[Previously unpublished online; Faith and Freedom 1, no. 4 (March 1950).]

Citizens of the old Roman Empire distrusted paper currency and refused to accept anything but gold or silver coin as money. So the rulers found themselves barred from inflating the money supply by the unobtrusive method of printing additional currency.

The most disturbing outcome of the recent mid-term election isn’t that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be a Member of Congress. I actually look forward to that because of the humor value.

[Previously unpublished online; Faith and Freedom 2, no. 9 (May 1951).]

It’s not often that US Government officials are honest when they talk about our foreign policy. The unprovoked 2003 attack on Iraq was called a “liberation.” The 2011 US-led destruction of Libya was a “humanitarian intervention.” And so on.

[Previously unpublished online; Faith and Freedom 2, no. 7 (March 1951).]

With the 2007-8 financial crisis came a splendid alphabetical soup of central bank interventions to stimulate financial markets, lower interest rates, provide astonishing amounts of liquidity to banks and, allegedly, prevent another Great Depression. Likening the failure of big banks to falling elephants crushing even the smallest grass, former Fed Chairman Bernanke argued that consequences from bank failures would have caused much more havoc to the economy than the liquidity provision and bailouts his Fed oversaw.

Is enacting anti-discrimination legislation the answer to social media de-platforming?

In Human Action , Ludwig von Mises identified two patterns for the realization of socialism. The first, which he called “the Lenin or the Russian pattern” is “purely bureaucratic. All plants, shops, and farms are formally nationalized.” The second pattern, Mises said, is “the Hindenburg or German pattern,” and Mises claims that this was the means by which the Nazis established socialism in Germany.

Mises goes on to describe what this pattern of socialism looks like:

When politicians and bureaucrats fail to deliver what they promise — which happens a lot — we’re often told that the problem can be solved if only we get the right people to run the government instead. We’re told that the old crop of government agents were trying hard enough. Or that they didn’t have the right intentions. While it’s true that there are plenty of incompetent and ill-intentioned people in government, we can’t always blame the people involved. Often, the likelihood of failure is simply built in to the institution of government itself.

What if you found out that the Chinese are burying dollars under the Great Wall of China? What would your reaction be? Would you be upset that the Chinese weren’t spending those dollars on U. S. exports, narrowing Americans’ balance of trade deficit with China? Judging by the anti-Chinese sentiment characterizing public discussion of Chinese-U.S. economic relations these days, I suspect you would.