In Defense of Turgot

Murray Rothbard views the eighteenth-century French economist and administrator Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot as a great and admirable figure, but David Graeber and David Wengrow do not agree. In their recently published The Dawn of Everything (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), they present Turgot as a force for evil. His ideas provided a justification for a false sense of Western superiority to people supposedly less civilized and in that way lent support to wars of conquest against them.

Covid and Life Expectancy

How dangerous is Covid? Two recent articles (see here and here) on mises.org suggest that what we are witnessing is hysteria. Both articles examined age-standardized mortality statistics for the US and UK respectively. In the UK, the 2020 mortality rate was at a similar level to 2008, and for the US the mortality rate was at around the same rate as 2004.

Subjecting the Global Warming Hysteria to Rationality and Logic

So much of our time, energy, and resources have been sacrificed to the Global Warming Hysteria without subjecting the issue itself to rationality and logic. I intend to provide a logical step-by-step approach that may be used for evaluating just about any controversial issue, whether it be personal or worldwide such as global warming.

Step One: Is the earth really warming?

Who Will Inflate Faster? Europe or the Fed?

The price of the euro in terms of the US dollar closed at 1.135 in November, against 1.156 in October and 1.193 in November last year. The yearly growth rate of the price of the euro in US dollar terms fell to –4.8 percent in November from –0.7 percent in October. Some commentators are of the view that the US dollar is likely to weaken against the euro (i.e., the price of the euro in US dollar terms is likely to increase). The reason for this is the massive US trade balance deficit.

Vaccine Mandates Result from the Abuse of True Science

There is an alarming degree of uniformity between the governments of many western countries when it comes to instituting tyrannical measures like mandatory medical injections at workplaces and vaccine passports. In doing so, they have departed from liberal values and principles, by no longer recognizing or respecting private spheres, personal goals, or individual freedom and rights.

Are Digital Marketspaces The Last Free Market Frontier?

In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith said of producers: “They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all inhabitants; and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” As an institution of entrepreneurship, the digital marketspace is the modern version of Smith’s invisible hand: a complex phenomenon that has not been designed by a