I am sorry to have to report that Ralph Raico has passed away. His intellectual brilliance was evident from an early age, and while still in high school, he attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar at New York University. There he met Murray Rothbard, who became his lifelong friend. Ralph was one of the most brilliant members of Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, working under Friedrich Hayek.
Just about everyone expects the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to raise its target interest rate at its meeting this week. The talk of raising rates has occupied newspaper columns all year, and the comments from FOMC participants have become stronger in recent months in discussing their desire to raise rates. But the decision to raise rates won’t have come about because of any strong economic data, be it inflation hovering around the Fed’s target or the low unemployment rate showing strength in the labor market.
Introduction
Knowledge of the principles of the free society is not something that everyone is born with or something that we just catch like the common cold. The principles of liberty must be carefully passed on from one generation to the next if they are to survive, let alone flourish. Each generation must learn anew from their predecessors the virtues of private property and the consequences of statism.
Donald Trump’s Carrier deal has once again placed the issue of tax breaks front and center in economic policy debates. Free-market economists have been unanimous in their criticism of the deal, but some commentators argue it can be defended as a kind of selective tax relief. For example, Tho Bishop suggests that, if the policy involves tax relief and nothing more, it should be welcomed.
With premiums rising an average of 22 percent and as high as 116 percent on Obamacare’s 2017 government exchanges, it seems surreal to read journalists attributing the economic pathologies of US health care to market failure. Yet that is essentially the perspective being driven by the Associated Press and NBC with approving input from industry economists and consultants.
Another day, another Tweet from President-elect Trump has moved the market.
A major threat to liberty is the assault on the right to discuss political issues, seek out alternative information sources, and promote dissenting ideas and causes such as non-interventionism in foreign and domestic affairs. If this ongoing assault on free speech succeeds, then all of our liberties are endangered.
One of the nicer side effects of the 2016 election has been the trashing of the reputations of US intelligence agencies, specifically the FBI and the CIA. During the election, of course, it became apparent that there was some sort of tug-of-war within the FBI which led James Comey to first declare that no “reasonable” prosecutor would ever go after Hillary Clinton.
