Tag Archives: newsletter

Unless you work for a bank or the government, you may not have noticed that yesterday was a federal holiday—Juneteenth—commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is a perfectly good thing to celebrate, of course, but alas, as Connor O’Keeffe has recently noted, since the day was declared a federal holiday in 2021, it has largely been used by leftwing groups to push ever larger amounts of government intervention in favor of the Left’s favorite...

[This essay originally appeared in Christian Economics, March 4, 1958. It was reprinted as chapter 10 of Planning for Freedom.]Our economic system — the market economy or capitalism — is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the necessity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the consumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A...

The Biden administration recently announced that it is canceling another $7.7 billion in student debt, and this will bring the total amount of student debt it has forgiven to over $160 billion since 2021.The reason for this aggressive push on the topic of student debt, according to some political analysts, is that in the three years Joe Biden has been in office, he has failed to do enough in regard to this issue. As expected, this has left some of his...

Overview: The US dollar is trading higher against all the G10 currencies today but the Norwegian krone. Norway’s central bank left policy on hold and warned that if the economy performs as expected, it does not anticipate a rate cut until next year. On the other hand, the Swiss National Bank surprised many with its second consecutive rate cut. The Swiss franc is the weakest of the major currencies, off about 0.70% against the dollar. The Bank of England is up next....

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....

The most recent Business Employment Dynamics (BED) summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the US economy lost 192,000 private-sector jobs during the third quarter of 2023. According to the BLS: From June 2023 to September 2023, gross job losses from closing and contracting private-sector establishments were 7.8 million, a decrease of 37,000 jobs from the previous quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over this period, gross job...

How does a radical libertarian abolitionist attorney from the North go from passionately defending the United States Constitution–arguing that the document prohibited slavery from its ratification–to declaring the United States Constitution “unfit to exist” two decades later?Lysander Spooner wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in 1845 as a response to William Lloyd Garrison, who opposed the Constitution due to its apparent preservation of slavery. Garrison was a...

Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions ranging from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and even violent assault.When people...

Last week, we looked at the weakness of the job market that belies all the happy talk from the administration about employment. For instance, we noted the fact that full-time employment is in decline, as is temporary work. We can couple this with the fact that the total number of employed persons in this economy has gone nowhere in eleven months. On top of all this, another indicator of the lackluster jobs economy is the volume of government-job growth compared to...

A thorough review of the existing literature on human rights finds a problem: it takes a book or lengthy chapter to describe them. Because of the complexity, many people misconstrue rights versus other human social engagements, such as obligations, promises, relationships, or privileges. This article summarizes an accurate but concise description of human rights theory, with a few examples, in a more readily accessible fashion that won’t require hefty research or a...