In its most recent attack on gun ownership, The New York Times went out of its way to confuse gun homicides with homicide in general. As I noted here, this is a rhetorical trick used to mask the true homicide rates in other countries in order to make the United States look like an outlier. 

Another trick employed by gun control advocates is to lump gun-inflicted suicides in with gun homicides as in order to inflate the total number of “gun violence” events. 

Ludwig von Mises is sometimes criticized for having a weak ethical component in his theory of praxeology. His basic idea, as he famously developed it in Human Action, is that people act. By this he means that every purposive behavior is aimed at replacing a less satisfactory state of affairs with a more satisfactory one. It is impossible to perform an action that would not be directed toward increasing the actor’s satisfaction (or happiness). What we do represents our preferences. Of course, we can regret what we did, but can we regret what we are doing?

The FBI announced today that Hillary Clinton will not be indicted for any charge — not even a misdemeanor charge — related to her use of unsecured personal servers for storage of classified government materials. 

Writing for Entrepreneur, Per Bylund offers three arguments for why innovation skeptics are wrong.

With the Tesla 3 hitting the markets, innovation is on everybody’s minds. However, an electric car is hardly revolutionary: It’s at best an evolution of what already exists. While Elon Musk’s venture is touted as innovative, it can be seen as a symptom of the very condition that many have observed lately: innovation inactivity.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is perhaps best known for advancing the narrative that the 2000s housing bubble, collapse, and Great Recession, from which much of the US and the world have yet to fully recover, were the result of “unfettered Wall Street bankers tanking the economy” by “tricking borrowers” into bigger homes and debts than they could afford.

I’ve said many times that the best way government can promote entrepreneurship is to get out of the way, so I can’t support the Obama Administration’s annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, a government-sponsored meet-and-greet for prospective entrepreneurs, funders, politicians, and hangers-on.

Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world; in the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich von Gentz, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the western world that preceded it and followed it.

In a video making the rounds in social media last week, conservative author Mark Dice performs a series of man-on-the-street interviews to show how most Americans have no idea what Independence Day commemorates. The punch line comes at the end when Dice finds a young woman who can quote the document that he apparently thinks we commemorate on Independence Day. She says a few lines out loud and then Dice high-fives her. 

Happy Independence Day weekend from everyone at the Mises Institute. It’s fitting that in the week leading up to our American celebration of secession that we have been able to applaud Britain for their own separation from a legislative body that Angel Merkel was forced to admit is about political control, and not free trade.

At its best, Independence Day is a celebration of American secession and a testament to individual liberty. At its worst, Independence Day is still a day where government offices are closed, American grills are lit and the evening sky is full of fireworks, which is still pretty good (at least in my subjective value.)