“Who controls the past now, controls the future. Who controls the present now, controls the past.”

That is from “Testify,” a song by newly minted rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famers Rage against the Machine. I don’t know if Phillip W. Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research is fan enough to be familiar with that, but I bet he knows the original source: George Orwell’s 1984.

The Federal Reserve’s inflation of the money supply and interest rate manipulation distort capital markets through, among other things, the creation of asset bubbles. As the cost of borrowing decreases and cheap money floods an economy, speculation in capital markets increases, leading to prices unmoored from fundamentals.

Wonka (2023) is a prequel film to the beloved story Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. Wonka tells the story of a young Willy Wonka, an up-and-coming chocolate salesman and magician, who challenges a chocolate cartel’s dominance.

I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work.

The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance
by David T. Beito
Independent Institute, 2023; x + 379 pp.

Headline math is a simple percentage expressed as a fact without context. Its design is to create an emotional response, support an opinion, or generate a click past the paywall. Once articulated, it exists in speech as a noun. W. Brian Arthur’s paper “Economics in Nouns and Verbs” explains the use of nouns to express a conclusion as fact, excluding further discussion. Student loan statistics for women are presented as facts, needing no further thought or understanding.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the European intellectual scene witnessed a remarkable theoretical contest known as the “battle of methods,” or in German, Methodenstreit. This intellectual clash stood out due to the confrontation between the precepts of methodological and subjective individualization, equipped with a subjectivist and individualizing worldview of the method.

Greenwashing is a relatively new term to describe false and misleading claims that a product or business practice has environmental benefits. The point is that companies can advertise their efforts as “green” while continuing various profitable activities that environmentalists consider “harmful,” gaming the system and profiting off well-intentioned, sustainably minded consumers.

The term was coined forty years ago by a student in response to a hotel that wanted customers to reuse the towels in their rooms to save the environment and save the hotel money.