Thorsten Polleit (TP): On November 5, 2024, Donald J. Trump was elected the new US president with a landslide victory. His declared goal is to take on the “Deep State” and its bureaucracy. His advisor, Elon Musk, is urging the reduction of national debt, and even the inflationary Federal Reserve (Fed) has become a target, described as an evil that must be healed. Is all this just early enthusiasm, or is the US truly at a turning point?

An influential Austrian economist of the late 19th century—Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk—is best known as a great critic of the Marxist view of economics, which he helped to render rapidly obsolete by confronting it with its own contradictions (such as the problem of transformation and the challenge of reconciling Marx’s labor theory of value with the tendency towards an average rate of profit across industries).

President-Elect Trump recently suggested privatizing the US Post Office (USPS). Why? Trump points out that people have options for delivering mail and packages: UPS, FedEx, and Amazon. Competition works…

According to Forbes, privatizing the Post Office would be “foolish” and “ridiculous.” Robert Reich posted this remark on Facebook:

Carl Menger was an early proponent of the subjective theory of value and an early pioneer of the Austrian School of Economics. No understanding of the Austrian School and Ludwig von Mises’s work is complete without an understanding of the School’s foundations in Menger’s work. Last month, the Polish Mises Institute released, on its YouTube channel, a new documentary about Carl Menger.

It’s been four years since the January 6 riots of 2021, and with each passing year it becomes more clear that the event was not an insurrection, and it certainly wasn’t a “coup” of any sort. 

Mises Institute president Tom DiLorenzo joined the Tom Woods Show to discuss The Axis of Evil: the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Link to the show.

In a previous post titled, “Why Does Government Always Make the Same Economic Mistakes?” I quoted Judicial Watch CEO Tom Fitton. Regarding another matter, he said that the way to predict future behavior is to look at what was done previously under similar circumstances. We know that Donald Trump wants to enforce our immigration laws, which means strict border control, especially via our southern border, plus higher and more widespread tariffs.

The yearly growth rate of the consumer price index (CPI) stood at 2.7 percent in November, against 2.6 percent in October. In June 2022, the yearly growth rate was 9.1 percent.

Typically, coup attempts do not wrap up in time for dinner.

But over the next few days, with the anniversary of the 2021 January 6 Capitol riot having become a progressive political holiday worthy of obsessive memorialization, the nation will be deluged with tales of attempted government overthrow, Trumpian lunacy, and the FBI desperately trying to explain why it has yet to catch a person who—on video—placed two pipe bombs in DC that day but has somehow gloriously managed to track down and prosecute 1,000 trespassers.

The recent ideological migration of the Republican Party towards overtly collectivist “national conservatives” (or “NatCons”) has sparked a crisis over the past year within American conservatism. “Freedom conservatives” (or “FreeCons”) have emerged in opposition to the NatCons.