This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

[Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America by Peter Andreas, Oxford University Press, 2013.]

Although a majority of Colorado voters successfully forced the state government to legalize the possession and sale of cannabis in 2012, this popular initiative did not of course bind the governments of surrounding states to a similar degree of tolerance.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

[A selection from Toward a Libertarian Society.]

Some Catholic clergy have, once again, denounced supporters of laissez-faire capitalism. Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga claims that the free market economy is “a new idol” which creates inequality, excludes the poor, and that “this economy kills.” Cardinal Maradiaga does not speak alone. He quoted Pope Francis in his recent remarks and claimed that since the Pope “grew up in Argentina,” he “has a profound knowledge of the life of the poor.”

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Minimum wage doesn’t apply to everyone.

When Congress first established minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it left a loophole for businesses that employ people with disabilities.

Thomas Piketty, a neo-Marxist French professor, has written a near-700-page book, published by Harvard University Press. His book is titled Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in honor of Karl Marx’s nineteenth century Das Capital. It has been greeted with fervent applause from the left-wing intellectual establishment and has been on The New York Times’s and Amazon.com’s best-seller lists.

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Thanks to the extraction of oil through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, the US is not only on its way to being energy independent, but is predicted to become a net exporter of oil and gas by 2025.

Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto. By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Rockwell Communications. 190 pages.

[Editor’s Note: This is a transcript from Jeff Deist’s interview with Tom Woods on June 3, 2014.]

WOODS: I want to talk about the time you spent as Ron Paul’s chief of staff. I can’t imagine that could be dull. So first of all, what was that like, and how would you compare it to what the likely experience of other politicians’ chiefs of staff would be?