We now live in a fundamentally altered landscape where old certainties no longer confer fitness.

President Trump has invoked the ancient fallacies of mercantilism in fashioning his protectionist trade policies. We will find that mercantilism is just as harmful today than it was hundreds of years ago when it first became Britain‘s national policy.

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Why do people watch sports? My mother believes it’s because “people want to be uplifted.” This may explain why many are upset about how basketball phenom Caitlin Clark, who broke the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) women’s and men’s scoring records, is being treated—or mistreated—in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

The people presented in this book are generally considered villainous, and the functions they perform, harmful. Sometimes society itself is damned because it spawns such reprehensible characters. However, the thrust of this book will concentrate on the following propositions:
They are guilty of no wrong-doing of a violent nature;In virtually every case, they actually benefit society;If we prohibit their activities, we do so at our own loss.                     —Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable, 1976
Three decades ago, I attended the week-long Mises University, the educational experience of a lifetime. Among the many lecturers were three of my libertarian heroes: Murray Rothbard, Walter Block and Sheldon Richman. Professor Block’s class on the environment, in particular, made quite

“This is all about regulation and the fact that at some point in time there was great advocacy for making sure that the regional banks and the smaller banks didn’t have to comply with some of the rules that perhaps would not have allowed them to get into this situation because there would’ve been stress testing and more oversight and more watching of what was going on.”
~ Rep. Maxine Waters (D), Financial Services Committee, March 15, 2023
As fate would have it, Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker lobbied in 2018 to raise the asset bar on the annual Dodd-Frank stress tests from $50 billion to $250 billion. On May 24, 2018, when President Donald Trump signed “the biggest rollback of bank rules since the financial crisis,” SVB’s assets footed to $54 billion. By the end of last year, they had

James Grant is editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, which he founded in 1983. He is the author of nine books, including Money of the Mind, The Trouble with Prosperity, John Adams: Party of One, The Forgotten Depression, and more recently Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian.

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”