“Fortunes cannot grow; someone has to increase them. For this the successful activity of an entrepreneur is needed. The capital reproduces itself, bears fruit and increases only so long as successful and lucky investment endures.” – Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p. 340
Julian Assange was arrested last week in London, and he awaits legal proceedings designed to extradite him to the United States to be tried on hacking and espionage charges.
The US government has sought to prosecute Assange since at least 2010 when WikiLeaks released video footage of US forces murdering civilians — including two Reuters reporters — during 2007 air strikes.
The arrest of Julian Assange has produced rapturous cheering from the American political elite. Hillary Clinton declared that Assange “must answer for what he has done.” Unfortunately, Assange’s arrest will do nothing to prevent the vast majority of conniving politicians and bureaucrats from paying no price for deceiving the American public.
On Monday, Bernie Sanders released ten years of tax returns, and it turns out he’s a millionaire. Thanks especially to revenues from book royalties, Sanders is now, as CNN put it, “in the category of the super-rich.” Or, as some might say, he’s part of “the 1%.”
After years of denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” and a supposed source of America’s economic problems, this information is a little awkward for Sanders.
2018 was the year when, yet again, the socialist model proved its inability to generate benefits for a population. The example most discussed by the media was that of Venezuela. In a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in the Americas, this South American country is deteriorating every day, but it is not the only one. Another country in Latin America that is suffering the consequences of socialist authoritarianism, and leaving its economy at the edge of the abyss and its people in collective misery, is Nicaragua.
ABSTRACT: In this paper we try to wrestle with the triviality objection to the concept of the same good. If we define two resources as serving the same list of ends, then whether these items can be subsumed under the rubric of the “same good” revolves around how we conceive of ends. If ends are at least partly language-dependent, that is, the way of individuating ends depends on the level of generality with which we refer to them, then the notion of the same good seems trivial.
The Problem of Production: A New Theory of the Firm
Per Bylund
London: Routledge, 2016, 194 pp.
Mateusz Machaj (mateusz.machaj@uwr.edu.pl) is research fellow at the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, Poland; and assistant professor at the Institute of Economic Sciences, University of Wroclaw.
The High Cost of Good Intentions: A History of U.S. Federal Entitlement Programs
John F. Cogan
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017, 513 pp.
Dr. Mark Thornton (mthornton@mises.org) is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
