As of this week, the Berlin Wall has been shattered for longer than it stood as a lethal divide in the center of Europe. I crossed checkpoints at the Berlin Wall a half dozen times in the 1980s when I was writing articles for the New York Times, Reader’s Digest, and other publications. I never caught much guff from communist border guards in Berlin — which lulled me into my biggest East Bloc blunder.
Timothy Hsiao recently made the rather startling case that libertarians should support the War on Drugs by claiming that recreational drug use undermines a critical precondition for freedom, namely, the ability to think clearly and to choose wisely. Hsiao notes that:
[This essay, written in October 1941, in one of Mises’s lesser-known works and explores the use of a union of Eastern European states in addressing geopolitical threats in the region. Readers may be struck by how far Mises goes in supporting a strong central government in this case.
Today would have been the 89th birthday of Burt Blumert, one of the greatest personalities of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was the indispensable man behind the scenes and was a key figure in the Mises Institute, the Center for Libertarian Studies, and LewRockwell.com. He was one of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends; and when you met him, it was easy to see why Murray liked him. He was a genial and kind person and a source of wise counsel to all those fortunate to know him. Burt was the founder of Camino Coins and a principal figure in the hard money community.
If recent stock market volatility is interrupting your sleep, Jim Bianco and CNBC’s Rick Santelli are saying, get used to it. The total assets of all central banks hit $16.4 trillion plus (an all-time high) and these banks now, collectively, own 33 percent of all the world’s sovereign bonds (someone/something had to buy ‘em).
In recent weeks, the euro has been at its highest level, relative to the US dollar, that we’ve seen in the last three years. This is a movement that surprises when the European Central Bank is carrying out the most aggressive monetary expansion in the world after the Bank of Japan.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, anti-Catholic sentiment was raging. After a flood of Catholic immigrants came into the country — largely due the Irish potato famine — nativist sentiment turned against Catholics to such a degree that the first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, was (falsely) smeared as a Catholic by his opponents in the 1856 election.
When a psychology professor at the University of Toronto publicly rejected the forced use of a set of pronouns, it catapulted him into the news feeds and conversations of millions of people. Jordan Peterson’s enduring renown, however, has been sustained by the immense interest in what he has to say about the deepest questions.
In the early 1990s, historian Eric Foner and Lynne Cheney were interviewed on the talk show Firing Line about the National History Standards, which was enjoying some national attention at the time regarding what account of history was being included in public school textbooks. During the interview, Cheney accused Foner of being an historical revisionist.
The next day, a reporter from Newsweek called Foner up to ask him about the accusation. “Professor Foner, when did all this revisionism begin?”
We all strive for satisfaction and purpose in our lives. We want to do what we love, love what we do, and do it well enough to pay bills and buy groceries. The Japanese have a word for this “sweet spot”: Ikigai, which translates to “a reason for being”. Artists have rendered the overlapping criteria like this:
