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The 2024 presidential primaries have never been in much doubt, but Vivek Ramaswamy emerged from his presidential campaign poised for the future. In part, Ramaswamy distinguished himself with his criticism of the Federal Reserve. For most of the election cycle, scarcely a word has been said about the Fed by other 2024 presidential candidates. It is therefore worth reviewing what Ramaswamy had to say about monetary policy during his campaign.As Jonathan Newman noted,...

The Austrian Economics Research Conference is the international, interdisciplinary meeting of the Austrian school, bringing together leading scholars doing research in this vibrant and influential intellectual tradition. The conference is hosted by the Mises Institute at its campus in Auburn, Alabama, and is directed by Joseph Salerno, academic vice president of the Mises Institute and professor emeritus of economics at Pace University.The conference begins on...

Utility bills—for electricity, natural gas, water, and garbage—have by long-standing tradition been based on customer usage, measured in kilowatt-hours of electricity, therms or Btu of natural gas, hundred cubic feet of water, or number of garbage cans. Every residence and business has electric, gas, and water meters that measure utility usage.But changes are afoot in the utility business as federal and state governments urge Americans to convert from fossil fuels to...

As the internationally recognized government in Haiti loses its grip on power, the small Caribbean country is descending into violence. The media reports about the situation are quick to, either implicitly or explicitly, place the overall blame for the violence on the absence of state institutions.Situations like this are often used to dismiss libertarians. Before Haiti, it was Somalia that experienced a so-called stateless period in the 1990s and early 2000s.While...

For lower income folks the landing is already hard. Chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab Liz Ann Sonders posted on X (and reported by Almost Daily Grant’s) that the tally of domestic temporary help employees slipped to a three-plus-year low of 2.748 million down from 3.181 million as of March 2022. The 14% comes in 4th in the category’s downward drops percentage-wise since 1990; to the early 2000s, the 2008 financial crash and the Covid debacle, each...

Overview: The US dollar remains bid ahead of the outcome of today's FOMC meeting. No change in policy is expected, but the forward guidance, partly delivered in the updated projections, is the focus. In the last iteration (December), the Fed "dot" was for three rate cuts this year. Japanese markets were closed for a national holiday today but dollar's gains against the yen have been extended and the greenback is nearing the peak seen in the last two years slightly...

Since the conclusion of World War II, each biennial session of Congress has ushered in a staggering 4-6 million words of additional legislation. However, amidst this flood of legal text, the State's focus on expanding regulations and enforcing compliance has overshadowed its fundamental obligation: provision of security—the cornerstone of what progressives call the social contract.This neglect is starkly evident in the steady decline of the national homicide...

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“One nice day in 1974 Europe woke up and heard that an army revolt was taking place in Portugal and that a large number of career officers turned out to be Marxists of all colors and stripes. We rubbed our eyes: officers in smart uniforms, coming from ‘nice, even noble families, and apparently a bit frivolous, falling prey to Marxism – a despicable XIX century pseudo religion, bankrupt, morally discredited as a murderous political philosophy responsible for pouring...

One of the most pernicious aspects of civil rights law is that it has abolished the presumption of innocence. Motive and intention are irrelevant in establishing liability for discrimination.Under the concept of disparate impact established in the notorious case of Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), any employment policy or practice that operates to exclude black people “is prohibited, notwithstanding the employer's lack of discriminatory intent.” As held in Griggs:...