Ludwig von Mises tries in Human Action to reconcile two arguments about charity that pull in opposite directions. The first of these is that some people cannot survive without receiving help: unless they are guaranteed such help by law, they are dependent on charitable donations from the better-off.

Recently, Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise, sought approval from its oversight agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), to purchase and guarantee second mortgages in the United States.

The most recent Business Employment Dynamics (BED) summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the US economy lost 192,000 private-sector jobs during the third quarter of 2023. According to the BLS: 

Unless you work for a bank or the government, you may not have noticed that yesterday was a federal holiday—Juneteenth—commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is a perfectly good thing to celebrate, of course, but alas, as Connor O’Keeffe has recently noted, since the day was declared a federal holiday in 2021, it has largely been used by leftwing groups to push ever larger amounts of government intervention in favor of the Left’s favorite interest groups. 

The Biden administration recently announced that it is canceling another $7.7 billion in student debt, and this will bring the total amount of student debt it has forgiven to over $160 billion since 2021.

Money is never an object when you have a legal counterfeiting racket at the center of the economy, yet counterfeiting, provided it has monopoly power and conducted by the “best and the brightest,” is virtually unchallenged as necessary for economic growth. 

How did this fraud come about? First, some basics:

How does a radical libertarian abolitionist attorney from the North go from passionately defending the United States Constitution–arguing that the document prohibited slavery from its ratification–to declaring the United States Constitution “unfit to exist” two decades later?

Last week, we looked at the weakness of the job market that belies all the happy talk from the administration about employment. For instance, we noted the fact that full-time employment is in decline, as is temporary work. We can couple this with the fact that the total number of employed persons in this economy has gone nowhere in eleven months.