The idea is now widespread that communities or groups exercise a form of collective thought, which can be duly expressed by the leader of the group as the thoughts of the group mind. Community leaders often purport to speak on behalf of all members of their group when expressing the wishes or needs of the group. For example, when demanding reparations for historical injustices, they identify themselves and every member of their group as a collective unit deserving redress.

Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as to make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to the revolutionaries themselves.

The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and cauliflower.

We rightly associate a bubble activity with an expansionary monetary policy of the central bank. This type of policy gives rise to various undertakings that, in the absence of the expansionary monetary policy, would not have emerged. An expansionary monetary policy—through the lowering of the interest rates via increases in the money supply—diverts savings to various projects that emerged on the back of the expansionary policy.

President Donald Trump created new tariffs on April 2, a day he would come to call the Liberation Day. In July, he decided to increase tariff rates. On November 20, the same decided to pull 10 percent of the tariff he had imposed on Brazilian goods entering the US economy, leaving the rate at 40 percent.

The man who would weaken the state must begin, not at the tax office, but at its ministry of opinion. Rothbard shows in his classic essay, The Anatomy of the State, that a predatory ruling apparatus cannot endure by force alone; it requires a caste of “court intellectuals” to wrap plunder in a halo of necessity, science, and morality.

I can’t help but feel very sorry for the Venezuelan people.

Imagine living under a brutal and corrupt illegitimately-elected dictatorship, a national-security state form of government, and a full socialist economic system.

Oh, but unfortunately, that’s not all. Imagine also having to live in a country in which the most powerful military empire in world history is also waging war against the citizenry.