From the shoes you wear to the ice cream you eat, politics has found a way to sneak into some of the most mundane aspects of our lives. The new trend of “Woke Capital,” where firms are actively promoting social justice causes, has had many free-marketers scratching their heads at how corporate America has hopped on board this wave of Progressivism.

Last week, the Business Roundtable launched a major attack on property rights, the bedrock of capitalism.

Most people who have undertaken a formal study of economics end up accepting such things as the necessity of a central bank to prevent or at least ameliorate recessions. They take as a given the need for government intervention in the economy, or if not as a given, as explained by countless historical incidents of injustice. Perhaps most of all, they regard anyone calling for an unregulated gold coin standard as so hopelessly backward and naïve that refutation seldom goes further than rolling one’s eyes.

[From Understanding the Dollar Crisis (1973)]

In response to a weakening in the yearly growth rate of key economic indicators such as industrial production and real gross domestic product (GDP) some commentators have raised the alarm of the possibility of a recession emerging.

Some other commentators are dismissive of this arguing that the likelihood of a recession ahead is not very high given that other important indicators such as consumer outlays as depicted by the annual growth rate of retail sales and the state of employment appear to be in good shape (see charts).

Jerome Powell has only been Fed chairman since last February, but he has already been initiated into the worst part of the job. Whatever the Fed does, some complain that it didn’t act sooner and/or do enough, while others complain that it acted too soon and/or did too much. The sniping also extends to every word he did or didn’t say and when he did or didn’t say it. And even the president who appointed him frequently treats him like his 2020 scapegoat-in-waiting.

Joakim Book has recently published an essay at AIER arguing that Rothbard was wrong to change his mind about free banking in Scotland. Rothbard had originally praised the episode of Scottish free banking in his 1983 book The Mystery of Banking, but then changed his mind in a 1988 essay on The Myth of Free Banking in Scotland.

This criticism of the market is more existential than ethical. It is the popular argument that laissez faire, or the free-market economy, rests its case on the crucial assumption that every individual knows his own self-interest best. Yet, it is charged, this is not true of many individuals. Therefore, the State must intervene, and the case for the free market is vitiated.

I am quoted in the Washington Post in a story about the controversy over video game loot boxes. Loot boxes have been much debated in the past few years, with consumers frequently venting their outrage and regulators circling the gaming industry eager for a chance to flex their political muscles.