For religions throughout the world, established rules, studies, and practices are instrumental for their legitimacy. Established religious institutions throughout the world train theologians to study the nature of God and their belief system.
Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy the State, which was published nearly ninety years ago in 1935, had a great influence on Murray Rothbard, transmitted though his friend and mentor Frank Chodorov, who was Nock’s main follower. The book is rich in insights, some of which I have discussed in a forthcoming review for The Misesian, but there are many more. In what follows, I’ll comment on some of these.
For years I have held up Venezuela in my economics classes as an example of bad government policy.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) posits that booms and busts can be explained by private versus public sectoral balances and the inherent instability of private financial markets. Stephanie Kelton frequently points to this graph of public and private surpluses and deficits:
Voluntary exchange is the core of all market economies. It is the lifeblood that propels innovation, societal welfare, and progress, creating intricate webs of interconnected transactions that heighten productivity. In pursuit of profits, businesses sell and improve their products to outperform competitors and increasingly capture market shares, spurring the development of novel ideas and solutions.
From the 2024 conference of the Property and Freedom Society:
Some people argue like this: Although the Fed as it now exists is very bad, a nation needs a central bank to regulate its money supply, and the Fed is better than nothing. That being so, we should try to urge the Fed to adopt a non-expansionary monetary policy. In this view, calls to “End the Fed” are mistaken. I’m sure most of my readers already know what I’m about to say, but, just to be clear, that view is disastrously wrong. We do not need a central bank, and to argue in the way indicated is to betray the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr.
Donald Trump on Monday floated the idea that he might seek to replace the federal income tax with federal taxes on imports—also known as tariffs.
