In a recent New York Times article, Robert Shiller takes aim at the idea that “an unregulated competitive economy is optimal for everyone.” While a defender of certain aspects of the free market, he has misgivings about the amount of manipulation and deceit that permeates it. A competitive economy, in his eyes, features numerous entrepreneurs preying on consumers making decisions that run counter to their best interests.

On Friday, a desperate China announced another round of interest rate cuts — its sixth such announcement in the past year. Cheered on by Nobel Prize winning economists, and pundits who dream of socialists utopias, governments continue to cling to the follies of central planning, easy money and growing debt.

Waiting for Godot is a play written by the Irish novelist Samuel B. Beckett in the late 1940s in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, keep waiting endlessly and in vain for the coming of someone named Godot. The storyline bears some resemblance to the Federal Reserve’s talk about raising interest rates.

Today is Ralph Raico’s seventy-ninth birthday. He is the greatest living historian of classical liberalism and a leading libertarian theorist. He was a member of Murray Rothbard’s legendary Circle Bastiat and one of Murray’s closest friends. Ralph has been my friend for more than thirty-five years, and his learning, analytical abilities, and devotion to liberty have always inspired me. He is also extremely funny and a master of the sarcastic put-down. He once said to me, “What’s wrong with you? I’m not as stupid as you look.”

Hendrik Hagedorn and Stefan Kooths write:

The Federal Reserve told a federal judge in Colorado to dismiss a lawsuit by Fourth Corner Credit Union, blocking marijuana businesses in the state from legal banking services. This is just one of the many legal conundrums the budding industry has had to face since state law branched away from federal law on marijuana.

Currency rates of exchange appear to be moving in response to so many factors that it makes it almost impossible to ascertain where the rate of exchange is likely to be headed.  Rather than paying attention to the multitude of variables, it is more sensible to focus on the essential variable.

As far as currency rate of exchange determination is concerned, this variable is the relative changes in the purchasing power of various monies. In short, it is the relative purchasing power of various monies that sets the underlying rate of exchange.

100 percent-reserve banking is being introduced through the backdoor by U.S. regulators who remain queasy about banks runs in a future crisis.

Violence, whether private sector (i.e., “crime” and non-state “terrorism”) or government sector (war and police actions) are at the center of the debate about the state and its uses. Those who want stronger more centralized states will often argue that one of the main benefits of a stronger, more centralized state is its ability to punish or prevent acts of violence against those who are forced to pay for said state. “Yes, you’re taxed,” they’ll say “but without us you’d be at the mercy of murderers and foreign despots.”