Imagine a system in which a private company as a “government service provider” offers you protection of life, liberty, and property. This service includes internal and external security, a legal and regulatory framework and independent dispute resolution. You pay a contractually fixed fee for these services per year. The government service provider, as the operator of the community, cannot unilaterally change this “citizens’ contract” with you later on.

As our commuter train stopped at the Riga suburb of Tornakalns, we saw a small railroad boxcar standing by itself on the side. To the passenger from the train, it was a small memorial; to a Latvian nearly 80 years ago, it was at worst a death sentence and at best, transportation to exile in a Siberian labor camp.

A popular poster depicts four cows standing in the corners of their respective fields at the intersection of two barbed wire fences. Each of the four cows has stretched her neck through the wires to reach the grass in another cow’s field. The poster invokes a humorous reaction from most observers. To most it would illustrate the phrase that “the grass is always greener on the other side,” or maybe how silly we all are pursuing distant pleasures when there is an abundance available to us where we are.

Assad was supposed to be gone already. President Obama thought it would be just another “regime change” operation and perhaps Assad would end up like Saddam Hussein or Yanukovych. Or maybe even Gaddafi. But he was supposed to be gone. The US spent billions to get rid of him and even provided weapons and training to the kinds of radicals that attacked the United States on 9/11.

But with the help of his allies, Assad has nearly defeated this foreign-sponsored insurgency.

Today is  Hans Hoppe’s birthday. He is an outstanding libertarian theorist, in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, and his strikingly original work ranges widely over philosophy, history, and economics. Among his many contributions are a defense of self-ownership and property rights through argumentation ethics and a trenchant criticism of democracy.  He is a scholar of the highest integrity and courage, and all lovers of liberty are in his debt.

For most experts a key factor that policy makers should be watching is the gap between the actual real output and the potential real output. The potential output is the maximum output that the economy could attain if all the resources are used efficiently.

The gap is labeled as the output gap. In June this year the output gap - expressed in percentage terms - stood at 3.8% against 3.25% in March and 2.75% in June last year.

Among issues in American politics, public education remains a sacred cow for many voters.

Political elites incessantly remind us that public education is a fundamental pillar of civilization. Without public education, we would continue to be uneducated savages.

All the innovations we see before us like the Internet would not be possible if it weren’t for the state-provided education pipeline.

Or so we are told.

Brian Price interviewed Max Wolff, chief economist at the Phoenix Group for Real Vision. Wolff believes the bloom will be coming off the Trump economic rose (Wolff contends it’s a continuation of the Obama boom) and was most testy about the president’s trade policy. “Two hundred years of economic wisdom versus a tier two real estate developer from New York. I’m not going with the tier two real estate developer from New York.

More than a little of that economic wisdom came from Ludwig von Mises, who explained,

An audio version of this article is available here.

As long as I can remember, unions have attacked as “scabs” those willing to accept work for wages and conditions those unions reject, even if it involves crossing union picket lines. In fact, that usage goes back centuries, from English slang for a mean, low, “scurvy” rascal or scoundrel. As Stephanie Smith put it in Household Words: