The Federal Reserve seems to have finally committed to, but has not yet begun its “rate cutting cycle” of lower interest rates, specifically the Federal Funds Rate, or policy rate.

This lines up well with what I have been thinking and saying here and elsewhere; the Fed was not likely to cut rates until the fall of 2024 or later.

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations.

Land in its natural state is not owned by anyone, argued John Locke in Two Treatises of Government, but after land is transformed by an individual’s labor, that person earns a right to own the land and any improvements. In the mid-1800s, the U.S. government put Locke’s property-rights theory into practice with the Homestead Act. Russia replicated the act in recent years. Today, America needs a modern version to create new opportunities.

Slavery has existed throughout history in all places and cultures. It was not introduced by the political state yet, as with many things, slavery could not have had the scope or extent that it did in human history absent the coercive apparatus of the political state. Through cronyism, slaveholders consistently had to seek assistance from the legal system in order to socialize and enforce slavery. The enforcement costs for keeping slaves slaves would have been too high for the minority slaveholding elite to maintain slavery, beyond their own strength or what they could afford to hire.

It is widely held that financial asset markets always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and that adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous.

In The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard asks “how many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today?” Describing the American Old Right, Tom Woods explains that:

One of the central tenets of Marxism is the labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially-necessary labor time required to produce it. In this framework, labor itself becomes a commodity—something that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. Marx argues that, under capitalism, workers are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists, who exploit them by paying wages that are less than the full value their labor produces. This difference—or “surplus value”—is appropriated by the capitalist as profit.