It’s well known that Murray Rothbard thinks that intellectuals play a crucial role in getting the public to accept the state. Why are these “court intellectuals” needed? The necessity arises from the nature of the state. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard maintains that the state is a predatory organization: it uses coercion to seize property from people. It consists, moreover, of a relatively small minority of people: even in states with large bureaucracies, most people are not state officials.

Inflation is so high in America that we’re now supposed to believe that inflation is “moderating” if it doesn’t go above 8.5 percent. That, at least, was the message in much of the speculation yesterday around what April’s Consumer Price Index inflation numbers would show.

Peyton Gouzien: Welcome to Repeal the 20th Century. I have a very special guest, Jeff Deist. For those who do not know, Jeff Deist is the president of the Mises Institute and hosts the Institute’s Human Action Podcast.

Jeff Deist: It’s a pleasure to speak with the famed investor Jimmy Rogers. How are you doing, sir?

Jim Rogers: I’m delighted to be here, Jeff. I’m a fan of the Mises Institute.

JD: You live in Singapore. How did you and your family fare during the last two years of covid?

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Simon and Schuster, 2022
viii + 373 pp.

Russians are “eschatologically chosen.” They must stand against the false faith, the pseudoreligion of Western liberalism and the spread of its evil: modernity, scientism, postmodernity, and the new world order. This is the thesis of Aleksandr Dugin, the prominent Russian philosopher, and a mentor of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. As a geographical “pivot area,” Russia must regain its position in the heartland of the Eurasian continent.

The success of Barbados relative to other Caribbean countries has unleashed a welter of studies explaining the ascendancy of Barbados. Frequently, Barbados is compared to Jamaica because they are both former colonies of England that attained independence in the 1960s.

Speaking at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, President Joe Biden on Tuesday morning declared inflation to be his top “domestic priority” and insisted that inflation would not be a problem were it not for covid and the war in Ukraine.

The government’s latest report puts the twelve-month official consumer price inflation rate at 8.5 percent, the highest since December 1981:

It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of right.

So wrote Ludwig von Mises in The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912. And further: