Editor’s Note: President Obama’s “Fiscal Cliff” message to the American public is essentially this: “Either Congress lets me soak the ‘rich’, or you yourselves will get soaked when across-the-board tax hikes automatically kick in at year end. It’s you or them.” The American people should not yield to this thuggish demagoguery. Not only does soaking the rich lead to capital consumption and all-around impoverishment, but it can contribute vanishingly little toward eliminating the federal deficit.

It is a nice classroom example of how welfare keeps people in poverty.

Deck the Halls with Macro Follies For the holiday from our friends at EconStories.

Two revisionist must-reads for this “Day of Infamy” (the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor): How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor by Robert Higgs and Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt Knew by Justin Raimondo.  Some conservative and libertarian-ish fans of our Facebook page have recoiled in horror at the evidence and arguments presented in these pieces.

[This talk was the Arthur M. Krolman Lecture at the 30th Anniversary Supporters Summit of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on October 26, 2012. Click here to watch the video of this talk.]

Hayek defined “scientism” or the “scientistic prejudice” as”slavish imitation of the method and language of Science” when applied to the social sciences, history, management, etc.

Yesterday  Barron and Bloom in “A Golden Path” (http://mises.org/daily/6281/A-Golden-Path) responded to my Mises Daily article “Fool’s Gold Standards”. Their expansion was very useful. I don’t think we are as far apart as they seem to think.

[Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow (1979), Lecture 5 (1958)]

Some people call the programs of economic freedom a negative program. They say, “What do you liberals really want? You are against socialism, government intervention, inflation, labor union violence, protective tariffs.… You say no to everything.”