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Last June I pointed to four unfortunate facts in the Chinese economy.

1. Overall credit had increased to $23 trillion dollars, up from $9 trillion as recently as 2008.
2. This amount of credit was over 200 percent of GDP, an increase of 75 percentage points in just five years. (By comparison over the same period the United States’ ratio of debt-to-GDP increased by 40 percentage points.
3. The credit rating agency Fitch had downgraded the Chinese government’s debt to AA-.

Jane Bussman is a British comedienne who moved to Los Angeles in the late 1990s. She wrote for a number of TV shows, including South Park, for a while. She then drifted into celebrity journalism interviewing the likes of Anna Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, and Aston Kutcher. She eventually chucked it all and sought to cleanse her soul by traveling to Africa to “find a country that had a really bad problem with genocide and just help out.” And this is where her story stops short of dreary cliche and gets really interesting.

Canada is amongst the top countries in the world when it comes to safety and security. So what could be so bad that it enticed tens of thousands of Canucks to flee the country in 2013?

How about socialized healthcare?

Mises’s Vienna 2.0: This map and the guide below have been compiled by Mises University graduates Andrew Finnerty and Robert Müürsepp, who were able to meet up in Vienna to explore the places important to the scholars of the Austrian school.

The minimum wage on its face is an unemployment law, not an employment law. It does not compel anyone to hire anyone else. It only stipulates who CANNOT legally be employed: no one may be hired for less than the amount stipulated by law. If the minimum wage law is set at $10 per hour, the law does not require any employer to hire any employee at that wage level. It only FORBIDS employment contracts set at $9.99 or below. This is not a matter of empirical evidence, not that there can be any such thing in proper, e.g., Austrian economics; this conclusion is a matter of pure logic.

by Ira Katz

As 2014 begins I, like all sensible people, ponder how long the dollar can last, for both my personal financial decisions and as a world event of the greatest importance.

Empires can be sustained only as long as they can be economically sustained. The Soviet withdraw from Afghanistan was certainly not for any normal human or moral reason, but simply because they were going broke. In hindsight we can see that the days of that evil empire were numbered with that strategic military retreat.

by Chris Rossini

Hjalmar Schacht was Hitler’s economic guy. According to Wikipedia, Schacht: ”became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and served in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. As such, Schacht played a key role in implementing the policies attributed to Hitler.”

Now, we all know what happened to Hitler. But what about Schacht?

On June 9, 1947 Henry Hazlitt would write in Newsweek:

Writes Robert Blumen: