One of the central issues in the current international furor over Venezuela are claims by some foreign governments that the results of the May 2018 elections do not reflect the true preferences of the voters.

For example, although Italy vetoed the proposal, the EU had been preparing to recognize the opposition party’s leader as Venezuela’s interim leader if a new election were not held immediately.

News media has been buzzing lately about the “Paycheck Fairness Act” sponsored primarily by Democratic elected officials in Congress. The rhetoric is exactly what one would expect: there is discrimination in the job market, observable in the “wage gap” between men and women workers (and other gender identities). So we need a law to fix this problem. As usual, any and all problems arise due to some mystical shortcoming in people’s voluntary choices — and they can always be corrected by glorious government.

The US debt ceiling suspension, signed on February 2018, expires in March this year. According to some experts, the US Treasury will have to carry out special measures because of possible delays in raising this ceiling. Treasury would need to draw down its deposits with the Fed and deposit the money in various banks for future use to pay government expenses. As a result, this would boost monetary liquidity and therefore would have beneficial effects on financial markets.

Venezuela’s government is in a state of upheaval. Foreign nations are lining up to support either the regime of Nicolás Maduro — who claims to be the legitimately elected president — or that of Juan Guaidó, who the opposition claims is now the constitutionally mandated interim president.

The current situation has been brought on by nearly twenty years of Chavismo, a hard-left socialist ideology, which has left the Venezuelan economy in ruins.

In a new interview with Pete Raymond, Sweden-born economist Per Bylund describes the Swedish economic system and takes a closer look at the claims of those who say Sweden is an example that ‘socialism’ can work in practice.

Much of the market observer community recently has wondered why Pacific Gas and Electric’s stock had a sharp valuation increase over the course of a day. This is somewhat illogical given that PG&E admitted that their faulty equipment caused California’s worst wildfire in recorded history and is faced with tens of billions in losses and potential lawsuits.

[Originally published as “Economic Science and Neoclassicism” in the Review of Austrian Economics: Winter 1999]

Back in September, foreign policy scholar Stephen Walt asked in Foreign Policy if “the emerging democratic socialists of the left, libertarians on the right, and realists in the center [could] join forces to produce a foreign policy that would command support at home and perform effectively abroad?”