The vast regime of torture created by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks continues to haunt America. The political class and most of the media have never dealt honestly with the profound constitutional corruption that such practices inflicted. Instead, torture enablers are permitted to pirouette as heroic figures on the flimsiest evidence.

One of the great things about working at the Mises Institute is the opportunity to work and correspond with people from around the world. Whether we’re looking at Mises University students, Fellows, Senior Fellows, or Mises Wire writers, we can find writers and scholars from Poland, Britain, France, Brazil, Hong Kong, Spain, Mexico, and many other places as well.

Adapted from an interview with Real Vision.

We have been hearing from international bodies, from central banks that we were living in a synchronized growth territory. That we were seeing developed markets grow faster than what was typical while emerging markets were also growing in tandem. And that the economies were much healthier, that everything was much better, and that 2018 was a year in which we would see the confirmation of that synchronized growth trend and the reflation trade.

Writing decades ago, Friedrich Hayek observed: “In all democratic countries … a strong belief prevails that the influence of the intellectuals on politics is negligible.”

Hayek conceded this was true to “the extent to which they can sway the popular vote on questions on which they differ from the current views of the masses,” but he warned that “over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today. … This power they wield by shaping public opinion.”

This week we witnessed the horrible spectacle of Nikki Haley, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, joining a protest outside the UN building and calling for the people of Venezuela to overthrow their government.

“We are going to fight for Venezuela,” she shouted through a megaphone, “we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone.”

This is the neocon mindset: that somehow the US has the authority to tell the rest of the world how to live and who may hold political power regardless of elections.

The “libertarian socialists” have struck again.

It began when a state Libertarian Party chapter posted a link to a court decision about an employer that did not allow its employees to have dreadlocks.

This was “discrimination,” the suit against it alleged.

Not so, said the court. The “race-neutral grooming policy,” it declared, was not discriminatory, since a hairstyle, unlike a racial identity, is not an “immutable physical characteristic.” Therefore, an employer is at liberty to enforce such a requirement.

On Sunday, October 7, 2018, Brazil holds its presidential election and will vote for the national deputies, the state governors, and the senators. Brazil has a diverse party system with tens of political parties. When no candidate reaches more than 50 percent in the first run, the two candidates with the highest score will compete against each other in the second vote few weeks later.

In discussions of international trade, the pervasive mind-set is that exports are a positive entry in a country’s “economic well-being” ledger, while imports are a negative entry in the ledger. In other words, exports are intrinsically “good” and imports intrinsically “bad.”

Throughout my time as an economics student at a public university, I’ve been taught lies on a weekly basis. On the first day of my “Principles of Macroeconomics” class, I was shown a quotation from John Maynard Keynes, and the semester preceded with the professor stumping for Keynesian pseudoscience day after day. I was taught that the prices were determined by some equation the professor made up. I learned that business cycles were the result of “animal spirits,” and the only way to solve this problem is for the government to step in and spend more money.