The UK Independent reported last week that legislators in Iceland have proposed a ban on circumcision of boys. In practice of course, a ban on male circumcisions essentially outlaws Judaism.

According to the Federal Reserve’s Underlying Inflation Gauge, the 12-month inflation growth in December was at 2.98 percent. That’s the highest rate recorded in 136 months, or about 11 years. The last time the UIG measure was as high was in September 2006, when it was at 3 percent. 

Nicolai Foss and I have written a paper criticizing currently fashionable “stakeholder” approaches to the firm and the idea that managers should pursue “corporate social responsibility.” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who manages $6 trillion in corporate assets, made a splash last month by insisting that corporate executives focus not on shareholders, but on a broader segment of society: ”Companies must ask themselves: What role do we pl

• On February 5, the Reserve Bank of Australia held its key rate steady at 1.5 percent. 
• The Bank of Canada raised its benchmark interest rate to 1.25 percent in January.
• At its February Meeting, the Federal Reserve announced it would hold the Federal Funds Rate steady at 1.5 percent.
• The Bank of England in January warned that it plans to hike rates this year, possibly as early as May.

In Liberalism (p.115), Mises argued that “the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education, [which] must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.”

The Private Academy project, founded under the umbrella of the Romanian Mises Institute in 2015, started out to do just this: to offer an alternative to the decades of nationalized higher education from which learning needed to be reclaimed and repaired. 

Of all the factors that contribute to police brutality and misconduct, one that has been relatively neglected but has received a growing amount of attention is police unions. Their influence became harder to ignore after all of the anecdotes of police unions making it more difficult to investigate and discipline misconduct.

Ever since the important contributions of new classical economists Finn E. Kydland and Edward C. Prescott during the 1970s and 80s, modern macroeconomics seeks optimal rules for monetary policy. Indeed, Milton Friedman had previously emphasized the importance of a binding rule for monetary policy. He recommended a constant but moderate expansion of the money stock over time as well as the abolition of fractional reserve banking in order to improve the central bank’s control over the money stock. Neither of these two measures has ever been implemented over an extended period of time.

I’m not a fan of Marvin Goodfriend. His views are dangerous, and he has been blatantly dishonest in order to hide them. Ron Paul even personally introduced a bill back in 2000 targeted directly at his idea of taxing cash.