Join Joe Salerno, David Gordon, Jeff Deist, Patrick Newman, and many more at the 2022 Libertarian Scholars Conference on Saturday, September 10th! We’ll meet at the Grand Hyatt in Nashville, Tennessee. The first Libertarian Scholars Conference was held in New York City in 1972 under the aegis of the Center for Libertarian Studies. The conference was held annually (except for 1973) throughout the 1970s in New York or Princeton, New Jersey (1977, 1978), with the 8th...
Read More »The West’s Russia Sanctions Could Lead to Many Unpredictable and Unpleasant Outcomes
Global supply shocks are historically rare events. All the more extraordinary to have two such shocks in quick succession—the second arriving even before the first has entirely faded away. That is what the world now experiences in the form of the Great Pandemic followed by the Great West-Russia economic war. The most visible symptom of the supply disruption is the sky-high price of energy and a range of other commodities. What Is the Effect of Sanctions? The waging...
Read More »Governments “Sanction” Their Own Citizens Every Day. The Russia Sanctions Are Just a Natural Evolution.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in the last week of February 2022 was the culmination of decades of transnational statist expansion. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which managers of the postwar Washington-centered imperium set up to counter Communist imperialism coordinated from Moscow, was rendered obsolete when the Soviet Union collapsed at Christmastide in 1991. But instead of rejoicing in the fall of an adversarial empire...
Read More »Trading with the Enemy: An American Tradition
During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Americans continued the great tradition of trading with the enemy, and even more readily than before. As in King George’s War, Newport took the lead; other vital centers were New York and Philadelphia. The individualistic Rhode Islanders angrily turned Governor Stephen Hopkins out of office for embroiling Rhode Island in a “foreign” war between England and France. Rhode Island blithely disregarded the embargo against...
Read More »Patents, Legal Monopolies, and the High Prices for Drugs
Currently, 63 percent of American adults are on prescription drugs, according to a 2021 survey. Of this 63 percent of Americans, 26 percent say they have difficulty affording their prescriptions. Despite the prices of prescription drugs falling in recent years, an increasing number of Americans are concerned about high drug costs and demanding action be taken, 88 percent saying they want it to be easier for generic drugs to enter the market. The same percentage...
Read More »With Inflation at a 40-Year High, the Fed Is Too Afraid to Act
Price inflation has been accelerating upward since April of last year. Yet the Fed has done virtually nothing. What’s the Fed waiting for? Original Article: “With Inflation at a 40-Year High, the Fed Is Too Afraid to Act” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rose 7.5 percent in January, year over year. This was, the BLS notes, the “largest 12-month increase since the period ending February 1982.” Moreover, The...
Read More »Inflation: Who or What Is the Culprit?
Inflation—defined herein as a widespread increase in the prices of widely purchased consumer goods—has gotten worse since I commented on it last spring. According to the official Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation is currently running at 7.5 percent year over year—the highest since 1982. What triggered the last year’s explosion in prices? President Joe Biden has tried to blame inflation on greedy corporations and supply-chain disruptions. The former is...
Read More »Behind Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the Great Reset: Part 3
Bob continues his series on Klaus Schwab and the Great Reset, highlighting an interesting remark in Biden’s SOTU, Strobe Talbott’s open support for global government, and the introduction to Schwab’s book on Covid-19 and the Great Reset. Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest: Part 1 and Part 2 of this series The WEF’s bio for its founder, Klaus Schwab Schwab’s books The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Covid-19 and the Great Reset Bob’s first...
Read More »Why Sanctions Don’t Work, and Why They Mostly Hurt Ordinary People
The United States and its western European allies have in recent days repeatedly increased economic sanctions against not only the Russian regime, but against millions of ordinary Russians. It has done this by cutting much of Russian trade and Russian finance out of international markets. Moody’s and S&P global have both downgraded Russia’s credit rating. The US has frozen Russian reserves and cut many Russian banks off from SWIFT, the international banking...
Read More »Why Putin Probably Hasn’t Doomed the Dollar
In this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at the economic consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. What has been the damage from America’s weaponization of the dollar? Is Russia likely to return to the gold standard? What may be the fallout in Europe? Recommended Reading “Can Government Successfully Counter Recessions Through Expansionary Policies? Don’t Count on It” by Frank Shostak: Mises.org/RR_72_A “Sanctions against Russia Are...
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