If it’s presidential election time, then, like clockwork, it’s time for Republicans to continue the US national security establishment’s sixty-year-long attack on Cuba. That’s because Republican presidential candidates feel the need to pander to Cuban American voters in Florida as a way to show how “tough” they are on communism.

Politicians have destroyed more than 13 million jobs this year in a deluge of edicts aimed to fight the covid-19 pandemic. More than two hundred thousand Americans still died from the coronavirus, but the anticovid government crackdowns probably did far more damage than the virus. The covid crisis has also shown how easy it is for politicians to fan fears to seize nearly absolute power.

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

In Friedrich Hayek’s 1954 book Capitalism and the Historians, the late French philosopher and political economist Bertrand de Jouvenel noted a baffling historical trend: “Strangely enough, the fall from favor of the money-maker coincides with an increase in his social usefulness.”

The action axiom is the starting point of Mises’s economic method (praxeology). But it is far more than a place to start. It solves a seemingly intractable problem.

As has become typical for years divisible by four, we are well into the high-intensity portion of the various “must vote” campaigns. Both parties push that as a bipartisan narrative, even though each side focuses their message mainly toward getting more of “their people” to vote. But while that pattern has become “same old, same old,” there has been a change in the pitch.

During Tuesday’s presidential debate, former vice president Biden attempted to paint Donald Trump as the bad-on-crime candidate when he claimed that crime had gone down during the Obama administration but increased during Trump’s term.