Congress recently passed a “continuing resolution” to avoid a government shutdown. We are good to go now. Government agencies may continue to operate while Congress tries to agree on the actual budget for the 2025 fiscal year that started on October 1st.
A continuing resolution (CR) is commonly called a “stopgap.” In fact, a Google search yields almost no other modern uses of the term. But is “stopgap” an appropriate term for this thing?
[Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, by Scott Horton, The Libertarian Institute, 2024; 690 pp.]
[Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them) by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Skyhorse Publishing, 2024; 258 pp.]
Our Enemy, the State
by Albert Jay Nock
This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.
Economists and the state are natural enemies. The central principle of economics is that the means for improving human well-being—what economists call “goods”—are naturally scarce and must be produced before they can be used to satisfy human wants. The scarcity principle also implies that, once produced, goods cannot be bestowed on one person without depriving some other person or persons of their use. In other words, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
[Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture, delivered at the ceremony awarding him the Nobel Prize in economics in Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1974. This lecture, along with “A Free-Market Monetary system,” can be found here in book form.]
The unusually extensive “pardon” by lame-duck “President” Biden has been much in the news lately, but the pardon is not the main issue we should be interested in. The real issue is that the Bidens, both father and son, are evil. Hunter’s Biden’s “lost” laptop—which 501 “security professionals” falsely claimed was a Russian fake —reveals warmongering brazen in its duplicity.
Politicians and pundits spent much of last week commenting on President Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter for lying on a federal gun purchase form, failing to pay taxes, and any other offenses he may have committed over the past decade. Much of the controversy is because President Biden repeatedly pledged that he would never pardon his son.
