On December 29, an armed gunman entered the West Freeway Church of Christ in Texas and shot two members of the congregation. Within six seconds, a third member of the congregation drew a weapon and shot the gunman dead.
George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen has penned a brief manifesto for what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism” on the Marginal Revolution blog. In it he makes the case for libertarians to embrace “state capacity” in certain limited cases. You can read his essay here.
My initial responses, in no particular order, are as follows:
Negative rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the mistakes of many central banks and some of their economists, who start with a wrong diagnosis: the idea that economic agents do not take more credit or invest more because they choose to save too much and that therefore saving must be penalized to stimulate the economy. Excuse the bluntness, but it is a ludicrous idea.
The Mises Institute is happy to welcome Daniella Bassi to our staff!
Ms. Bassi will act as assistant editor for mises.org, our journals, and our full slate of new books for 2020.
Ms. Bassi joins us from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where she edited publications for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.
She also was the senior editor for the University of Vermont History Review while earning her master’s degree there.
In today’s political discourse, the minimum wage is frequently mentioned by the more progressive members of Congress. On a basic level, raising the minimum wage appears to be a sympathetic policy for low-income wage earners. Often kept out of the conversation, however, are the downstream effects of this proposal.
The single-payer healthcare system is a healthcare system in which one party is the sole provider of medical services within a society. Generally speaking, the party that manages the single-payer system is the government. In the United States, the idea of a single-payer system has gained support among many Americans under the rallying cry “Medicare for All,” which is a political term used to make the proposal sound more inclusive. Yet it is also a term that reveals the government’s subtle takeover of the healthcare industry.
In various writings, Milton Friedman argued that there is a variable lag between changes in money supply and its effect on real output and prices. Friedman held that in the short run changes in money supply will be followed by changes in real output. However, in the long run changes in money will only have an effect on prices. This means, according to Friedman, that changes in money with respect to real economic activity tend to be neutral in the long run and non-neutral in the short run.
Political correctness recently took a dangerous turn in the United Kingdom when the North Bristol National Health Service Trust announced that hospital patients who use offensive, racist, or sexist language will cease receiving medical care as soon as it is safe to end their treatment.
We mourn the passing of our good friend Butler Shaffer, who died yesterday afternoon at the age of eighty-four. Butler was a libertarian at a time when there were very few libertarians in the world. Like many supporters of the free market, he was first attracted to the Republican Party. He supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, but he soon came to realize that limited government was a chimera and that the state was by nature opposed to liberty.
As he put the issue in a letter to me in November 2014,
