The 1947 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting [in Switzerland] was enough to satisfy Mises’s curiosity about Europe and European scholars for quite some time. Europe lay in shambles, even Paris was in rags. He did not even wish to think about traveling to Austria. All that was good and memorable about Europe was in the past. No need for him to return to the old continent just to witness the misery induced by those very statist follies he had spent a lifetime fighting.

In the incessant media discussion about whether inflation is transitory there is a big elephant in the room about which all are silent. Perhaps strangely some do not see it. Others for whatever reason pretend it is not there. The elephant is the fantastic surge in US corporate profits that monetary inflation has fueled during the second year of the pandemic. This elephant’s unremarked appearance is likely transitory, unlike the simultaneous jump in US consumer prices.

The headline 3.9 percent unemployment rate looks positive, but job creation fell significantly below consensus, at 199,000 in December versus a consensus estimate of 450,000.

The weak jobs figure should be viewed in the context of the largest stimulus plan in recent history. With massive monetary and fiscal support and a government deficit of $2.77 trillion, the second highest on record, job creation falls significantly short of previous recoveries and the employment situation is significantly worse than it was in 2019.

Back to 2020, the federal government’s covid-mandated shutdown of meat production plants hobbled the nation’s meat production capabilities, leaving farmers with nowhere to send their beef.

2021 may have seen the greatest proliferation in American government command and control, with its corresponding constriction in liberty, in my lifetime. Power has become dramatically more centralized in the federal government--at the expense of individuals and their voluntary arrangements--with trillions of dollars of new programs and proposals (promoted as costless to Americans), expanded regulatory abuses, and breathtaking efforts at income redistribution nowhere authorized in the Constitution.

David Gordon is a genius, a man whose intellectual abilities and output exceed mine. I make that claim without any sense of envy. I also claim our unequal conditions are beneficial to each other, and society in general. Because of these declarations, I am a classical liberal in the Misesian sense. Let me explain.

Mainstream economists and the media have a well-known love affair with using lighthearted words to describe policy decisions and economic concepts they find difficult to explain. CNBC uses the term triple threat to describe what was revealed in the December Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting this week. The triple threat would occur if the Fed were to:

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14–16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center.

Government breaks things. Then it often rides in on a white horse promising to “fix” the very things it broke.

In the latest example of government claiming it will solve a problem it created to begin with, President Joe Biden has committed to fixing the rising cost of meat.

Overall, meat prices have climbed 16 percent over the last year. Beef prices are up 20.9 percent. Biden says the problem is a lack of competition in the meatpacking industry.

“Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism—it’s exploitation,” Biden said.

The US and other countries of the Western world are divided by ever more stark ideological differences, to put it mildly. Because most people live in societies where the power to make some of the most important choices, and to use offensive force to effect them, is concentrated in the state, these increasing differences of opinion are raising the stakes of losing or lacking political power. Accordingly, all kinds of people have begun to take an interest in political secession and decentralization as a solution to the intensifying power struggles.