Is the economy “overheating,” or is it “humming” along smoothly? Should the Federal Reserve “prime the pump” to spur investment, or “pump the brakes?”

Such questions of course use an engine metaphor to describe the economy. But why?

In fact, the economy is more like a complex ecosystem rather than an engine or machine.

Indeed, a machine is consciously designed to accomplish one main purpose, and its parts fitted together to achieve that objective.

Socialists throughout the western world are celebrating the decision in South Africa to confiscate land from white citizens to redistribute to the black population. Flowing from the logic of collective, race-based guilt, the justification is that this land redistribution is the correction of historical injustices that took place under apartheid.

President Trump has proposed a one-year pay freeze for federal bureaucrats, which has reinvigorated the debate over whether compensation levels for the civil service are too lavish.

At Wal-Mart, Bitcoin is now competing alongside gold, silver, and government coins in the candy isle. 

Editor’s note: our immigration roundtable is a series of articles presenting the views of prominent Austrian and libertarian thinkers. By necessity each article provides only a basic overview of those views, with links to original sources.

Our goal is to present each thinker’s views on immigration by excerpting his or her writings on the subject.

For all that could be said about the leftist bias which has so often been exhibited by Britain’s state-sponsored news and media monolith, one of the more consistent themes in the recent history of the BBC has been its adversarial relationship with Jeremy Corbyn.

Today begins the Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. At Mises University this year, during a talk on how the courts disregard natural law in America, Judge Andrew Napolitano looked at some troubling moments in Judge Kavanaugh’s legal career.

Here is a clip from that lecture:

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.