On Thursday 7 July 2016 during a Dallas protest of the killings of Philando Castle and Alton Sterling an attack on officers tasked to watch left five dead and an additional seven hospitalized.

THE AUSTRIAN: What is the “Great Monetary Experiment” you refer to in your book?

Brendan Brown: The Federal Reserve has sought by using non-conventional monetary tools to produce a stronger than normal economic expansion following the Great Recession. The resort to such tools has occurred in a context where money market rates have already fallen to near zero, meaning that the conventional tool of rate cuts is not available. The ECB and Bank of Japan joined in the experiment with a considerable lag behind the Federal Reserve.

If there is one overriding economic myth that plagues us today it is the notion that society can do collectively what we cannot do individually: get rich by living today at the expense of tomorrow. It is the doctrine of the political class, professional economists, and central bankers. It is monetary and fiscal hedonism masquerading as technical analysis. And, it leads to fiscal default. It is arguably the biggest untold story of our time, but you won’t hear about it from Hillary or Bernie or Donald.

The national minimum wage introduced in 1999 by the Blair government was seen as one of the best policies to tackle exploitative work and the conditions of low pay. What better than to create a floor under which no one can fall? Well it seems that floor was not so stable, as young people have borne the brunt of this misguided policy.

[From the Spring 2016 Issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.]

Pokémon Go, an extremely popular mobile game released last month, uses the GPS and camera on players’ phones to turn the real world into an adventure land filled with cartoon creatures, called Pokémon, which can be found and caught by exploring real-world places and throwing Pokéballs at them before other players do the same.

“Never trust a criminal … until you have to,” is the official motto of The Blacklist, the American crime-thriller television series that premiered on NBC on September 23, 2013. But the real lesson of The Blacklist is “never trust the government … even if you have to.” Not many shows are both anti-state in their narrative and enjoyable at the same time. The Blacklist, however, deserves to be watched. If there is one show that takes the government for what it is, i.e., a “bandit gang” as Rothbard called it, it would be The Blacklist.

Describing what he called the “crack-up boom,” Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, said:

The boom cannot continue indefinitely. There are two alternatives. Either the banks continue the credit expansion without restriction and thus cause constantly mounting price increases and an ever-growing orgy of speculation — which, as in all other cases of unlimited inflation, ends in a “crack-up boom” and in a collapse of the money and credit system.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently been investigating sponsorships between video game developers and popular internet personalities known as “influencers.” The parties under investigation include sponsors like Warner Bros. as well as influencers like Felix Kjellberg—better known by his online moniker PewDiePie—creator of what is to date the most subscribed-to channel on YouTube.