In my last post, I made light of British columnist George Monbiot’s absurd charge that today’s free market economists and libertarians are part of an establishment crony capitalist system. A “progressive” friend of mine responded by asking: “Doesn’t big business wrap itself in the mantle of free markets? If so, aren’t exponents of free markets supporting crony capitalism? Aren’t they therefore responsible for the crony capitalist practices that beset us today?

From the perspective of the state, one of the benefits of growing larger geographically is that bigness makes it more difficult for residents to emigrate or cross over borders to escape taxes. 

The Senate began working through President-elect Trump’s cabinet appointments this week, as Washington prepares for next week’s inauguration (which will cost taxpayers over $100 million.) One of the pressing concerns worrying libertarians is Senator Jeff Session’s view on the war on drugs, which has been one of the most successful areas for states’ rights in recent years.

The BBC is running a story titled “Bizarre excuses for failing to pay the minimum wage”. The article follows an investigation by HM Revenues and Customs in the UK, which is organizing a government awareness campaign for underpaid workers. Some of the excuses are indeed hilarious and evidently made up on the go, such as “My accountant and I speak a different language—he doesn’t understand me and that’s why he doesn’t pay my workers the correct wages.”

Whenever politicians bring up the topic of “tax reform,” what they usually want is a reshuffling of taxes so changes to the tax code will look like a tax cut — without reducing tax revenues or lessening the tax burden. In other words, policymakers usually want a tax reform that is “revenue-neutral,” and this has been explicitly stated by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle for years now. 

Talking to the proponents of the European Union whose interest in every day politics is rather marginal (and their knowledge of political thought superficial) one could arrive at a conclusion that very often their support for the project is not fueled by some interventionist sympathies for social engineering but a simple desire for closer integration between nations not inhibited by state-imposed regulations rooted in a nationalist mindset. Moreover, this mindset is consonant with the original plans for Europe conceived long ago by the spiritual founding fathers of the EU: Robert Schum

The Mises Reader is a new book available form the Mises Institute designed to help introduce the texts of Ludwig von Mises to both scholars and laymen alike. In this interview with Tom Woods, the book’s editor, Shawn Ritenour, discusses the book, Ludwig von Mises, and his work. 

In December the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in 2016, once again failing to meet its own expectations it set the year prior. Unfortunately forecasting failures at the Fed is nothing new, for years it has routinely missed on both rate hikes and GDP projections. While it’s unfair to expect Fed economists to be fortune tellers, crying wolf does have consequences.