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,

Buried in the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report is some insight into how the foreign policy establishment is attempting to re-create a new Cold War with the Russian Federation. Much of the report is devoted to one of the primary charges against the president: that he allegedly obstructed Congress’s investigation.

The first claim is largely asserted through legalese about how Trump was insufficiently cooperative with Congressional investigators.