The following is a slightly amended version of the 2023 Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed at the Austrian Economics Research Conference, Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama:

Total public debt reached $34,001,493,655,565.48 at the end of 2023, with over $2.5 trillion added since the end of 2022.

The U.S. Treasury reported $6.1 trillion in outlays, but only $4.4 trillion in receipts for the 2023 fiscal year, resulting in a deficit of almost $1.7 trillion.

Figure 1: Cumulative receipts and outlays of the U.S. government

The folks at the Federal Reserve haven’t said whether they will continue the Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) which is set to expire on March 11, 2024. Jay Powell was asked about it during the November meeting Q & A and said they’d start thinking about it in 2024. With $131 billion outstanding in loans to banks and credit unions collateralized by U.S.

A debate between Dr. Glenn Drover of the UBC School of Social Work and Dr. Walter Block of the Fraser Institute; September 24, 1988.

It is now the year 2525. Equality has finally been attained. Yes, it took quite a while to attain this goal. Why? This is because as we approached it, as we became closer and closer to this ideal, as people became more and more identical, there were fewer and fewer people of genius to do the heavy lifting. And those few who still remained were not at all as smart as the top of the IQ (a thousand pardons more mentioning this concept) distribution used to be earlier in the day.

“If Chairman Wu were in power when Henry Ford was ruining the blacksmith, horse training and saddle making industries, she would have taxed the latter and subsidized the former. How about when computers took out the typewriter, carbon paper, and correction fluid (Wite-Out) industries?”

Much has been written in the international press, including within Argentina, about recently inaugurated Argentinian president

In this week’s column, I’d like to raise two questions suggested by David Beito’s excellent book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, which I reviewed last week. First, how can it be that Franklin Roosevelt has acquired a reputation among leftist historians as a champion of liberty, with his internment of Japanese Americans during World War II regarded as an aberration, in the face of the manifold violations of civil liberties that occurred during his administration?