Free Republic

The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released new price inflation data Tuesday, and according to the report, price inflation during May decelerated, coming in at the lowest year-over-year increase in twenty-six months. According to the BLS, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rose 4.0 percent year over year in May before seasonal adjustment. That’s down from April’s year-over-year increase of 4.9 percent, and May is the twenty-seventh month in a row with inflation above the Fed’s arbitrary 2 percent inflation target. (More precisely, the Fed targets a two-percent rate in the PCE measure.) Meanwhile, month-over-month inflation rose 0.1 percent...

On this episode of the Resistance Library Podcast Sam Jacobs welcomes Tho Bishop onto the show. Tho Bishop is the Assistant Editor of Mises.com and a proud Florida Man. He recently penned an article on a Rothbardian right as an alternative to the paleo-progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt. He believes this to be the fighting ideology that can effectively combat federal overreach and globalist tyranny alike. Listen now to our latest guest episode!

When not assisting the continued politicization of America’s most powerful legislative branch, the media this week has relished in a variety of news items continuing to push the narrative that President Donald Trump is mentally unfit to hold office. While it’s fair to question the fitness of anyone to hold the power given to the modern American president, the obsession with Trump’s mental stability is a wonderful example of the absurd lack of self-awareness enjoyed by the privileged residents of America’s capitol. After all, the city that finds Donald Trump so revolting is – as a recent study by Ryan...

As the events of recent weeks demonstrate beyond doubt, political correctness is very real, deeply authoritarian, and wedded at the hip to progressive government. PC is not about respect or inclusivity, but rather a naked attempt to consciously manipulate language in service of progressive ends. Worst of all, PC creates an atmosphere in which we mostly censor ourselves. When libertarians like Daniel McAdams and Scott Horton find themselves de-platformed by twitter, it's time to see the "state-linguistic complex" for what it really is. Jeff Deist addresses the Federalist Society of Montgomery, Alabama, to make sense of it all.

We've long been told that Cuba's health care system is one of the greatest in the world. In spite of the fact that health usually correlates with wealth in national statistics, we're assured that Cuba's obvious poverty is offset, at least in part, by amazingly low infant mortality rates and life expectancy. But in a new short article for the journal Health Policy and Planning, Gilbert Berdine, Vincent Geloso, and Benjamin Powell examine some of the ways that the data is being manipulated in Cuba to ensure better-looking health statistics. For example, on the matter of infant mortality, doctors have...

"Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.” And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing...

There's an old saying that "he who distinguishes well teaches well." In other words, if one's going to talk about an important subject, one should be able to define his terms and tell the difference between two things that are not the same. This wisdom, unfortunately, is rarely embraced by modern pundits arguing about the causes of the American Civil War. A typical example can be found in this article at the Huffington Post in which the author opines: "This discussion [over the causes of the war] has led some people to question if the Confederacy, and therefore the Civil...

I made a small note in a previous article about how we shouldn’t worry about technology that displaces human workers: The lamenters don’t seem to understand that increased productivity in one industry frees up resources and laborers for other industries, and, since increased productivity means increased real wages, demand for goods and services will increase as well. They seem to have a nonsensical apocalyptic view of a fully automated future with piles and piles of valuable goods everywhere, but nobody can enjoy them because nobody has a job. I invite the worriers to check out simple supply and demand analysis...

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a senior judicial analyst for Fox News, was a guest lecturer last week at Mises University in Auburn Alabama. During an opening lecture where he discussed natural rights, the development of the Constitution and footnote 4 of United States v. Carolene Products Co., he closed the question and answer period following his lecture by saying he saw dark clouds coming for the country and warned the students that some of them may die in government prisons by standing faithful to first principles. The full warning is here (1 minute 33 seconds):

An essential element of the “unorthodox” doctrines, advanced both by all socialists and by all interventionists, is that the recurrence of depressions is a phenomenon inherent in the very operation, of the market economy. But while the socialists contend that only the substitution of socialism for capitalism can eradicate the evil, the interventionists ascribe to the government the power to correct the operation of the market economy in such a way as to bring about what they call “economic stability.” These interventionists would be right if their antidepression plans were to aim at a radical abandonment of credit expansion policies....

The attack on a Christmas market in Berlin earlier this week, apparently carried out by a Pakistani immigrant*, is just the latest in a series of violent and disturbing terrorist incidents in Germany. The event raises uncomfortable questions about immigration, culture clashes, Islam, and identity: what does it mean to be German, rather than someone who merely lives in Germany? It also raises pragmatic questions about how to provide physical security in public spaces, given such dramatic failures by the German government. Libertarians can duck these questions, or dismiss them. We can sniff about how everyone is an individual, how...

North Carolina recently offered Boeing $683 million in tax incentives to open a plant in North Carolina to build Boeing’s new 777X jetliner. The NC bid failed, as did those from some other states, when Boeing decided to build the 777X in its home state of Washington where there is no state, personal, or corporate income tax.

In dealing with this system of economic organization — the market economy — we employ the term "economic freedom." Very often, people misunderstand what it means, believing that economic freedom is something quite apart from other freedoms, and that these other freedoms — which they hold to be more important — can be preserved even in the absence of economic freedom. The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society. The individual is able to choose his career; he...

If Only D'Souza Were Right Mises Daily: Monday, September 03, 2012 by Gary North by Gary North 2016: Obama's America I went to see 2016: Obama's America. Dinesh D'Souza wrote, stars in, directed, narrates, and did the original research for it. If we look at this from the point of view of its success as a documentary, I think it is effective. It is making money in theaters. This is amazing for a documentary. It is a campaign-year documentary, and it is a good one. It is also dead wrong. That is because it misses the fundamental political fact of...

While we were students of the state education apparatus, how many of us had to write research papers where we were asked to "change the world"?I'm sure we can all remember a writing prompt similar to this: "If I could change one thing about the world, it would be …" or "How I can make the world a better place."Often, these writing prompts were given to us when we were not even old enough to think about abstract concepts like war and politics.Were these assignments teaching us to think critically? In some cases, this is possible. For the most part,...

A recent article by the best-known Keynesian economist at Yale, Robert Schiller, begins this way: [A] … fact … about our current economic situation … can no longer be denied: our economy is in desperate need of government stimulus. Does the rest of the article provide a defense of stimulus? No. Since the need for stimulus is undeniable, there is no need to defend it. No reasonable person would disagree. Right? Wrong. There is a problem here. Reasonable people do disagree, strongly disagree. Robert Barro, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote an article about the same time as Schiller's explaining why...

It's a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes from Mises Media on Vimeo. We are surrounded by miracles created in the private sector, particularly in the digital universe, and yet we don't appreciate them enough. Meanwhile, the public sector is systematically wrecking the physical world in sneaky and petty ways that really do matter. Jeffrey Tucker, in this follow-up to his Bourbon for Breakfast, draws detailed attention to both. He points out that the products of digital capitalism are amazing, astounding, beyond belief—more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of the Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box...

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out a massive class-action sexual-discrimination lawsuit against Walmart. By overruling a lower court's decision, the Supreme Court raised the barrier to future legal challenges against large corporations. As might be expected, probusiness outlets defended the ruling, while advocates for women and minorities lamented it. In the present article I won't discuss the specific legalities of the case, as I'm not a lawyer. Rather, I will argue that standard libertarian theory says that there should be no such things as laws against "discrimination," because they are illegitimate infringements on property rights. Furthermore, in...

Friedrich Hayek and American Science Fiction Mises Daily: Friday, April 08, 2011 by Jeff Riggenbach Friedrich August von Hayek was born in Vienna on the eighth day of May 1899. When he graduated from the University of Vienna in 1921, at the age of 22, he applied for a job with the Austrian Office of Claims Accounts, the government agency charged with paying the nation's war debts as those had recently been defined in the Treaty of Saint Germain, the treaty that, for those who lived in Austria, ended World War I. Hayek had a letter of recommendation from a...

Every once in a while, something comes along that perfectly encapsulates the idea of so-called "social justice" in action. For all the wonderful critiques that have been written about this wretched concept by its many detractors,[1] none quite match the elegant simplicity of a recent work by some of its advocates. I am referring here to a recent video made for the World Day of Social Justice[2] in which students and teachers complete this sentence: Everyone has the right to _____. The video is a colorful montage of possible completions to this sentence, set to some pleasant easy-listening music. It...