Mises Media

Antitrust populists claimed blocking the Spirit–JetBlue merger would protect competition and consumers. But their effort led to an intervention that strengthened the very oligopoly they set out to fight.

Read the article here: https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-antitrust-populists-drove-spirit-airlines-out-business

2026 is the Year of Rothbard—Murray's 100th birthday—and we're celebrating by giving away free copies of Anatomy of the State through May 31. Grab yours today at https://mises.org/gabfreebook

Be sure to follow the Guns and Butter podcast at https://Mises.org/GB

If executed perfectly, this swap allows the Fed to neutralize a shrinking money supply by swapping $2 trillion in mortgages for $2 trillion in government debt. 

Original article: https://mises.org/power-market/mbs-slope-n-swap

Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History more than 30 years ago, believing that the fall of the communist bloc would lead to a more peaceful world. We are still waiting for that moment of peace.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/fukuyama-was-wrong-history-did-not-end

Philosopher Matt Zwolinski has declared libertarianism to lack any coherent standards. Zwolinski’s confusion is the result of his rejection of libertarianism as outlined by Murray Rothbard and others based upon free markets based on individual rights.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/libertarianism-incoherent

The government created a market for stolen goods, paid criminals cash for five months, watched robberies spike, arrested everyone at a mafia-themed party, then called it a success because arrests went up. The robberies they subsidized didn't count.

Original article: https://mises.org/power-market/when-federal-government-subsidized-robberies

The recent DOJ indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center might be controversial, but what is not controversial is that the SPLC engaged in conduct that was more reminiscent of the Ministry of Love in 1984 than protecting someone’s civil rights.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/justice-department-indicts-ministry-love

Gold markets have been volatile, to put it mildly, and the drama isn’t over. Unfortunately, governments are so involved in the gold markets that true market prices are hard to find.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/precious-paper-problem-divergence-western-bullion-markets

In the late 1800s, American finally went in search of empire abroad, taking land by force and subjugating people who simply wanted their captors to leave.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/when-america-chose-empire

When the recent NFL draft was held in Pittsburgh, city officials declared bus fares would be free so fans would pack the auditorium where the draft was held. Who would have thought that making scarce goods free would bring about chaos with the bus riders?

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/nfl-draft-and-public-buses

It's not enough for an ideology to merely have a "good argument." Historical conditions must also combine to delegitimize the regime and its institutions. 

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/battle-ideas-paves-way-radicals-and-revolutionaries

As the US is involved in yet another pointless war, we would do well to remember the real costs of war, how it strips us of our liberties, and destroys our futures.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/remembering-costs-war

Bob responds to a new working paper from the Geo-chartalism project, which claims to offer a complete theory of the price level by combining insights from Menger, Cantillon, and Warren Mosler. Bob argues that the paper overlooks a crucial prior contribution: Mises' regression theorem, developed in The Theory of Money and Credit, which already solved the circularity problem in monetary theory that the paper claims required Mosler to resolve. Along the way, Bob also explains chartalism, Georgism, and Mises's explanation of the absolute price level.

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The bulk of the US gold reserves held in Fort Knox are made up of impure “non-standard” bars that don’t qualify for use in international settlements.

Original article: https://mises.org/power-market/ft-knox-full-impure-gold-unfit-international-transactions

On the latest episode of Minor Issues, Mark Thornton opens with a detailed analysis of the gold correction. Is the three-month decline a sign that inflation is over, or a temporary reallocation driven by war? The answer is in the data: the CRB commodity index continues to climb, the money supply is at an all-time high, and there is no evidence of deflation anywhere in the price structure. The inflation regime remains firmly in place, and the gold correction is a normal feature of bull markets whose real-world zigzags get smoothed away on long-term charts.

The second...

The UK does not have an energy problem, it has a freedom problem.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/freedom-upsets-patterns-deregulation-argument-westminster-will-not-have

Luck egalitarians fallaciously declare property and wealth to be illegitimate or at least suspect due to a mysterious, unquantifiable force called luck. Their arguments fail even if what they claim about luck is true.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/luck-fallacy-and-luck-egalitarianism

Ryan McMaken, Jonathan Newman, and Joshua Mawhorter of the Mises Institute take a look at the politics of "fedspeak" and what officials at the Federal Reserve really mean when they say they're going to fix the Fed.

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The old republic is gone. The constitutional order of the Jeffersonian years—i.e., the so-called "American experiment"—was swept away long ago.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/we-are-living-fourth-american-republic

The dearth of child-bearing in western countries like the US is seen as a political crisis. Yet, if there is any place in our lives where government should stay out, it is in the area of childbirth.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/tragedy-socialized-fertility

The Trump administration’s downsizing USAID has brought the usual claims: that without US aid, millions of poor people around the world will die of starvation and disease. Not surprisingly, the claims are exaggerated.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/usaid-funded-aid-programs-abroad-mainly-was-jobs-program-progressives

In his concluding argument, Molinari envisions a society where security is provided by competing private firms chosen voluntarily by consumers. He contends that such a system would deliver better protection at lower cost while preserving individual freedom.

Molinari describes the inevitable consequences of monopolized security: rising costs, declining quality, and the use of force against the very citizens the government claims to protect. He illustrates how monopoly governments tend toward oppression and fiscal exploitation.

This section critiques the justifications used to legitimize government monopoly, from the divine right of monarchs to the sovereignty of democratic majorities. Molinari argues that majority rule is no more legitimate than royal absolutism when it violates individual rights.

Molinari distinguishes between society, which arises naturally from voluntary human cooperation, and government, which imposes itself through force. He argues that conflating the two leads people to accept unjust authority as a necessary feature of civilized life.

This section traces how governments historically established and maintained their monopoly over the production of security. Molinari describes how coercive control over defense led to the familiar abuses of taxation, war, and the suppression of individual liberty.

Molinari draws a parallel between monopoly and communism, arguing that both represent departures from the principle of free competition. He shows that a government monopoly on security shares the same economic defects as collectivized production in any other industry.

This section outlines the two fundamental ways a community can organize the production of security: through monopoly or through free competition. Molinari frames this choice as the central political question that determines whether a society will be free or oppressed.

Molinari confronts the common objection that security is somehow different from other goods and must be exempted from market provision. He systematically challenges the reasoning behind treating defense as a unique case requiring government monopoly.

Molinari applies the general principle of free competition directly to the provision of security services. He contends that, just as with bread or iron, the quality of security improves and its cost decreases when multiple producers compete for consumers.

This section lays out the economic principle that all goods and services are best provided through free exchange governed by competition. Molinari argues that the division of labor and voluntary cooperation form the natural basis of social organization.

Molinari opens by establishing that humans have a fundamental need for security of their persons and property. He frames security as a commodity like any other, one that must be produced and supplied to satisfy this universal demand.

Rothbard introduces Molinari's essay as a pioneering work that took free-market principles to their logical conclusion by questioning the state's monopoly on defense. He situates Molinari within the French liberal tradition and highlights the essay's enduring relevance to libertarian thought.

In this interview with Trey Reich, Mark Thornton explains why gold’s long-run trend is driven less by headlines and more by monetary debasement, and why Middle East conflict can perversely pressure gold in the short run by pushing oil higher and taking Fed rate cuts “off the board.” Mark walks through Austrian business cycle theory, the scale of malinvestment in private equity/credit and the AI boom, and why the Fed’s real priorities are debt-rollover finance and backstopping the banking system. He also discusses why CPI is a flawed policy guide, why the global monetary regime is shifting...

There are fuel protests in Ireland, which are not surprising given the havoc Trump’s Iran war has caused in oil markets. They also should be protesting against the government policies that make the situation worse.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/fuel-protests-ireland-their-lights-and-shadows

On World Affairs in Context with Lena Petrova, Ryan McMaken breaks down what the economic data is actually saying beneath the headlines. The money supply has grown by a trillion dollars in seven months, while the Fed insists policy is tight. Q4 GDP was quietly revised down to 0.5%. Consumer confidence is at multi-decade lows. And the stock market keeps hitting new highs.

Ryan explains why these aren't contradictions. They're symptoms of the same underlying problem: a bubble economy sustained by continuous liquidity injections since 2009 that the Fed has never unwound and never will. He draws a striking...

Despite support from some economists in the free market camp, fractional reserve free banking is doomed for failure, as Murray Rothbard pointed out.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/case-against-free-bankers

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-daily/revolution-was

The right of self-determination is the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/right-self-determination

Under a system of private ownership, in which the government's only function is to protect property rights, it is immaterial where the frontiers of people's country are drawn.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-daily/economic-causes-war

While there is a public uproar about China having access to the work of American scientists, there is a bigger issue at stake: Is science “owned” by “the public”? If not, why are we so worried about the Chinese?

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/if-science-public-good-let-china-pay-it