It’s almost Christmas time again, and that means its time for White House politicians and staff to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Christmas decorations and events for the White House.

Parties and pricey decor have, unfortunately, become “tradition” at the White House where the holiday season has become an excuse for the staffs of the White House and the first lady’s staff to put on a wide variety of “social” events which are really just public relations junkets.

Ludwig von Mises famously argued that people must choose between outright socialism and unfettered capitalism, because there is no coherent “middle ground” between the two. The allegedly reasonable compromise of a highly interventionist state — where the authorities retain nominal private property but issue edicts regulating how legal owners may use their property — is unstable.

Every December, my family and I watch Frank Capra’s cinematic masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life. It has only recently become a Christmas tradition in my family, largely because my silly youthful disdain for black-and-white movies made me reluctant to watch it. The film still moves me no matter how many times I see it.

ABSTRACT: I will first offer a general understanding of the flavor of libertarianism I will be using as the foundation for my argument for open borders. Then, I will summarize the argument put forth by Joseph Carens (1987) which consummates the importance of open border policy in maintaining the efficacy of property rights. After, I will supplement an additional argument to Carens’s in order to strengthen it.

When Murray Rothbard founded the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1977, he wrote an editorial for the first issue. In it, he said, “The Journal of Libertarian Studies has been founded not simply to provide an outlet for scholarship and research that may be unpopular in a particular discipline.

This Murray Rothbard Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Dr. Don Printz, was given at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute on March 23, 2019. A number of edits have been made for clarity.

There is a growing genre of literature that can best be described as apologias for Ebenezer, the aim of which is to show that Ebenezer Scrooge, the main character of Dickens’s classic Christmas tale, was really a great man, unfairly put upon by spectral busybodies and hand-wringing underlings. A peaceful and honest man, Scrooge was really the victim of A Christmas Carol, not the villain.