Highway Robbery Continues to Be the Law of the Land
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
What Would Mises Think? Austria Is Applying (Some) Austrian Economics
2023-12-01
Austria is one part of the name “Austrian economics.” How has the country of Austria prospered by applying Austrian economic concepts? The nation regained full sovereignty in 1955. Their form of government is a parliamentary coalition with a prime minister as head of state and a ceremonial office of president.
How would Ludwig von Mises view Austria today implementing Austrian economics? He would not recognize the country he fled in 1934 ahead of the German war machine and its purposeful discrimination of people of Jewish descent. He would probably be thankful Austria’s Jewish population is thriving. He would also see its standard of living and economy flourishing today.
Austria has large services and industrial sectors, and it has a small, highly developed agricultural sector. The
Overcoming Chinese Communist GDP Myths
2023-11-25
In March, at the National People’s Congress, Beijing set its annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth target. Since 1985, in every year but one, China has met or exceeded its official projections, raising doubts about whether or not Beijing’s claims of rapid growth can be believed. The New York Federal Reserve issued a report in 2020 that challenged the numbers, saying that China’s GDP growth chart was too smooth for the data to be authentic.
Typical of a communist system, the central government’s growth target is divided up and assigned as quotas for provincial governments, who in turn set quotas for local governments, and so on down the line. Politicians who fail to meet quotas can expect negative consequences so they are incentivized to lie, pumping up the numbers. The reports are