In a video making the rounds in social media last week, conservative author Mark Dice performs a series of man-on-the-street interviews to show how most Americans have no idea what Independence Day commemorates. The punch line comes at the end when Dice finds a young woman who can quote the document that he apparently thinks we commemorate on Independence Day. She says a few lines out loud and then Dice high-fives her.
Happy Independence Day weekend from everyone at the Mises Institute. It’s fitting that in the week leading up to our American celebration of secession that we have been able to applaud Britain for their own separation from a legislative body that Angel Merkel was forced to admit is about political control, and not free trade.
At its best, Independence Day is a celebration of American secession and a testament to individual liberty. At its worst, Independence Day is still a day where government offices are closed, American grills are lit and the evening sky is full of fireworks, which is still pretty good (at least in my subjective value.)
Fascism: The Career of a Concept. By Paul E. Gottfried. Northern Illinois University Press, 2016. Vii + 226 pages.
A hundred years ago, British units (alongside a smaller French force) attacked the Germans on an eleven-mile wide front in Picardy, straddling the Somme River. The attack was the attempt to break through on the Western Front, and in accordance with emerging artillery doctrine and practice, the German lines were saturated with shells for a week in advance. But when the artillery stopped to allow the British to attack, the Germans raced out of their deep dugouts, manned their machine guns, and mowed down the British attackers.
Ludwig von Mises is not an easy figure to get your arms around. His writings total tens of thousands of pages. A newcomer to Mises could be lost in this vast body of work. That’s why the Institute is publishing The Mises Reader.
Mises put the ideals of liberty, property, and peace before his professional prestige, his career, his income, even his personal safety. He suffered for this, but not even Hitler could silence him. It is a proud record that shines through the darkness of the 20th century like a beacon.
Today the Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor written by Mark Thornton on the Fed’s basic misunderstanding of “natural” interest rates.
Dr. Thornton writes:
Economics, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run.
This is the lesson that has been the special concern of this book. We stated it first in skeleton form, and then put flesh and skin on it through more than a score of practical applications.
