My wife often poses the joke “Do you know the difference between doctors and God?” with the punchline being “God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.” The atrocious behavior of my neurosurgeon made me wonder: How does anyone get away with acting like this?In part one of my deep brain stimulation to fix the tremors in my hands, two holes are drilled into my skull while my head was secured in place by a metal cage with a plexiglass box fitted over it. I was sedated to a level...
Read More »Anarchy in the UK
Anarchism [an·ar·chism] n. 1. “a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups”Merriam WebsterThe venerable British magazine The Economist has us worried in their May 11 issue titled “The New Economic Order.” Contemplating what seems to be the collapse of the global, liberal order—Francis Fukuyama’s End of History...
Read More »Is High Inflation Followed by Demands for Sound Money? Usually Not.
The severe losses for the center-right parties in the mid-summer French and British general elections, (i.e., Macron’s center-right coalition partners and Britain’s Tories) together with a shift in the US toward MAGA within the Republican Party, pose a severe and possibly existential challenge to the ideal of sound money. This is despite surveys revealing strong and broad popular anger about the cumulative loss of purchasing power of their money during the pandemic...
Read More »Dr. Robert Malone Reads Rothbard
One of the silver linings of the covid regime is the fact that the state overplayed its hand and turned many people into skeptics of the State and its pawns in the media and academia. This wave of healthy skepticism has led to a surge of interest in the work of Murray Rothbard, the State’s greatest enemy.Dr. Robert Malone, whose Wikipedia entry tells you everything you need to know about what the establishment thinks of him, followed this path. He recently wrote on...
Read More »Another Presidential Debate, Another Loss for the Palestinians
In a recent article for the Mises Wire, Connor O’Keeffe rightly argues that President Joe Biden indisputably failed at appearing psychologically and physiologically well during the recent presidential debate. O’Keeffe further goes on to write that former President Donald Trump “did a perfectly good job” at looking stable enough against the characterization of him by many democrats as an “unhinged maniac” intent on “tearing the country down.”If one disregards Biden’s...
Read More »Bring Back the Political “Smoke-Filled Rooms”
As anyone who is conscious knows by now, the Joe Biden re-election campaign is in serious trouble. The president clearly showed signs of serious mental deterioration in his recent debate with Donald Trump and Biden’s performance was bad enough for even the New York Times (which had claimed up to the debate that Biden’s cognitive skills were fine, and anything said to the contrary was a lie) to call for him to drop out of the race.Biden, not surprisingly, has been...
Read More »It Didn’t Begin with LBJ: How the US Became a Transfer Society
Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill’s fascinating account traces the decline of the American constitutional framework from its origins in laissez-faire individualism to its current state of redistributive collectivism. Viewing the evolution as a series of legal developments motivated by ever greater financial incentives to involve the federal government, they highlight the following pivotal cases: (1) Marbury v. Madison (1803), which established the Supreme Court’s...
Read More »Do We Have Regrets While Celebrating July 4?
This is a transcript from Mark Thornton’s Podcast, “Minor Issues,” July 6.Well, I know that many of my listeners will have a certain number of regrets about the July 4th holiday. And some of them may not even celebrate it at all. I certainly share many of those regrets. And concerns about the future of our country.We have an extremely bad government. That has increased in size and power enormously. We have a national debt which has exploded in size with an annual...
Read More »British Sound Money MP Replaced by Labor Party Apparatchik: A Sign of the Times
Sound money advocate and Conservative Party MP for Wycombe Steve Baker lost his seat in the general election that took place on 4th July–curious timing for a sitting Prime Minister to have called an election his party was always near-certain to lose. As Americans were celebrating Independence Day, the remnant Brits opposed to the government meddling in every aspect of their lives were bracing for a prime minister who describes himself as a socialist–and thinks that...
Read More »It’s All MMT: The Fraud of “Monetary Policy”
Modern monetary theory (MMT) is not convincing to most trained economists of various schools of thought. This causes many to balk at MMT and mock it, some of which is warranted as a reductio ad absurdum, especially given some of MMT’s more outlandish claims. In fact, my own thesis was an Austrian critique of MMT.But there is also a fair amount of hypocrisy in the non-Austrian (e.g., mainstream, Keynesian, monetarist) critiques of MMT by mainstream economists. The...
Read More »