David Gordon’s recent article regarding the late Murray Rothbard’s keen interest in handicapping political races shows that Rothbard was hardly bound up in a world of theoretical abstractions. But critics of Rothbard often claim that his supposed intransigence, his unwillingness to compromise on matters of libertarian principle, rendered him a less effective advocate in the real world.
Do you believe that a minority teenager, maybe a high school drop out, with very few job skills, has a right to work? Or do you believe that being low skilled, maybe so low-skilled that you can only command $8 or $9 an hour in the job market, means you should have this right taken away? Oddly enough, for the progressive left, those who claim to be the most compassionate in our society, have adopted the latter position.
The anarcho-capitalism that Murray Rothbard favored differed entirely from the American system of government, and he saw the State as a gang of robbers. It by no means followed from this, though, that he was uninterested in politics. Quite to the contrary, he was passionately absorbed in it.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on labor productivity today. During the first quarter of 2016, labor productivity fell 0.5 percent, making the first quarter the third quarter in a row for falling productivity. Prior to the first quarter of this year, labor productivity had not fallen three quarters in a row since 1979 in the lead up to the 1980 recession and the 1981-82 recession.
It is well-known trivia that the original formula for Coca-Cola contained cocaine, but the lesser known history of Coca-Cola has other interesting components involving the government, cronyism, and the War on Drugs.
For this year’s Summer Olympics in Rio, the Brazilian government spent $4.6 billion — that’s a conservative estimate that covers facilities used for sports only. When we include all other related expenses, the total comes to $12 billion.
Despite its shortcomings, America is still by far the greatest country in the world. For those of us who are fortunate enough to live here and are, thus, able to enjoy the luxuries provided to us by our American way of life, we often make the mistake of assuming our way of life is the only way of life.
Earlier this year, music sensation, and leader of the female empowerment movement, Beyoncé Knowles, came under fire when it was discovered that her new athletic clothing line is being produced by women in alleged “sweatshops” in Sri Lanka.
In the wake of the 2007-2009 recession, 78 months passed before employment returned to where it had been before the crisis. This was, by far, the longest period needed to recover from job losses in decades. The second-longest period needed to recover jobs occurred after the 2002 recession when about 50 months were needed to recover lost jobs:
There is no ready-made answer in Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT) to the multi-trillion dollar question now looming over the global economy and markets. Is the present virulent asset price inflation disease likely to enter any time soon its final phase of bust and recession? Will this happen even though the Federal Reserve has flip-flopped on even token steps toward policy normalization and leading foreign central banks (i.e., the Bank of Japan, ECB, and Bank of England) to pursue experiments with negative interest rates and novel forms of mega-balance sheet expansion?
