One of the unfortunate side effects of the United States’s relatively laissez-faire attitude toward immigration is that some who come to the US for political reasons bring their politics with them and want American taxpayers to fight their old battles for them back in the old country.

The US government has moved toward normalizing relations with Cuba, including opening an embassy in Havana and allowing for some limited trade. The economic basics of the agreement include:

Mises Daily Friday by Ron Paul:

Those who voted for the omnibus to avoid a shutdown fail to grasp that the consequences of blindly expanding government are far worse than the consequences of a temporary government shutdown.

Advisor Perspectives shows in two quick graphs how student loan debt outweighs mortgages and tax receivable on Uncle Sam’s balance sheet.

Mises Daily Friday by Mark Tovey: 

The rich make new resource-intensive products economically feasible. Those wealthy early-adopters of new products act as mannequins on which new products are draped, increasing demand as producers attempt to bring those products to the mass market. 

The Washington Post reports: 

When George Stinney Jr. was executed for the killings of two white girls in 1944, he was so small that the straps of South Carolina’s electric chair didn’t fit him properly, and he had to sit on a book for his electrocution.