“Happy families are all alike,” goes the Leo Tolstoy quote from the Russian classic Anna Karenina, “but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Open a popular magazine of your choice, or even the newspaper of record, and you’ll find a lot of fascinating claims seemingly backed by scientific aura. Eat this superfood and you’ll be healthy; do this minor thing every day and you’ll be successful; have governments just slightly change some condition that faces us hapless humans and we’ll change the world.

No government looking to massively expand its size in the economy and monetize a soaring deficit is going to act against rising prices, despite claiming the opposite.

One of the things that surprises citizens in Argentina or Turkey is that their populist governments always talk about the middle classes and helping the poor, yet inflation still soars, making everyone poorer.

It may come as a surprise—though it should not—that one of the very first acts of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was a tax program at least as great as the one imposed on the colonies by Great Britain. It turned out that taxation with representation could be just as oppressive as taxation without representation or worse.

The yearly growth rate of US’s “Austrian money supply“ jumped by almost 80 percent in February 2020 (see chart). Given such massive increase in money supply, it is tempting to suggest that this lays the foundation for an explosive increase in the annual growth of prices of goods and services sometime in the future.

If one boldly asserts the importance of the right of freedom of speech, it is almost inevitable that another will respond with one of the most common apologetic arguments for the government limitation of speech, “But you can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” The non sequitur argument is supposed to humble the right of free speech in favor of some government restriction.

The reductive and lazy dismissals of the possibility of bringing about free market systems of healthcare, in addition to the administrative and legislative hurdles imposed by government agencies, have all been brought into the limelight in the wake of the pandemic. However, dealing with them is not the purpose of this article; there are a sufficient number which can easily address the usual complaints.