For more than three years, 58-year old cancer survivor Ethel Tari had “been a regular at an outpatient clinic at St. Joseph’s Hospital, providing rides to and from the clinic to patients who aren’t allowed to drive after being sedated for procedures such as endoscopies and colonoscopies.” But the long arm of the law finally caught up with Ethel, and she was fined $2,260 for owning and operating a vehicle for hire without a licence.

Trump’s whirlwind European tour, with just enough time to meet the Queen at Windsor and perhaps for a few rounds of golf at his golf-courses in Scotland has all Europe in a stir. He started with a two-day NATO meeting in Brussels and immediately admonished Mutti Merkel for not spending enough on NATO, while finding the money to invest in Russia’s Nord Stream II pipeline. For Trump, his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki at the end of his tour is all about the future, while the EU and NATO are about the past.

[Originally published at EconLog.]

Recently, some of my friends singled out this piece by Jeff Deist , president of the Mises Institute, as truly awful. When I actually read it, however, it seemed like a reasonable presentation of a plausible view. Deist:

Here we go again. A fed official is once again going to the media to repeat the age-old myth that the Fed is totally independent of political influence.

The last time we heard about this from someone at Powell’s level what last year, when Steve Mnuchin reminded everyone of the Fed’s alleged independence in January:

When it comes to human migration, nearly everything we hear nowadays in relation to the United States and Europe is related to immigration into North America and Europe.

Historically, however, governments have often been as concerned with emigration as they have been with immigration.

It’s easy to find income inequality in the United States when we compared the super-rich with the middle class. But when we compare the middle class to the “poor” there’s a surprising amount of income equality.

But how can the middle class have incomes similar to the poor? Isn’t that logically impossible?

Brian Simpson (2017) in responding to my lengthy review of his two volume Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle, provides a welcome opportunity to identify the main distinctions between Simpson’s business cycle theory and Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). Simpson’s earnest pleas to the contrary, I nevertheless remain unmoved that he advances our understanding of ABCT. In his response, Simpson asserts I made several errors in my initial review.

On the matter of immigration, even many commentators who support ease of migration also oppose the extension of government benefits to immigrants.