The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism. While the Levellers are often characterized as a quasi-socialist movement, the aim of my research is to restore the Levellers to their classical liberal heritage, and to find out to what extent they were in fact libertarian.

President Obama recently commented that he wanted a next Fed chairman who would do good for all not just for Wall Street and the rich [and politicians and chrony capitalists supporting government spending at unsustainably high levels), but for everyone. Perhaps if what he has in mind is a real “helicopter Ben” who, instead of buying $85 billion in securities a month from financial institutions, would drop $85 billion from helicopters at pre-announced locations, the common folk might feel an illusion of increased prosperity in the very short run.

In today’s feature on the US housing market, an NPR correspondent sadly notes that foreclosure victims are “trapped” in rentals. Why, those poor, unlevered souls, choosing to purchase a flow of housing services over time, rather than buying a huge, illiquid housing asset outright, using borrowed funds. Tragic!

It made me think of similar tragedies:

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term as chairman of the Fed expires at the end of the year and President Obama has quite ungraciously indicated his intent to replace him, remarking that he had, “already stayed a lot longer than he wanted or he was supposed to.”

Mises University this year featured a  “conference within the conference”.  The distinguished jurist and television commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano offered a course of five lectures on “The Growth of the Commerce Clause as an Instrument of Federal Power.” Judge Napolitano presented a masterful survey of how the Supreme Court has interpreted the commerce clause, from Gibbons v.Ogden (1824) to the present.

A new NBER working paper by Ricardo Reis (unfortunately gated) tackles “Central Bank Design.” I’ve written a little on this myself, and gave a lecture Saturday at Mises University on “Microeconomics of Central Banking” elaborating on my ideas.

Those who still believe the hogwash that the the United States is a two-party, representative democracy should ponder the following. On Wednesday, the amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 proposed by libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan) was narrowly defeated in the House by a vote of 217-205. The amendment would have ended the authority for the unconstitutional, police-state metadata-phone call spy program carried out by the NSA whose existence was leaked by the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden last month.