Despite once touting itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News,” CNN’s economic knowledge and reporting seem to be lacking. Last week, they published a thought-provoking article titled Why do businesses keep raising their prices, which began with the claim:

After two years of surging prices, economists still can’t agree on what has caused the world’s worst inflation crisis in decades.

With the rise of homeless camps and tent cities in many American cities, the issue of squatting has become a cause for alarm among many residents and policymakers. In many cases parks, sidewalks, and other public rights-of-way have been taken over by people living in tents or makeshift shelters, rendering the areas unusable to most area residents.

The local paper’s headline posed the question, “Do renters have the upper hand in Las Vegas right now?” “[The apartment project] offered us two weeks of no rent to get us moved in on the timeline we wanted,” said a renter who was also given passes to the Life Is Beautiful music festival as part of the deal.

Misinformation does not exist, nor does disinformation. They are words created to be able to call someone a liar without addressing any facts, they were created to shut people up, shut down debate, and in general make it much easier to declare oneself right and an opponent wrong and evil and stupid.

To explain Japan’s economic problems, Paul Krugman employed a model that assumes people are identical and live forever. While admitting that the model is not realistic, Krugman nonetheless argued that his model could still offer solutions to the crisis.

[This article is Chapter 1 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.]