At a campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio, one month before election day, Donald Trump shared his plan for addressing voters’ growing concerns about student loan debt.

Trump’s student loan repayment plan came late in the campaign cycle, long after Senator Bernie Sanders and Secretary Hillary Clinton released their respective plans, both of which would have increased government intervention in higher education, further distorting the already-convoluted education and student loan markets.

[Originally published November 20, 1999.]

Each year at this time, schoolchildren all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

Thanksgiving is not simply a holiday celebrating the abundance of capitalism, but a time to give thanks for all we are grateful for. The Mises Institute is thankful to all of our generous donors, talented writers, and incredible supporters — your enthusiasm is what allows us to spread the ideas of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt and the rest of the Austrian School throughout the world.

Call me old-fashioned, but one thing I am always thankful for every Thanksgiving is the blessing of not having Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House. After all, of all the heroes of the American progressive movement, few have quite the record of sins as FDR.

Can Trump-economics prevent the asset price inflation now infecting the global economy — with its origins in the radical monetary experiment under the Obama Administration — from moving on to its late deadly phase?

One of the many political myths to which Americans continue to cling is the idea that the Supreme Court is an “non-political” institution and that its traditions and institutional framework are sacrosanct. 

The court has never been non-political, of course, and has always been composed of political appointees closely connected to elected officials in Washington. 

Far from being outdated and past their time, the ideas behind the electoral college are greatly underutilized. The electoral college is thought by many to be somehow uniquely American, but this is not the case. Similar mechanisms — sometimes called “double-majority” systems — have been used in many different times and places in political history. 

In his plan for his first day in office, Donald Trump announced that he is ready to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he called a “disaster”. The administrations of TPP partner countries have reacted negatively, arguing that the U.S. is foregoing a strategic opportunity, rendering the agreement “meaningless.”