In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 3, 2012, President Obama called a budget proposal of his Republican opponents in Congress “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.”

It is widely held that financial asset markets always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and that adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous. This way of thinking which is known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is closely linked with the modern portfolio theory (MPT), which postulates that market participants are at least as good at price forecasting as is any model that a financial market scholar can come up with, given the available information.

In its most recent attack on gun ownership, The New York Times went out of its way to confuse gun homicides with homicide in general. As I noted here, this is a rhetorical trick used to mask the true homicide rates in other countries in order to make the United States look like an outlier. 

Another trick employed by gun control advocates is to lump gun-inflicted suicides in with gun homicides as in order to inflate the total number of “gun violence” events. 

Ludwig von Mises is sometimes criticized for having a weak ethical component in his theory of praxeology. His basic idea, as he famously developed it in Human Action, is that people act. By this he means that every purposive behavior is aimed at replacing a less satisfactory state of affairs with a more satisfactory one. It is impossible to perform an action that would not be directed toward increasing the actor’s satisfaction (or happiness). What we do represents our preferences. Of course, we can regret what we did, but can we regret what we are doing?

The FBI announced today that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted for any charge — not even a misdemeanor charge — related to her use of unsecured personal servers for storage of classified government materials. 

Writing for Entrepreneur, Per Bylund offers three arguments for why innovation skeptics are wrong.

With the Tesla 3 hitting the markets, innovation is on everybody’s minds. However, an electric car is hardly revolutionary: It’s at best an evolution of what already exists. While Elon Musk’s venture is touted as innovative, it can be seen as a symptom of the very condition that many have observed lately: innovation inactivity.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is perhaps best known for advancing the narrative that the 2000s housing bubble, collapse, and Great Recession, from which much of the US and the world have yet to fully recover, were the result of “unfettered Wall Street bankers tanking the economy” by “tricking borrowers” into bigger homes and debts than they could afford.

I’ve said many times that the best way government can promote entrepreneurship is to get out of the way, so I can’t support the Obama Administration’s annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, a government-sponsored meet-and-greet for prospective entrepreneurs, funders, politicians, and hangers-on.

When I was a boy, one of my favorite holidays was Independence Day. I was an enthusiastic student of the War for Independence. My favorite book was the How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution by Felix Sutton. I spent a lot of my childhood reading about the colonial era, the lives of people like Sam Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Washington.

Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the western world that preceded it and followed it.