Previewing President Biden’s trip to Europe last week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that, “the president is traveling to Europe to make sure we stay united.”
That sure didn’t go as planned. This may have been the most disastrous – and dangerous – Presidential overseas trip ever.
Let’s say a house is on fire. The fire department shows up, except rather than spraying water on the fire, they spray gasoline. Moments later they are shocked the fire has gotten out of control.
Yet here we are. The central planners are fighting inflation with more inflation.
In Canada, the province of Quebec plans on giving individuals who make less than $100,000 a year a $500 check to:
Carl Schmitt has been classified in many different ways, but certainly never as a libertarian. To the contrary, Schmitt strongly supported a strong state and for a few years was a leading light among Nazi jurists, though he fell out of favor with the Nazi Party after 1936. In his great work Constitutional Theory (1928), he writes critically of the bourgeois state based on the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), and the great classical liberal Benjamin Constant is a principal target.
Changes often induce fear--including the fear that some aspect of our current well-being will be eroded due to changes that could take place in markets. For instance, the invention of a lower cost way of providing a service I now offer could lower what I now earn. The potential that we might be harmed by such changes can make us very risk averse.
Prices of goods and services in the economy seem to be going through the roof, and both consumers and producers suffer from the falling value of their money. Unfortunately, the public turns to politicians in Washington and economists around the world for answers.
On Wednesday, March 16, 2022, the US central bank, the Federal Reserve System, raised the target for the federal funds rate by 0.25 percent, to 0.50 percent. According to Fed officials, the increase in the federal funds rate target was in response to the strong increases in the yearly growth rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which stood at 7.9 percent in February against 7.5 percent in January and 1.7 percent in February of the year before.
Recently, many industrialized countries such as the United States and the euro area have experienced high and further rising inflation, whereas in Japan and Switzerland inflation has remained low. While inflation reached 5.9 percent in the eurozone and 7.9 percent in the US in February 2022, Japan and Switzerland reported 1.0 percent and 2.2 percent, respectively. Since the turn of the millennium, the average year-over-year inflation has been 0.1 percent in Japan and 0.4 percent in Switzerland, compared to 1.7 percent in the eurozone and 2.2 percent in the US.
Readers of Murray Rothbard’s articles and speeches on war collectivism will immediately recognize the progressive pietist fervor surrounding today’s progressive war jingoism: everywhere is Ukraine! The atavistic need to analogize today’s situation to 1938, with Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler and war skeptics as Neville Chamberlain at Munich, is proof of this.
