Last week, Tom Woods and I spoke on the Tom Woods show about the FBI, its origins, and its crimes. We also took a look at some issues surrounding policing and why modern law enforcement is made more dangerous and more difficult by the state’s drive to manage and control every aspect of daily life. 

In Human Action Ludwig von Mises wrote, “corruption is a regular effect of interventionism.” As Peter Klein highlighted this week, we’ve seen a perfect illustration of that with continuing scandal plaguing Hillary Clinton involving the Clinton Foundation, and the speaking fees she received from Wall Street banks and other powerful companies. The larger government becomes, the more important it is to it have on your side.

Americans have more disposable income than nearly every other country on earth. The few exceptions include a handful of northern Western European states and some small city states like Monaco.

Even when accounting for government benefits and taxes, Americans still have more income available to spend than almost anyone else.

One of the few things economists agree on is that prices are determined by supply and demand. This is summarized by means of supply and demand curves, which describe the relationship between the prices and the quantity of goods supplied and demanded.

The most definitive study on fascism written in these years was As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in the 1920s. It was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought FDR every step of the way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a leader of the America First movement that saw FDR’s drive to war as nothing but an extension of the New Deal, which it certainly was.

Hillary Clinton has been taking heat for her relationship with the Clinton Foundation. Did individuals and firms making large donations to the Foundation, or paying large speaking or consulting fees to Bill Clinton, get preferred access to Ms. Clinton as Secretary of State? Is there a revolving door between the Clinton campaign and the Foundation’s fundraising staff? Are these relationships the subject of the emails she deleted from her private server?

The Western welfare states know many ways to get rid of their enormous sovereign debt — at great cost of their citizens. Once the debt burden becomes unbearable, the government simply reforms the currency. Then, the government debt will be “adjusted” with the private wealth of the citizens. This is when the citizens will notice that their government’s sovereign debt is their own debt.

But the government does not always need to make use of these large torture devices. More subtle ways, such as financial repression, are possible.