This year marks the fiftieth anniversary since Nixon suspended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold. This began the era of a global fiat money, debt-fueled economy. Since then, crises are more frequent but also shorter and always “solved” by adding more debt and more money printing.
How is it that America became a “strong but limited” government, and the world’s richest and most free country? That is the central question both considered and answered by Luigi Marco Bassani in his new work, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government, 1776–1865. As an eminent scholar, Bassani has long studied the antebellum area, Amercia’s struggle between national vs. local power, and the Jeffersonian tradition that colored the era.
Mandating private and government employees to be immunized against covid-19 and requiring the use of standardized electronic passes as proof of immunization across the nation is what liberty is made of, the editors of the Washington Post argued last week.
With June 2021 CPI growth being at a thirteen-year high, inflation has been on a lot of people’s minds lately. You can’t blame them, seeing as over 23 percent of all dollars in existence were created in 2020 alone. Although future inflation is certainly an important concern, in this article I instead focus on the chronic inflation this country has faced for over a century.
Sociologist Mike Savage’s new book, The Return of Inequalilty, is the latest in a long line of unsuccessful attempts to demonize and eliminate inequality. James R. Rogers provides an interesting and useful discussion of it in his review, “Is Inequality a Problem?” on the Law and Liberty website.
It is hard not to notice the Biden administration’s clear demonstration of their disregard for Americans’ property rights and the Constitution. All one needs to do is read the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause while considering Biden’s extension of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction moratorium.
Why? It did so despite admitting that despite trying everything they could to “discover” any plausible-sounding excuse that would meet constitutional muster, they were unable to do so.
Beginning in the early 1700s, a hitherto rather peripheral group of Native Americans called the Comanche swept into a vast area comprising much of what is now the southwestern United States, creating an empire that spanned parts of the modern states of Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In the process they dispossessed rival Native American tribes already occupying those lands – among them the Apache, who were fortunate to be able to relocate and preserve their nation further to the southwest.
Plenty has been written about financial transaction taxes (FTTs), mostly arguing over the politically charged issue of who pays: Main Street or Wall Street.
While talk today of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that touched off the Great Recession tends to center mainly around the failure of regulators or bad individual actors at the level of banks and lenders, we should not forget that it was Fed policy from 1993 to 2005 that created the crucial conditions for the ultimate collapse.
