The Grinch showed up this year at the nation’s deposit insurer suspending bonuses for senior officials at the FDIC. Bank Regulators have been behaving like frat boys for at least the last couple years according to an internal investigation performed by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and released to the Wall Street Journal.
Academic Agent is a state-socialist author and YouTuber whose channel includes some excellent explanations of Austrian school economics. However, it also includes an entire series of ten videos entitled “Issues with Libertarianism,” in which he claims to address fallacies in those same Austrian positions which lead him to decidedly anti-libertarian, statist conclusions.
A typical argument against the participation of young individuals in the labor market goes like this: Child labor deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity. It harms children mentally, physically, socially, and morally. It interferes with their schooling, preventing them from attending or concentrating in school. In the most serious cases, it may involve children being separated from their families, exposed to serious hazards, or enslaved.
Interest rates play a critical role in the economy. Were entrepreneurs limited to just asking to borrow the wealth and savings of friends and family, rather than loans from banks, certain projects and services could never be achieved. Further, interest rates play a nearly miraculous role that inadvertently gives society a sort of “computational boost.”
The debate over immigration is working out perfectly for the deep state. Donald Trump is calling on the CIA and the FBI to “get involved” in domestic policing. At the same time, MAGA conservatives are begging the US government to impose a vast new surveillance state on Americans in the name of stopping illegal aliens.
Walking the sidewalks in any US small or large city, one sees at street intersections ramped curb-cuts designed to benefit people in wheelchairs. While these infrastructure modifications have certainly benefited some needing assistance to cross at intersections, many of these amenities are as likely to benefit skateboarders, cyclists, and parents pushing strollers and baby carriages—or mere ordinary pedestrians—as they benefit the wheelchair-bound.
Jason Jewell, a longtime contributor to the Mises Institute and Mises Graduate Program alumnus, has been appointed as the inaugural Chief Academic Officer of the Florida University System. Our friend Allen Mendenhall writes a proper tribute:
[The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies. by Auron Macintyre, Regnery 2024; 173 pp.]
