For the past year or so, the Fed has come across as more or less “hawkish;” preferring to position themselves as ready to tighten monetary policy via continued interest rate hikes. Following the recent several hikes, the Q1 GDP numbers came in terribly low and the Fed’s anticipated source of “economic growth,” consumer spending, hasn’t been up to par either. The economy, quite frankly, looks sick despite the Fed’s best efforts to increase the cost of living (what they refer to as inflation).

Mises Cuba has announced that Nelson Rodríguez Chartrand is missing. The organization believes he was taken by state security forces.

An influential left-wing think tank has called for the government to create millions of jobs for those without a college degree, leading to headlines like The Nation’s declaration that “It’s Time for the Government to Give Everyone a Job.”

When the cable TV sports giant ESPN announced 100 layoffs recently, including letting go a number of high-profile broadcasters, a lot of people took notice, and well they should: things no longer are business as usual in sports broadcasting, and we are not even at the beginning of the end, and maybe not even the end of the beginning.

A strange caricature of the laissez-faire liberal (i.e., libertarian) ideology persists. Namely, that libertarians are all required to pursue an individualistic lifestyle in which each person lives on his or her own with few social or economic connections with others. 

Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered federal prosecutors in drug cases to seek the maximum penalty authorized by federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Sessions’ order represents a setback to the progress made toward restoring compassion and common sense to the sentencing process over the past few years. Sessions’ action also guarantees that many nonviolent drug law offenders will continue spending more time in prison than murderers.

[Adapted from a talk at the May 20 Seattle Mises Circle, “House of Cards: Has the US Economy Recovered?”]

I think we can all agree that the state of the economy has little to do with Donald Trump, at least for the moment.

This review of Frank D. Graham’s book, Exchange, Prices and Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany 1920–23 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1930) was published in Economica (May 1932).

All the misfortunes from which Europe has suffered in the last two decades have been the inevitable result of the application of the theories which have dominated the social and economic philosophy of the last fifty years. Our troubles are the upshot of much laborious thought.