Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

The Fifth Amendment declares, “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”Except by dogs.The Supreme Court declared in 1967, “Wherever a man may be, he is entitled to know that he will remain free from unreasonable searches and seizures.”Except by dogs.The Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless unreasonable searches, but canines now provide push-button vetoes for constitutional rights. Last month in my piece “Highway...

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There 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...

The canary in the coal mine, is the consumer in our current economic period. We can still hear it, but it is growing weaker.We clearly hear Janet Yellen telling us in a March interview that rapidly increasing credit card use by consumers is normative. Is it normative to use credit card debt to offset “transitory” inflation?America has used credit to promote a recovery. Household debt rose to 17.5 trillion in the 4th quarter 2023. Debit and Credit card balances...

Our present cultural landscape is filled with the language of class conflict, ideology, bias (conscious or unconscious), and the politicization of everything. While there are many contributors to this, we can largely thank (or blame) Karl Marx and his theory of class consciousness and class conflict. While not necessarily following Marx in his economics, these concepts have captured the imagination of many, especially in the modern Western world.The claim is rather...

New York was the toughest nut for the Federalists to crack. For here was one state where not only was the population overwhelmingly opposed to the Constitution, but the opposition was also in firm and determined control of the state government and the state political machinery. Here was a powerful governor, George Clinton, who would not, like Hancock and Randolph in the other critical states, yield to a sellout under pressure. Clinton had been a highly popular...

Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Oxford University Press, 2022; pp. 261Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who teaches philosophy at Georgetown University, has a very different view of justice from libertarians. We believe that justice is based on the libertarian rights of self-ownership and Lockean appropriation, expressed in laws that apply to everyone and do not discriminate between different races or classes of people.Táíwò, by contrast, is a proponent of what...

The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imaginationby Aaron Alexander ZubiaNotre Dame 2024; 366 pp.The central thesis of Aaron Zubia’s very scholarly book will be of interest to students of Ludwig von Mises. Zubia argues that the thought of David Hume underlies contemporary liberalism. He intends “liberalism” broadly, so that it encompasses not only twentieth-century liberalism, but classical liberalism as well....

On February 5, 2024, Oklahoma Representative Cody Maynard introduced House Bill 3027, which would eliminate all capital gains taxes on gold and silver and expand legal tender to include not only gold and silver coins issued by the US government, but other specie that an Oklahoma court rules to be within state authority to make or designate as legal tender. While the bill has yet to be debated and passed in the Oklahoma House, this could be a realistic step toward...

Natural orders are things that emerge on their own or reflect the true nature of how something is or was meant to be. Two of my favorite books, both of which dramatically changed my outlook on the world, are A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century (by biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein) and Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (by economics professor Paul Seabright). Even though they deal with different subject matters, what unites...