In the first few weeks of President Trump’s second term, the Trump administration has unleashed a barrage of executive orders and other actions intended to dizzy his detractors. So far, he has been successful. However, his opposition has taken a unique interest in President Trump’s efforts to streamline government. President Trump has tasked Elon Musk and a team of tech gurus—under the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”)—to perform “audits” of key federal agencies by examining their expenditures and identifying fraudulent or wasteful spending.Thus far, DOGE has introduced the American public to countless examples of wasteful spending. Senator Joni Ernst highlighted some of this waste: USAID “authorized a whopping $20 million to create a Sesame Street in Iraq.” Like many of you, my

Student loans and government “forgiveness” has been a hot topic among progressives since the Occupy Wall Street movement began. The movement consisted of educated but underemployed urban progressives upset with the obvious corporatist corruption that ensued after the Great Recession. The central theme was that Wall Street operated a series of blatantly corrupt and risky financial schemes that tanked the economy, but the instrumental and systemically important Wall Street players were bailed out at taxpayer expense (i.e., socialism for the rich). The Occupy Wall Street protesters sought to verbally oppose the Wall Street bailouts, while also expressing their support for a taxpayer bailout of the then-$1 trillion in outstanding student loans.The concept of student loan forgiveness touches on

In mid-March, the Supreme Court is going to hear oral arguments in a case called National Rifle Association v. Vullo. This case has received relatively little media attention, but according to SCOTUSblog, it centers around whether the “First Amendment allows a government regulator to threaten regulated entities with adverse regulatory actions if they do business with a controversial speaker, as a consequence of (a) the government’s own hostility to the speaker’s viewpoint.”Central to this case is a referral from the New York County District Attorney’s Office for the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) to open an investigation into firearms-based insurance programs endorsed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). In 2018, three entities, which provided some of the insurance

Even when Congress tries to restrict government agencies from illegally gathering information on people, the agencies simply exploit legal loopholes or just break the law—without consequences.
Original Article: Government Agencies Exploit Data Brokers as End-Around to Legal Restrictions

Data is sometimes referred to as today’s most valuable commodity. Given the technologically focused world around us, data is generated with almost everything we do or consume, whether you use Apple Pay to purchase goods from a retail outfit or use a credit card for your Uber Eats order. It is, in other words, largely unavoidable to create a digital footprint. This continuously produced data is often monitored, retained, repackaged, and resold to third parties—including the federal government—by shadowy organizations referred to as data brokers.
A data broker is a business that aggregates information from several sources or enriches, cleanses, or analyzes this information, according to Gartner. As third parties, data brokers do not have the same financial incentives to protect consumer data

In the past decade, the growth of the Internet and social media has brought with it a dramatic uptick in populist sentiment. Legacy institutions have declared war against populism, referring to its claims as “misinformation” or “disinformation” and calling on the government or government-adjacent actors (herein referred to as “the censors”) to clamp down on such claims as they spread across the Internet like wildfire. The censors rarely decline these opportunities to silence criticism, justifying the censorship as a matter of “national security.”
More than other Western nations, the United States champions freedom of speech. But it has frequently failed in its aspirations, beginning in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts. There are countless examples since then of the US failing to

States continue to seek new ways to make the financial system an “economic chokepoint” enabling the state to crack down on specific organizations, individuals, or activities.

Original Article: “The West’s Russia Sanctions Show Why States Want to Weaponize the Financial System”
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

In times of crisis, governments have a tendency to overcompensate for risk. This tendency may be in the public’s best interest, but it could also serve broader governmental interests. The public and government’s interest are not always one and the same.

When one imagines working on Wall Street, he envisions stock traders scrambling to place buy or sell orders, perhaps even some puts or options. Today’s powerful artificial intelligence tools allow traders to game stock market trading. In some ways, this computer-driven high-frequency trading resembles actual gaming in that it may seem as if one is simulating various trading scenarios.

In today’s political discourse, the minimum wage is frequently mentioned by the more progressive members of Congress. On a basic level, raising the minimum wage appears to be a sympathetic policy for low-income wage earners. Often kept out of the conversation, however, are the downstream effects of this proposal.