Government censorship has shifted to the forefront of American conversation with the recent passing of H.R. 752, which would essentially ban TikTok; this development, which has passed the House and is on its way to the Senate, is igniting debating on how much involvement the government should have in social media.This debate is not new, considering the government has been intervening in social media for years. For example, this is not the first...
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Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org
March Report: The Recession In Full-Time Jobs Is Here
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More Easy Money Will Plunge Us into Stagflation
Thirty major central banks are expected to cut rates in the second half of 2024, a year when more than seventy nations will have elections, which often means massive increases in government spending. Additionally, the latest inflation figures show stubbornly persistent consumer price annualized growth.In the United States, headline PCE inflation in February will likely grow by 0.4%, compared with a 0.3% rise in January, and consensus expects a 2.5%...
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Understanding the History of African Slavery: The Europeans Were not the Only Slave Traders
In the vast pantheon of history, black people have been both victims and oppressors. Yet history has been so politicized that we hear endlessly about the former and almost never about the latter. Rhetoric has eclipsed facts. It is a fact, for example, that Africans participated in the transatlantic slave trade. History is now frequently used as a cudgel to hammer white people into submission.Instead of recognizing nuance and complexity, many who...
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The Nigerian People vs. NYSC Decree No. 24 of 1973: An Austro-libertarian Review
Every year, thousands of Nigerian youths who are below the age of thirty and who’ve completed their undergraduate studies—whether in Nigeria or abroad—are compelled by law to give up one year of their working time in active duty to the country under the auspices of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), an agency of the government.It has now been fifty years since the establishment of the NYSC mandatory program under Decree No. 24 of May 22, 1973...
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Chokepoints
What happens when war shuts down the Strait of Hormuz? Mark looks at the economics and causes of a growing list of problems with the "chokepoints" of international trade: the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, and Baltimore harbor. Will these chokepoints become scapegoats for the Federal Reserve, and could war closing the Strait of Hormuz become a genuine world crisis?Be sure to follow Minor Issues at Mises.org/MinorIssues.Get your free copy...
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The CRE Bust is a Slow-Moving Train
Day-to-day we don’t hear much about the commercial office property crash. As The Fed’s Michael Barr said at an event hosted by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition in Washington, “This is the kind of thing where it’s likely to be a very slow-moving train as the financial sector and commercial real estate market move forward,” he said, adding that refinancing deals will play out in the next few years. “It’ll take some time.”Barr, the vice...
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Butler, Butt Out!
Who’s Afraid of Gender?by Judith ButlerFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024; 308 pp.Judith Butler is a well-known feminist theorist, and one approaches her latest book with interest, all the more so because of its puzzling title. By “gender,” Butler means the view that the roles of men and women in society are not determined by biology but vary in different cultures and times and, further, that there are some people who do not fit within the “binary”...
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Gaza: What If America Were the Good Guy?
“Genocide Joe” and the foreign agents knowns as the “American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose Israel-First focus makes them a fifth column; Trump with Jared Kushner and his better-half: These are America’s 2024 election options.The Biden-AIPAC bloc has begun whispering sweet nothings in the ears of Israel’s Benny Gantz (National Unity Party), ostensible rival of Bibi Netanyahu (Likud). The AIPAC-run Biden bloc would like you to...
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The Consequences of Good Intentions
Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that is best shoved in the closet and forgotten like all the rest of America’s decades of costly foreign...
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FDR and the End of Gold: 2,500 Percent and Counting
The world is full of scraps of paper today.- Benjamin Anderson, economist, Chase Manhattan Bank (1920 - 1939)April 1933 found America mired in a crushing economic depression, and newly elected president Franklin DeLano Roosevelt -- who had declared the previous month he had a legal power derived from the Trading with the Enemy Act to assume control of our monetary system -- responded by taking America off the gold standard. That the Act, an...
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Fixing FDR’s Biggest Blunder: From Gold Standard to Fiat Folly and Back
Today, states across the country are beginning to actively embrace prosound money legislation, inviting a critical examination of how America abandoned the gold standard of money and racked up $34.5 trillion in debt. To understand how we got here, it’s important to understand the policy that initiated our monetary decline.More than ninety years ago today, April 5, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102, forever reshaping...
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Are American Libertarians Unduly Pessimistic?
Nick Gillespie, editor-at-large for Reason, recently got into a friendly dispute with Bob over whether American libertarians were being too pessimistic. He joins Bob to make the case for optimism, while Bob demurs.Human Action Podcast listeners can get a free copy of Dr. Guido Hülsmann's How Inflation Destroys Civilization: Mises.org/HAPodFree
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The Most Important Price of All
In The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor has given us a colorful and provocative review of the history, theory, and the profound effects of interest rates, the price that links the present and the future, which he argues is “the most important price of all.” The history runs from Hammurabi’s Code which in 1750 BC was “largely concerned with the regulation of interest,” and from the first debt cancellation, which was proclaimed by a ruler in ancient...
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How the “Informal” Economy Creates Free Markets in Bolivia
In today's discourse on Bolivia, notions of liberalism, free markets, or traditional capitalist ideals don’t ever come to mind in contrast with mainstream discussions of 21st-century socialism, Keynesian policies, and a notable lack of economic freedoms. In fact, Bolivia was ranked 117 in 2021 by the Fraser institute in the Economic Freedom of the World: 2023 Annual Report. And it scored 43.4 in the Economic Freedom Index by the Heritage...
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An Optimistic Strategy for Liberty
A strategy for liberty must be both optimistic and realistic.Perennial optimists are sometimes tempted to ignore or minimize hazards, their answer to every challenge being somewhat lackadaisical: “Don’t worry, it will be fine.” They make the mistake of supposing all that is needed to surmount any challenge is a good bout of optimism. They can be heard, for example, assuring us that simply pronouncing the slogan “go woke, go broke” will scatter the...
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Why Average Goods Prices Cannot be Established
The price or the rate of exchange of one good in terms of another is the amount of the other good divided by the amount of the first good. In the money economy, price will be the amount of money divided by the amount of the first good.Suppose two transactions were conducted. In the first transaction, one TV set is exchanged for $1,000. In the second transaction one shirt is exchanged for $40. The price or the rate of exchange in the first...
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Abolish all Treason and Sedition Laws
The word "treason" has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years—on the Left. It used to be more popular on the Right. During the Cold War, conservatives frequently employed the word to demand their ideological enemies be exiled or executed. Nowadays, anti-immigration activists frequently denounce their opponents as "the treason lobby." But it's on the Left that the word appears to have its most devoted advocates at the...
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Why Genocide?: Every Law of War Has Been Violated in Gaza
Why, then, are Israel’s 2023-2024 actions in Gaza genocidal? In a November 14, 2023 essay, "Bibi Netanyahu May Find Himself In the Dock, In The Hague,” your columnist explained why, logically at least, Israel has met the threshold for criminal intent, mens rea.“If you know in advance that your actions will cause the deaths of thousands-upon-thousands of civilians; attached to your criminal actions (actus reus) is a guilty mind (mens rea),...
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The Intellectual Humility of the Spontaneous Order
Statists demand that proponents of the free market explain in painstaking detail how every conceivable service would be provided without the heavy hand of government coercion. How would law be administered? How would security be maintained? How would charity and education function? And of course, the tiresome refrain—who will build the roads? While Austrian economists have offered satisfactory answers to these questions, entertaining them may...
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On Swiss National Bank
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SNB Sight Deposits: decreased by 2.4 billion francs compared to the previous week
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Gold finds some support at $2,660, with upside attempts limited
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USD/CHF aims to revisit 0.8950 as SNB to cut rates further
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US Dollar tries to keep gains for a fourth straight day despite flat CPI
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Gold price retreats from over two-week top; bulls turn cautious ahead of US CPI
Main SNB Background Info
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