Mises Wire

C Jay Engel Reviews The Socialist Manifesto, from the Editor of Jacobin.

Whiskey production depends on investment in highly specific capital, and it requires a long time horizon. It's a textbook case of the sort of industry that's likely to suffer most in case of an economic bust.

Sanders’s and other progressives’ blustering about “morality” is really a smokescreen designed to distract from their vision of a society organized around the threat of government aggression against innocents who simply want to mind their own business.

The Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights prohibits trying a person twice for the same crime. But the federal government now routinely ignores this.

Only gradually, the damage becomes visible. Economic growth is dwindling; political conflicts over income distribution are increasing; the state becomes more and more powerful.

Let's set aside the politically tempting task of speculating about what might happen in the event of a No Deal Brexit, what can we say with certainty will happen?

Loose monetary policy can appear to work so long as real wealth is expanding. But money expansion weakens wealth creation over time, eventually leading to slower growth, lost wealth, and economic busts.

While repealing laws and police reforms are important in alleviating mass incarceration, the problem is likely to continue as long as prosecutors are permitted to operate with so few constraints.

The whole episode shows the folly of top-down political solutions to social challenges.

Slavery was a monstrously unfair and immoral institution. It was also inefficient, compared to a system based on free labor.