The opposite of secession is annexation wherein governments extend their monopolies over a greater territory. Just as secession naturally limits the power of states, annexation extends it, and should be opposed, writes Ryan McMaken.
This audio Mises Daily is narrated by Robert Hale.
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2024-02-01
Murray Rothbard called Richard Cantillon the “father of modern economics.” While that title is often given to Adam Smith, Rothbard suggested that all the good things in Smith were first discovered by Cantillon or other pre-Smithian economists and that virtually all of Smith’s original ideas were “a significant deterioration of economic thought.”
One of Cantillon’s greatest insights involved the uneven effects of monetary expansion. New money enters the economy at a particular point—the first spender of new money acquires goods from the market, and those sellers may now use the money to increase their demands for goods, and so on. The money ripples out from its origin, providing real benefits to those closest to the center. As the new money is spent, prices rise, meaning those whose incomes
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Our vacation airline tickets in September were funded by accumulated miles on our Alaska Airlines credit card. While on vacation this summer, my brother-in-law graciously hosted eight of us for dinner. He tried to downplay the generous hospitality by saying he had just gotten his “cash back” award from his credit card company. The “cash back” credit card had accumulated a tidy sum of money, paying for a very nice dinner.
At home in Brookfield, a takeout restaurant advised a 3.5 percent surcharge if paying by credit or debit card. Shopping later, our favorite farm market added a dollar to all card transactions. It is not unusual in Brookfield to see two prices for gas: one price is for cash, and the slightly higher gallon cost is for credit. These actions offset the cost of interchange
2023-11-03
Last month, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University announced that it was laying off almost all of its staff, in spite of having received almost $55 million in funds in the last three years. Critics have jumped on Kendi’s fall to renew arguments that he’s a grifter or a “midwit,” but there’s another underappreciated aspect to Kendi’s fall. Kendi always struck me as someone who had the raw intellectual horsepower to succeed but whose rigid ideology pushed him toward ideas and solutions that were farther and farther from reality. In that way, his fall represents a cautionary tale for all of us.
A few years ago, a landmark study published by Cambridge University Press claimed that our rigid ideologies could actually be making us dumber. The study’s authors
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Is a true populist US government on the horizon? Probably not.
Original Article: The Spirit of the Establishment Will Thrive under a "Populist Opposition" Government
2023-10-31
Germany is the euro area’s economic powerhouse and most competitive economy. It accounts for close to 30 percent of the euro area gross domestic product (GDP) and has recorded sizable current account surpluses since the introduction of the euro. Substantial fiscal and labor market reforms in the early 2000s propelled the German economy.
However, these golden days seem all gone now. Years of misguided energy policies—part of the government’s interventionist green agenda—increased energy prices and uncertainty for investors. In addition, the business environment deteriorated due to heavy bureaucracy and taxation, seriously weakening Germany’s productivity and output growth. The real beneficiary of Germany’s economic woes seems to be China, which has replaced it as the top global
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It’s been more than three decades since the Berlin Wall fell and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the time, when everyone knew that the time for the “mothership” of socialism had come, China didn’t want to take the Soviet Union’s position but opted for an ambiguous role. In the three decades after the downfall of the Soviet Union, it was clear which country was at the top of the world.
Those were the times to which the Beltway wanted to return. Having never learned a lesson about their failures in thinking that if America doesn’t assume the role of policeman of the world, D.C.’s reputation in hotly contested regions only deteriorated. After Saddam Hussein and ISIS, once the news of the US openly backing Israel after the Hamas attack hit the pages of Arabic outlets, the Iraqi
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According to the U.S. Treasury, year-end data from September 2023 show that the deficit for the full year 2023 was $1.7 trillion, $320 billion higher than the prior year’s deficit. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit was 6.3%, an increase from 5.4% in FY 2022. This means that the United States will likely post the worst GDP growth excluding debt increases since 1929, or, in other words, that the country is in a recession disguised by bloated deficit spending.
This disastrous result shows that the Keynesian science fiction of the public sector multiplier does not work. The Biden administration increased taxes, but revenues declined. Governmental receipts totaled $4.4 trillion in FY 2023 (16.5 percent of GDP), 9.3% lower than in 2022 and below the budget projections. This decline is mostly
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