Lately, I’ve wondered how my neighbor, Sam, affords to buy so much stuff. He appears to have an unlimited budget. When I asked him about this, Sam asked, “Do you think I’m spending too much?”

“That depends,” I said, “How much money do you make?”

“I take home $100,000 a year.”

That surprised me. I would guess that he’s spending more than that. But I tried to be encouraging, “That sounds like plenty of income. With a little planning, you should be able to budget your spending and be financially stable.”

Remember Cecil the Lion? It was a lion who was hunted and killed in Zimbabwe last year, and when photos of the dead lion appeared on line, scores of first-world suburban white people cried out in anguish that a cute big cat was killed. 

Nine cities in Romania rank in the top 15 in the world with the highest speed of Internet connection. The average monthly costs of a Mbps is a meager $0.71, with some providers offering 1 Gbps for a subscription of $18 per month. Two Romanian cities rank higher than Kansas City, the first US city on the list.

The Federal Reserve is a key component of the American Transfer State. Under the guise of “macroeconomic management,” it redistributes vast amounts of wealth on an ongoing basis through inflation. The victims of these transfers are ordinary Americans. The beneficiaries are the government and its elite cronies.

The Fed masks the nature of this surreptitious taxation and corporate welfare by performing a simple shell game that is just complicated enough to confound the general public.

A new working paper by Academic Vice President Joe Salerno, “The Development of the Neutral Money Concept: The Austrian School Further Dehomogenized,” is now available here. The abstract is below.

In celebration of what would have been his 90th birthday, the Rothbard Reader is a new collection of the best of Murray Rothbard. 

The following is the Introduction by its editors Joseph T. Salerno and Matthew McCaffrey:

March 2 would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninetieth birthday. Had he lived, you can be sure he would have been up all night, going through the results of Super Tuesday. In any election, he was able to provide a detailed account of every candidate, issue, faction, economic interest, newspaper, magazine, and television station involved.