If you haven’t yet bought yourself a copy of Lew Rockwell’s Against the Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism do yourself a favor and pick one up.

The biggest political issue over the next fifteen years may be changing conditions that affect how much Social Security can pay. This would include the decline in the ratio of those who are paying into the system to those collecting. Once this was as much was some forty-two to one. Today the ratio is down to about three to one. That ratio will probably fall further, which would likely require more cuts and higher taxes. Rachel Greszler complains that more tax increases, already pending in Congress, are the most likely solution.

Social Security, the primary retirement savings tool and biggest tax for millions of Americans, is a bad deal, critics contend.

They argue that mandatory Social Security is a poor investment because it only provides an average annual income of some $17,000. This is a lousy return on the decades of tax payments, critics contend. They say most would obtain superior returns with private investments.

Donald Trump likes to posture as a tough guy and part of that tough guy persona involves bragging about how much he’s spent on the US military. This tendency was on full display in a tweet he posted three days after an American drone killed Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani in Baghdad:

According to the US Labor Department, worker productivity in the non-farm sector increased at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 after declining by 0.2 percent in the previous quarter. For the year, productivity increased 1.7 percent, up from 1.3 percent in both 2017 and 2018. It was the best annual showing since the 3.4 percent increase in 2010. For most commentators, an increase in productivity is considered an indication that the US economy is becoming healthier and wealthier.

This week the latest Democratic Party attempt to remove President Trump from office—impeachment over Trump allegedly holding up an arms deal to Ukraine—flopped. Just like “Russiagate” and the Mueller investigation, and a number of other attempts to overturn the 2016 election.

We’ve had three years of accusations and investigations with untold millions of dollars spent in a never-ending Democratic Party effort to remove President Trump from office.

Eugen von Bőhm-Bawerk wrote the most famous criticism of Karl Marx’s economic theory, and all students of Austrian economics know his Karl Marx and the Close of His System and his discussion of Marx in the first volume of Capital and Interest. Marx’s labor theory of value could not withstand the criticisms that Bőhm-Bawerk, writing from the standpoint of the subjective theory of value, directs against it. Bőhm-Bawerk, though, is not the only proponent of the subjective theory to examine Marx’s economics.

In the wake of the Brexit vote, Scottish nationalists have renewed their calls for a new referendum on Scottish independence. But many remain unconvinced, and many claim Scotland is “too small” to be an independent country. Others claim that Scotland is too poor, since Scotland’s GDP per capita is only 90 percent that of England.

Today would have been the ninety-first birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends, and when you met him, it was easy to see why Murray liked him. He was a genial and kind person, and a source of wise counsel to all those fortunate to know him. Burt was the founder of Camino Coins and a principal figure in the hard money community.

There are myriads of words written about socialism, and yet lots of misconceptions about it still exist even in the minds of those who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The most striking and frequent blunders are the identification of socialism exclusively with Marxism, the confusion between the concepts of socialism and communism, and the claim that fascism and National Socialism belong to the right, to name a few.