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

The standard leftist refrain about “advanced capitalism” is that it amounts to “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.” Like most leftist notions, this idea represents almost the exact opposite of the truth. The system they refer to is anything but socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Capitalists do not want socialism for themselves and capitalism for the rest. Capitalists seek profit, which can only come under a capitalist system.

In 1975, after nearly a decade of outright conflict, the United States government abandoned its doomed escapade in Vietnam. It left a devastated country and over a million corpses in its wake. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime, already teetering on utter collapse, completely dissolved without American support. And the Communist forces of North Vietnam eagerly descended on Saigon, impatient to implement their antimarket and antiproperty policies.

The Left is often assumed to be a major force against war and intervention to the point that many on the Right and Libertarians try to appeal to the left based on the agreement on the issue. This assumption ignores how the left’s opposition to war has mostly been when politically beneficial.

The Russian central bank recently announced that it will stop buying gold at a fixed rate and will instead buy it at the negotiated rate from banks. Following the numerous sanctions imposed on Russia, the ruble had fallen tremendously against the US dollar, to get out of such a situation it had announced that it would buy gold at a fixed price of five thousand rubles a gram until June 30.

As hard as it is to believe, the Chinese regime is still employing a “zero covid” strategy and claims it can eradicate covid entirely through lockdowns and vaccinations. China’s draconian, nightmarish, near-total lockdown policy—which is notably still “necessary” in spite of widespread vaccination—has recently been revived in Shanghai, where residents are now struggling to find food.

Both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard thought highly of Alfred Schutz, an Austrian philosopher and sociologist who studied with Mises in Vienna and worked as both an academic and an investment banker in Austria and later in the United States. (He spelled his last name “Schűtz” in Austria but Anglicized it to “Schutz.”) In today’s column, I’m going to talk about a few things we can learn from his book The Phenomenology of the Social World, which was published in German in 1932 and appeared in English translation in 1967.

Physicist John Stewart Bell said:

The scientific attitude is that correlations cry out for explanation.

Using the Federal Reserve’s data, see the Consumer Price Index (blue line) left axis and M1 Money Supply (red line) right axis for the 14 month period of January 2021 to February 2022: