President Trump recently imposed sanctions on Turkey to protest the Turkish government’s detention of an American pastor. Turkey has responded by increasing tariffs on US exports. The trade war is being blamed for the collapse of Turkey’s currency, the lira. While the sanctions may have played a role, Turkey’s currency crisis is rooted in the Turkish government’s fiscal and (especially) monetary policies.

I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that history is largely a history of inflation, and usually of inflations engineered by governments and for the gain of governments. - Friedrich August von Hayek

At Freedom Fest, Walter Block was interviewed by CSPAN’s Book TV to discuss his new book Space Capitalism: How Humans Will Colonize Planets, Moons, and Asteroids.

Click here to watch Dr. Block make the case for privatizing the final frontier. 

Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world where freedom and free markets are crushed by not-so-well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats. The story is a blueprint for the creation of a command economy where prices, wages, and production are dictated by bureaucratic apparatchiks.

Ann Coulter once mocked Ron Paul for his call that the government get out of marriage. Coulter demanded that governments regulate marriage because, well, people would have too much freedom otherwise.

That was just one of many times that Ann Coulter’s knee-jerk preference for government controls and government intervention became apparent. Consistency has never been her strong suit.

International analysts are not giving us the full story on Venezuela.

Political commentators have given their spin on the topic of Venezuela’s economic crisis. To their credit, some of them get the surface level details correct on the contributing factors to Venezuela’s collapse — destruction of civil liberties and property rights.

There’s a whole lot of buzz about the sharing economy. Many seem to think it is something new, with some calling for a ‘new economics’ to explain it while others deride the ‘gig economy’ as a higher level of exploitation, inequality, and poverty. Neither is a good analysis.

An audio version of this article is available here.

The UK’s Express reports this week the South African government has begun seizing farms in the country following a failure to negotiate sales with the owners.