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[A selection from Toward a Libertarian Society.]

Some Catholic clergy have, once again, denounced supporters of laissez-faire capitalism. Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga claims that the free market economy is “a new idol” which creates inequality, excludes the poor, and that “this economy kills.” Cardinal Maradiaga does not speak alone. He quoted Pope Francis in his recent remarks and claimed that since the Pope “grew up in Argentina,” he “has a profound knowledge of the life of the poor.”

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Minimum wage doesn’t apply to everyone.

When Congress first established minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, it left a loophole for businesses that employ people with disabilities.

Thomas Piketty, a neo-Marxist French professor, has written a near-700-page book, published by Harvard University Press. His book is titled Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in honor of Karl Marx’s nineteenth century Das Capital. It has been greeted with fervent applause from the left-wing intellectual establishment and has been on The New York Times’s and Amazon.com’s best-seller lists.

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Thanks to the extraction of oil through hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, the US is not only on its way to being energy independent, but is predicted to become a net exporter of oil and gas by 2025.

Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto. By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Rockwell Communications. 190 pages.

[Editor’s Note: This is a transcript from Jeff Deist’s interview with Tom Woods on June 3, 2014.]

WOODS: I want to talk about the time you spent as Ron Paul’s chief of staff. I can’t imagine that could be dull. So first of all, what was that like, and how would you compare it to what the likely experience of other politicians’ chiefs of staff would be?

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

This article is also available as an Audio Mises Daily

Just as Professor Bernanke exits center stage at the end of Act I of the monetary comedy he created, the scene shifts to Frankfurt. The star of Act II is European Central Bank (ECB) chief Mario Draghi. As we pick up the story, Mr. Draghi has been launching a defense against a phantom threat of deflation.

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Earlier this year Chris Kjorness described the importance of entrepreneurship in the rise of the Beatles. The Beatles became a global phenomenon when they arrived in the US fifty years ago, thanks to the entrepreneurial alertness and imagination of Brian Epstein.