In 1962, businessman Sam Walton had an entrepreneurial objective in mind: Offer shoppers the lowest prices possible. From forcing US suppliers to slash costs to finding cheap imports abroad, Walmart became an iconic global brand, generating $500 billion in annual revenues because of its ability to enhance the consumer’s purchasing power, enabling the rise of the middle class.

“The first transport of Ice, from the shores of the United States to the banks of the Ganges is an event of no mean importance; and the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through their adventure at their own cost, deserve to be handed down to posterity with the name of other benefactors of mankind.”1

The Federal Reserve today raised the the Federal Funds Rate to a target/range of 2.0-2.25 percent:

Money supply growth rose in August, rising to the highest rate recorded since March of this year. Overall, money-supply growth remains well below the growth rates experienced from 2009 to 2016, and has fluctuated very little since March.

In August, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 4.8 percent. That was up from July’s growth rate of 4.1 percent, and was also up from August 2017’s rate of 4.2 percent.

September 29 marks the birth of Ludwig von Mises, who Guido Hulsmann’s biography, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, argued was the 20th century’s foremost economist.

Is there any hope in the Western World that individual citizens can win some release from the relentless and imprisoning growth of government? In the US, government spending, a reasonable proxy for their power over us, increases every year, except for a few minor blips. The citizens’ situation becomes more and more dire.

The FBI released new homicide data this week, and at the nationwide level, the 2017 homicide rate fell slightly, dropping to 5.3 homicides per 100,000 from 2016’s rate of 5.4.

The furor over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh is spurring many commentators to bewail that the Supreme Court has become too powerful. But the real problem is that the Court is now often little more than a fig leaf to provide legitimacy for a Leviathan that would have mortified the Founding Fathers. The Court’s betrayal of its constitutional role has vastly increased the stakes for the current and any future Justice nomination.

When pundits and activists look at life expectancy data, they often find that the US has a lower life expectancy at birth than other wealthy countries. The common response is to then immediately assume that the United States must have lower life expectancy rates because it lacks so-called “socialized medicine.”