I know your mailbox is stuffed this time of year, but please don’t overlook the letter Lew Rockwell recently sent from the Mises Institute.
Ludwig von Mises had the right ideas, and fought for them. He fought the rising tides of progressivism, socialism, Nazism, and Marxism, not only in Europe but also in his adopted America. Surely we owe ourselves and our children the same fighting spirit Mises showed throughout his life.
When reading about the curious case of Garrison Keillor, the public radio icon fired for what he considers an innocent misunderstanding—or was it payback for his defense of Senator Al Franken?—I noticed a line in a comments section about where today’s raging response to sexual harassment (among other fruits of the sexual revolution) is likely to lead.
Allen Mendenhall, Associate Dean at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and Executive Director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty, introduces Judge Andrew Napolitano, Senior Legal Analyst at Fox News, who delivers the commencement address to the 2017 graduating class of Thomas Goode Jones School of Law and receives an honorary doctorate for his distinguished career. Recorded May 13, 2017.
President Trump has lambasted the NFL more than 20 times for players’ “Total Disrespect of Our Great Country.” Ratings are down for NFL games and Trump figures it’s because some players aren’t standing, hand over heart, and mouthing the words to the national anthem.
If you were a Martian visitor just disembarked from of one of Elon Musk’s rocket ships and were therefore uninfected by earth-based fake news, the culprits in Washington’s witch-hunt de jure would be damn obvious.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision on eminent domain, many pro-centralization libertarians complained that the Supreme Court should have outlawed state and local government authorizations of eminent domain.
This was the wrong approach. The correct approach is to support the decentralization of eminent domain powers — and then to outlaw eminent domain at the state and local level.
As we’ve noted at mises.org many times, the amount of land owned by the federal government in Western states is enormous. Today, the feds control 640 million acres (not counting the far larger federally-owned areas of coastal sea floor). And in most Western states, the Federal government owns more than a third of all the land. In the case of Utah, the federal government owns 65 percent.
Capitalism is a wondrous human institution for the mutual betterment for all in society. Yet, critics often insist that market systems enable sellers to take advantage of buyers, because those on the demand-side often lack the specialized knowledge that suppliers possess, thus, enabling a possible exaggerated misrepresentation of what is being offered for sale. What is missed is that market competition generates the incentives and opportunities to earn profits precisely by not misinforming or cheating the buyer.
In a recent column for Mises Wire, Doug French raised very important issue of negative interest rates. Quoting Fleckenstein Capital He wrote,
Yesterday a Parisian BBB-rated company (i.e., quasi junk) issued $500 million in three-year notes yielding negative 0.026%. We have been peppered with so many absurdities, nothing seems absurd anymore…
French continues with his own observations:
Why was James Madison so critical of democracies? Moreover, why was he so concerned about them when, according to the definition he provided, “democracies” basically don’t exist anywhere, either in his time or in our own.
Today, many conservatives like to claim that “the Founding Fathers” opposed democracy and supported less majoritarian republics.
