Should Catalonia be independent?

Surely Catalans, and nobody else, must answer that question. Some Catalans consider themselves Spanish and some don’t. Many Spaniards consider Catalonia part of Spain, while some don’t. But it’s clear that a significant number of Catalans feel politically conquered, and resent it. Why should they live under a Spanish government, when their history, culture, and language are not Spanish?

Last week US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin warned the US will impose new sanctions on China if it doesn’t conform to UN sanctions on North Korea:

“If China doesn’t follow these sanctions, we will put additional sanctions on them and prevent them from accessing the U.S. and international dollar system, and that’s quite meaningful.”

The period July to November this year marks the centenary of the Battle of Passchendaele. In a war already overflowing with misery, Passchendaele remains a byword for unspeakable suffering; it was one of the most appalling campaigns of the First World War, claiming almost half a million casualties and inflicting lifelong physical and psychological damage on the survivors. It’s also a gruesome example of the human costs of war and the evils of war-making.

Organizations named for someone often are accused of deviating from that person’s ideas, and the Mises Institute unfortunately is no exception. Recently, we have come under attack along the following lines: “Ludwig von Mises was a cosmopolitan, opposed to nationalism and racism. But the Mises institute, though named after him, has betrayed him. Guided by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, the Institute has opposed liberal humanist values. Mises would never have done this.”

After fifty years of imposing embargoes and other sanctions, the United States never managed to topple Cuba’s communist regime. After forty years of the same in Iran, the US met with similar amounts of success. Ongoing sanctions against North Korea have not toppled to regime there. 

But, some people in Washington won’t let decades of failure dissuade them. 

It is almost universally asserted today that consumer spending drives employment. This thesis gives support to the general Keynesian idea that government should “stimulate” the economy when it is suffering from a recession, whether it is through fiscal or monetary policy.

For more than a century the world has been caught in the grip of social engineers and political paternalists determined to either radically remake society from top to bottom in collectivist directions, or to use various government regulatory and redistributive policies to try to modify existing society into desired “social justice” forms and shapes. Both are based on false conceptions of man and society.

Last week, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) reminded Congress that in matters of war, they have the authority and the responsibility to speak for the American people. Most Senators were not too happy about the reminder, which came in the form of a forced vote on whether to allow a vote on his amendment to repeal the Afghanistan and Iraq war resolutions of 2001 and 2002.

It wasn’t easy. Sen. Paul had to jump through hoops just to get a vote on whether to have a vote.

The pre-capitalistic system of product was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. The victorious kings had given the land to their paladins. These aristocrats were lords in the literal meaning of the word, as they did not depend on the patronage of consumers buying or abstaining from buying on a market. On the other hand, they themselves were the main customers of the processing industries which, under the guild system, were organized on a corporative scheme. This scheme was opposed to innovation. It forbade deviation from the traditional methods of production.

Growth in the supply of US dollars fell again in August, this time to a 108-month low of 4.2 percent. The last time the money supply grew at a smaller rate was during August 2008 — at a rate of 4.1 percent. 

The money-supply metric used here — an “Austrian money supply” measure — is the metric developed by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Salerno, and is designed to provide a better measure than M2. The Mises Institute now offers regular updates on this metric and its growth.