Cheering for the home team can unify communities divided by politics, economics, and personal differences. However, this unification can come at a high cost, one that will inevitably fall to the taxpayer. While it is typical for professional athletic associations to use tax dollars to pay for their stadiums, arenas, or other venues of choice, public subsidies are not the only means to this end, nor are they the most efficient.
Senator Joe McCarthy perfected the technique in the United States: whenever you disagree with anybody, don’t debate ideas, go right into name calling. In McCarthy’s day, the epithet of choice was “Communist.” In recent years, it has morphed into “racist, sexist, homophobe, latinophobe, Islamophobe, xenophobe etc., etc.”
The thirteenth annual Austrian Student Scholars Conference will be held on the campus of Grove City College February 24–25, 2017. Open to undergraduates and graduate students in any academic discipline, the ASSC will bring together students from colleges and universities across the country and around the world to present their own research papers written in the tradition of the great Austrian school intellectuals such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Hans Sennholz.
In recent decades, India has become a frontrunner in global politics representing a powerful bloc of emerging economies that are characterized by high growth rates and an untapped reservoir of human capital. It plays a crucial role in influencing international markets as its borders encapsulate not only some of the brightest minds in a wide array of specialties but also an increasingly unrestricted market that welcomes innovation and celebrates novelty.
I grew up a block away from the 7-train, where I’d take a short ride from the 90th Street station to the Willets Point–Shea Stadium station to watch my favorite team, the New York Mets.
While the American media is distracted trying to figure out whether to be more outraged by “fake news” or Donald Trump not informing them of his dinner plans, the Mises Wire noted a number of important global trends this week. For one, the war on cash continues to grow. In Australia a number of large financial institutions came out with policies supporting the Australian Treasury Department’s goal of a cashless society.
America came into the Second World War two years after it started, but before that it sold large quantities of American goods to the Allied forces: weapons, war materials, ships, and so on. The bills for all these products and commodities were settled in gold, and American gold reserves were the highest in the world.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan has announced plans to request that Japan’s corporate leaders increase salaries and wages at an upcoming meeting of government, business, and nonprofit leaders in preparation for the spring labor negotiation period, or shunto. That would be the fourth straight year that Mr. Abe has proposed higher wages to strengthen Japan’s beleaguered economy.
