Following Hurricane Helene, many private helicopter pilots launched their own search and rescue missions. One would think government officials would welcome the help of these volunteers, but instead they harassed them and even threatened to arrest them!

For example, one private helicopter pilot rescued an individual stranded by Helene. Unfortunately, he was threatened with arrest if he flew his helicopter back into the impacted area to save someone left behind on the earlier flight.

Many people oppose the free market because it leads to inequality of wealth and income. It is unfair, they say, that some people have vastly more money than others. Some defenders of the free market respond that these inequalities, while undesirable in themselves, make the poor better off than they would be otherwise, and so should be accepted. Another argument made by defenders of the free market is that restricting inequality would interfere liberty, so that, although inequality is bad, we have to put up with it.

In the year 1949, the first issue of the socialist publication Monthly Review was released. Within the collection of essays, one stood out in particular. Notably, its author was none other than Albert Einstein. Somewhat misleadingly titled “Why Socialism?” the essay reads more like a critique of capitalism than a justification of socialism.

The idea that “if it can fail, it should” probably seems oxymoronic to most people when applied to the economic realm. Isn’t the whole point of economic systems to succeed, to thrive, and to bring prosperity to all? So it would seem. But not according to the Austrian school of economics. Indeed, we believe that the possibility of failure is a prerequisite for genuine economic advancement.

For the past eight years, the two major political parties have been gripped by a messy and ongoing realignment. It began with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, which was a major repudiation of the neoconservative-establishment coalition that had dominated the Republican Party since the presidency of George W. Bush.

Crack-Up Capitalism will be of interest to many readers of The Austrian because of what it says about Murray Rothbard; and for the most part, I shall limit my review to discussing this. The main point of the book is easy to grasp. In recent decades, the notion of a centralized state has come under fire in various ways, including attempts to secede, to create “enterprise zones” within states, and to establish societies without a state at all. Quinn Slobodian, a professor of the history of ideas at Wesleyan University, does not approve of these developments.

For decades, the US Federal Reserve has carefully cultivated and promoted the idea that it is somehow separate and independent from the US regime that created it.