
2021-02-09

In the Age of Enlightenment, in the years in which the North Americans founded their independence, and a few years later, when the Spanish and Portuguese colonies were transformed into independent nations, the prevailing mood in Western civilization was optimistic.

Weekly SNB Sight Deposits and Speculative Positions: SNB selling

Last week, the United States signed a five-year extension of the New START arms control treaty with Russia. Russia’s President Putin signed the treaty shortly thereafter. The “Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty” allows Russia and the US to monitor each other’s nuclear forces, facilities, and activities. The idea is to keep track of the relative strength of the two regimes’ respective arsenals and to encourage reductions. The treaty also caps the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550 each. (The total stockpiles for the US and Russia are 4,700 and 4,300, respectively.)
The move is a departure from the Trump administration’s opposition to the treaty. The Trump administration had wanted to renegotiate the treaty, insisting that so-called tactical

Within a day of the inauguration, the Biden administration issues a bevy of new executive orders designed to please a variety of the Democratic Party’s core special-interest groups. Among these was an executive order curtailing oil and gas leasing on federal and tribal lands.
But a problem quickly presented itself: many tribes earn a significant amount of income through oil and gas drilling on their lands. These operations also provide jobs for tribal members. The administration’s new orders would curtail tribal control and instead place decision-making authority over these drilling operations on a handful of federal officials.
Not surprisingly, at least one tribe reacted with alarm to these new federal limits. Reuters reports:
An oil-producing Native American

Although advocates for covid-19 lockdowns continue to insist that they save lives, actual experience keeps suggesting otherwise.
On a national level, just eyeballing the data makes this clear. Countries that have implemented harsh lockdowns shouldn’t expect to have comparatively lower numbers of covid-19 deaths per million.
In Italy and the United Kingdom, for example, where lockdowns have been repeatedly imposed, death totals per million remain among the worst in the world. Meanwhile, in the United States, states with with the most harsh lockdown rules—such as New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are among the states with the worst total deaths.
Lockdown advocates, of course, are likely to argue if researchers control for a variety of other variables, then

In the debate over whether or not China will soon rise to challenge the United States as the world’s hegemon, it is often assumed that states with large aggregate economies are necessarily more militarily powerful ones.
This stems from decades-old methods that remain popular among scholars and pundits who write on international relations and foreign policy.
The theory goes like this: states that rule over economies with a large gross domestic product (GDP) have more access to resources. This means more access to weapons, food, personnel, and a variety of other resources necessary to carry out military operations or project power in the international sphere.
Consequently, theorists in international relations have long used GDP and similar measures—such as the

On Wednesday, a mob apparently composed of Trump supporters forced its way past US Capitol security guards and briefly moved unrestrained through much of the capitol building. They displayed virtually no organization and no clear goals.
The only deaths were on the side of the mob, with one woman—apparently unarmed—shot dead by panicky and trigger-happy capitol police, with three others suffering non-specific “medical emergencies.”
Yet, the media response has been to act as if the event constituted a coup d’etat. This was “A Very American Coup” according to a headline at The New Republic. “This is a Coup” insists a writer at Foreign Policy. The Atlantic presented photos purported to be “Scenes From an American Coup.”
But this wasn’t a coup, and what happened on

The 2020 election failed to live up to the projections of many pollsters and Democratic strategists . The predicted landslide failed to materialize, and the Democrats lost seats in the House. This means in 2022 the Democrats will be defending a razor-thin majority in the House—a majority they’re almost certain to lose in a mid-term election if Biden is the final victor. The Democrats did well. But not that well.
Nonetheless, Nancy Pelosi, in the days following the election, reportedly declared the Democrats “have a mandate!”
But do they?
Let consider what constitutes a democratic victory given the standard handed down to us by pundits and politicians on the Left. According to the current narrative, the legitimacy of a president’s electoral victory depends on the

Two hundred and forty-seven years ago this month, a group of American opponents of the Crown’s tax policy donned disguises and set about methodically destroying a shipment of tea imported into Boston by the East India Company. The vandals trespassed on privately owned ships in Boston Harbor and threw the tea into the ocean. These protesters were thorough. Not content with having destroyed most of the company’s imported tea that night, the activists later discovered another tea shipment which had been unloaded at a warehouse in Boston. The activists then broke into the warehouse and destroyed that tea, too. Total damages amounted to more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars.
This was the work of the Sons of Liberty, a group led in part by Samuel Adams and which

Thanks to lockdowns, high unemployment, and general uncertainty and fear over covid-19, the personal saving rate in the United States in October was 13.6 percent, the highest since the mid-1970s. This is down from April’s rate of 33.7 percent, which was the highest saving rate recorded since the Second World War.
Moreover, among those who received “stimulus” checks under the CARES Act, only 15 percent of those surveyed in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study reported spending it. Thirty-three percent said they saved the payment, and 52 percent said they used the money to pay down debt.
Taken all together, these factors should spell an immense amount of deflationary pressure, both on the money supply, and ultimately on consumer prices as well.1

In November, money supply growth rate was essentially unchanged from October and remains near September’s all-time high. The stabilization we find in money-supply growth in recent months comes after eight months of record-breaking growth in the US which came in the wake of unprecedented quantitative easing, central bank asset purchases, and various stimulus packages.
Historically, the growth rate has never been higher than what we’ve seen this year, with the 1970s being the only period that comes close. It was expected that money supply growth would surge in recent months. This usually happens in the wake of the early months of a recession or financial crisis. But it appears that now the United States is several months into an extended economic crisis, with around

In 1923 Lenin released a propaganda pamphlet titled Down with the Private Kitchen. It explained how private dinners with one’s family are reactionary, bourgeois, and generally something requiring total destruction.

Original Article: “Why Commies Hate Your Thanksgiving Dinner“.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

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What Germany Must Do for a Speedy Recovery
2020-07-08

On June 29, the German parliament reacted as parliaments normally do when there is a problem, namely, by allowing the government to spend more. In order to respond to the economic difficulties due to the corona epidemic and the government restrictions, it

In October, money supply growth fell slightly from September’s all-time high, although growth still remains at levels that would have been considered outlandish just eight months ago. October’s easing in money-supply growth comes after eight months of record-breaking growth in the US which came in the wake of unprecedented quantitative easing, central bank asset purchases, and various stimulus packages.
Historically, the growth rate has never been higher than what we’ve seen this year, with the 1970s being the only period that comes close. It was expected that money supply growth would surge in recent months. This usually happens in the wake of the early months of a recession or financial crisis. But it appears that now the United States is several months into an

It should be self-evident that a just and moral political regime can only exist in the long term if a sufficiently large number of people actually believe in it.
Original Article: “Both Theory and Praxis: Rothbard’s Plan for Laissez-Faire Activism“.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

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How Historians Changed the Meaning of “Liberalism”
Understandably enough, the current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred what Raimondo Cubeddu (1997: 138) refers to as “the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal.” Many writers today have recourse to the stratagem of “inventing for oneself a ‘liberalism’ according to one’s

Even if he loses, Donald Trump still has time to change military policy, pardon allies, unseat the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and throw a wrench in the deep state apparatus.

Original Article: “Here’s What Donald Trump Should Do Before Inauguration Day​“.
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

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The COVID Crisis Supercharged the War on Cash
The corona crisis has already taken a very high toll and caused deep damage in our societies and our economies, the extent of which is yet to become apparent. We have seen its impact on productivity, on unemployment, on social cohesion and on political division. However, there is

“Countries threaten to split apart when their people seem hopelessly divided…. We’re less united today than we’ve been at any time since the Civil War.”

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.
Original Article: “The Benefits of Secession Are Becoming Increasingly Obvious“.

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The Disastrous Legacy of Woodrow Wilson
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Princeton University has made it official: Woodrow Wilson’s name no longer will have any place on campus. The former president, or at least his memory, now is part of cancel culture, which is sweeping the nation. The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs will

Both private sector businesses and police departments believe there is a good chance there will be postelection unrest. Both groups are taking steps to protect themselves in case of riots. Some left-wing protest groups state they plan to do “whatever it takes” to make sure the correct candidate—i.e., Joe Biden—wins. The National Guard has mobilized in several states in anticipation of riots.
It remains to be seen if this apocalyptic rhetoric proves to be well founded. If Trump wins, we may or may not see anything more than a few flare-ups of violence in a small number of cities. In a nation of more than 330 million people, that wouldn’t exactly indicate a state of general upheaval. On the other hand, if Biden wins, we may never know if the Left’s plans for chaos