On February 28th, while addressing a joint session of Congress, President Trump quoted Abraham Lincoln and praised his economic philosophy:

The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the “abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government [will] produce want and ruin among our people.”

There is much hand-wringing in the financial media this week after Treasury Secretary (and Lego Batman producer) Steve Mnuchin helped push the G-20 to remove its long standing language to “reject protectionism” from its annual statement.

This Thursday, the House of Representatives will vote on a Republican bill that supposedly repeals Obamacare. However, the bill retains Obamacare’s most destructive features.

The Trump rally has stocks at all-time highs. The VIX (which reflects the volatility of the S&P 500) is at 10-year lows. The headline unemployment rate is 4.8%. Everything must be A-OK in the US of A.

[Reprinted from the Lara-Murphy Report, February 2017.]

LARA-MURPHY REPORT: How did you become interested in Austrian economics?

JEFF DEIST: Fortunately Austrian economics became interested in me, through two happy developments.

Last week was a tale of two cities. 

Rhetoric has recently trumped reality. It has become a misconceived bit of common “knowledge” that the United States of America is a bastion of free trade. Little could be further from the truth. The “freest” nation on earth, as we are taught to believe, imposes a staggering number of tariffs, import and export bans, sanctions and embargoes. Yet somehow “free trade” is blamed for the financial ills of the unemployed in the formerly industrial Midwest.