Listen to Ryan McMaken’s commentary on the Radio Rothbard podcast.

2017 may have been the worst year for homicide in Mexico since the government began keeping track in the 1990s. 

It’s a safe bet that the homicide rate isn’t coming anywhere near what it was in the years surrounding the revolution. But it may be the worst rate in several decades. 

The Broward County Sheriff’s office announced this afternoon that Deputy Scot Peterson resigned after being suspended for not engaging the shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He had been making over $75,000 a year as the school’s Student Resource Office, a position he had held since 2009.

With “Radio Rothbard” I’ll be doing short podcasts highlighting some of our columns and authors, while also providing audio versions of my own columns. But, I’ll also add just a little extra commentary and also read it the way I’d want it to sound in your head.

Before Carl Menger, various German economists had criticized the labor theory of value specifically and rejected the doctrine of inherent value in general. Menger’s view that value was subjective (personal, individual) in nature was not exceptional among German authors of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Swedish government and its central bank have long been in the vanguard of the war on cash.  Now they are suddenly having second thoughts about its potential outcome.   The value of notes and coins in circulation has crashed to its lowest level since 1990 and now stands at 40% below its level in 2007.  “No cash” signs are popping up everywhere in restaurants and retail establishments and even museums throughout Sweden.

Prior to the 2016 election, Ryan McMaken noted that voting Republican has proven to be the best way to grow government. At the time, he was referring to the growth of government spending under four of the past five administrations. Of course one of the Trump administrations first legislative “achievements” of the year was passing the largest spending increase since 2009.

Since I called Trump a big-government Republican during the 2016 campaign and just condemned his capitulation to a spendaholic budget deal, it goes without saying that I’m not a huge fan of the President.

For people who have spent little time in California, the metropolitan areas all look pretty much the same. Sure, they know that there are some rural areas of California that are unabashedly right-leaning, but the rest is all pretty much just like San Francisco. But, that’s not quite true, though. As recently, as 2008, we saw that California isn’t quite the uniform place many outsiders assume it to be.