Benedict XVI: A Life
By Peter Seewald
Volume 1: Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927–19651
Published in English by Bloomsbury Continuum, London, 2020
Translated by Dinah Livingstone

For Rothbard week, we asked some of our writers and scholars to talk about why Rothbard is worth remembering. Here’s what they had to say.

Gary Galles

March 2 marks the birth of Murray Rothbard. Given his importance to the cause of liberty, that makes it a date worth recalling the man and his work. In fact, I have done that in the past, recalling some of what I find are some of his most inspiring words.

The official slogan of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was “America UnCancelled,” and the conference featured a slate of topics confined to such controversial viewpoints as “Why the Left Hates the Bill of Rights … and We Love It” and “California Socialism: Promising Heaven, Delivering Hell.” Fitting for the single largest annual event for America’s conservative movement, CPAC was hosted at a corporate hotel that strictly enforced a Democrat-controlled local government’s mask mandates and featured a controversial stage constructed by a major Democrat don

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article.

To gain insight into the state of an economy, most financial experts and commentators rely on a statistic called the gross domestic product (GDP). The GDP framework looks at the value of final goods and services produced during a particular time interval, usually a quarter or a year.

In this era of monetary fiction, one tends to read all types of undocumented and misguided views on monetary policy. However, if there is one that really is infuriating is the MMT (modern monetary theory) science fiction.

One of its main principles is based on a fallacy.

“A country with monetary sovereignty can issue all the debt it needs without default risk”

Leo Strauss is one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century, and like him or not, we need to understand his ideas. Murray Rothbard, by the way, had a mixed verdict on Strauss. He says, for example,

In January, money supply growth hit a new all-time high, rising slightly above September 2020’s previous high, and remaining well above growth levels that one year ago would have been considered unthinkable. January’s surge in money-supply growth makes January the tenth month in a row of remarkably high growth, and came in the wake of unprecedented quantitative easing, central bank asset purchases, and various stimulus packages.