In response to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas this week, one now sees repeated claims that school shootings are somehow “normal” or common in the United States. For example, social media at this moment is teeming with users—assuming they’re not bots—posting about how they’re absolutely terrified if the idea of allowing their children to attend school. Yesterday, in a now-deleted post, Elizabeth Bruenig—notable for writing on the topic of Millennials having babies—declared that one reason Millennials don’t have babies is because they believe their children are likely to be...
Ludwig von Mises
Trade Restrictions Are Depriving Our Infants of Formula
For parents who rely on baby formula—whether by choice or due to medical necessity—the nationwide baby formula shortage has become increasingly difficult to ignore. According to the Wall Street Journal, Walgreens, Target, CVS, and Kroger have all begun rationing supplies of formula. Covid lockdowns, combined with a product recall by formula manufacturer Abbott Nutrition has created a very real shortage in a product that is key for proper nutrition in many children. With the shortage has come the usual half-baked bromides about "evil corporations" and how baby formula companies are...
No, Disney World Isn’t the First of ‘One Thousand Liechtensteins’
One of the stranger narratives coming out of the controversy over Disney's "special district" in Florida is the notion that Disney's Florida property is some sort of truly independent self-governing entity operating without government oversight. Most claims in this regard wildly overestimate the degree to which Disney enjoys self-governance. Some also claim that Disney's Florida special district represents some sort of model for a truly "private city" in the model of a sovereign city-state. Or as one Twitter commenter put it, "Unironically, Walt Disney style private city-states is my...
Support Ukraine’s Independence? Then Support Secession Everywhere
By now, it should be abundantly clear to all that the official U.S. regime narrative on Ukraine is that one is supposed to be in favor of Ukrainian political independence. That is, we’re supposed to support the idea that Ukraine is a separate state that is politically independent from the Russian state. By extension, of course, the idea that Ukraine is a sovereign state also implies it is separate from all other states as well. But how did Ukraine get that way? States, of course, don’t appear out of nowhere. They generally come into being through one of two ways, or a combination of both....
Elon Musk is Angering the Right People
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Twitter’s senior management and Elon Musk are in the final stages of agreeing on terms for Musk’s proposed takeover of the social media platform. Musk had announced on April 21 that he had $46.5 billion lined up—half in cash, half financed by his bankers Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America—for a purchase of the company. Musk was offering $54.20 per share for the takeover at a time when Twitter’s stock price was In the mid forties. This followed a spending spree that began in early 2022 and resulted in Musk owning more than 9 percent of...
Real Wages Continue to Fall as the Fed Scrambles
According to a new report released Wednesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index increased in March by 8.6 percent, measured year over year (YOY). This is the largest increase in more than forty years. To find a higher rate of CPI inflation, we have to go back to December 1981, when the year-over-year increase was 9.6 percent. March’s surge in consumer price inflation is also the twelfth month in row during which the increase is well above the Federal Reserve’s arbitrary 2 percent inflation target. March’s CPI inflation rate was up from February’s rate of 7.9...
Human Action Book Review. Jacob Hornberger & Keith Knight
https://youtu.be/YUpUBt52hXk Economics, as a branch of the more general theory of human action, deals with all human action, i.e., with man’s purposive aiming at the attainment of ends chosen, whatever these ends may be. Ludwig von Mises, Ph.D., Human Action, p. 880 Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story by Jacob G. Hornberger Odysee BitChute Minds Flote Archive...
Joe Biden Is Killing America’s Energy Sector
One of the saddest quotes from the Vietnam War came from journalist Peter Arnett, who wrote in a dispatch in 1968 about an American attack on a Vietcong-held village: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” As often happens with such quotes, they take on a second and even third life. Today, the Biden administration seeks to destroy the American economy ostensibly to save America from the dreaded climate change. No one advocating the so-called Green New Deal (GND) has put it quite like that. In fact, its advocates claim that not only will the GND give us better weather, but...
It’s Time to Get NATO Off the American Dole
American policymakers have shown a surprising about of sanity so far in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While some war enthusiasts among the American punditry have certainly been agitating for World War III, the leadership in both the White House and Congress have repeatedly and straightforwardly refused most calls to escalate the conflict. Unfortunately, a number of foreign parliaments among the U.S.' NATO "partners" have not been nearly as hesitant to escalate matters. Among the most reckless on this issue have been lawmakers from a number of eastern European states. For...
What Rothbard Has to Say About Today’s War Collectivism
Readers of Murray Rothbard's articles and speeches on war collectivism will immediately recognize the progressive pietist fervor surrounding today's progressive war jingoism: everywhere is Ukraine! The atavistic need to analogize today's situation to 1938, with Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler and war skeptics as Neville Chamberlain at Munich, is proof of this. The lessons of 1914, where a series of tragic blunders turned a regional conflict into a conflagration across Europe, are far more apposite. The obvious interest for the U.S. is containment of the war as a terrible but internecine...