The West Coast Regional Mises Circle in Costa Mesa is sold out, but be sure and mark your calendars so you can join us live via Mises.org. On November 8 —one week from Saturday— we’ll be broadcasting all the lectures and speeches from Costa Mesa. I’ll provide you exact links as the event draws nearer.

Here’s the schedule:

Tentative Schedule (all times Pacific)

10:20 a.m. Welcome

10:30 a.m. Jeff Deist “The Case for Optimism”

Michael Pollaro, Mark Thornton, and I went looking for some good introductory materials to help newcomers understand Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

Pollaro posted this helpful article over at Forbes, noting:

NPR recently reported on a June 2014 journal article in which political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood conclude that one’s political affiliation is now the primary source of group polarization in America, outpacing even race as a major source of conflict.

If you use the word contagion these days, people are likely to think you’re talking about ebola. Back up five years ago, however, and contagion was the buzzword to describe the financial crisis.

With the IRS scandals of early 2014 all but a distant memory, some closure is coming to the groups that the long arm of the tax law harassed. Unfortunately the verdicts aren´t going the way the affected would like.

The IRS may have inadvertently figured out how to win its legal battles against aggrieved tea party groups: Give them what they wanted in the first place — tax-exempt status.

In his recent three-part interview (here, here and here) on the gold standard, Larry White perplexes almost as much as he enlightens.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act focused the attention of Americans on government regulation as few issues have. However, they should have paid attention decades earlier because states have been eating away like termites at freedom in the healthcare insurance market for decades. The PPACA adds little to existing state regulations. States began dictating to insurance companies what to cover, whom to cover, when to cover them and how much they could charge in the 1950s.

This article is a transcript of the interview on Mises Weekends.

Most defenders of the state assume that government services help the poor. And, sometimes, some poor people do benefit financially from government programs. But there’s a hidden cost: taxation and mandatory programs (Social Security, for instance) that hurt the needy by restricting their choices. Government taxes away income that low-income households could invest in improving their lives. At the same time, state-sponsored benefits create incentives that keep the poor trapped in poverty.