In domestic policy, a time-honored strategy for ramming through ill-considered legislation is to insist that it is better to do something than to just stand around doing nothing. Are “too few” people earning advanced degrees? Then we are told we must increase subsidies for college tuition. Will that solve the problem? Who knows? What’s important is that we did something.

This sort of thing is politically valuable, of course, because the new program and the new spending can be seen and measured.

Professor Paul Krugman asked a very important question in his January 10 New York Times essay “Trump’s Big Libertarian Experiment; Does contaminated food smell like freedom?”.  In his opinion piece, Krugman maintained that the recently concluded governmental shutdown demonstrated the hypocrisy of Republicans. The Nobel Prize winning economist also defended a plethora of government programs such as the Small Business Administration, food stamps, the FDA and socialized medicine.

Since the 1990s, it has become increasingly popular for the United States and other Western nation-states to justify new wars on the basis of “humanitarianism.” This was the case in Somalia in 1993, in the former Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, and in Libya in 2011. Humanitarianism was also part of the justification given for both Gulf Wars (in 1991 and 2001) and in Afghanistan. We are now told by many in the media and in the US military establishment that invasions of both Syria and Venezuela could be justified on grounds of humanitarianism.

I’ve periodically opined about why politicians should not try to control people’s behavior with discriminatory taxes, such as the ones being imposed on soda.

And I’ve cited some examples of how these taxes backfire.

Mises Institute Fellow Patrick Newman recently joined the Age of Jackson podcast to discuss Murray Rothbard’s The Panic of 1819.

Topics discussed on the show include Rothbard’s analysis of the panic, why he believed it to be the best received of his books among his profession, and why it remains one of the most cited works on the era.

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the euro’s existence, and far from being celebrated, it is being blamed for many — if not all — of the Eurozone’s ills. 

[From the Introduction to Mises’s Liberalism (1927).]

A society in which liberal principles are put into effect is usually called a capitalist society, and the condition of that society, capitalism. Since the economic policy of liberalism has everywhere been only more or less closely approximated in practice, conditions as they are in the world today provide us with but an imperfect idea of the meaning and possible accomplishments of capitalism in full flower.

Ludwig von Mises was the first twentieth-century economist to propose the establishment of a banking system with a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. Mises made his recommendation in the first edition of his book, The Theory of Money and Credit, published in 1912. At the end of this first edition, in a section literally reproduced in the second, which was printed in 1924, Mises draws the following conclusion:

There is a case — Timbs v. Indiana — currently before the United States Supreme Court regarding civil asset forfeiture and whether the excessive fines clause of the 8th Amendment also applies to the states due to the 14th Amendment’s incorporation clause.