This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on October 12, 2024.“Printing Power” in our title has a double meaning: It can mean “printing power”—the power to print money, which central banks have. But we will focus on “printing power”—the central bank’s money printing as an essential source of the power of the state, including of course the Federal Reserve’s printing to promote the power of...
Read More »The Bailout Fallacy
What Went Wrong with Capitalismby Ruchir SharmaSimon and Schuster, 2024; 384 pp.It is always encouraging when a non–Austrian School economist accepts through his own reasoning an essential tenet of Austrian economics. Ruchir Sharma, who is chairman of Rockefeller International, founder and chief investments officer of Breakout Capital, and a well-known economic journalist, is not an Austrian, though he is aware of Friedrich Hayek’s work. He lends strong support to...
Read More »Selections from Our Enemy, the State: Supports Summit 2024
All States Are Empires of Economic Lies—Tom DiLorenzoI’m going to start out by expressing my agreement with Doug Casey, who wrote about the economics profession of today. Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists. They tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.This has been going on for a long time. Here’s the founding document of the American Economic Association from the 1880s....
Read More »Why Politicians Love Tariffs
What is the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order....
Read More »Who Ultimately Pays the Cost of Protective Tariffs?
It is a benefit of sound economic theory that it proves very useful in the refutation of popular fallacies and misconceptions about the workings of the market economy. One such fallacy is the assertion that government interventions through protective tariffs are without negative consequences for the people of the imposing country. Politicians and statesmen have employed these talking points to earn the support of the majority of the voting masses who are mostly...
Read More »The USS Liberty and America’s Greatest “Ally”
The recent destruction of the Syrian regime, replaced by Islamists and Jihadists, reminds us that the American foreign-policy establishment in Washington continues to do the bidding of the State of Israel which exerts its influence through one of the most well-funded and extensive lobbying efforts Washington has ever known. The surreptitious alliance of terrorist Syrian Rebels, Israelis, and Americans, is just the latest manifestation of this working...
Read More »No, A Continuing Resolution Is Not a Stopgap
Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” to avoid a government shutdown. We are good to go now. Government agencies may continue to operate while Congress tries to agree on the actual budget for the 2025 fiscal year that started on October 1st.A continuing resolution (CR) is commonly called a “stopgap.” In fact, a Google search yields almost no other modern uses of the term. But is “stopgap” an appropriate term for this thing?Modern dictionaries define...
Read More »Provoked: The Long Train of Abuses that Culminated in the Ukraine War
[Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, 2024; 690 pp.]“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” Scott Horton is the liberty movement’s foreign policy hedgehog, endeavoring to convince the American public of one essential truth: the folly of war. But within that sphere, Horton is a fox, weaving an encyclopedic knowledge of various conflicts into an...
Read More »Hunter Biden Is Evil—and So Is Joe
The unusually extensive “pardon” by lame-duck “President” Biden has been much in the news lately, but the pardon is not the main issue we should be interested in. The real issue is that the Bidens, both father and son, are evil. Hunter’s Biden’s “lost” laptop—which 501 “security professionals” falsely claimed was a Russian fake —reveals warmongering brazen in its duplicity.Concerning the pardon, only this need be said. Of course no one should be prosecuted for tax...
Read More »The Real Scandal of Hunter’s Pardon
Politicians and pundits spent much of last week commenting on President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for lying on a federal gun purchase form, failing to pay taxes, and any other offenses he may have committed over the past decade. Much of the controversy is because President Biden repeatedly pledged that he would never pardon his son.Some have also observed that the pardon’s timeline starts the year Hunter Biden joined the board of the Ukraine energy company...
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