The long-running joke about Brazil is that it is the country of the future, and always will be. If Jair Bolsonaro is able to follow through on the tone he has set at the start of his presidency, however, it may not be long until the future becomes the present. 

With the recent legalization of hemp in the United States, one may ask the question of why it was ever illegal to begin with. Being a non-psychoactive form of cannabis, its uses were entirely industrial. One need not be a libertarian to recognize that the prohibition of hemp ranks among the most absurd and pointless laws our government passed in the twentieth century.

On January 1 this year, a new law in the Flemish region of Belgium went into effect, effectively banning kosher slaughter of animals “after regional parliaments introduced prohibitions for animals that have not been pre-stunned.”1

What is money, where does it come from and more importantly where does it go?

The global controversy over video game loot boxes is now over a year old, and shows no signs of abating. In fact, quite the opposite: consumer outrage continues to grow, and governments around the world are increasingly interested in regulating the use of loot boxes and other microtransactions.

Speaking to the Washington Post, President Trump said, “My gut tells me more sometimes, than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” This comment generated scoffs aplenty, as people imagine the receptacle of a daily intake of gallons of Diet Coke and multiple Big Macs somehow provides anything intelligent. However, this classic Trump quip has some merit after reading John Coates’s The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind.

[Editors note: Recently the Mises Institute received a box of documents belonging to Murray Rothbard from our friend Justin Raimondo. We will make new material available online as we work through the collection. The following is an autobiographical essay written while Murray was still a high school student. Fans of Rothbard will not only appreciate some of the personal details about his parents and upbringing, but also how his formative years clearly influenced his later work, including his critiques of public education.