After closing at 735 in February 2009 the S&P500 has been following a relentless up-trend closing at the end of June this year at 2941.76 – an increase of 300% since February 2009.

The increase in the US stock market this year appears to defy the visible softening in the momentum of various economic data. For instance, there has been a deterioration in the annual growth rate of industrial production and a slowdown in the yearly growth of personal income (see chart).

In the aftermath of the Virginia Beach shooting, the usual gun control debate has come back into the national conversation.

As has happened during every recent presidential campaign that might result in higher taxes on “the rich” (i.e., every one with a Democratic candidate), some of the 1 percent (or the .1 or .01 percent) have come out in favor of “taxing me more,” in the name of paying what they think is their fair share and generating government funds to address poverty, wealth inequality, or the latest in progressive proposals.

Socialism and capitalism offer radically different solutions to the problem posed by scarcity: everybody can’t have everything they want when they want it, so how can we effectively decide who will own and control the resources we have? The chosen solution has profound implications. It can mean the difference between prosperity and impoverishment, voluntary exchange and political coercion, even totalitarianism and liberty.

A hundred and five years ago, on June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Prinzip, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to precipitate the crisis that led a few weeks later to an unthinkable war. A hundred years ago this week, the Versailles Treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. That was some five years: a half-decade that was itself a kind of microcosm of the twentieth century.

As we mourn the death of the great anti-war activist Justin Raimondo, one can obtain a better understanding of him by looking at his intellectual pedigree. Here, one figure stands out: the great Austrian economist and libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard. Raimondo for many years worked closely with Rothbard as a libertarian activist.

[Excerpted from America’s Great Depression, chapter 1 “The Positive Theory of the Cycle,” section “The Explanation: Boom and Depression,” pages 9–14 .]

In the purely free and unhampered market, there will be no cluster of errors, since trained entrepreneurs will not all make errors at the same time.

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.