A review of: A Tale of Four Cities: From the Invisible Hand to Cancel Culture by Phil Duffy

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I’m Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute.

It’s not unfair to say that the current unrest and rioting in the UK has been accompanied by a lot of inaccurate information. As with any event, everyone should be aware that it becomes a lot easier to spread false information and have people believe it. Tensions are boiling over and emotions are running amok, and it does not take a genius to understand why you should be more wary of misinformation when emotion is in the driver’s seat.

In A Cure Worse Than The Disease: Fighting Discrimination Through Government Control, M. Lester O’Shea criticizes the notion that we should legislate against unfairness. He poses the question as follows: “No one defends unfairness. So shouldn’t it be against the law?” In posing the question that way, his point is that the mere fact that we regard something as unfair – or even morally wrong – does not mean we ought to legislate against it.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues podcast. I am Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute.

The great reckoning seems to be following the course that I have been charting by guesswork. In other words, the great trainwreck seems to be happening. Let’s see what we are experiencing so far.

Interest rates appear to be headed out of their long inversion. My anticipation was that the economy would not enter recession when interest rates started to invert, but rather when they started to reverse the inversion.

The mid 2000s saw a new intellectual movement emerge on the scene under the name of “New Atheism.” Representatives of the movement saw themselves as champions of the scientific method, of evidence-based reasoned analysis of the facts against the mystical, primitive superstitions of organized religion and all the societal, political and cultural harm it allegedly produces.

In June, the Texas Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit claiming that the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) had broken the law when it set the wholesale price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt hour for about 80 hours during the Texas blackouts that occurred during Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.

Last month, Britain made a dangerous swing to the left. Private education has been attacked, more public housing, the promotion of environmental Marxism, and much more. But that isn’t to say there wasn’t an unspoken gospel among the main parties concerning the deliberate impoverishment of the British Isles. Merely aesthetic differences separate them.

In Race & Economics, Walter Williams emphasizes the importance of causality in understanding racial inequality. He argues that it is not enough to document and track economic inequality — it is necessary also to understand its causes.