The recently-passed big-spending budget deal’s failure to generate significant opposition from the “tea party” has led some to pen obituaries for this once-powerful movement. These commentators may have a point. However, few of them understand the true causes of the tea party’s demise.
In Friday’s article on Mexico homicides, I briefly mentioned the myth that Mexican homicides are driven by American guns. This myth drives so much of the rhetoric about Mexican crime, that it bears some examination in slightly more detail.
We’ve now posted the second episode of Radio Rothbard, which today is the audio version of Friday’s column on gun violence in Mexico. Here’s the mp3 version, and it’s also available on our Youtube channel:
The term “classical liberal” always has been a misnomer, in that it presupposes an earlier or undiluted form of liberalism that must be distinguished semantically and temporally when discussing liberalism today. But the great historian Ralph Raico disabused us of this empty distinction in his great book Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School:
Jeffrey Peshut at RealForecasts.com has composed several very illuminating graphs based on the Rothbard-Salerno True Money Supply (TMS). In one graph Peshut shows the collapse of the growth rate of TMS beginning at the end of 2016, which was caused by the Fed beginning to raise the fed funds target rate at the end of the preceding year.
Most economists are of the view that by means of economic indicators it is possible to identify early warning signs regarding an upcoming recession or prosperity. What is the rationale behind this approach?
The National Bureau of Economic Research introduced the economic indicators approach in the 1930’s. A research team led by W.C. Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns studied about 487 economic data to ascertain the mystery of the business cycle. According to Mitchell and Burns,
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is recommending “a 24 percent tariff on all steel imports from all countries,” the NY Times reports. Ana Swanson writes that the tariffs, “are aimed at saving American steel and aluminum producers, who have struggled to compete with a flood of cheap metals from abroad, particularly from China.”
