The national minimum wage introduced in 1999 by the Blair government was seen as one of the best policies to tackle exploitative work and the conditions of low pay. What better than to create a floor under which no one can fall? Well it seems that floor was not so stable, as young people have borne the brunt of this misguided policy.
Pokémon Go, an extremely popular mobile game released last month, uses the GPS and camera on players’ phones to turn the real world into an adventure land filled with cartoon creatures, called Pokémon, which can be found and caught by exploring real-world places and throwing Pokéballs at them before other players do the same.
“Never trust a criminal … until you have to,” is the official motto of The Blacklist, the American crime-thriller television series that premiered on NBC on September 23, 2013. But the real lesson of The Blacklist is “never trust the government … even if you have to.” Not many shows are both anti-state in their narrative and enjoyable at the same time. The Blacklist, however, deserves to be watched. If there is one show that takes the government for what it is, i.e., a “bandit gang” as Rothbard called it, it would be The Blacklist.
Describing what he called the “crack-up boom,” Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, said:
The boom cannot continue indefinitely. There are two alternatives. Either the banks continue the credit expansion without restriction and thus cause constantly mounting price increases and an ever-growing orgy of speculation — which, as in all other cases of unlimited inflation, ends in a “crack-up boom” and in a collapse of the money and credit system.
The Federal Trade Commission has recently been investigating sponsorships between video game developers and popular internet personalities known as “influencers.” The parties under investigation include sponsors like Warner Bros. as well as influencers like Felix Kjellberg—better known by his online moniker PewDiePie—creator of what is to date the most subscribed-to channel on YouTube.
It was a lost decade for Latin America. Years of populist governments combined with a commodity boom turned out to be our oil curse, our Dutch Disease. This disastrous mix made bad public policies look like temporary successes, pushing developing countries to an unsustainable path.
Murray Rothbard was relatively fond of guerrilla warfare. He wasn’t fond of war, of course, which he considered to be synonymous with mass murder, but he believed guerrilla warfare — conducted by non-state institutions — to be more morally legitimate than state-centric conventional warfare.
Whether it is Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump who stands on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C in January 2017 to take the oath of office as president of the United States, all public opinion polls suggest whomever emerges victorious will have among the highest unfavorable ratings for anyone beginning their time in the White House. Both Clinton and Trump represent a failure for American democracy.
