Donald Trump has made it clear that he likes the idea of Greenland seceding from Denmark. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.
Even though we are two weeks into 2025, I want to suggest some more New Year’s resolutions.
The Federal Reserve should resolve to stop enabling excessive federal spending by purchasing Treasury bonds, thus monetizing the federal debt. The Federal Reserve’s monetization of federal debt enables the federal government to amass trillions in debt while running a global empire abroad and a welfare state at home.
The American people feel the effects of the Fed’s debt monetization in the form of the regressive inflation tax.
This past January 6, a joint session of Congress certified the election of Donald Trump as president. The event was ceremonial, as everybody knew right after the November election that Trump had defeated Kamala Harris, whose efforts to fill in for dead “President” Joe Biden, had been a miserable failure, in an overwhelming victory. It was ironic that Harris, presiding over the session, had to read the tally of her own defeat. January 6, 2021 was not at all like that.
Starbucks has finally admitted that it wasn’t a great idea to allow anyone and everyone to sit in their coffee shops and use their restrooms. In practice, this has meant that every type of cheapskate, grifter, and drug addict could set up shop in any Starbucks, monopolize the bathroom, and generally crowd out the paying customers.
The AP summarizes how the current policy came to be. The policy was adopted
In 2020, sixteen Montana youths filed a children’s climate lawsuit in state district court (the trial court level), alleging that the state’s actions exacerbated the harm they were experiencing from climate change, violating the state’s constitution. Defendants in the suit included the state of Montana, the governor, and multiple state agencies.
Recently, I watched The Soviet Story, a documentary examining the evils of Soviet socialism and their striking similarities to Nazism, highlighting their collaboration. Centralized economies, Gestapo officers trained in torture techniques developed by the NKVD, and the Soviet Union providing the Germans with grain, oil, iron ore, and other vital resources for the war effort.
After years of calling for border walls and closed borders with adjacent states, one might be forgiven for thinking that Trump has high regard for national borders. He doesn’t. He has about as much respect for borders as the Israelis have for the border with Syria, or the Russians have for the border with the Donbas, or George W. Bush had for the border with Iraq.
The Mises Institute will host the Libertarian Scholars Conference on March 20 at our Auburn campus.
The LSC has been the preeminent interdisciplinary meeting of scholars advancing libertarian thought since the 1970s, when the first LSC was organized by the Center for Libertarian Studies. The inaugural conference featured papers by Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, Leland Yeager, and other prominent libertarian scholars.
