If you can pay through the nose here, you can pay through the nose anywhere.

That’s because the most common complaint of overtaxed New Yorkers for generations has been housing costs here are outrageous. This happens in a city and state in which rent control laws have persisted for generations, going back to the 1940s and even before then.

It is not automation that scares people, it is inflation. Might sound odd, but what I mean is that the promise of a fully (or at least a more extensively) automated future seems like a threat because modern currencies are fundamentally inflationary.

When we work and save, the purchasing power of our saved funds diminishes with time. This is not a natural state of things, as many nowadays would assume. It is created. The reason prices tend to go up over time is that money loses its purchasing power.

Justin Raimondo, longtime editor of AntiWar.com and a great friend of the Mises Institute, has died.

Far too young, we might add, at 67. We can only mourn the silencing of his voice, and acknowledge him as perhaps the most important libertarian foreign policy writer of the past several decades.

Yet unlike many peace advocates, Justin read and understood economics—not to mention history and political theory.

On Monday, CNN reported on how, in spite of all the talk about job growth in recent years, wealth accumulation and incomes have been significantly and negatively impacted for many groups in the United States.

Much of what the article explored has been emphasized ever since the Great Recession started. The impact on younger earners, for example, has long been noted: “people entering the labor market during recessions have lower lifetime earnings.”

The US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Trump administration cannot include a question about citizenship in the 2020 census form.

In response to efforts to add a census question asking respondents about citizenship, several large US states sued the administration, claiming the question would lead to under-reporting of the true number of residents in each state.

The court did not rule that the question could not be used under any circumstances, however.

June 28, 2019 is the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles. The notorious treaty, signed by Germany on June 28, 1919, was the most important of the peace treaties that ended the First World War. Although each defeated nation signed its own treaty, the entire settlement is often called the Treaty of Versailles. The war and peace settlement caused a century of statism and war. On the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, it is appropriate to reassess its consequences and its lessons for the future.

Despite significant economic progress since ancient times, most people in agrarian societies continued to live at the subsistence minimum until modern times. By the nineteenth century, it was said that these societies fell into a “Malthusian trap.” The Malthusian trap describes a situation that keeps population growth in line with available resources. The increase in income per person was not sustainable in the long run, as economic growth was inevitably consumed by population increases.

This week the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can keep secret the food stamp sales totals of grocery stores. By a 6-3 vote, the court decided that such business records are exempt from disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This case, started eight years ago by the Argus Leader (a member of the USA Today network), is another landmark in cloaking federal data from the American people.