The Panic of 1857: An Austrian View

Historians often view the Panic of 1857 as being caused, not by economic events, but political ones. Such disparate events as the end of the Crimean War in 1856 involving England, France, Russia and Turkey, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, the battle over slavery in the Kansas Territory, even the sinking of the SS Central America are all part of the developments bound together as causes of the 1857 panic.

The Political Economy of Pesticides: How to Subsidize a Poison

The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement is well-known for its skepticism of chemical additives in foods, and of large-scale pesticide-intensive agriculture. With environmentalist and current US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy now leading the movement, many of the long-held concerns of environmentalists about toxins and food quality have found a curious place in t he Trump administration.

Fraud as Policy: The Incentives of the Modern Welfare State

The scale of fraud uncovered in recent years has exposed how government transfer programs function, even as meaningful public or legislative reckoning remains largely absent. What began as a series of pandemic-related scandals has revealed something broader and more troubling: large-scale fraud is not an anomaly within the modern welfare state. The federal government, taxpayers, lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud, based on data from 2018 to 2022.