The ideas of economists—whether they are right or wrong—are often more powerful than commonly understood. Consider President Trump’s statements about the magical powers of tariffs or Mexico’s Sheinbaum’s discourse on import substitution industrialization. Our leaders—even when they believe themselves to be smart and independent thinkers—are often slaves to the ideas of past economists.
Adam Smith believed that the economic arrangements he prescribed would achieve the greatest amount of prosperity distributed to the widest population. He did not anticipate the periodic “boom-and-bust business cycles” that historically accompanied capitalist “progress” and eventually sparked heated, progressive calls for active government intervention. Prolonged economic crises struck the United States in 1792, 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and—worst of all—the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This article was originally delivered as a lecture at Educating for Liberty: Mises Circle in Tampa on February 22. Transcript edited for clarity.
I want to talk about how we can train young children as soon as they’re able to grasp a story, as soon as they’re able to follow along while you’re reading a book to them.
How can we get them to start to embrace important principles of liberty, and important economic concepts as well? It turns out that it’s possible, and I’ll talk about a few examples that I’ve tried to do in my own work with children’s books.
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, has announced that the digital euro will be ready for October 2025.
However, she stressed the importance of moving forward with the legislative process that would impose the digital euro, urging the European Commission, the European Council, and member states parliaments to accelerate the laws and directives that are required to make the digital euro viable.
[This article is a selection from Lecture 1 of Raico’s The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought.]
The critical point was, again, the Middle Ages, and there you had an adversarial position between the church and the state that was, in fact, crucial. It goes back even before the Middle Ages, to the first centuries of the church.
Western officials continue to push African nations to divest from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, but such a move would be detrimental to Africa’s economic growth. Renewable energy remains expensive and unreliable, while fossil fuels provide the dependable power necessary for industrialization.
[Marcuse by Jacob McNulty, Routledge, 2025; 262 pp.]
Once again, we have efforts to release Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in which they have been confined for nearly 17 years—ever since the US Treasury did a 100 percent bailout of their creditors in 2008. Pros and cons are hotly debated relative to the proposed release of the twins that continue to rank among the largest systemically important financial institutions in the world.
