A mantra popularized by Bernie Sanders and like-minded progressives declares “billionaires should not exist.”
The statement serves as both a declaration of the “immorality” of wealth inequality as well as a justification for steep confiscatory taxes on wealth favored by the likes of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that police throughout the Western world will not hesitate to forcefully impose arbitrary and absurd government regulations.
In a recent interview Black Lives Matter (BLM) organizer Ariel Atkins argued that lootings are reparations for African Americans. Atkins denounced the suggestion that anything can be gained from peaceful protests. “Winning has come through revolts, winning has come through riots, ‘’ she said.
In the New York Times on September 8, 2020, Paul Krugman wrote that
The CARES Act, enacted in March, gave the unemployed an extra $600 a week in benefits. This supplement played a crucial role in limiting extreme hardship; poverty may even have gone down.
[John Kay and Mervyn King
Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers
Norton, 2020. xvi + 528 pages]
Kay and King are not Austrians, but in this important book, they lend aid and comfort to several key points of Austrian economics. Kay teaches economics at Oxford, and King, who was formerly governor of the Bank of England, teaches at NYU. (King in an earlier book, The End of Alchemy, that I had occasion to review warns against the dangers of fractional reserve banking in a way that will delight admirers of Murray Rothbard.)
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch its currency….Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer way of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action was published on this date in 1949. From the beginning, the Mises Institute’s mission has been to champion this book’s importance in the history of economic thought.
In the words of Henry Hazlitt, in his New York Times Review:
America is about growth and getting big, supersized, or bigly, as the president would say. There’s no debate, growth is good, in fact essential; bigger is better.
Is American politics reaching a breaking point? A recent study by researchers from Brown and Stanford Universities certainly paints a grim picture of the state of the national discourse. The study attempts to measure “affective polarization,” defined as the extent to which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than their own, in nine developed countries, including the United States.
