With the exception of punk, hip-hop, or other explicitly politically conscious musical scenes, there is very rarely a connection between music and the development of one’s political and economic thought. So it might come as a surprise that my first contact with political philosophy and economics came from my involvement in the rave scene when I was seventeen. At […]
In late 2010, the European Union presented to Ukraine the Action Plan on Visa Liberalization (VLAP), which set explicit benchmarks of relevant political development to be met. If completed, the EU would open its doors to visa-free short-term travel from Ukraine. On 20 April 2016, the European Commission recommended to the European Council and the […]
Since Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the presidential election earlier this month, the Orange Hitler’s opponents have been on high alert for signs of a coming Fourth Reich. First were the mostly apocryphal reports of an outbreak of violence toward racial and religious minorities. Then there was Trump’s appointment of Breitbart executive Steve Bannon […]
In one of the latest posts on this blog, I took a look at the economics of why Uber, a cornerstone of the sharing economy, took a social justice stance in its fight against New York Mayor de Blasio. Last week Airbnb, another linchpin company in the sharing economy, took a political stand that might have […]
If you regularly involve yourself in advocating for economic liberalism, you have probably, at one point or another, explained to some interventionist naïf that markets tend to allocate resources to their highest valued uses. You spoke it as a central truth of social science, as the economic truth. And anyone who simply took the time to […]
It has long been a harsh reality in the Big Apple that black denizens have a substantially tougher time hailing a taxi than their fairer neighbors. Even as the caucasoid cabbie becomes the unicorn of transportation, black New Yorkers struggle to find a driver willing to drive them to or fro. Uber highlighted this fact earlier this year in […]
In a 1978 interview conducted by James Buchanan, economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek, when considering constitutional restraints on the scope of government, expressed that “the [First Amendment] ought to read ‘Congress shall make no law authorizing government to take any discriminatory measures of coercion.’ I think this would make all the other rights unnecessary.”1 […]
Socialism today is a much different animal than it was a century ago. Younger generations are largely unaware that socialism was originally touted by intellectuals primarily as an economic system with the ability to produce abundances of wealth unfathomable to a world yet burdened by the capitalist yoke, not so much as a panacea for […]
My family’s ancestral home is a modest plantation with a sizable white house in New Market, Virginia just below Shenandoah Mountain. The plot of land constitutes a section of the “Field of Lost Shoes” on which the American Civil War’s Battle of New Market took place. To this day, bullets, buttons, and other war artifacts […]
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a Facebook group that is intended to function as a place for debate between capitalist and communist anarchists. As one would expect, all the familiar communist tropes are present. In accordance with the Zeitgeist of our Occupy Wall Street era, they all upbraid the inherently oppressive nature of […]
Mises Christ! 