For at least twenty years, the term “illegal alien” (or similar variations like “illegal immigrant”) has been the subject of a contentious debate between pro-immigation and anti-immigration activists. Over the past decade, the Left has increasingly managed to limit the use of the term “illegal” to refer to any migrant.
[From the September-October 2023 issue of The Austrian.]
David Jarrett has been a longtime supporter of the Mises Institute and attended Mises’s NYU lectures in 1965, when they were held in Nicholas Hall. The building no longer stands, but the photos that David took one evening with his Leica M3 camera and APO-Summicron-M 90mm f/2 ASPH telephoto lens are still around. The negatives have been carefully guarded for decades, and now, David has generously donated them to the Mises Institute:
Imagine someone giving a State of the World address that begins with a reminder that people possess free will and ought to be doing a better job of exercising it. This could possibly raise doubts about the speaker’s mental stability—at least until the talk went into the dark details of civilization’s condition.
Stock markets tumbled this morning when the January Consumer Price Index (CPI) data came in hotter than expected. If you are wondering what the connection could be, the answer is that higher-than-expected price inflation means a longer-than-expected wait for the Fed to cut its interest rate target. It’s clear that financial markets are addicted to artificially low interest rates when any hint of a delay in rate cuts pushes stock prices off a ledge.
The American bankruptcy show of the twenty-first century continues unabated with federal and state government spending. History reveals that some states have defaulted through not meeting a required bond payment, leaving the bondholders and that state’s taxpayers with a debt problem. Today, we might call a state government bond payment default a bankruptcy.
Thomas DiLorenzo, the President of the Mises Institute, has already reviewed Paul C. Graham’s Nonsense on Stilts: The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Imaginary Nation (Shotwell Publishing 2024) in characteristically excellent fashion, but the book is so insightful that some further comments are warranted. It is clear that Graham has a philosophical turn of mind and is a master of linguistic analysis.
