Earlier this month, information from a Panamanian law firm was leaked which showed that many wealthy people had set up Panamanian shell companies to hide income and avoid taxes.

With April 15 come and gone, let’s have a look at how well the Federal government has been doing for itself in recent years.

It turns out things have been going quite well. In 2015, Federal receipts (well over 90 percent of which comes from taxes) hit an all time high of 3.2 trillion in 2009 dollars. In real terms, that’s the highest level ever reached.

The Murray Rothbard wall poster depicts a graying professor pecking at a typewriter. His words rise magically from the machine and blend into a black flag of anarchy rippling above his head. Beneath the drawing is the caption: “Murray N. Rothbard—the greatest living enemy of the state.” The poster, like almost everything else relating to politics, causes Rothbard to laugh. He has a penchant for humor that, in his younger days, let him to write an Off-Broadway play, Mozart Was a Red, which poked fun at the Ayn Rand cult of the individual. Today he still laughs very easily.

The saga of the so-called Charlotte bathroom ordinance — and the state of North Carolina’s response to it — has taken on a life of its own. At the national level leftists are accusing North Carolina of bigotry while, in the name of tolerance, a growing list of performers and businesses are boycotting the state. Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in all the rhetoric surrounding this issue is the truth about both the original Charlotte law and the state’s response to it.

Money was in the news this week as Treasury Secretary Jack Lew sided with Ben Bernanke, announcing that the father of crony capitalism gets to stay on the ten dollar bill while Andrew Jackson makes way for Harriett Tubman.  But why stop at Jackson?

Thanks to the Rothbard Reading Group at Southeast Missouri State University for hosting Joseph Salerno last Tuesday, April 19. Dr. Salerno spoke on “Money and the State.”

Salerno writes: “Murray Rothbard lectured at the University in 1989. He had been invited by Dr. Peter Kerr — a long-time friend of the Mises Institute — who was in attendance at my own lecture this week.”

Marijuana was legalized, the owners were permitted and they asked the government to conduct a business inspection. Instead the police busted them and stole all their stuff!

In his classic little history of fiat money inflation in the French Revolution, Andrew D. White points out that the more evident the evil consequences of inflation became, the more rabid became the demands for still more inflation to cure them. Today, as inflation increases, apologists emerge to suggest that, after all, inflation may be a very good thing—or, if an evil, at least a necessary evil. The chief spokesman of this group is Prof. Sumner H. Slichter of Harvard.

On Wednesday, Jack Lew announced that the US Treasury was following Ben Bernanke’s advice and keeping Alexander Hamilton on the $10, instead deciding to bring Harriett Tubman to the $20.