As the Washington drawbridge lowers for a second Trump administration, the world attempts to glean any insights that might indicate the direction of his second term. At the top of the list of concerns is the topic of sanctions.
It is a benefit of sound economic theory that it proves very useful in the refutation of popular fallacies and misconceptions about the workings of the market economy. One such fallacy is the assertion that government interventions through protective tariffs are without negative consequences for the people of the imposing country. Politicians and statesmen have employed these talking points to earn the support of the majority of the voting masses who are mostly unable to fully comprehend economic arguments.
Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” to avoid a government shutdown. We are good to go now. Government agencies may continue to operate while Congress tries to agree on the actual budget for the 2025 fiscal year that started on October 1st.
A continuing resolution (CR) is commonly called a “stopgap.” In fact, a Google search yields almost no other modern uses of the term. But is “stopgap” an appropriate term for this thing?
[Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, 2024; 690 pp.]
[Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Skyhorse Publishing, 2024; 258 pp.]
Our Enemy, the State
by Albert Jay Nock
This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.
Economists and the state are natural enemies. The central principle of economics is that the means for improving human well-being—what economists call “goods”—are naturally scarce and must be produced before they can be used to satisfy human wants. The scarcity principle also implies that, once produced, goods cannot be bestowed on one person without depriving some other person or persons of their use. In other words, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
