When asked about price inflation in his Sunday interview with 60 Minutes, President Joe Biden claimed that inflation “was up just an inch … hardly at all.” Biden continued the dishonest tactic of focusing on month-to-month price inflation growth to obscure forty-year highs in year-over-year inflation. This strategy may yet work to placate the most ignorant voters, but people who are paying attention know that price inflation continues to soar.

For most economists the velocity of money circulation is an important factor in determining the prices of goods and services. If, for example, the quantity of money increased by 10 percent in a given year, while the price level has remained unchanged it would mean that there must have been a decline of about 10 percent in the velocity of money circulation.

Foundation for Economic Education founder and cornerstone Leonard Read always had an ear out for widely accepted but misleading clichés that served to aggrandize government power and limit liberty. In his 1965 “A Cliché of Socialism: Under Public Ownership, We the People Own It!” He focused his attention on the large gap between public ownership of assets and the idea that “we the people” own them.

Imagine a hypothetical libertarian paradise (“Paradise”) that seeks only to live in peace and harmony with the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is not as pacifistic as Paradise; indeed, it has at least a few bad guys, countries controlled by people willing to use violence to get what they want. Worse yet, our Paradise is the only country with sufficient military might to resist the world’s bad guys effectively.

On 60 Minutes last Sunday, President Joe Biden declared “the pandemic is over,” but quickly added that “we still have a problem with COVID, we’re still doing a lot of work on it.”

Biden then reiterated: “But the pandemic is over” and his evidence was the fact “no one’s wearing masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing, and I think this is a perfect example of it.”

[Originally published by Law&Liberty.]