Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 92nd birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect, if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point.
Some commentators might even have felt some sympathy for Fed Chief Powell in his first testimony before Congress. He is so obviously navigating a treacherous monetary path ahead without any reliable compass. That is no different from the reality of his predecessor’s position, but at least in Mr. Powell’s case, there is not the academic triumphalism; rather the big danger evident is institutional complacency.
First came the Republican memo, courtesy of the Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes. Their memo detailed the surveillance abuses against one Carter Page, enabled by a kangaroo court which was strengthened immeasurably by the old Republican-Party boss, George Bush.
Now that I have several children, I’m often in the company of other parents who talk about the way things “used to be.” When the issue of child safety comes up, I hear parents sadly shake their heads and say things like “it’s not like it was when we were kids ... the world is so much more dangerous now.”
Usually, the sentiment behind this idea is that there are more murders now than there used to be.
Thomas Hardy was a British poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Hardy, along with the great liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer, was one of the few members of the British aristocracy to oppose the Boer War. In 1902, he penned The Man He Killed in critique of this aggressive war, and it would become one of the most known anti-war poems of the century.
Whenever there is a gun massacre, statists inevitably respond that it’s time to repeal the Second Amendment. The idea is that if the Second Amendment is gone, so will be the right to own guns in the United States.
There is just one big problem with that position: It’s wrong. The Second Amendment, like the First Amendment, doesn’t give anyone any rights. Instead, it prohibits the federal government from infringing on rights that are natural and God-given and that preexist government.
The end of the era of cheap money highlights the risk of “Enron-style” bankruptcies in many sectors, including renewable energy. With the path of three rate hikes in the United States in 2018 confirmed by the Federal Reserve and a nervous equity market, the challenges are more evident than ever.
The past eight years of massive liquidity and low rates have not helped deleverage, and many companies have used this period to increase imbalances and create complex debt structures. In fact:
Dr. Sally Satel argues in an Op-ed for Politico that the narrative that medical doctors and pharmaceutical drug producers and distributors have caused the Opioid crisis is false. She finds that “contrary to popular belief, it is rarely the people for whom they are prescribed. Most lives do not come undone, let alone end in overdose, after analgesia for a broken leg or a trip to the dentist.”
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Paul Cantor About His New Book, Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy: The Twilight of the Ancient World.
