The Pope is touring North America this week, promoting a variety of interventionist “solutions” to global warming, poverty, and more. But a far more powerful religious figure, Janet Yellen, continues to pull the levers of the global financial system.
In spite of past assurances to the contrary, our central planners at the Federal Reserve emerged this week to announce that their zero-interest-rate policy will continue. Is the world coming to realize that the emperors have no clothes?
Progressives once bragged about how their economic policies favored whites over blacks in the job market. Nowadays, Progressives claim to be helping racial minorities, although their economic policies remain exactly the same.
Many are debating the nature of the state’s role in marriage, but the state has never been a friend to marriage of any kind, and has done much to undermine marriage’s economic and social benefits while substituting the state for family institutions.
Following Supreme Court decisions, commentators often claim that a law is now "settled public policy." This is a tactic to silence dissent, and draws on fanciful ideas about the permanence of federal law. In real life, no political question is ever settled.
Some states are attempting to take control of federal lands within their own borders. But even if the states succeed at this, fewer federal expenditures on federal lands won’t translate into lower taxes for anybody.
Both the left wing and right wing in the United States today use nullification as a tactic against federal law, even though nullification is clearly illegal according to modern legal interpretations. Nullification isn’t a legal tactic, though. It’s a political one.
Legal recreational marijuana has now been legal in Washington State for two and a half years. During that time, violent crime has decreased, and the doom-laden predictions of opponents to legalization have failed to come true.
Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 July 2015.
