Sound Money Movement Strikes Gold in 2023
2023-12-30
Against the backdrop of high inflation rates and geopolitical uncertainty, states are increasingly enacting measures that encourage saving in precious metals and even using gold and silver as money.
With five bills signed into law in 2023, sound money reforms are gaining momentum across the United States.
Money Metals Exchange’s Sound Money Defense League project has emerged as an influential force, actively engaging in legislative battles by prompting intense grassroots support, drafting legislation, recruiting bill sponsors, and providing expert testimony directly to lawmakers.
Twenty-five states considered fifty pieces of legislation this year aimed at ending taxes on monetary metals, strengthening state finances by investing reserve funds in physical gold, establishing in-state
Why Secession Offers a Path to Wealth and Self-Determination
2023-12-28
[This article is chapter 5 of Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities. Now available at Amazon and in the Mises Store.]
One of the most consistent and enthusiastic defenders of human rights and “natural rights” in the twentieth century was the economist and historian Murray Rothbard. A self-described libertarian, Rothbard would also have fit in well among the more radical liberals of the nineteenth century such as the Belgian-French economist Gustave de Molinari and the American anarchist Lysander Spooner.
Like Spooner—a New England abolitionist who advocated for the dissolution of the United States through secession—Rothbard supported the “radical decentralization” of the state. Indeed, Rothbard regarded secession and other forms of
The State Does Not Compromise and Neither Will We
2023-12-27
I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.”
Henry Hazlitt never retired to the beach, and his great voice, once described by Ludwig von Mises as “the
Do Destroyed Monuments Represent a Past Not Worth Defending?
2023-12-21
The wonderful thing about liberty, property rights, and markets is that if you don’t like something, you don’t have to be a part of it. Under pure and beautiful capitalism, consumers are sovereign: they’re not forced to consume something, and their value creation isn’t expropriated to finance what someone else thinks is important.
A liberal order based on individual property rights thus becomes a conflict-minimizing system in that we can leave one another be and only cooperate when it serves both parties. If there’s something you dislike about my opinions, religion, or behavior, you don’t have to associate with me. You can just look away and invoke that long-forgotten American ideal of “live and let live.”
In contrast, when things are commonly owned—or unowned—anything less than consensus