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G.K. Chesterton is a somewhat controversial author in most libertarian circles. As an intelligent man who wisely predicted a century out so many of the problems we face today, he has garnered great respect among many who have read him.

Americans across the board have routinely spoken for term limits. Recently, however, this has been most common among Republican politicians. On January 29, Ron DeSantis announced his legislative priorities over social media as he found himself no longer focused on a presidential campaign, and his very first item on the list was enforcing term limits. Additionally, perhaps the most right-wing politician in America, Anthony Sabatini, routinely calls for term limits. Most recently, almost a week before DeSantis’s post, Sabatini tweeted out “WE NEED TERM LIMITS FOR CONGRESS,” and historically, Sabatini has gone as far as sharing that there should be “TERM LIMITS FOR EVERY ELECTED OFFICIAL IN THE UNITED STATES PLUS STAFF.”
Before I continue, I will state that I do not mean to attack DeSantis

Murray Rothbard asked this question and concluded that the current American regime, if the wisdom of Aquinas’ words is taken seriously, cannot wage a just war.
Original Article: Can the American Government Wage a Just War?

In a recent Mises Wire article, Connor O’Keeffe posed the question: “Is It Just War or Unjustified Slaughter of Innocents?” O’Keeffe points to Murray Rothbard’s claim that the difference between war and other manners of crime is merely a matter of scale, concluding that what we currently see occurring in the Middle East—as well as in any number of previous conflicts around the world—is not justified.
However, it can be further shown that involvement in these foreign wars is further unjustified by looking at another theory of just war built upon natural law. I am referencing the just war theory of St. Thomas Aquinas—a man that Rothbard highly praised as “the towering intellect of the High Middle Ages, the man who built on the philosophical system of Aristotle, on the concept of natural law,

When Mises wrote that the fascists had "saved European civilization," he could have been describing Francisco Franco of Spain, who kept Spain from becoming a communist dictatorship.
Original Article: "What Mises Really Thought about Fascism"

Leonard Read’s famous "I, Pencil" explained the workings of the market in terms of the creation of a simple pencil. However, we should not forget that the reviled fossil fuels are involved at every turn.

Original Article: "Not Even a Pencil Could Exist without Fossil Fuels"

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
—Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition
Mises controversially stated this quote in his book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition. This seemingly profascist line is routinely taken out of context and used to justify tremendous amounts of outrage. Previous Mises Wire articles have done a much better job than I ever could at putting these words in their proper context to explain just how misguided these criticisms are. However, the quick answer is to simply read the lines immediately

The usual answer is that secondhand smoke is bad. But if value is subjective, perhaps secondhand smoke also can be seen as a public good.

Original Article: "Is Secondhand Smoke Bad, or Is It a Public Good? It’s Complicated"

President Biden makes the false claim that wind- and solar-generated electricity are cheaper than power generated from coal and oil.

Original Article: "Wind and Solar Are NOT Cheaper than Coal and Oil"

In 1964, Leonard Read wrote a genealogy from the perspective of a pencil, demonstrating the vast, complicated web of the structure of production that is handled by the division of labor on free markets. The pencil explained that no one knows how to make a pencil because of the myriad production processes involved:
My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through

In his recent address, President Joe Biden claimed that “wind and solar are already significantly cheaper than coal and oil.” This is flat-out wrong. There are many arguments that can be made for Biden’s claim. However, not only can they all be refuted, but they have all already been refuted.
Alex Epstein, in his book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, explains that two facts are ignored when pretending that wind and solar are cheaper. The first is that
solar and wind exist in large quantities exclusively in places where they are given massive government preferences. When you look at where solar and wind are used, you will invariably find subsidies—that is, the government forcing taxpayers to give money to solar and wind

Do we have a right to sunlight? How do we assert those rights? Murray Rothbard provides some answers.

Original Article: "How Should We Regulate the Sun (Since Our Government Regulates Nearly Everything Else)?"

Murray Rothbard once proposed:
Quick: Which is America’s Most Persecuted Minority? No, you’re wrong. . . .
All right, consider this: Which group has been increasingly illegalized, shamed and denigrated first by the Establishment, and then, following its lead, by society at large? Which group, far from coming out of the “closet,” has been literally forced back into the closet after centuries of walking proudly in the public square? And which group has tragically internalized the value-system of its oppressors, so that they are deeply ashamed and guilty about practicing their rites and customs? Which group is so brow-beaten that it never thinks of defending itself, any attempt at which is publicly condemned and ridiculed? Which group is considered such sinners that the use of doctored

Some conservatives are upset because the new best-selling beer is owned by the same company that owns the beleaguered Bud Lite. Actually, they should have no problem with that.

Original Article: "Do Boycotts Really Work? Another Look at the Bud Light Situation"

When we think of “solar power,” we picture a field or a roof full of glass panels churning out electricity. However, this is just a more recent development in channeling the sun’s energy. Most histories of solar power will begin with stories regarding the use of magnifying glasses and mirrors to make fire. From the first to fourth centuries, the Romans began including large south-facing windows in their famous bathhouses, optimizing the heat energy the sun provided to heat the buildings.
However, this led to an interesting development. In the sixth century, not only bathhouses but also many Roman houses and public buildings all trended toward having a sunroom. As such, the Justinian Code actually enshrined “sun rights” so that each individual would be guaranteed access to the sun. Once the

The latest round of wildfires in Canada has brought out the usual statist demands that we ban fossil fuels, but in the real world fossil fuels protect people from climate-related disasters.

Original Article: "Fossil Fuels Enable Us to Better Fight Fires and Other Environmental Disasters"

For the past ten weeks, American conservatives have been boycotting Bud Light in response to a beer can featuring transgender figure Dylan Mulvaney. Since then, sales of the beer have been plummeting. However, this week, a new benchmark has been passed: Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light is no longer the top-selling beer in the United States. Instead, it has been overtaken by Modelo, as the following graph from the Wall Street Journal shows:
Source: Wall Street Journal.
However, Modelo taking the top spot has sparked a debate in and of itself as some conservative figures have made the complaint that Modelo is still largely owned by Anheuser-Busch. In America, the company was broken up by an antitrust law; however, outside of North America, Modelo is still owed by Anheuser-Busch. As such, the

This week we’ve seen a relatively unprecedented environmental phenomenon in New York City. Canadian wildfires have led to the worst air quality New York has ever had—and the worst air quality anywhere in the world right now. The air has taken on a sepia tint, and the city looks like the setting of a postapocalyptic movie.
Many individuals are blaming the situation on climate change and calling for mass government intervention. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, has used it to renew her call for a Green New Deal. This is an example of what Mises Institute fellow Joshua Mawhorter has referred to as the statist non sequitur: “The statist non sequitur involves the existence of a problem followed by the alleged solution of statism. It is typically put in the form of a statement or a loaded

Those adhering to Austrian Economic thinking see the beauty in concepts coming together and providing a way to truthfully assess human action.

Original Article: "Yearning for Beauty in the Truth of Economic Thinking"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Yearning for Beauty in the Truth of Economic Thinking
We as a human race have a natural desire for beauty, and we as academics have a tendency to get lost in the weeds and forget this. Mises Institute president Jeff Deist has articulated this better than perhaps anyone before him in a speech (“We Need Truth and Beauty”) where he stated:
We know Austrian economics is fundamentally true; in fact, truth is its most important and fundamental responsibility. Yet we cannot afford to ignore the corollary to truth, namely, beauty. Without beauty, divorced of any higher human longings, economics devolves from a beautiful theoretical edifice into a bastard cousin of accounting and finance, a business discipline. Or even worse, it becomes nothing more than an intellectual veneer for so-called public

One of the fundamental tenets of Austrian economics is the ordinal value scale. Augustine articulated the idea more than a thousand years before Carl Menger wrote his pathbreaking Principles of Economics.

Original Article: "Saint Augustine, Proto-Austrian"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

In a past Mises Wire article, I’ve written about how Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of hope correlates incredibly well with what Carl Menger would describe in his definition a good six centuries later. This trend of religious figures like Aquinas and his later followers, the late Spanish scholastics, discovering economic truths despite studying theology, not economics, can be found often throughout the course of history. Tom Woods has explained this by stating:
One of the characteristic features of Catholic thought over the centuries has been its emphasis on reason. Man’s mind, according to this tradition, is capable of apprehending a world of order that exists outside itself. Man is able to abstract “universals” from the myriad objects and sense data that appear to him and thus bring

While the average person thinks economics begins with Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations, readers of the Mises Wire know that the story goes back much further than that. Members of the Austrian school commonly describe their earliest intellectual predecessors, the late Scholastics, as “proto-Austrians.”

We must, therefore, emphasize that “we” are not the government; the government is not “us.” The government does not in any accurate sense “represent” the majority of the people.

Readers of the Mises Wire are most likely familiar with the Volcker moment. This was when former Fed chair Paul Volcker, in the face of steep price inflation, skyrocketed rates to nearly 20 percent.

When conservatives applaud unlimited war spending, they not only harm our economy and body politic, but they give the Left a powerful talking point.

While supporters of the Biden administration fault Putin for shortages, Austrian economists know the answer lies in Washington’s monetary and economic mismanagement.

The vast majority of Mises Wire readers are already familiar with the Austrian business cycle theory. For those who are not, it is an Austrian perspective on what causes the sudden general cluster of business errors that results in a boom-bust cycle, with the busts being the recessions or depressions that we as a society so dread.