Welcome to the second article in this series of developing your economic map. Today, we’ll talk about the government’s interference in the markets. To start, I give you this priceless quote from none other than Ringo Starr:
Everything government touches turns to crap.
With that in mind, let us begin.
There’s a tool in every mechanic’s box called a ratchet.
What inflation actually costs the American family.
The Consumer Price Index gets the cheap stuff right and the expensive stuff wrong. The Reality Index measures the gap between what the government reports and what families actually pay.
The Reality Index argues that official CPI inflation understates the real cost increases for American families by a lot — especially on big expenses like housing and healthcare, while overstating rises in cheap stuff like food.[continue reading…]
I’m perfectly fine with receiving feedback from subscribers who disagree with my view. After all, reasonable people disagree all the time. And since I live in a different part of the world and hold a different perspective, inevitably, readers will sometimes wonder what I’m getting at.
After writing Uncle Sam’s Invisible Hand for the Daily Reckoning last week, I received what I’ll politely call the most misguided criticism I’ve ever received. It was positively inane and missed my point by what Elaine from Airplane! would call “a tad.” I won’t print it for those reasons. [continue reading…]
Corporate America didn’t “go woke” because its executives suddenly discovered compassion or equality. They danced with the left because that’s where the power and protection rackets live.
How Corporate America Went Full Left – And Why It Was Never About Woke
This isn’t idealism, it’s the oldest scam in the book: the powerful using government to rig the game against the stateless rest of us. Let’s rip the mask off with some real history.
The Socialist Razor Baron
Back in 1924, King Camp Gillette — the guy who made his fortune with disposable razor blades — teamed up with Upton Sinclair, the muckraker who wrote The Jungle. Together they pushed a book promoting Gillette’s longtime obsession: a single, gigantic, vertically integrated socialist corporation that would run everything from mines to your dinner table, enforcing equality through central planning. [continue reading…]
As a libertarian anarchist and Austrian school economist, I was interested in following the election of the first president in the world who professed to share my ideas. He said a lot of the right things on TV, and his radical policies seemed similar to what I would want implemented. After 30 months of close observation, I can confidently say Javier Milei’s policies bear no resemblance to what an Austrian economist would do, and he has used Austrian economics as a cover to run one of the most inflationary presidencies in Argentina’s highly inflationary history. Predictably, and in light of the most recent inflation and growth data, it is now safe to call Milei’s presidency a failure on all the important questions. Ignoring inconsequential rhetoric, Milei has been just another Latin American inflationist demagogue, selling his citizens pipe-dreams financed through inflation and debt that will burden and impoverish them for generations. In the 30th month of his presidency, when the seed of economic recovery planted early in the term should be bearing fruit, prices continue to rise, economic activity is declining, and the unsustainable government debt ponzi is larger than ever, suggesting much more pain to come.
The first two chapters—my “Preface” and Hans’s “Introduction”—were published the week of Rothbard’s birthday here on the Property and Freedom Podcast (PFP315 and PFP314). The other main chapters will be released sequentially weekly on Mondays. The next in the queue:
Editor’s note: We are pleased to present a comprehensive bibliography of the works of Murray N. Rothbard by Tyler Kubik. Kubik sent it to me after he noticed some various information about Rothbard posted on the PFS page for Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment (2026)2 including David Gordon’s bibliography, “Murray N. Rothbard: Chronological Bibliography (1949–1995),”3 a 54-page bibliography compiling work published between 1949 and 2005; and an Italian Bibliography, from Rothbard.it, which purports to cover Rothbard publications from 1947 to 1996. Kubik’s contains far more entries than these and covers a larger time period, from the early 1940s to 2019. [continue reading…]
The traditional English defence of freedom of speech did not begin with modern liberalism. It emerged instead from a long and uneven struggle against authority. The medieval Church wished to supervise doctrine. The Tudor and Stuart monarchies wished to supervise printing. The political nation, when it slowly emerged from the seventeenth century, discovered by painful experience that censorship is not merely an inconvenience, but an instrument by which every other liberty may be dissolved.
[This article, first published in Modern Age 24, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 9–15 (pdf; Mises Daily) is based on a paper presented at the April 1979 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Chicago. The theme of the meeting was “Conservatism and Libertarianism.”]
Libertarianism is the fastest growing political creed in America today. Before judging and evaluating libertarianism, it is vitally important to find out precisely what that doctrine is, and, more particularly, what it is not. It is especially important to clear up a number of misconceptions about libertarianism that are held by most people, and particularly by conservatives. In this essay I shall enumerate and critically analyze the most common myths that are held about libertarianism. When these are cleared away, people will then be able to discuss libertarianism free of egregious myths and misconceptions, and to deal with it as it should be on its very own merits or demerits. [continue reading…]
In 2026, basically every country has their evil right-wing boogey man. Some countries, like the United States with Donald Trump, are already governed by the political right. Germany is not and has not yet been under a right-wing government. The AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) is the right-wing party but the guy who is considered to pull the strings behind the curtains did not even make his way to the politics on the federal level but is the head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia. His name is Björn Höcke and he was recently invited to a big German podcast where he talked 4 and a half hours about his past as a history teacher and his political world view.2 This podcast episode, which is currently above 4 million views on YouTube, produced a huge meltdown all over German social media. Everyone in the mainstream media was shocked that this podcast could be aired without a certain classification by an expert—in other words: without left-wing censorship. Of course, nobody cried for censorship when the head of the leftist party was on the same podcast. The desperation was so big, that a few days later, three of the biggest left-wing parties (SPD – Social Democrats, Grüne – Green Party and Linke – Leftists) of Germany and with them a lot of politicians announced that they will leave X (formally Twitter) for good. Their plan is not yet obvious but a good prediction is, that most of them switch to bluesky—a twitter fork—now and after the launch of W Social—a bluesky fork, introduced by the WEF in 2026 and currently in its beta phase—they will have their officially state-owned social media.
The first two chapters—my “Preface” and Hans’s “Introduction”—were published the week of Rothbard’s birthday here on the Property and Freedom Podcast (PFP315 and PFP314). The other main chapters will be released sequentially weekly on Mondays. The next in the queue:
A note on my health for all of you good people: I have been pushing a rock uphill for several months with strange hematology numbers, getting more unusual by the month. I’m not worried. I have good doctors and we are getting to the bottom of it. The main symptom is fatigue but I’ve learned to manage my projects around what I know will be “good and productive” times during the day. I have a great team on both the podcast and on the film, so all is well. But given your support, both financial and spiritual, I do feel I need to keep you in the loop. One of our financial supporters on the film has become a wonderful friend. We lunch and catch up. Nice to have the in-person contact sometimes.
The inaugural meeting of the PFS was held 20 years ago this month, from May 18–22, 2006. It was a wonderful, magical event, and set the stage for the years to come. I and others have written various reports discussing subsequent meetings as well. (Collected at PFS Press & Offsite Material) For more coverage of that meeting and info about the PFS, see below.
As noted on our History and Principles page, the idea of founding an international society for the promotion of “Austro-Libertarianism,” the economic and social philosophy most prominently represented during the 20th century by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and his leading American student Murray N. Rothbard, and tying back to the 19th century French economists Frederic Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari, were first presented by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in August 2005 during a small informal gathering at the annual Mises Institute Summer University, in Auburn, Alabama. Those present at the meeting, Thomas DiLorenzo , Guido Hülsmann, and Ralph Raico, welcomed the project, and Guelcin Imre offered to host the inaugural meeting of the society in Bodrum, Turkey.[continue reading…]
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
To donate with BITCOIN please use the address below. If you would like us to credit your payment (for dues, conference fees, etc.) please email Stephan Kinsella ([email protected]) when you make the bitcoin payment.
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."
(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)
Welcome to the second article in this series of developing your economic map. Today, we’ll talk about the government’s interference in the markets. To start, I give you this priceless quote from none other than Ringo Starr:
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Doug French
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Jay Baykal
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Martin Cabrera
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