The Greek government continues to negotiate with international creditors following its recent default on its 1.6 billion euro loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Consequently, Greece runs the risk of losing access to a 1.8 billion euro loan tranche and 10.0 billion euros for recapitalizing banks.

Commentators are of the view that the key factor behind the troubles in Greece is high government debt, which as a percentage of GDP stood at over 177 percent in 2014 against 79.6 percent in 1990.

In this interview, Mark Thornton expands on today’s Mises Daily article and reviews the cases of Portugal and Washington state: have the fears of the prohibitionists been realized? 

1. Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs by Peter St. Onge

2. The Myth of CEO Pay and “Greed” by Matt Palumbo

3. Fact Checking Paul Krugman’s Claim To Be “Right About Everything” by Andrew Syrios

Tate Fegely and Jeff Deist discuss what crime and punishment might look like in a libertarian society, and how to convince skeptical libertarians that private police can do a better job of dealing with violence, theft, and fraud.

Steven Pinker is well known for his theory that violence (globally speaking) is now at lower levels than its every been, and that this is due to the triumph of enlightenment ideas. While I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think Pinker overstates his case sometimes. For example, the fact that the world has not been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust is not due to the fact that the large regimes of the world are particularly enlightened. In fact, US policymakers routinely discussed using nuclear weapons well into the Vietnam War.

The Chinese government has done the following to prop up its stock markets:

1.    Cut interest rates several times

2.    Cut reserve requirements

3.    Prevents large stock owners of a company from selling their share for 6 months

4.    Induced stock brokers to buy $19 billion of shares

5.    Imposed restrictions of short selling

6.    Stopped new issues of stocks and IPOs

7.    Directed pension funds to buy more shares of stock

Last month, the United States Supreme Court declined to take up a case involving Arizona’s and Kansas’s attempts to require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. The two states sought SCOTUS review in an attempt to overturn a prohibition imposed by lower federal courts.

The political and economic turmoil in Greece has perhaps elicited more commentary than any other economic event over the past years. Among numerous discussions on the fragility of the banking system, the Eurozone, and the black hole of government spending, there’s one issue that stands out: the failure of international organizations and supranational states.