Originally published at LewRockwell.com.

In office for just over nine months, Argentine President Javier Milei continues to face enormous economic and political challenges. His support from Congress and the Senate is fragile, and the president’s opponents are trying to mobilize the masses against his policies. This makes success in the economic sphere all the more urgent. The aim here is to find a way out of stagflation—the simultaneous occurrence of stagnation or recession and inflation—in which the Argentine economy currently finds itself as quickly as possible.

Public opinion polls consistently show the economy is one of the top issues, if not the top issue, for American voters. This may strike some as odd, since official government statistics show low unemployment and declining price inflation, suggesting the Federal Reserve has engineered a “soft landing” bringing down inflation without causing a recession. So why the concern over the economy? One reason is more people are realizing government economic figures hide the truth about the economy.

In recent years, a disturbing development has taken place in America’s universities. People who apply for faculty positions, and those who are on the faculty and want to be promoted are required to make “diversity statements,” in which they declare their commitment to DEI—diversity, equality, inclusion—and detail their activities on behalf of this goal.

As Kamala Harris declares herself open to paying reparations for slavery in a desperate bid to win more black voters, the debate about redressing historical injustices has been once again reignited. California has passed a raft of new proposals “as part of a reparations legislative package” with policies on education, housing, and criminal justice for the benefit of black people.

In Murray Rothbard’s thinking, the state is a criminal organization of aggression and depredation against the just rights of private property of its subjects. The state acquires its revenue by physical coercion (taxation) and achieves a compulsory monopoly of force and ultimate decision-making power over a given territory. Hence, there is no just state in Rothbard’s libertarianism.

The State of Israel

There’s a new ballot initiative in Colorado that shows what the “progressive” Left wants as the next step in abortion policy. Coloradans are now in the process of voting on Amendment 79 which paves the way for taxpayer-funded abortions and for protecting pro-abortion mandates on private insurance. The amendment would also create a legal right to an abortion in the state constitution. 

Individuals are often presented as if a value scale is hard-wired in their heads. Allegedly, this value scale remains the same all the time. As a result, this value scale supposedly instructs individuals in the selection of goods. Were that the case, then it makes sense to attempt to extract this value scale either by means of questionnaires or various psychological tests. Once the value scale is extracted, social scientists could establish how to allocate scarce resources in the most efficient way.

“…boom and bust cycles are caused—not by the mysterious workings of the capitalist system—but by governmental interventions in that system.” — Murray Rothbard