A strange caricature of the laissez-faire liberal (i.e., libertarian) ideology persists. Namely, that libertarians are all required to pursue an individualistic lifestyle in which each person lives on his or her own with few social or economic connections with others. 

Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors in drug cases to seek the maximum penalty authorized by federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Sessions’ order represents a setback to the progress made toward restoring compassion and common sense to the sentencing process over the past few years. Sessions’ action also guarantees that many nonviolent drug law offenders will continue spending more time in prison than murderers.

[Adapted from a talk at the May 20 Seattle Mises Circle, “House of Cards: Has the US Economy Recovered?”]

I think we can all agree that the state of the economy has little to do with Donald Trump, at least for the moment.

This review of Frank D. Graham’s book, Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany 1920–23 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1930) was published in Economica (May 1932).

All the misfortunes from which Europe has suffered in the last two decades have been the inevitable result of the application of the theories which have dominated the social and economic philosophy of the last fifty years. Our troubles are the upshot of much laborious thought.

The tsunami of government spending and easy-money monetary policy shows no sign of letting up. In spite of many claims of strong economic growth, the world’s central banks refuse to do much at all in terms of scaling back their huge balance sheets or their rock-bottom interest rates.

Once an economy falls into recession many commentators tend to express concern that as a result of the economic slump there are now underutilized capital and labor. Resources that can be used are now made unemployed. It is held that the key factor behind this is an insufficient demand for goods and services.

Once it is accepted that this key factor is associated with insufficient demand these commentators take the view that what is required is to somehow boost overall demand in the economy.

Big Eye is watching you. For more than a decade, lobbyists from Johnson & Johnson (J&J), which controls over 40 percent of the contact lens market as a result of their cozy relationship with optometrists, and the American Optometric Association (AOA), which represents nearly 40,000 optometrists nationwide, have been fighting to create an artificial monopoly in the eye care industry.