Lew Rockwell writes:
If you’re a libertarian, chances are you find yourself bombarded with objections, or feeling compelled to respond to the barrage of uncomprehending criticism your friends are sharing on social media. Conservatives badger you about war, drugs, even liberty itself, and left-liberals demand to know why you don’t favor redistribution and a Scandinavian welfare state.
I have two suggestions for you, and they both involve new books by Tom Woods.
As a historian, my training is about analyzing the past. Those times I have strayed into predicting the future, I have failed pretty spectacularly (”Yes, class, I predict that the Berlin Wall will not come down in my lifetime or yours!”--Oct 23, 1989).
[Originally published February 25, 2015.]
Super tall buildings, or skyscrapers, are being built at an astonishing rate. Ninety-seven buildings that exceed 200 meters (656 feet) high were constructed in 2014, setting a new record. The previous record was eighty-one buildings completed in 2011. The total number of skyscrapers in existence now is 935, a whopping 350 percent increase since the year 2000.
Unfortunately, there is a sentiment the persists among some Christians of all types that historical and traditional Christian ethics are somehow opposed to free markets. This idea has long been fueled by many proponents of free markets themselves, it seems, as many of them subscribe to rather questionable quasi social-Darwinist theories or strange notions about how monetary profit is somehow more valuable than non-monetary motives or values.
The current issue of the Cato Policy Report (January/February 2015) contains a short article about a book by Zhang Weiying called The Logic of the Market: An Insider’s View of Chinese Economic Reform, which was originally published in Chinese (and said to be a best-seller in China in that form) and was recently translated into English.
Jeff Deist interviews John O’Donnell in this week’s Mises Weekends.
People accuse Austrian economics of being overly theoretical—but our guest John O’Donnell proves them wrong. He’s applied Austrian economics consistently over his long career both as a successful investment banker and the CEO of several public companies.
More evidence the future of Austrian economics is in good hands is Patrick Newman’s (a PhD student at George Mason University and a participant in the 2012 Mises Institute Summer Fellowship program) excellent piece of scholarship recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics as “The Depression of 1873: An Austrian Perspective.” The paper is extremely important and timely as the Great Depression of 1873-1879 is
RussiaToday, and other sources, report that the Russian state has joined the new BRICS bank:
The Russian State Duma has ratified the $100 billion BRICS bank that’ll serve as a pool of money for infrastructure projects in Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa, and challenge the dominance of the Western-led World Bank and the IMF.
