Late last week, Congress passed and President Trump signed the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill marks the first time the US military budget officially passed the one trillion dollar mark. Of course, when you add in other military-related spending such as interest on the debt, veterans’ affairs, and military components of other government agencies, the true number is at least one and a half times that amount.
Many people today are upset, and rightly so, about programs that promote “woke” values and “tolerance” for degeneracy. To counter this, some people support efforts to purge the schools of such programs and replace them with better ideas. It’s easy to understand why people support such efforts, but this approach ignores the root cause of the problem,
Recently my wife suddenly needed to go to a nearby hospital in the middle of the night. There are multiple public bus lines outside our door here in Pittsburgh. But they stopped running around 1 a.m. Thankfully we got a private cab to the hospital and rode one back. It was available at all hours of the day and night. Thank God for the private sector.
Sound economics and economic freedom have never been more crucial than today. Rampant inflation, tariffs, and taxes saturate every corner of our world. The state continues to reach for control of all aspects of our lives. But we continue to fight back.
Our mission statement has not changed since the Institute’s founding 43 years ago. The Mises Institute exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace.
The idea is now widespread that communities or groups exercise a form of collective thought, which can be duly expressed by the leader of the group as the thoughts of the group mind. Community leaders often purport to speak on behalf of all members of their group when expressing the wishes or needs of the group. For example, when demanding reparations for historical injustices, they identify themselves and every member of their group as a collective unit deserving redress.
Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as to make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to the revolutionaries themselves.
The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and cauliflower.
We rightly associate a bubble activity with an expansionary monetary policy of the central bank. This type of policy gives rise to various undertakings that, in the absence of the expansionary monetary policy, would not have emerged. An expansionary monetary policy—through the lowering of the interest rates via increases in the money supply—diverts savings to various projects that emerged on the back of the expansionary policy.
