The political circus of the 2016 presidential election has revived and reinvigorated popular belief in age-old protectionist fallacies. Currently both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, are both in favor of expanding protectionist trade policy, with both of them arguing that free trade “destroys” jobs and hurts domestic workers and producers by exposing them to foreign competition. Both candidates espouse an utterly misguided zero-sum view of economics, in which one side to an exchange wins only when the other side loses. Both men are, of course, completely wrong.

... according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) — the so-called central banks’ central bank. The BIS has just released a research report questioning whether negative interest rates are effective in achieving policymakers’ goals of staving off a (phantom) deflation without adversely impacting the financial sector and the overall economy.

It’s getting near tax time, again, and the conservative press is busy repeating Mitt Romney’s favorite hobby-horse, namely, that nearly half of Americans don’t pay enough in taxes.

[Reprinted from The Free Market (September 1985). Included in The Rothbard Reader.]

Murray Rothbard would have turned 90 years old on Wednesday, and his contributions to economics have never been more relevant. As more Americans wake up to the Federal Reserve’s shell game and frustration continues to grow

Although Phishing for Phools was published only a few months ago, it has already attracted much attention, owing to the eminence of its authors, both Nobel Laureates; but it has been misunderstood. Reviewers have taken it to be just another popularization of behavioral economics. The book does make use of behavioral economics, but its fundamental emphasis lies elsewhere. It is a radical attack both on the free market and a key part of standard economic theory.

Last month, we looked at military spending by state, and how some states — South Carolina and Virginia, for example — have military spending as a major component of their local economies. Proposing cuts to government spending via military spending would likely be political suicide in any of these places.

The world’s largest container ship just entered a US port. Just in time for record low levels in the Baltic Dry Shipping Index, which is a measure of how much ships can charge. This is a classic case of how artificially low interest rates, globally, creates malinvestments, deflation, and eventually bankruptcies.

According to an article in the Daily Mail:

Joining Jeff to explain why Rothbard remains so relevant today is University of Manchester Professor Matt McCaffrey, a former Mises Institute Fellow and co-editor of our new Rothbard Reader.