The Mises Institute recently spoke with Nicolás Cachanosky, an Argentina-born economist, now at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, who is familiar with sovereign debt issues. We asked him about a recent UN resolution that seeks to make it easier for governments to default on their debts.

There’s something very odd about the United States military that makes many of the most budget-hawkish fiscal conservatives turn into starry-eyed, big government welfare pushers. The hypocrisy is breathtaking; at the same time as many conservatives are talking about “America’s descent into socialism” they are pushing their own brand of military socialism to ever more absurd lengths.

Charles Murray thinks that government has become arbitrary and tyrannical. In doing so, it has betrayed the “Madisonian” heritage of America, which strictly limited the power of the government to interfere with individual liberty. “As I [Murray] got into the book, I discovered I had to find a label less cumbersome than ‘people devoted to limited government’ … my first impulse was to call us Jeffersonians, but Jefferson was well to the libertarian side of the spectrum, and I wanted to include advocates of limited government who think of themselves as conservatives.

Mark Spitznagel and Rand Paul write in the Wall Street Journal:

According to mainstream thinking, the central bank is the key factor in determining interest rates. By setting short-term interest rates the central bank, it is argued, through expectations about the future course of its interest rate policy influences the entire interest rate structure.

When George W. Bush was in the White House, left liberals were the ones denouncing war, calling for less intrusive government, and generally striking an anti-government pose. That all abruptly stopped when Obama was sworn in. And now that Obama is president, it’s the conservatives who are talking about secession and denouncing violations of civil liberties. There’s no sign of conservative opposition to interventionism foreign policy, though. Indeed, it seems that Obama’s big sin here is not being interventionist enough.

Mises Daily Wednesday | Matthew Doarnberger writes:

[I]f easy classes and sham majors are the price we pay for the ability of elite athletes to specialize in what they do best, then so be it. 

The Canadian Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World” report [PDF] was released last week, and, as The Week reports: “America is less economically free than Jordan, Mauritius, and the United Arab Emirates.” In fact, “the decline of economic freedom in the United States” is a topic specifically addressed by the authors, beca