[This article is excerpted from a talk delivered on February 22, 2020 at the Austrian Student Scholars Conference, hosted by Grove City College in Pennsylvania.]

One need not look far for evidence that many Americans want to help the poor. One obvious piece of that evidence is that many give substantial amounts of time, effort, and money to do so. But given that evidence, why do we need government to be so substantially involved in redistribution, backed by coercion, rather than relying on individuals and voluntary associations to provide charity?

According to the popular way of thinking, it is held that banks are responsible for the expansion of lending also known as credit, and given that economic prosperity is associated with an increase in credit, they are seen as crucial to the economic well-being. But are banks the true source of credit?

It has become something of a tradition in the free market corners of social media to express shock and dismay over the possibility that New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)—an avowed “democratic socialist”—has an economics degree from Boston University.

This is how it works: AOC makes a statement that is notably antimarket, prosocialist, or generally clueless about general concepts from the field of economics.

From at least the 1960s onward, Murray Rothbard regarded secession and what he called “radical decentralization” as central to libertarian ideology.

On Tuesday, February 18, President Trump with excellent judgment commuted the fourteen-year prison sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, a.k.a. “Blago.”

“We have commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich,” Trump said. “He’ll be able to go back home with his family after serving eight years in jail. That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion. And in the opinion of many others.”

Wherever you look, prices for consumer goods, real estate, stocks, and bonds are on the rise. That means that the purchasing power of money is on the decline. For if, say, stock prices go up, your money unit can buy fewer stocks. What it also means is that although people holding assets, whose prices increase, become “richer,” people holding money get “poorer.”

During the early 1990s, as the world of the old Soviet Bloc was rapidly falling apart, Murray Rothbard saw it all for what it was: a trend of mass decentralization and secession unfolding before the world’s eyes. The old Warsaw Pact states of Poland, Hungary, and others won de facto independence for the first time in decades. Other groups began to demand full blown de jure secession as well.

Rothbard approved of this, and he set to work encouraging the secessionists over the opposition of many foreign policy “experts.”