The Federal Reserve lowered its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday, cutting the target federal funds rate by 0.25 percent to a range of 0.5 to 0.75 percent.

Federal spending and federal taxation in the United States set new records in 2019. And the federal budget deficit swelled to more than a trillion dollars. Europe is in the middle of an enormous spending binge. But apparently hard-core laissez-faire libertarian purists have taken over the world’s governments.

Oct. 31 marks the 11th anniversary of the release of the famous bitcoin whitepaper. It is worthwhile to take stock of the first crypto-currency’s impressive achievements to date, while also warning of the future perils it faces.

Bitcoin has defied the critics repeatedly, being declared “dead” many times over. (In this respect it’s appropriate that it was born on Halloween.) Although its price has been volatile, it’s currently trading at a market cap of $170 billion — more than McDonald’s, and comparable to CitiGroup.

The IMF recently released a new study pushing for governments around the world to implement “a global carbon tax” that would rise to $75/ton by 2030, in order to limit global warming to at most the “safe” ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius.

In a recent article, I contrasted the Austrian School approach to product safety with the “Law & Economics” tradition that is associated with the Chicago School and UCLA. In today’s article I will show the contrast on the issue of air pollution. Again we will see that not only is the Austrian approach more technically accurate, but it also sounds less shocking to non-economists.

As every reader of Murray Rothbard knows, the principle of self-ownership stands at the basis of libertarian thought. Each person is the owner of his or her own body. If we add a principle for homesteading land and natural resources, we can without much trouble get to an anarcho-capitalist society. But even on its own, the self-ownership principle rules out the welfare state. You cannot be compelled to labor for someone else, even if the other person “needs” your labor more than you do.

A car stops its march in front of the red light. At the wheel, a 40-year-old lawyer looks at her cell phone to check the time. She is hoping to get home and see her children.

Suddenly, a rumble is heard.

In a matter of seconds, the thief enters the vehicle through the window and snatches her purse, which was lying on the floor of the passenger’s seat.

Terrified, she looks at the damage to her car. The window is crashed and the wallet is gone. Also gone are her money, the credit card and some pictures of her family.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeff Deist’s talk at the Mises Institute’s recent summit in Los Angeles]

Introduction

Those of us who read and enjoy Mises, and he wrote so much about so many things, might well wonder what he would have to say about the state of America and the West in 2019. After all, he was a sociologist and philosopher and political theorist as well as an economist. Surely we could use his perspective today, and so much of what he wrote was prescient and still relevant.