The Redistributive Effects on Monetary Policy

2024-02-26

Seizure fever is toxifying law enforcement across the nation. For more than thirty years, federal, state, and local government agencies have plundered citizens on practically any harebrained accusation or pretext.
You could be at risk of being pilfered by officialdom anytime you sit behind a steering wheel. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from sixty thousand travelers on the nation’s highways—with no criminal charges in most cases, according to the Washington Post. Federal, state, and local law enforcement have institutionalized shakedowns on the nation’s highways to the point that “forfeiture corridors are the new speed traps,” as Mother Jones observed.
Police can almost always find an excuse to pull someone over. Gerald Arenberg, executive director of

2023-11-29

Are the chickens coming home to roost for the US Treasury? As Ryan McMaken noted in a recent Mises Wire article, the United States is in a debt spiral and there’s no easy way out.
The problem is multifaceted, but the origin is profligate government spending. While it typically spikes during crises, spending is increasing at an alarming rate even outside of crisis periods. And tax revenues are not keeping up, which means ever-deepening deficits. Government expenditures spiked during the 2020 crisis, but even ignoring those spikes, annual spending has increased by about $1.6 trillion since 2019, while tax receipts have only increased by about $600 billion.
The government must borrow to make up the difference, which has led to a mountain of debt. Total public debt has ballooned to over $32

2023-11-29

The traditionalist author Álvaro d’Ors emphasized in his work that the political thought of Rome was essentially stateless as it had a personalistic character. In contrast, Greek political thought had a territorial focus, giving rise to the idea of the state. Intellectuals who created and legitimized the idea of the state in modernity drew from Greek political thought. To abolish the state, we need to investigate what both the Greeks and Romans said. This was the work carried out by d’Ors, and it is important to recover it.
The State and Greek Political Thought
The nation-state as we currently understand it is grounded in a territorial conception. Murray Rothbard defines it as “that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given

2023-11-27

From the onset of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict, the statements from the Joe Biden administration and Congress were crystal clear: America is the indispensable nation, and we’re rich and powerful enough to be able to afford two wars to guarantee the safety of the world. Even with the displeasure over an unstoppable growth in debt and a declining economy, the message to both the domestic and international audiences is DC will get involved wherever it need be. We will remain in Ukraine and Israel and will go elsewhere to destroy anything that is perceived to be a threat to “democracy” lest the threat arrives at our doorstep.
But maintaining credibility abroad as paranoia runs rampant in DC comes at a price: people aren’t accepting lies about the “booming” Biden economy and the rapid

2023-11-25

In an October column, Paul Krugman admonished people who are not all in on the Joe Biden economy and declared that we are headed at worst for a “soft landing” in which an economic slowdown—if it happens at all—will be short and shallow. He wrote:
The most important reason for optimism is that an ever-widening range of indicators suggests that the conventional wisdom—that we needed a recession to bring inflation under control—was wrong. Instead, we seem close to returning to the Federal Reserve’s inflation target without paying much of a price at all. (emphasis mine)
Two months earlier, Krugman’s employer, the New York Times, ran a disturbing piece entitled, “America Is Using Up Its Groundwater like There’s No Tomorrow,” in which the Times chronicled how urban and agricultural interests are