This past July, I had the privilege of attending Mises University, also known as “the greatest week of the year.” It was, without a doubt, one of the best weeks of my life so far. Throughout the program I had numerous opportunities to learn from and engage not only with some of the most accomplished and intellectually exciting faculty, but with over 100 students from all over the world equally excited about equipping themselves with knowledge in order to fight for a better future.

With last weeks’s beginning of Ken Burns’ new documentary about the Vietnam War, the war will be brought back to the front burner for national discussion and debate.

There is one thing that is crystal clear and indisputable about the U.S. intervention into Vietnam’s civil war: The intervention was illegal under our form of government. That’s because it was waged in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the document that sets forth the powers of U.S. officials, including those in the military and the CIA.

Time is the soul of money, the long-view — its immortality. Hard assets are forever, even when destroyed by the cataclysms of history. It is the outlook that perpetuated the most competent and powerful aristocracies in continental Europe, well up through World War I and, in certain prominent cases, beyond; it is the mindset that has sustained the most fiscally serious democratic republic in the Western world, that of Switzerland (as demonstrated in this article).

During the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake in Los Angeles, my mother was working in downtown Los Angeles in one of the buildings then known as the Arco Towers. 

Almost a decade later, the Federal Reserve this week announced it will begin reversing quantitative easing. Slowly. Very slowly. The balance sheet currently stands at $4.5 trillion and they will begin allowing $10 billion in assets to roll off their sheets next month. Given the unprecedented nature of QE, even this modest reduction has many market observers on edge.

Let’s face it. The economic case for “price gouging” is one for which economists have both a strong argument and minority view, relative to more popular narratives drilled onto the three-by-five card of acceptable opinion. In that sense, we are in familiar territory, going back at least to Thomas Carlyle’s attack on economics as “the dismal science” when he realized economic arguments, when accepted by the broader population, would hasten the demise of slavery. 

It is safe to assume that most of the readers of Mises UK are not admirers of the Marxist historiographical school, and the defects and inadequacies of Marxian reconstructions of the past are by now well-known, even though a large percentage of academics in the Humanities insists in perpetuating Marxian myths and in using a Marxist vocabulary in textbooks and lectures. Yet, for all the shortcomings of the Marxist school, it is important to recognize that the narrative that it proposes has a strong relationship with economic theory.