Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 20, no. 1 (Spring 2017)

[Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers by Walter E. Block and Peter L. Nelson]

President Donald Trump proposed last month a tax plan that would lower the top individual tax rate to 35% from 39.6%. It would also lower the corporate income tax rate to 20% from 35%.

The plan however, says nothing about how spending will be cut to avoid increasing deficits. According to supply-side economics — a relatively new school of economics — a reduction of tax rates and lower revenues for the government does not need to be offset by decreased government spending or increased borrowings.

Apple held its 10th anniversary iPhone press event on 9/12. As expected, the tech giant released new iterations of their decade-old smartphone as well as the new iPhone X. Whereas the media has focused on innovation and technology, the event also tells another story: how the company uses the perception of innovation as a strategy for dealing with inflation.

Many people in Catalonia wish to secede from Spain and form their own country, but the Spanish government has used force to block them from doing so. What should libertarians think of this conflict? In trying to answer this question, it is useful to seek guidance from Mises and Rothbard. Not that these two thinkers are always right, but it is a safe bet that these two giants of twentieth-century social science will have something illuminating to say.

A classic argument for central bank controlled fiat money goes like this: a commodity such as gold is very costly to produce. All the resources, capital, and labor devoted to mining gold for monetary purposes could be employed elsewhere in the economy, to the benefit of society, if only we had a fiat standard.

President Trump and the congressional Republican leadership recently unveiled a tax reform “framework.” The framework has a number of provisions that will lower taxes on middle-class Americans. For example, the framework doubles the standard deduction and increases the child care tax credit. It also eliminates the alternative minimum tax (AMT). Created in the 1960s, the AMT was designed to ensure the “wealthy” did not use “loopholes” to “get out of” paying taxes. Today the AMT is mostly a means to increase taxes on the middle class.

I came across a clever tweet recently claiming that people who say ”The Nazis were socialists, it’s in the name!” must be ”very confused by buffalo wings.” It is now the conventional wisdom that the Nazis were capitalists, not socialists, despite their misleading name “The National Socialist German Workers Party.” Anybody with a college degree knows they were capitalistic, if not in name, then at least in principle.

One of Ayn Rand’s most notorious claims is that Europeans and their descendants were justified in driving Indian tribes off their lands because aboriginal Americans ”did not have the concept of property or property rights,” and because they “wish[ed] to continue a primitive existence.” Rand also claims the Indian tribes had no right to the land they lived on because “they didn’t have a settled society,” and “had predominantly nomadic tribal ‘cultures.’”