During the 2016 race, presidential candidate Gary Johnson was asked what action he would take in response to the refugee problem created by the destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo.
In response, Johnson asked, “What is Aleppo?” Once prompted with enough reminders, Johnson was finally able to answer the question.
On January 3, Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi condemned the US’s killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, calling the airstrike a “massive breach of sovereignty.” Abdul Mahdi
The US government tells us that Iraq is harboring anti-US Iranian forces and must be bombed. Yesterday, the US bombed Baghdad International Airport, killing seven people, including an Iranian general and two Iraqi politicians. Meanwhile, US marines invaded Iraqi sovereign territory — in a move euphemistically called “arrest raids” — in an effort to capture an Iraqi member of parliament and a militia leader.
But how is it that Iraq is so full of anti-US politicians and militia leaders working with Iranian forces?
ABSTRACT: The goal of this article is to extend the argument about the possibility of economic calculation under socialism first advanced by Ludwig von Mises (and later extended by Rothbard) to a related topic, the possibility of developing a comprehensive plan of production as a whole when all of the means of production are owned by a single entity. A division of ownership of the means of production permits a division of intellectual labor, a necessity when the scale of production is large.
ABSTRACT: This article is an evaluation of the General Theory largely on its own terms. Extensive quotations from The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money are used in order to allow Keynes himself to expound the theory. The goal of this article is to show that even on its own terms the General Theory must be considered a failure, for the problem it purports to solve, involuntary unemployment, does not exist. Many of the individual points made here have been made before, but no references are provided.
Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept.
The worst mistake that the American people have made in the entire history of the United States was to permit the conversion of the federal government into a national-security state. That conversion has played a major role in the destruction of our liberty, privacy, and economic well-being.
What is a national-security state? It is a totalitarian-like governmental structure that consists of an enormous military-intelligence establishment with extraordinary powers, such as indefinite detention, torture, secret surveillance, and even assassination of both citizens and foreigners.
Discussions about the incentive effects of taxes can be misleading. The focus is usually on the tax rates imposed. But one’s incentives are not best measured by tax rates, but by how much value created for others (reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay) is retained by the creator, which I refer to as take-home income.
