In the midst of the 2018-2019 Shutdown, active members of the US Coast Guard did not receive paychecks on time.

I wrote a couple of days ago about America’s best and worst cities for pro-market policy, and I noted that there are several rankings of economic liberty for states and nations.

According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control (”Mortality in the United States, 2017“), “Life expectancy for the U.S. population declined to 78.6 years in 2017,” largely due to obesity and drug addiction.

The American life expectancy trend does not reflect global trends, however.

Tom and I talked about how governments make housing less affordable, and how the best way to make housing more affordable is to build more. But both government planners and private owners will often join forces to prevent new housing from being built. Thus, the most commons “solution” ends up being schemes to subsidize housing.

ABSTRACT: Murray Rothbard developed the concept of decision-making rent as a return to a kind of unhirable labor performed by the entrepreneur in his role as owner and ultimate decision-maker of the firm. Rothbard conceived owner’s rent as separate from profit and loss and the decision-making function as concerned with productive organization and technique, which is distinct from the function of forecasting uncertain future market conditions.

One of the central issues in the current international furor over Venezuela are claims by some foreign governments that the results of the May 2018 elections do not reflect the true preferences of the voters.

For example, although Italy vetoed the proposal, the EU had been preparing to recognize the opposition party’s leader as Venezuela’s interim leader if a new election were not held immediately.

News media has been buzzing lately about the “Paycheck Fairness Act” sponsored primarily by Democratic elected officials in Congress. The rhetoric is exactly what one would expect: there is discrimination in the job market, observable in the “wage gap” between men and women workers (and other gender identities). So we need a law to fix this problem. As usual, any and all problems arise due to some mystical shortcoming in people’s voluntary choices — and they can always be corrected by glorious government.

The US debt ceiling suspension, signed on February 2018, expires in March this year. According to some experts, the US Treasury will have to carry out special measures because of possible delays in raising this ceiling. Treasury would need to draw down its deposits with the Fed and deposit the money in various banks for future use to pay government expenses. As a result, this would boost monetary liquidity and therefore would have beneficial effects on financial markets.

Venezuela’s government is in a state of upheaval. Foreign nations are lining up to support either the regime of Nicolás Maduro — who claims to be the legitimately elected president — or that of Juan Guaidó, who the opposition claims is now the constitutionally mandated interim president.

The current situation has been brought on by nearly twenty years of Chavismo, a hard-left socialist ideology, which has left the Venezuelan economy in ruins.