Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

On Saturday night, Donald Trump announced he intends to appoint Kash Patel as director of the FBI. The news sparked an immediate frenzy from establishment figures across media and politics. Legal and national security “experts” were deployed to the Sunday morning news shows to characterize the move as evidence that Trump intends to politicize the FBI and use it as a weapon against his many political opponents.The political establishment’s concerns about what a Trump...

The biggest mistake America has ever made since the nation’s founding was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. If the American people are ever going to achieve a genuinely free society, a necessary prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security establishment and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.America’s national-security state is a...

Jean Claude Escalante’s From Indentureship to Entrepreneurship is an extraordinary exploration of the Indo-Trinidadian community’s journey from humble indentured laborers to influential figures in the arenas of academia, commerce, and industry. Escalante skillfully dismantles common assumptions that attribute Indo-Trinidadian success solely to preferential colonial policies, instead presenting a nuanced analysis that emphasizes the community’s resilience, cultural...

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”―George Orwell, Animal FarmThe nation’s deposit insurer (FDIC) let slip the other day which large depositors were bailed out when Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed last spring. SVB banked the nation’s tech illuminate.Its failure exposed fractional reserve banking’s Achilles heel when a bank run was initiated via social media and carried out with depositors moving money on their cell phone apps. The...

[Editor’s Note: In this selection from his new essay “Seeds of Resistance,” William Hartung provides some interesting context on the important role of public opinion and public pressure in pushing back against aggressive foreign policy in any presidential administration. Essentially, Hartung expresses hope that perhaps Trump will be something like Ronald Reagan whose bellicose pre-election rhetoric was far worse than the actual policies that Reagan eventually...

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been making a lot of noise about all the federal employees it plans to fire. The DOGE people have framed total federal employment as something of a proxy for the total size of the federal government.  Cutting the federal workforce is all well and good, but in reality, the size of the federal payrolls doesn’t really tell us much about the growth of the federal government. Federal employment has been...

The history of slavery in the United States cannot be covered in a brief article, but one point that is important to address in the context of contemporary “antiracist” debates is the notion that slavery was historically supported by the South and opposed by the North. The aim of antiracists, in advancing that notion, is to justify the destruction of Confederate monuments, the proscribing of Confederate flags, and the renaming of military bases. It is, therefore,...

With much consternation, capital markets participants are watching US treasury bond yields go up while Jerome Powell and the Fed continue to lower the Fed Funds Rate in an effort to spur another round of easy money.The Fed Funds rate is a short-term interest rate used for interbank borrowing. US treasury bonds are medium-long term securities that represent the sovereign debt of the US government, so the yield on those bonds represents the US government’s cost of...

The interim between a US presidential election and the swearing in of a new Administration has for most of our history been a non-eventful period where the outgoing Administration winds down operations and the incoming Administration ramps up new personnel before the inauguration.The 20th Amendment to our Constitution was enacted in 1933 to reduce the “lame duck” period between election and inauguration to January 20th instead of March 4th. Increasing ease in travel...

In a previous article, I had the pleasure of exposing how several canon law jurists from the University of Bologna, in Italy, influenced the works of later theologians and economic scholars from the School of Salamanca, whose theologians—for many Austrian economic scholars—are the fathers of modern economic thought.In the prior article, I spoke of the intellectual terrain built by the Bolognese of the fourteenth century that allowed the discoveries of the...