Plenty has been written about financial transaction taxes (FTTs), mostly arguing over the politically charged issue of who pays: Main Street or Wall Street.

While talk today of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis that touched off the Great Recession tends to center mainly around the failure of regulators or bad individual actors at the level of banks and lenders, we should not forget that it was Fed policy from 1993 to 2005 that created the crucial conditions for the ultimate collapse.

For some members of the American foreign policy establishment, the world is permanently stuck in 1938 Munich. Ever since the Munich agreement and the strategy of “appeasement” failed to deter the start of the Second World War, some scholars have concluded that the only thing between global peace and complete chaos is the projection of American military strength around the world.

In Egypt, the recent announcement that bread prices, long subsidized for much of the population, would likely have to rise was met with cries of despair. Indeed, over two-thirds of the population of Egypt depend on inexpensive bread for daily sustenance.

The Biden administration, the Fed, and Wall Street all cheered the July employment report on Friday, which stated that total nonfarm payrolls rose by 943,000—8.4 percent better than expectations of 870,000—and the unemployment rate fell 0.5 percent to 5.4 percent in July. They also upwardly revised the prior two months by 119,000 jobs.

“Brewed according to the German Purity Law,” a Hobräu München hefeweizen bottle proudly declares. This brewery is not alone. Other German and even American brewers brag about how their beer adheres to the 1516 Bavarian Reinheitsgebot, which originally limited beer’s ingredients to water, barley, and hops.

Every quarter this past year I’ve provided updates on the stock holdings of the Swiss National Bank (SNB). Comment sections, internet chat boards, social media, and various articles about the bank reveal many people don’t understand the significance of its anticapitalist actions nor the problems this creates.

The philosopher Michael Huemer is usually favorable to the free market, and he is also a strong defender of anarchism. Although I disagree with some of the arguments in his defense of anarchism, The Problem of Political Authority, it is an excellent book.

In a recent blog post, he surprisingly suggests that taxation may in some cases be justified. He offers two examples, Pigouvian taxes on negative externalities and Georgist land taxes. In what follows, I’ll concentrate on the first of these.