Perhaps one of the more astute observers of Russian foreign policy in recent decades has been John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago. He has spent years warning against US-led NATO enlargement as a tactic that would provoke conflict with the Russian regime. Moreover, Mearsheimer has sought to explain why this conflict exists at all. Why, for example, doesn’t the Russian regime just accept US-led expansionism in the region? Or perhaps, more precisely, why have...
Read More »If Government Can Take from One Group, It Can and Will Take from Everyone
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to argue that private property rights, as understood by classic liberal thinkers, by those who embrace Austrian economic theory, and by all members of an enlightened society, are not only the cornerstone, but also the last defense of human civilization and the Western way of life in particular. Nothing stands a chance without this premise. No prosperity can ever come about or even be maintained, none of the civil liberties and human...
Read More »The Fed Cannot Go Bankrupt; However, It Can Bankrupt the Country
A recent essay on the Mises Wire triggered quite a bit of discussion among a group of Austrian school economists. Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock’s “Who Owns Federal Reserve Losses and How Will They Impact Monetary Policy?” became the focal point for a wide-ranging discussion of monetary issues that got to the heart of our monetary and overall economic future. The Fed Cannot Go Bankrupt The article itself is a fairly straightforward explanation of how the Fed...
Read More »Inflation Hits 9.1 Percent after Months of Empty Talk at the Fed
The US Bureau of Labor statistics released new Consumer Price Index inflation estimates this morning, and the official numbers for June 2022 show that price inflation has risen to 9.1 percent year over year. That’s the biggest number since November 1981, when the price growth measure hit 9.6 percent year over year. The month-over-month measure surged as well, with the CPI measure hitting 1.4 percent. That’s the highest month-over-month growth since March 1980, when...
Read More »Turns Out the Elites Like the Administrative State Better than Democracy
If there is a mantra among progressive American political and media elites, it would be “our democracy,” usually preceded by what they believe to be a threat from the Right. For example, progressives deemed the recent reversal of Roe “a threat to our democracy” because it removed laws regulating abortion from Supreme Court jurisdiction and returned the issue to democratically elected legislatures. It would seem inconsistent to invoke the democratic electoral process...
Read More »Like the Old McCarthyism, the New McCarthyism Targets Russia
In January 1956, the iconoclastic leftist American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote “America,” a prose poem that laments the state of the country and the poet’s place in it. “America” was included in the short poetry collection entitled Howl, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Publishers in November of the same year. In 1957, Howl became a cause célèbre as the centerpiece of People of the State of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, an obscenity trial that...
Read More »The Industrial Revolution and the West Indies: Did the Colonies Spark Progress in the Metropole?
There is a renewed interest in the West Indian colonies' relevance to the British industrial revolution and the subsequent economic transformations that substantially altered Western society's fortunes. This literature has been provoked by the urge to challenge earlier interpretations that underestimate colonies' value to Western countries by showing how interconnected global economies were. Colonies were expensive for Britain, and economists contend that there would...
Read More »How Much Did the US Government Pressure Twitter to Ban Alex Berenson?
Nearly a year ago, former New York Times Journalist Alex Berenson was permanently banned from Twitter for writing the following lines about the Covid shot: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” From the beginning of the Covid hysteria, we followed...
Read More »More than Sixty Years after “Liberation,” Cuba Is a Communist Slave State
In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick has a chapter named “The Tale of the Slave” in which he explains the nine phases from the most restrictive to more liberating states of slavery. He writes that even though enslaved people have certain forms of self-rule, they are still enslaved. He asks: “Which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave?” Nozick’s question highlights that there is no difference between people under...
Read More »War Spending Gives MMTers and the Left a Strong Talking Point
When conservatives applaud unlimited war spending, they not only harm our economy and body politic, but they give the Left a powerful talking point. Original Article: “War Spending Gives MMTers and the Left a Strong Talking Point” Time and time again, prowar spending concedes one of the Left’s most convincing points. As Assal Rad tweeted recently, we will have sent $54,000,000,000 to Ukraine in less than 4 months. “How will we pay for it” never seems to apply to...
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