The progressive intellectual looks upon capitalism as the most ghastly of all evils. Mankind, he contends, lived rather happily in the good old days. But then, as a British historian said, the Industrial Revolution “fell like a war or a plague” on the peoples. The “bourgeoisie” converted plenty into scarcity. A few tycoons enjoy all luxuries. But, as Marx himself observed, the worker “sinks deeper and deeper” because the bourgeoisie “is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.”

For a group of people who reject political power and even the state itself, libertarians sure seem to care a lot about the election. In the past few months, there’s even been a kind of desperation in libertarian circles to find something, anything that could vaguely connect one of the candidates to a philosophy of liberty or economic sanity. The leaps of logic required to make these endorsements defy all attempt at parody: warmongers, democratic socialists, and economic and human protectionists have by turns been suggested as the most viable options for libertarians.

[Debating War: Why Arguments Opposing American Wars and Interventions Fail. By David J. Lorenzo. Routledge, 2016. viii + 233 pages.]

In response to last week’s post on median incomes, several readers responded on Twitter with links to posts by the American Enterprise Institute think tank which explain some of the problems with using measures of household income.

[Delivered at a memorial service at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, January 20, 1995.]

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a worldwide renewal in the scholarship of liberty.

”Give me a short description of his thought and contributions,” said the reporter when this free-market giant died at the age of 68. But how do you sum up Beethoven’s music or Dante’s poetry?

PressTV reports [see full video]:

Press TV: What has gone wrong with the US economy?

[Mark] Thornton: Well the unemployment report today is very disturbing. The number came in 160,000 new jobs all of which are accounted for in the service sector and all the other sectors of the American economy are negative in terms of job growth or very disappointing.

[Author’s note:  This essay is adapted from my preface to the Chinese edition of The Ethics of Money Production, available here in its English version. This is the first time the essay has been published in English.] 

Nathan Bond, 30, is an entrepreneur and the cofounder of Rifle Paper Co., based in Winter Park, Florida. Founded in 2009, the company has since expanded worldwide. We recently spoke with Bond about his support for the Mises Institute and how Austrian economics has impacted the way he does business.

THE AUSTRIAN: How did you first discover the Mises Institute?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) today released a new report concluding that in 2014, 16 percent of men between ages 18 and 24 were jobless or incarcerated. Out of a total of 38 million young men in the age group, 5 million were unemployed and one million were jailed.

In 1980, 10 percent of men in this category were jobless and 1 percent were incarcerated; those shares rose to 13 percent and 3 percent, respectively, in 2014.