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Mises.org Power & Market William D. Hartung 12/04/2024 When the election results came in on November 5th, I felt a pain in the pit of my stomach, similar to what I experienced when Ronald Reagan rode to power in 1980, or with George W. Bush’s tainted victory over Al Gore in 2000. After some grieving, the first question that came to my mind was: What will a Trump presidency mean for the movements for peace and social justice? I offer what follows as just one person’s view, knowing that a genuine strategy for coping in this new era will have to be a distinctly collective process.

Mises.org Jacob G. Hornberger 12/04/2024 The biggest mistake America has ever made since the nation’s founding was the conversion of the federal government from a limited-government republic to a national-security state. If the American people are ever going to achieve a genuinely free society, a necessary prerequisite is the dismantling of the national-security establishment and the restoration of America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic. America’s national-security state is a gigantic military-intelligence entity that is divided into three major parts — the Pentagon, the CIA, and the National Security Agency (NSA). To a certain extent, the FBI can also be considered to be part of this massive apparatus. Since the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of the Cold War and America’s anticommunist crusade, the national-security establishment has become the dominant, controlling branch of the federal government. One of the best books that has ever been written on America’s national-security state is National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, a professor of law at Tufts University and a former counsel to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I wish every American would read this book because it holds a key to getting our nation back on the right track.

Mises Wire Ryan McMaken 12/04/2024 Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been making a lot of noise about all the federal employees it plans to fire. The DOGE people have framed total federal employment as something of a proxy for the total size of the federal government. Cutting the federal workforce is all well and good, but in reality, the size of the federal payrolls doesn’t really tell us much about the growth of the federal government. Federal employment has been flat for decades. If the total number of federal workers was a good proxy for federal power, we’d be forced to conclude that the federal government has gotten smaller and weaker over the past thirty years. Obviously, that’s not remotely true given that federal spending has increased at breakneck speed. Since 1950s, federal spending has increased by more than ten-fold while federal employment has not even doubled.

By Mark Goodwin December 02, 2024 Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, is poised to further facilitate the now long-standing, commandeered use of the Department of Commerce to engineer the rise of a global financial control system in private hands that runs on dollar-denominated debt. On November 19, President-Elect Donald Trump announced that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and co-chair of his transition team, would be his nominee for Commerce Secretary. Lutnick’s company Cantor Fitzgerald and its subsidiaries are multinational in scope, promote the implementation of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (which have major implications for debt politics and economic activity), and are even directly partnered with foreign state-owned firms that recently came under scrutiny following the release of the contents of the laptop of the current (and recently pardoned) First Son, Hunter Biden. Lutnick had previously been angling for a job as incoming Treasury Secretary, an unsurprising ambition given Cantor Fitzgerald’s outsized role in the U.S. Treasury market (i.e. the U.S. government debt market) and its relationship to dollar stablecoins, which are rapidly becoming one of the main purchasers of U.S. debt. It is unknown currently why Lutnick was passed over for Treasury, despite endorsement for the position from Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and appointed to Commerce instead. However, Trump’s previous Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, was widely believed to have been given the role to repay a past favor of major significance. In Ross’s case, it was his assistance in rescuing Trump from bankruptcy in the early 1990s. At the time, Ross worked for Rothschild Inc., and when clarifying why the European banking dynasty had bailed out the future President, Ross stated “the Trump name is still very much an asset.” Shortly before, Rothschild Inc. had been bankrolling the entry of Robert Maxwell, intelligence asset for Israel and arguably the Soviet Union, into the American economy, with a specific focus on New York City.

Mises Wire Mises Institute 12/01/2024 Dr. Gary Schlarbaum, one of our generous supporters, has again offered to match donations received through December 9. That means your $10 donation becomes $20, your $25 donation becomes $50, and so on. For the last ten years, Gary has kickstarted our year-end campaign with his matching gift. He’s ready to match your gift today! With a donation of $25 or more, you’ll receive a copy of Tom DiLorenzo‘s newest booklet, The Axis of Evil: America’s Three Worst Presidents. And, thanks to Gary, your donation doubles. Please donate today. Your gift allows the Mises Institute, in this critical moment, to carry on publishing our books and videos, aiding scholars and teachers of Austrian economics; promoting the Austrian School to the public, and training tomorrow’s champions of the economics of freedom.

1 gallon of gasoline is $2.79 today. I will be curious what the average market price will be after January 2025, and what, if any, "factors" will affect it.