It has been just over a century since Ludwig von Mises started the socialist calculation debate, one of the main contenders for fight of the century in economic theory. The debate raged primarily throughout the 1930s, but was also active in the 1920s and 1940s. Although Austrians started and comprised the one side of the debate, historians of economic thought have typically concluded that they ultimately lost.

President Biden is tub-thumping for Congress to create new federal handouts to make college free for the vast majority of students. But as Ryan McMaken and other commentators on mises.org have pointed out, college is vastly overpriced and overrated nowadays.

The Federal Reserve concluded its November meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on Wednesday.

According to the FOMC’s statement, the Fed now plans to taper beginning in mid-November by cutting back its asset purchases by $10 billion in Treasury securities and $5 billion in mortgage-backed securities. Right now, the Fed buys $80 billion in Treasurys and $40 billion in housing-backed securities each month. So, according to the FOMC statement:

President Biden’s proposal to require roughly seven hundred US billionaires to pay taxes annually on unrealized capital gains has garnered wide support from Democrats as another step to make the rich pay for the uncontrolled spending by the federal government. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi says Democrats hope the plan will raise as much as $250 billion to help pay for expanding the social safety net and tackling climate change.

As I was listening to Fox News describe the expected victory of Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia gubernatorial race during the evening of November 2 and then to the happy talk that followed the next morning after Youngkin squeaked out a two-point victory, I kept thinking about how the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel described the French Revolution:

All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time … as if the reconciliation of heaven and earth were now first accomplished.

Previous sustained surges in consumer prices – otherwise described as big levies of inflation taxation - have brought in their wake episodes of monetary normalization. These have usually featured a “return to gold” or at least to monetary rules associated with the gold standard. The 2021-2 surge will likely prove an exception thanks in no small part to an unholy alliance between crypto and unsound money. The alliance spells trouble for the ideal of sound money.

Advocates for vaccine mandates—led by the Biden administration—are apparently unconcerned that the mandates are likely to drive down total employment and reduce access to government services. In many cases these are the same services that mandate-pushing politicians have always insisted are utterly “critical” and must be expanded. Instead, the party is taking the position that the drive for vaccination must be placed before all other values in society, including public safety and employment for working-class Americans.