Congress’ top priority this fall will be passing legislation funding the government and avoiding a “shutdown.” As of this writing, it appears unlikely that the Republican-controlled House will be able to make a deal with President Biden and the Senate Democrats on a long-term spending bill. Instead, they will likely pass a short-term funding bill to give themselves more time to reach agreement on a longer-term bill.

When Robert (Bob) Ekelund passed away Thursday, August 17, just short of his eighty-third birthday, the academic world lost a truly great economist, the world lost a talented artist and musician, and many of us lost a man who was a good friend. The Mises Institute also lost someone who was a fellow traveler with the Austrian school and someone who was a mentor to those of us who did our graduate work at Auburn University while tied in various ways to the institute.

In the following diagram, Jesús Huerta de Soto has summarized the actions people take to recover from a disaster when people are free.

In this week’s column, I’d like to continue discussing Graham Priest’s unusual book Capitalism: Its Nature and Its Replacement. Priest uses ideas he gets from Marxism and Buddhism to criticize capitalism. Last week, I said that Priest has interesting things to say about Marxism but I avoided Buddhism. This time I won’t avoid it, because the account of human personality he gets from it is crucial to his rejection of libertarianism.

Priest is an eminent logician, and he is quick to cut through nonsense. He says about historical materialism:

Earlier this month, CNN published the results of a poll that found that most Americans oppose sending more money and military aid to the Ukrainian government. A closer look reveals that Republican voters are behind the results. Around seven in ten Republicans oppose sending more support to Ukraine.