Week in Review: January 21, 2017
America has a new president, but will the new boss be the same as the old boss? Already we’ve seen the GOP embrace the same failed policies of the past in regard to healthcare and spending.
What Trump Could Do
Today Donald Trump becomes the 45th president of the United States. American voters rejected the devil they know so well — Hillary Clinton — for the devil they don’t. Why they did so, and how Trump prevailed, is the biggest political story of our age. But the rejection of progressive hubris, what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” of those who would presume to plan our lives, is at the heart of that story.
Did The Free Market Kill Coal?
Would you like to know my secret to turning my environmentalist friends into stalwart defenders of the marketplace? The answer is simple: coal.
You would be amazed by the reversal in rhetoric witnessed right before your eyes, typically accompanied by a big dose of schadenfreude aimed at Appalachian people.
German Inflation Anxiety Could Bring an Election Shock in 2017
The ECB’s increasingly shrill mantra that it makes policy for the monetary union as a whole and not for its largest member (Germany) could well cause a black swan to appear — in the form of a German political shock this autumn.
Must Libertarians Be Individualists?
One of the most common criticisms of liberalism — also known as libertarianism and the often-pejorative and vague “neoliberalism“ — is that liberalism is extreme in its individualism. That is, its critics accuse liberalism of forcing its alleged victims into an “atomistic” existence separated from the communal institutions and activities that have been central to human civilization from time immemorial.
The Failures of Obama’s Foreign Policy
As Murray Rothbard often emphasized, the free market and a peaceful foreign policy are indispensable partners. We cannot maintain a free market if the government engages in a bellicose foreign policy. A powerful and aggressive state constantly engaged in war requires vast resources to sustain it, and “military socialism” is an all-too-present reality.