21. An Immigration Roundtable with Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Immigration remains a contentious issue in the US and across the West. Libertarians have not been immune. While the reflexive tendency favors freedom of movement, this reflex is not dispositive wherever private property exists. The right to leave a place—the right not to be imprisoned or enslaved—is different than the right to enter a place, at least in a society with any degree of private-property norms.
Immigration and Borders
20. Market Borders, Not Open Borders
The attack on a Christmas market in Berlin earlier this week, apparently carried out by a Tunisian immigrant, is just the latest in a series of violent and disturbing terrorist incidents in Germany. The event raises uncomfortable questions about immigration, culture clashes, Islam, and identity: what does it mean to be German, rather than someone who merely lives in Germany? It also raises pragmatic questions about how to provide physical security in public spaces, given such dramatic failures by the German government.
From March 17, 2022, to the end of January 2023, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) increased its federal funds rate from practically zero to 4.50–4.75 percent. The rise in lending rates came in response to skyrocketing consumer goods price inflation: US inflation rose from 2.5 percent in January 2022 to 9.1 percent in June. Notwithstanding inflation falling to 6.4 percent in January 2023, the Fed continues to signal to markets that it will continue to hike rates to bring down consumer price inflation.
State lawmakers of both houses have just voted overwhelmingly to exempt physical gold, silver, platinum, and palladium coins and bullion from the Mississippi state sales tax, sending the bill to Governor Tate Reeves (R) for his signature.
Is the main problem with the US healthcare system that hospitals have gotten too large since the 1990s? That seems to be the remarkable conclusion of two of the nation’s most distinguished health-policy analysts, David Dranove and Lawton R. Burns. Dranove is an economist and Walter J. McNerney Distinguished Professor of Health Industry Management at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Burns is a sociologist and James Joo-Jin Kim professor of health care management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
18. Babbitt Is Back
Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America?
19. YouTube Attempts to Silence the Mises Institute
YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided yesterday to remove a Mises Institute video. This decision apparently lasts for all eternity, cannot be appealed to an actual human, and comes with this friendly admonition: “Because it’s the first time, this is just a warning. If it happens again, your channel will get a strike and you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week.”
15. Getting Liberalism Wrong
Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism and one leader of a new “national conservatism” project, recently wrote an important and compelling article for Quillette titled “The Challenge of Marxism.” Hazony says out loud what few Western intellectuals will admit, namely that liberalism is not holding and has not triumphed in 2020 America and Europe. We have not reached the end of history.
Our criticism lies not with Hazony’s thesis, but with his particular conception of what liberalism is, what it has become, and what it should be.
Pandemic Government
