[Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory, by Brent M. Rogers, Nebraska University Press, 2017, xiv + 383 pp.] Behind its clinical-sounding subtitle about “federal management,” Brent Rogers’s Unpopular Sovereignty contains essential history for understanding how American westward expansion paved the way for the growth of federal power during and after the American Civil War.Contrary to the popular myth that the settlement of the trans-Mississippi frontier was a laissez-faire process with minimal federal involvement, Rogers shows how Congress and federal agents took a keen and active interest in asserting federal power and control into western territories in the 1850s. Examples of this process can be found in Kansas, New

Fed Chairman Jerome Powell held a press conference at the annual Jackson Hole economic conference today, and he all but said that a September cut to the federal funds rate is a done deal: “The time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear.”Naturally he threw in the usual propaganda phrases about how the Fed is data driven. He continues: “the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”Remember, with its official statements, the Fed is always careful to try and give the impression that it is not a political organization and responds only to economic data.But, for whatever reason, Powell and the Fed have now decided official CPI inflation is low enough for the central bank get away

Watch the video version of this article on X/Twitter. The latest monthly report on taxes and spending from the Treasury Department shows that in July, the federal deficit was $244 billion, or nearly one quarter of a trillion dollars.In spite of the fact that the US government managed to collect $330 billion in taxes in July, they also managed to spend $574 billion.Through the end of July this fiscal year, the feds racked up a deficit of a little over 1.5 trillion dollars. Last year, for the same period, the total deficit was a bit over $1.6 trillion.By the time the current fiscal year ends, however, we can expect this year’s total to be even larger than last year’s. that is, the Congressional Budget Office in June estimated that the total deficit for 2024’s fiscal

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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Historically—especially during the days of the classical gold standard—central banks maintained stocks of gold to facilitate the conversion of gold-backed national currencies. Those days are long gone, but in modern times, many central banks continue to own gold, and many central banks buy gold as part of their open-market operations. For example, in his article last week—”Central banks purchase gold to offset their own money destruction“—Daniel Lacalle writes: The rising purchases of gold by central banks are an essential factor justifying the recent increase in demand for the precious metal. Central banks, especially in China and India, are trying to reduce their dependence on the dollar or the euro to diversify their reserves. However, this does not mean full

Money-supply growth rose year over year in June for the second month in a row. This is the first time the money supply has grown for two months in a row since October of 2022. The current trend in money-supply growth suggests a significant turnaround from more than a year of historically large contractions in the money supply that occurred throughout much of 2023 and 2024. As of June, the money supply appears to be, for now, in a period of stabilization.The money-supply growth of May and June ends an eighteen-month period during which the money supply repeatedly contracted, year over year. In June, YOY growth in the money supply was at 0.24 percent. That’s the same as the May 2024 increase, and was a large reversal from June 2023’s YOY decline of 12.5 percent.

Historian Julian Zelizer writes that Watergate-style investigations are OK sometimes, but we shouldn’t go overboard in being mistrustful of the government. After all, “faith in government,” Zelizer writes, “is necessary for a healthy society.” As Rothbard notes below, the watergate scandal was an excellent event precisely because it undermined faith in government. Zelizer, however, tells us to “banish the memories of Watergate” so we can get over all this unhealthy suspicion of government. Writes Zelizer:Often, this outlook [of suspicion of government] has salutary effects by encouraging politicians to make sure that similar levels of corruption don’t happen again. But, too often, as many would say has been the case with the IRS, stories of administrative

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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President Biden has not been seen in public since announcing he would not seek re-election on Sunday. Biden’s “resignation” was nothing more than a text-only post on Twitter/X—and we know that the president does not manage his own social media accounts. There has been no video of the president making an announcement, and the White House is apparently planning no press conference or official act of any kind. Biden has not been seen by anyone except his inner circle in days. (We can contrast this situation with Lyndon Johnson’s televised address announcing his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign.) This is, in the words of Glenn Greenwald, “strange.” Moreover, Biden’s silence is inexplicable if Biden actually made the decision to withdraw from the race.

According to the most recent report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy added 206,000 jobs during June while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.1 percent. Unlike most months over the past year—which repeatedly described the employment situation as “strong” and “a blowout”—the general media narrative for the June jobs report was far less enthusiastic. According to CNN, for example, the June jobs report suggests a “’steady-as-she-goes’ US labor market.Yet, the employment situation has not fundamentally changed from what has been common over the past year. That is, claims of solid, or even “blowout,” gains in employment have been unconvincing if we look at the bigger picture. As we have seen repeatedly over the past year,

Within minutes of the July 13 attempted assassination of Donald Trump, observers were asking how the assassin managed to gain a clear shot of Donald Trump at the Butler Farm Show Grounds near Butler, Pennsylvania. Since then, the question remains unanswered, but many allegations about the shooting have emerged. For example, multiple sources plausibly contend that both local police and the Secret Service had spotted the armed shooter—on a nearby roof with a rangefinder and a gun—several minutes before the shooting occurred. Law enforcement officers and agents chose to do nothing. Videos of the event show bystanders vocally warning both police and federal agents of the shooter’s presence. Again, law enforcement did nothing. The New York Post reports that a “counter

Yesterday, we looked at how the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) report showed job losses last year while the much-reported and much-touted monthly Establishment survey report showed “blowout” job gains throughout most of the year. Indeed, over the past year, the Establishment survey has repeatedly showed considerably more job growth than both the BED report and the Household survey. Another source we can now consider is the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), also released by the Burau of Labor Statistics. This report is prepared quarterly, rather than monthly. It provides far more detail than the Establishment report, and QCEW surveys nearly twenty times more businesses than the Establishment survey. The most recent QCEW report revisions show—not

Unless you work for a bank or the government, you may not have noticed that yesterday was a federal holiday—Juneteenth—commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is a perfectly good thing to celebrate, of course, but alas, as Connor O’Keeffe has recently noted, since the day was declared a federal holiday in 2021, it has largely been used by leftwing groups to push ever larger amounts of government intervention in favor of the Left’s favorite interest groups. For example, among the “property is theft” crowd, the end of chattel slavery is framed as merely a small part of the larger “ongoing struggle“ to abolish so-called “wage slavery.” The Origins of “Wage Slavery”The idea that wage earners are “slaves” of one sort or another is certainly not new.

The most recent Business Employment Dynamics (BED) summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the US economy lost 192,000 private-sector jobs during the third quarter of 2023. According to the BLS: From June 2023 to September 2023, gross job losses from closing and contracting private-sector establishments were 7.8 million, a decrease of 37,000 jobs from the previous quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over this period, gross job gains from opening and expanding private-sector establishments were 7.6 million, a decrease of 561,000 jobs from the previous quarter. The difference between the number of gross job gains and the number of gross job losses yielded a net employment decline of 192,000 jobs in the private sector during

Last week, we looked at the weakness of the job market that belies all the happy talk from the administration about employment. For instance, we noted the fact that full-time employment is in decline, as is temporary work. We can couple this with the fact that the total number of employed persons in this economy has gone nowhere in eleven months. On top of all this, another indicator of the lackluster jobs economy is the volume of government-job growth compared to private-sector job growth. There are a couple of ways to look at this. The first is to look at growth in government jobs versus growth in private employment over time. In this case, we see that since March of 2023 government employment has been growing faster than private employment. Last month, for

Earlier this week, those of us who follow news about the US dollar’s global status noticed numerous claims that the US-Saudi petrodollar agreement had “expired” and that the Saudis would now sell oil for many currencies other than dollars. Some versions of the story even claimed the Chinese yuan would replace the dollar. The reports appear to have originated either in India or in publications that cater to crypto investors. Fervor over the story was large enough that economist Paul Donovan at UBS felt the need to clarify that there have not actually been any big, new developments in Saudi-US currency relations. It now seems clear that these reports of an alleged formal petrodollar “contract” did indeed get several key facts wrong. First of all, the Saudis’ turn

According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, the US economy added 272,000 jobs during May while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.0 percent. As has been repeatedly the case over the past year, the latest monthly job-growth number was described as a “blowout” or “hot” number by major media outlets like CNN. As is typical in the good-news-is-bad-news view on Wall Street, the Dow fell on Friday out of fear that the “strong” jobs report would impel the Federal Reserve to put off interest-rate cuts further into the future. Clearly, the memo went out from the administration’s supporters that this jobs reports was to be reported as nothing but good news. The Biden White House, for example, released a

When it comes to political battles and controversies there is, unfortunately, a deeply-seated human tendency to emotionally attach one’s self to political leaders and candidates, rather than to principles or policies. This tendency is especially foundational to modern democratic politics in which voters are encouraged to embrace candidates on an emotional level. Once this occurs, the specifics of a candidate’s positions and principles become secondary to the candidate’s image and personality. For many activists and voters, what matters is the (one-sided) emotional bond between the voter and the candidate. Campaign workers encourage this, of course, because an emotional response to the candidate is more likely to get the voter to actually go through the trouble of

There is no shortage of former hangers-on at the Mises Institute who now claim to have deep insights into the inner workings of the Institute and its staff. Among these people, one will often find a certain group of people who never miss an opportunity to tell you all about how tight they once were with the Institute staff, and how now they can no longer support the Institute because “it changed.” The latest writer that checks the usual boxes of the “self-described-insider-turned-critic” gimmick is a person named Jordan Schachtel in an article titled “Libertarian Cancel Culture: Prominent Think Tank Dismisses Scholar for Supporting Israel.” The “prominent think tank” in question is the Mises Institute, and the alleged “dismissal” is apparently supposed to describe

Tuesday at Power & Market I described a certain type of soft and wobbly Mises Institute “supporter” who believes that the Mises Institute is not allowed to have standards. In the minds of these people, the Institute must publish articles that contradict the Institute’s core editorial positions in the name of “debate” and avoiding “dogmatism.” Apparently, it’s not enough that nearly the entire edifice of the American regime—along with academia and the legacy media— are opposed to the values and mission of the Institute. It’s not enough that one can read, virtually everywhere, commentary devoted to supporting the state, its socialism, and its wars. No, in the mind of these “supporters,” we are also required to make the case at mises.org for terrible anti-freedom

In case you haven’t read it lately—or perhaps you’ve never read it—the mission statement of the Mises Institute states that the Institute “exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.”For those who find this mission statement to too non-specific, I recommend consulting the decades’ worth of commentary and research published by the Institute over the forty-plus years of the Institute’s existence. For anyone who has bothered to read any significant portion of this body of work, the Mises Institute’s mission and editorial positions over the past four decades are no mystery. In my ten years as an editor at the Mises

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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Among the larger albatrosses burdening the economics profession is the idea of Homo economicus. To this day, most economics undergraduates hear about it in the context of neoclassical economics. Homo economicus, we are told, is the ideal economic man who always seeks to maximize profits and minimize costs. He only acts “rationally,” and rationalism is defined as, well, always seeking to maximize profits and minimize costs. Even worse, “profit” is often assumed to mean “monetary profit” measurable only in dollars (or some other currency).Yes, many economists will say, “It’s just a model,” and note there are many caveats that come with its use. These protestations are often less than convincing given the use of models based on “rational” behavior. But, for now,

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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According to a new report from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics this week, the US economy added 175,000 jobs for the month of April while the unemployment rate rose slightly to 3.9%. The new reported job growth was considered a “miss” in that it came in below expectations, and for the first time in months, the media did not declare the jobs report to be “a blowout” or “strong.” Instead, the official narrative seemed to be that the “slowing economy” will bring down CPI inflation, and thus the Federal Reserve will soon force interest rates back down and bring about the fabled “soft landing.” Not surprisingly, then, the lackluster jobs report led to a rally in stocks, as Wall Street anticipates a Fed rate cut. For anyone who has taken a more

Inflation Is Destroying UsOne of the most damaging shortcomings of modern statistics-based economics is that it all too often removes the individual human person from its analysis. In this setting, “economics” becomes a matter of “macro” aggregates and data factoids like GDP and CPI. This kind of “economics” removes the individual acting person as the central, key variable.Austrian School economics, on the other hand, never loses sight of the importance of the individual in understanding economic analysis. This focus on the individual provides another advantage as well: Austrian School economists are far less likely to forget the fact that society and the economy are not machines to be fine-tuned and tinkered with. Rather, we understand that groups of individuals

When I was still in graduate school and still in my early twenties, I was riding on the airport shuttle to an event at the Mises Institute when I encountered an interesting phenomenon. It was the phenomenon of the “libertarian” who is free-market in the small stuff, but embraces war and statism in the big things.
I still remember that shuttle ride well. I had become involved in a discussion with a man who was probably twenty years my senior. He was on the way to the same Institute conference, and was expressing the usual free-market sentiments about low taxes and the problems with government regulation.
When the topic turned to foreign policy, however, freedom and the evils of the state were quickly forgotten. This man ended up singing the praises of Washington’s

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

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