Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

In 1971 Richard Nixon took the US off the last feeble vestiges of the gold standard, otherwise known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. That system had been a bizarre gold-dollar hybrid where the dollar was the world reserve currency but the US agreed to keep the dollar backed by gold. Henry Hazlitt’s book From Bretton Woods to World Inflation explains the consequences of this situation well. The end of this system left a vacuum at the heart of world...

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It is tempting, as Naomi Wolf has done recently, to ascribe the breakdown of Western civilization to the debasing of “Judeo-Christian” ethics and the reemergence 0f malignant supernatural forces. Witnessing the many assaults on the infrastructure and social order of the United States of late, I wouldn’t rule out metaphysical causality either. But to blame the pagan gods, or, in specifically Christian terms, to blame Satan, is to take comfort in an...

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We currently find ourselves in a bizarre wasteland of mainstream political discourse. These days no US institution, and indeed no corner of American life, is safe from politicization or even from becoming a mouthpiece for extreme activism. Since last November, Yale, Harvard, and other top US law schools have opted out of participation in the annual rankings by US News & World Report, a long-established go-to reference for how the nation’s laws...

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Never is a very, very long time in politics. Yet whenever the topic of secession or so-called national divorce comes up, how often do we hear that “secession will never happen.” It’s difficult to tell if people using the term “never” actually mean it. If they mean “not in the next ten or twenty years,” that’s plausible. But if they truly mean “not in the next 100 (or more) years,” it’s clear they’re working on the level of absolutely pure,...

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As it always does, the State of the Union (SOTU) address dominated the media cycle for several days before and after. Now that the period has (gratefully) passed, and the issues raised have faded from the headlines into the background, it is worth taking a look at some of the policies that featured heavily in Biden’s speech, and which have reemerged to become so vogue among both Democrats and Republicans. Specifically, protectionism. Indeed, with...

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A new movement is emerging on the left. This movement sells guilt and self-flagellation and calls it antiracism. Its leaders present themselves as the absolute authority on race relations and claim that being a good white person means following their instructions. But when it comes to racism, “the elect” (to borrow Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter’s term for members of this movement) misdiagnose the problem and posit...

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