The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 21, no. 2 (Summer 2018). For the full issue, click here.

[The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017., Hope Jahren, ed., Wilmington, Mass.: Mariner Books, 2017, 352 pp.]

In our Principles of Microeconomics courses, we sometimes consider whether a firm should shutdown some line of production. A firm shuts down when it ceases operations, when it closes down and stops its production. The firm stops spending money on everything except its fixed costs.

A federal government “shutdown” has a completely different meaning.

[A note from Dr. Joe Salerno to our editor Ryan McMaken on MMT, a “new” policy proposal being pushed by economists like Stephanie Kelton and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.]

As soon as he returned from war service [in World War I], Ludwig von Mises resumed his unpaid teaching duties at the university, adding an economics seminar in 1918. Mises writes that he only continued working at the Chamber because a paid university post was closed to him.

When the first demonstrations on the streets of Paris were reported nine weeks ago, nobody could have foreseen the endurance, the tenacity and the viral effect of the Yellow Vests movement. After all, the French are known to protest and to strike, it’s part and parcel of their culture. However, by the time this article is being written, protests, marches and demonstrations have broken out in a multitude of European cities.

Over the past few months, tensions between China and Taiwan have mounted. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently expressed his desire to unify the island nation with the Chinese mainland, and did not discard the option of using armed force to realize this goal.