The US Constitution never granted the federal government authority to create a central bank. The Founders, having lived through hyperinflation themselves, understood that government should never have a printing press at its disposal. But from the very beginning of America’s founding, the desire for a crony central bank was strong.
In today’s political discussion, one of the fundamental principles our society is built on has been on the defense: private property rights and the protection of such rights. Just take the current debate about the housing shortage in Germany as a prime example. A very prominent policy proposal is flat-out expropriation of housing. Another one is the limitation of ownership of residential apartments.
The Macro Problem of Microtransactions: The Self-regulatory Challenges of Video Game Loot Boxes by Matthew McCaffrey has been published as a case study for Harvard Business Review.
Today is Hans Hoppe’s birthday. He is an outstanding libertarian theorist, in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, and his strikingly original work ranges widely over philosophy, history, and economics. Among his many contributions are a defense of self-ownership and property rights through argumentation ethics and a trenchant criticism of democracy. He is a scholar of the highest integrity and courage, and all lovers of liberty are in his debt.
When a woman in 2002 wrote a New York Times Magazine article on Americans adopting Ethiopian children, she mentioned my family, which has two Ethiopian boys. Just before the story was to be printed, someone from the newspaper called me, a “fact checker” who asked several questions trying to ensure that the story would be accurate and that no wrong information would leak into the account.
Submission window: March 15 – April 15, 2020
Guest editor: Per Bylund, School of Entrepreneurship, Oklahoma State University
The U.S. government is infamously in debt. Since about 2012, the official national debt has equaled or exceeded the GDP.
As we noted earlier this week, modern pundits are claiming modern American capitalism was built on a foundation of antebellum slavery. The contention is obviously false for no other reason than the fact the industrial economy didn’t skip a beat when slavery was abolished. Moreover, even in its day, the slave economy of the south was never as impressive as its supporters supposed it was. Cotton production was important. But northern farmers, miners, and factory workers would have been fine without it.
