The President of the United States says he has a plan to address inflation. NBC provides an annotated transcript of this week’s State of the Union Address. Some points of interest:
Inflation rose 7.5% for January over the previous year, beating the 40-year high set in December. Price increases hit food, electricity and housing, in particular.
Persons have a natural right to go into business together, and they may do so either as a partnership or a corporation. In the latter type of organization, the persons setting it up limit their civil liability (I won’t be concerned in this article with the vast and complex issues raised by this). The people who set up a corporation are the owners, and they hold stock in it. Modern corporations normally consist also of managers, including the CEO, and a board of directors, but all of these are agents of the shareholders and act in their interest.
Review of Michael Kulikowski, Imperial Triumph: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (London: Profile Books, 2016) and Imperial Tragedy: From Constantine’s Empire to the Destruction of Roman Italy (London: Profile Books, 2019)
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-sixth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed, in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked whether Mises had answered this point.
When the Bush Administration announced in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would be eligible for NATO membership, I knew it was a terrible idea. Nearly two decades after the end of both the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War, expanding NATO made no sense. NATO itself made no sense.
Explaining my “no” vote on a bill to endorse the expansion, I said at the time:
Probably the worst of the multitude of villainous covid restrictions came at the expense of churches, the forced closure of their doors. Coupled with this tragedy was the fact that while churches were empty, liquor stores remained open for business. And while this wasn’t true everywhere, in many areas, bars were allowed to open for inside business before churches had been given the green light for pews to be filled. It is not my intention here to speak to the morality of these measures; they speak for themselves.
With President Joe Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court, the usual suspects are weighing in with the usual rhetoric about the candidate. In nominating Jackson, who is black, Biden declared:
Democracy is held as the apotheosis of governance, the pinnacle of societal organization that replaced a long succession of failed predecessors (monarchy, oligarchies, dictatorships, etc). Its sine qua non is the peaceful exercise of power and authority. But that peaceful guise is an illusion. Those who submit to the majority’s wishes do so not out of a noble love for democracy, but rather out of fear of its enforcement. Democracy, after you strip away all the slogans and grade-school platitudes, is a proxy for violence.
