History is full of tax revolts. It’s a fairly popular pastime, if historians are to be believed. But when do they come? What’s the spark and what’s the gasoline?
In Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, he argues that long military campaigns are unwise because they exhaust the people, and he says that long campaigns exhaust “seven tenths” of the wealth of the elites.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve felt the slight sting of “patriotic duty” invoked during this current wave of big-budget sci-fi action thrillers.
The recent civil disobedience, rioting, and police brutality in Ferguson, Missouri reminds us of what happens when police states and bad economics are mixed together.
Devastated by decades of ruinous economic policies, the economies of many inner cities continue to languish as the self-ownership of local residents is treated with contempt by the police and any attempt at building a small business-based or wage-based economy is hobbled by government regulation.
As an apparently war-minded people, Americans (or at least, our American political leaders) have been comfortable framing parts of the domestic policy agenda as wars for decades. Two of the most prominent have been the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
Despite the similarity in their names, there is an important difference between the two. The War on Poverty is not a real war. The War on Drugs is.
2014’s Mises University concluded last Saturday evening following a full week of seminars, lectures, and many opportunities to work with Mises faculty and fellow students to discuss, learn, and plan for the future.
Recently, a corn ethanol plant in Nebraska that switched to using cheaper sugar to produce biofuel was sued by local corn farmers. The dispute allows a glimpse into the clashing worlds of subsidized agriculture, and highlights what happens when people make market-oriented decisions within the tangled framework of the state-directed economy.
On June 3, 2014, Catholic University in Washington, D.C., hosted a conference entitled “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case Against Libertarianism.”
Despite all the massive monetary pumping over the past six years and the lowering of interest rates to almost zero most commentators have expressed disappointment with the pace of economic growth. For instance, the yearly rate of growth of the European Monetary Union (EMU) real GDP fell to 0.7 percent in Q2 from 0.9 percent in the previous quarter. In Q1 2007 the yearly rate of growth stood at 3.7 percent. In Japan the yearly rate of growth of real GDP fell to 0 percent in Q2 from 2.7 percent in Q1 and 5.8 percent in Q3 2010.
Today, capitalism is blamed for our current disastrous economic and financial situation and a history of incessant booms and busts. Support for capitalism is eroding worldwide. In a recent global poll, 25 percent (up 2 percent from 2009) of respondents viewed free enterprise as “fatally flawed and needs to be replaced.” The number of Spaniards who hold this view increased from 29 percent in 2009 to 42 percent, the highest amongst those polled.
“The lamps are going out all over Europe,” Sir Edward Grey famously said on the eve of World War I. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
It was 100 years ago last week that Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, setting in motion the unspeakable calamity that contemporaries dubbed the Great War. Well in excess of ten million people perished, and by some estimates, many more.
