It has long been said that the financial and economic education in the public school system is far from perfect. I, as a current high school student, can vouch for that claim. From promoting crazed statist ideologies to nonsensical Keynesian beliefs, the public school system is nothing short of a tool for the state to harness power.
Of all the problems 2020 has given the world, perhaps one of the greatest has been granted by the Fed to a handful of CEOs across the country, that is, if their corporation has a credit rating of junk bond or higher.
[Editor’s note: this essay was found among Bettina Bien Greaves’s files. A note in her handwriting indicates that it was written in 1944 and that Mises used it in his 1959 seminar.
Robert Nozick’s derivation of a minimal state in the first part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) has generated a lot of criticism, and you might think there is nothing new to be said about it. I have a new point, though—at any rate, I haven’t seen it discussed—and this is what I’m going to talk about.
The first time governments imposed business closures in the name of fighting the spread of COVID-19, the job market imploded.
Forty million Americans lost their jobs, and at least 20 million of those are still unemployed. Income in America fell to such low levels that federal tax revenues fell by more than 50 percent year over year in April and remained down more than 25 percent in May. These are losses of historic proportions.
It is not disputed that the popular meaning of liberal has changed drastically over time. It is a well-known story how, around 1900, in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, the term was captured by writers who were essentially social democrats. Joseph Schumpeter (1954: p.
Understandably enough, the current disfavor into which socialism has fallen has spurred what Raimondo Cubeddu (1997: 138) refers to as “the frenzy to proclaim oneself a liberal.” Many writers today have recourse to the stratagem of “inventing for oneself a ‘liberalism’ according to one’s own tastes” and passing it off as an “evolution” from past ideas.
[Ralph Raico, Alexis de Tocqueville (Auburn: Mises Institute, 2017), 94 pp.]
With the venerable Dr. Thomas Sowell turning ninety this week, a question arises in the fintwit (financial Twitter) world: Who is the greatest living economist?
