Joseph Solis-Mullen | The Libertarian Institute

The Federal Reserve, Interest Rate Suppression, and the Reach for Yield

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Oct 2, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

With Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve beginning a cutting cycle, it is worth revisiting why the Feds manipulation of interest rates is not a harmless (if misguided) technocratic tool for attempting to “fine-tune” the economy, but is instead a source of deep distortion. This is because, as the Austrian School of economics has long argued, that artificially suppressing rates not only misleads investors but creates systemic fragility. One key mechanism by which this occurs is the phenomenon of “reaching for yield.” When safe assets offer little return because monetary policy holds the...

The Failure of Constitutionalism

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 25, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

September is Constitution Month, a celebration of the document produced by the 1787 Convention to replace the Articles of Confederation. Predictably, whether Republican or Democrat, there was no shortage of public effusions in its praise. Even libertarians, inheritors of the tradition of classical liberalism, are inclined to celebrate. This is, however, a mistake. For it was precisely their faith in constitutionalism that proved its great undoing. Indeed, the tragedy of classical liberalism is not simply that it was betrayed by later generations, or that its ideals were corrupted by...

The ‘Fake China Threat’ Vindicated

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 18, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

For several years and in a variety of works at the Libertarian and Mises Institutes, I have argued that Washington’s bipartisan consensus about Beijing as an aggressive, revisionist challenger to U.S. global supremacy was deeply misguided. Far from seeking global hegemony, I have maintained that China’s ambitions are modest, largely defensive, and overwhelmingly focused on domestic stability and development. Now, new peer-reviewed research published in International Security under the title “What Does China Want?” provides powerful empirical backing for those claims, dismantling much of the...

Trump, India, and the China Hawks’ Horror

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 11, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

For more than two decades, Washington labored to bring India closer—easing sanctions, opening high-tech trade, recognizing India as a responsible nuclear power, and embedding it in U.S.-led Indo-Pacific strategy. From President George W. Bush’s civil nuclear deal and Barack Obama’s endorsement of a United Nations Security Council seat, to the Quad revival under Donald Trump’s first term and the technology initiatives of the Joe Biden years, U.S. policy showed remarkable bipartisan continuity. The goal was clear: position India as a democratic counterweight to China. Yet, since January 2025,...

Washington’s Fiscal Doom-Loop

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Sep 4, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles

With U.S. gross debt now at a staggering $37 trillion—roughly equivalent to the combined debt of all other major advanced economies—Washington is trapped in a fiscal doom loop of its own making. Decades of bipartisan overspending have pushed the nation to a point where a mere 1% increase in mean Treasury interest rates adds $370 billion to annual debt service costs. The arithmetic is unforgiving. Yet, Donald Trump's second administration is doubling down, pursuing policies that risk accelerating the crisis. Consider the following combination: President Trump’s push for the Federal Reserve to...

John Locke and the Two Streams of Liberalism

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 28, 2025 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism

The Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment bequeathed to the Western world two basic springs of political thought. Both emerged from a common source: the rejection of divine-right monarchy, feudal hierarchy, and the suffocating weight of hereditary authority. Both, in their ways, extolled the dignity of the individual and the promise of human freedom. Yet from this same source, the waters quickly diverged. One stream ran toward the principles we now associate with classical liberalism: limited government, secure property rights, voluntary exchange, and the conviction that liberty...

Contra Colby

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 21, 2025 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

So sick of liberal hegemony, critics of Washington’s foreign policy have long been apt to seize at anything that promises something, anything, different. Hence the vigorous applause directed towards anyone who doesn’t mindlessly embrace every single one of the blob’s wars. One of the most prominent in the second Donald Trump administration is Elbridge Colby, current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, who has drawn the predictable beltway ire for reviews of Ukraine aid and AUKUS, among other things. But here’s the problem with Elbridge Colby, and everyone else like him, from the...

The Myth of European Plunder

by Joseph Solis-Mullen | Aug 14, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy

Among a certain species of “critical” historian, it is an article of faith that Europe’s remarkable economic ascent was built not on its institutions, not on liberty, not on commerce, but on the systematic looting of the rest of the world. In this telling—descended from the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the 1960s New Left—Europe’s “miracle” was a simple matter of taking what didn’t belong to it, whether gold and silver from the Americas, spices from the Indies, or raw materials from Africa and Asia. This narrative has the advantage of being emotionally satisfying to those looking to discredit...

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