Mises Wire

Can Donald Trump and Elon Musk actually change the direction of government growth and spending? The proverbial Overton Window does not stay open very long.

President Trump has announced his intentions for the government to set up a sovereign wealth fund. However popular the idea might be, it runs headlong into the realities of economic calculation and would soon deteriorate another government slush fund.

The Southern Reconstruction, while portrayed by progressives as virtuous northerners trying to rebuild the South, was actually an attempt to use state power to direct social and economic life there. 

Although egalitarian interventionism constantly is wrecked on the shoals of reality, there is always a stable of new politicians eager to promote what Murray Rothbard called “a revolt against nature.”

The US government‘s gold stockpile is not supporting the US dollar. The demand for US debt and currency is largely based on the state‘s taxation power. It‘s not based on gold.

The world‘s trading systems are broken, thanks to fiat currencies and the reckless deficit spending by the US government. There is a way out; it is called settling accounts in gold, which would force fiscal sanity once more.

In a recent New York Times column, Dartmouth professor Brooke Harrington claimed that Trump is undoing trust in our institutions while Franklin Roosevelt restored it. Clearly, Harrington doesn‘t know much about FDR—or Trump.

Franklin Roosevelt’s attacks on the gold standard ushered in “the age of inflation” that has now robbed generations of Americans through the inflation tax.

The US gold reserves in Fort Knox are a legacy of the time the US government confiscated private gold and reneged on its promises to pay its debts in gold.

Universities are incubators of socialism because they are themselves socialist institutions funded by taxpayers with Rube Goldberg-style incentive systems.