I think the most exciting message for me today is that things are changing.

Often, when I come to these events, people ask me, “isn’t this grueling, isn’t this very tough?” It’s not, though, and it’s actually a little bit selfish on my part, because I get energized when I meet all the young people here. It’s true there is a spread of ages here, but there are a lot of young people and some of them even come up to me and say “you introduced me to these ideas when I was in high school a few years ago.”

[This article is excerpted from Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis]

It is a mistake to think that the lack of success of experiments in Socialism that have been made can help to overcome Socialism. Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

Thanks to Hunter Lewis, the Mises Institute can now offer three new books free and online at mises.org:

Where Keynes Went Wrong

Crony Capitalism in America

Free Prices Now!: Fixing the Economy by Abolishing the Fed 

With Bernie Sander’s large victory over Hillary Clinton, he’s signaled he’ll be a headache for Clinton and the party elites, for a while, even if he ultimately fails to get the nomination. We’ll know after Super Tuesday, in less than a month, if he has the ability to win a big state like Texas. 

Congressman Jeb Hensarling, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, mentions Hayek’s Fatal Conceit regarding the Fed bureaucracy’s ability to manage money and interest rates.

Reporter responds by asking how much confidence do you have -- “are they (central bankers) the right people to be doing this...I don’t even know what to think anymore at this point.”

After admitting the Fed has created asset bubble that are beginning to pop, Hensarling admits that he does not have faith in the Fed.

It’s long been common knowledge among advocates for limited government that the best thing to hope for is “gridlock” in DC where one party controls the White House and the other party controls the Congress.

This theory assumes that in such a case, the two parties will spend all their time fighting each other and neither will be able to pass much damaging legislation.

January was the winter of our discontented stock market. It was the worst January since 2008, when the Great Recession officially began. It was, in fact, the worst January in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. According to Citigroup, Inc., it was also the worst January ever for credit markets.

One of the nice things about Bernie Sanders is that he seems to be honestly saying flat-out that he plans to massively increase the size of government.

The other candidates are probably lying either to themselves or to us  — or to both — about what they likely will do in office.

Of course, it’s been so long since any president oversaw a federal government that actually cut spending, we’d have to go back to the immediate post-war years to remember any of that.

Of course the Super Bowl Indicator—the idea that the football league that wins the Super Bowl predicts the direction of the stock market—is a fallacy. 

When it was discovered in the 1970s it had a nearly perfect record for predicting whether the stock market would experience a positive or negative year. The indicator’s record has since fallen to the low 80% level. Over the last 16 years it’s record has been 50%, or what you would expect at random. 

If you thought the Soviet Union’s collapse meant the end of central planning, you were wrong. Central planning is alive and well. In fact, it’s even stronger now than it was during the Soviet Union’s heyday. What’s even more disturbing is that many who would strongly oppose Soviet-style central planning and who consider themselves to be defenders of free markets fail to recognize their acceptance of central planning and see no contradiction between their acceptance of central planning and their alleged support of the market economy.