After nearly a decade of being able to borrow money for next to nothing, interest rates are finally beginning to creep higher.

Spring is in the air signaling the start of homebuying season. But here in Las Vegas, buyers “are aplenty,” 1st Realty Group owner Thomas Blanchard tells the Las Vegas Review Journal, but “we just don’t have the properties to sell them.”

Audit the Fed recently took a step closer to becoming law, when it was favorably reported by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This means the House could vote on the bill at any time. The bill passed by voice vote without any objections, although Fed defenders did launch hysterical attacks on the bill during the debate as well as at a hearing on the bill the previous week.

In 1966, Milton Friedman wrote an op-ed for Newsweek entitled “Minimum Wage Rates.” In it, he argued “that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.” He was, of course, referring to the then-present era, after the far more explicitly racist laws from the slavery and segregation eras of United States history had already been done away with.

Tatsuya Iwakura — translator of many works by Mises and Rothbard into Japanese — has completed two new translations now available on Amazon:

• The Case Against the Fed by Murray Rothbard 
• The Essential Rothbard by David Gordon 

Other translations by Mr. Iwakura include: 

[This unsigned editorial, written by Murray N. Rothbard, appeared in the April 15, 1969, issue of The Libertarian (soon to become The Libertarian Forum).]

April 15, that dread Income Tax day, is around again, and gives us a chance to ruminate on the nature of taxes and of the government itself.

Tax season is here. This is a time to celebrate. No, I mean it. Not because the State makes its claim on our hard-earned monies known, but because of what is on everybody’s mind and the type of activity we’re all involved with. Seldom is the State as present in our pockets (and pocket books) as in mid-April every year, when we either learn that we have inadvertently paid even more than the State thinks is its “fair share” of our earnings, or learn that even the outrageous amounts we have already paid weren’t enough.

French economist Frédéric Bastiat was a man far ahead of his time. He was a “classical liberal,” which, today, would identify him as a libertarian. He expanded upon the free-market argument set forth by Adam Smith in 1776.