The best people in the world support the Mises Institute. 5,112 people to be exact. Will you join them?

Who are they? People just like you. Average people who happen to care deeply about human liberty and human flourishing. People who care about real economics. People who oppose state power, central banks, and war. People who care about truth and honest history.

When an economy turns from expansion to contraction there is an order of events. The first signs are an unexpected increase in inventories of unsold goods, both accompanied with and followed by business surveys indicating a general softening in demand. For monetarists, this is often confirmed by an inverting yield curve, which tells them that at the margin the short-term rates set by the central bank are becoming too high for business conditions.

If there is a global recession brewing —and the probability is increasing — Spain will suffer and might enter a recession of its own.

Let’s look at the leading indicators in Spain.

First, Spain has grown the most among European countries since the last recession ended in 2013, especially since 2014, although Spain’s decline in economic activity prior to 2014 was also much more pronounced. We can also see that the Spanish economy was growing much more rapidly than the Eurozone economy before 2009.

Canada’s socialized health care is a failure, as measured against the service the government promised to provide. Tom Kent, the senior government policy person when the Medical Care Act was passed in 1966, described the government’s objectiv : “The aim of public policy was quite clearly and simply ... to make sure that people could get care when it was needed without regard to other considerations.”

The idea of a “third way” in economic policy has fascinated politicians, scholars, artists, and the voters around the world. Surfing this wave, the welfare state has spread quickly in recent decades.

Some even say that Nordic countries are the definitive evidence that it is possible to deliver a prosperous and egalitarian society through state intervention, mixing free markets with high taxes in order to get high living standards and a smaller inequality gap. But is the matter really settled?

In recent decades, increasingly rapid innovation in medicine, education, means of transport, data storage, and communication have contributed to a general improvement in living standards. Still, from time to time this successful narrative is hit hard by noisy worries about the “job-destroying effect of automation” — a notion that remains lodged in minds of a lot of people.

There is an emerging view held by many commentators that it is banks and not the central banks that are key for the expansion of money. This way of thinking is promoted these days by the followers of the Post Keynesian school of economics (PK). In a research paper by the Bank of England’s Zoltan Jakab and Michael Kurnhof, they suggest that

The New York Times has created a huge stir with its 1619 Project , which claims that the real founding of the United States was not the American Revolution, but rather slavery and racism. One might mistake the concept as one that said America’s political founders did not hold enlightened racial views, but still helped to create a country with the kind of ideals that finally led to the end of slavery and even undercut racism itself.

“Because liberty is so fragile, its true defender recognizes that war is its greatest enemy, and therefore the true patriot is often the courageous individual who opposes a particular war because he recognizes that it is unjust — that it would be fought for the wrong purposes or that the risk for the loss of liberty is greater than any benefit to be gained by the war.” - John V Denson

A tariff is a tax on imports that is used to satisfy a policy goal. Before the federal income tax became law in 1913, the US federal government was funded almost entirely by tariffs and excise taxes. An excise tax is a tax on a good that is produced in the US. The best example of a current excise tax is the federal tax on gasoline. The most infamous excise tax was the tax on whiskey in the early days of the Republic that resulted in the Whiskey Rebellion, centered in western Pennsylvania. The tax on whiskey was so unpopular that even George Washington couldn’t enforce it.