Paul Krugman was the featured speaker at a special session of the 2004 Southern Economic Association meetings, held the weekend before Thanksgiving, and a number of economists listened intently as the most famous man at the conference spoke religiously about the glories of Keynesian economics. Professor Joseph Salerno and I were in the audience sitting next to each other, and we kept our disagreements with Krugman’s points to ourselves.

Whether its CNBC, or The New York Times, or NPR, the mainstream media is clearly committed to using the current partial government shutdown to portray federal workers as beleaguered victims of the American political system.

The Transportation Security Administration, a federal agency, is facing a no-show problem with employees, as paychecks are put on hold during the partial government shutdown. This is reportedly leading to longer lines and security problems at airports nationwide. According to CNN ,

Newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not be the expert on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict or what the three branches of the American government are, but she certainly thinks herself an expert on tax and energy policy. Her energy policy involves reducing carbon emissions to zero within 12 years.

Dr. Mark Thornton joined Glenn Beck for an interview on how Austrian economists have predicted every major crisis of the last century. 

The interview begins at the 44:50 mark.

The Skyscraper Curse is available now as a hardback, paperback, e-book, and audiobook at the Mises Store.

I’m starting to wonder whether President Trump has any power over US foreign policy at all. Many people believe that the US president is just a figurehead, with actual foreign policy firmly in the hands of the deep state. Trump’s latest dramatic U-turn on pulling troops from Syria certainly feeds such theories.

[Adapted from a classroom lecture delivered November 14, 2018.]

Children working in factories with hazardous working conditions in pollution ridden cities are some of the images historians enjoy using when covering the Gilded Age of American history — the period following the American Civil War up until the early 20th century.

If we took court historians’ interpretations at face value, we’d be under the impression that the Gilded Age was a precarious hellscape. To them, government intervention was the savior that swooped in and rescued the United States from the horrors of capitalism during this period.