Select politicians, government officials, economic elites, and experts arriving at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland were greeted with an open letter signed by more than 250 billionaires and millionaires. The signers request their respective governments raise their taxes.
This article is a revised version of a talk given at the Oxford University Mises Society on January 16, 2024. The talk drew upon themes discussed in David Gordon and Wanjiru Njoya, Redressing Historical Injustice: Self-Ownership, Property Rights and Economic Equality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
The situation in the Middle East is growing more and more dangerous for the Americans stationed there. Two Navy SEALs are dead after being lost at sea off the coast of Somalia while searching a boat that was allegedly carrying weapons bound for Yemen.
Socialism: A Logical Introduction
Scott R. Sehon
Oxford University Press, 2024; 268 pp.
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The government, federal or otherwise, has no business model because it is not a business. We know this at the outset because government does not compete in the market for people’s money, as every other business must do. With a monopoly of violence, it seizes the money it wants through taxes and monetary inflation. As long as the government doesn’t get carried away by taxing and inflating too much, most people—many of whom call themselves libertarians—regard this setup as necessary.
Adam Smith, in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, stipulates the guiding principles of classical economic orthodoxy, establishing guiding principles that will guide the English economic paradigm. Despite a tradition more focused on Colbertism (between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and physiocracy (from the eighteenth century onwards), classical economics managed to penetrate this French academic environment due to names such as Jean-Baptiste Say and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot.
