In February 2025, President Trump implemented an extra 25 percent tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on imports from China, which doubled to 20 percent last week. There’s also a 10 percent tariff on energy resources from Canada. This is significant as goods from China, Mexico and Canada accounted for more than 40 percent of imports into the US in 2024. On March 11, 2025, the uncertain climate led many investors to withdraw from tariffed sectors with elastic demand, causing a US stock market decline.

Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free.

According to most commentators, artificially lowering interest rates by the central bank prompts businesses to increase investments in capital goods and the structure of production (e.g., tools, machinery, infrastructure). This is supposed to increase economic growth. In short, artificially lowering interest rates equals economic growth. But does it make any sense?

Looking back on more than a century of expanding bureaucracies, waning civic virtue, and the increasing substitution of state-led planning for individual initiative, the work of Alexis de Tocqueville remains, unfortunately, prescient as ever. Fortunately for modern defenders of liberty, Ralph Raico left behind an unpublished manuscript on Tocqueville, posthumously made available by the Mises Institute.

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” -  H.L. Mencken

You would think it is impossible to call Ludwig von Mises a fascist. He was of course an old fashioned classical liberal, what we would call today a libertarian. Some extreme leftists have even been stupid enough to claim that Mises was sympathetic to the Nazis. They don’t deny that Mises was a refugee from Nazism, but they say, when it comes down to it, Mises would take fascism, even Nazism, over a Marxist socialist revolution.

Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent argued that the mass communications industry influences public perception in ways that benefit elite interests, all without overt coercion. The book critiques not only the nature of the media but also the very concept of “consent.” Chomsky contends that “consent” has been rendered meaningless by the pervasive use of propaganda to manipulate the masses.

Imagine being famous for saying something you never said, seven centuries after your death. What has come to be known as Occam’s razor—“entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”—has been attributed to English philosopher and theologian William of Occam (1287-1347), though he never used those exact words in his writing. According to conceptually.org,