“Salus populi suprema lex.” The health of the people is the supreme law.

As ruling ideals go, this is a good one. Unfortunately, the governing class in America decided long ago that raw milk—one of nature’s most perfectly nutritious substances—must be regulated and prohibited to the point of making it nearly impossible to obtain. In its place, they teamed with the dairy industry to promote pasteurized milk, a lifeless liquid so devoid of the natural beneficial compounds found in raw milk that it should more accurately be called a “milk-like substance.”

I had the good fortune of attending the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) twice in succession, during the summers of 2020 and 2021. By that time, I was already quite familiar with the ideas of the Austrian School thanks to the many podcasts and recorded Mises University lectures, among much more, the Mises Institute has made freely available online. However, I likely never would have realized my own understanding of Ludwig von Mises’s economic works was so deficient without twice undertaking a close reading of Human Action for RGS.

With gold reaching all-time highs and the Dow approaching similar records, many are sharing their opinions on the reasons behind these market movements. Following the Dow’s closure at its highest level since January 2022, Reuters attempted to explain that investors:

… viewed cooling inflation data as a harbinger of easing Federal Reserve monetary policy.

According to modern portfolio theory (MPT), financial asset prices always fully reflect all available and relevant information, and any adjustment to new information is virtually instantaneous. Thus, asset prices respond only to the unexpected part of information since the expected portion is already embedded in prices.