There is a lot to learn from the slow and painful post-hurricane recovery that is going on in Puerto Rico right now.

[Editor’s Note: Last week, Mises Institute President Jeff Deist took a pro-secessionist, decentralist position in regards to the current secession movement in Catalonia. See “Let Catalonia Decide“ from September 19. In response, many of our of alumni and supporters have claimed that the current secession movement should be blocked. Below we present a column by one alumnus, without modification.

September 29, 2017 is the one-hundred-and-thirty-sixth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields—of what enables me to understand the events shaping the world in which we live. I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to him, because I believe that he deserves to occupy a major place in the intellectual history of modern times.

Janet Yellen this week cast doubt on the Fed’s announced plan to continue Fed rate hikes and reverse its years of “unconventional” monetary policy. 

“My colleagues and I may have misjudged the strength of the labor market,” Yellen announced on Tuesday, adding that they’d also misjudged “the degree to which longer-run inflation expectations are consistent with our inflation objective, or even the fundamental forces driving inflation.”

[This article is excerpted from the keynote address at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s new building dedication and conference on the great Austrian economists, June 5-6, 1998, in Auburn, Alabama.]

The autobiography of Milton and Rose Friedman tells a story about Ludwig von Mises that was retold in the Sunday New York Times book review. In 1947, some free-market economists, including Friedman and Mises, came together to form the Mont Pelerin Society. But Mises was clearly agitated at the ideological tenor of the discussion.

Please don’t fall for tax reform. 

[Reprinted from the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 20, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 84–96.]

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
By Nancy MacLean
New York: Viking Press, 2017

Roy Moore has won the run-off in the Republican primary for the US Senate. This virtually guarantees that Moore will be the next US Senator from Alabama, replacing Jeff Sessions, who is now US Attorney General. Moore will replace Luther Strange, who was appointed as temporary Senator until a special election could be conducted. 

Strange had the endorsement of both Donald Trump and Republican establishment fixtures such as Mitch McConnell.