Vancouver is a wonderful place, a clean metropolitan city featuring both breathtaking scenery and fascinating diversity. The place is no longer cheap, a lesson for Americans in dollar degradation. Figuring I needed a few loonies for my stay and for paying for the cab ride to the Fairmont, I handed a C-note to the foreign …

I’m here in Vancouver for Agora’s Financial Symposium, where there will be plenty of discussion of booms, busts and stagnation. Watching BNN this morning, Canada’s version of tout TV, a message crawled along the bottom of the screen: “RBC: Toronto, not in a condo bubble.” Fears of a condo bubble in Canada’s biggest housing market …

Even in this seemingly permanent recession, government is intensifying its regulation, taxation and harassment of regular business people. Business pages are filling up with pleas to government from real-life entrepreneurs. All these people are saying is give freedom a chance. An example is Seth Gordon, the co-founder and “TeaEO” of Honest Tea, which makes fabulous …

In The Dark Knight Rises, a cruel strongman rallies the people of Gotham against the corruption of the elites, instituting a violent dictatorship in the name of a people’s liberation. What’s troubling for the viewer is that the strongman is right about the corruption. In this case, and as usual, the fix is worse than …

There were plenty of big names speaking at FreedomFest in Las Vegas last week. There were TV talking heads like Steve Forbes and Andrew Napolitano. Famous entrepreneurs like John Mackay came. Tea Party star Rand Paul attracted vast attention. But it was an unassuming woman, a brilliant author who rarely leaves her rural home in …

I became lost the other day, wandering around in Mon Ami Gabi, an upscale French restaurant situated within Las Vegas’ Paris Hotel. Standing somewhere between the outdoor patio and the bar that opens to the casino, I began to turn around in circles, looking in sheer awe of the size of the seated crowd, the …

In his famous “you didn’t build it” speech, President Obama cited the Internet, fire departments, the GI Bill, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam as examples of government action that helps business owners. Each needs addressing, but let’s start with the Hoover Dam. The president is riffing off of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC commercial …

People can’t get enough of predictions. There is that basic human desire to know the future and capitalize on it. People especially like hearing predictions that confirm their view of the world. Hearing prognostications that match up with your own makes you feel smart. And in turn, you view the predictor as smart for confirming …

From what I can tell, most of what people believe about politics has nothing to do with reality. For example, remember when President Obama took office and hordes of dupes swooned in maniacal frenzy about the utopia he was going to usher in? It was astonishing that so many people imagined that one man’s hand …

People tell me that I get overly worked up about small government regulations. But small matters. The building of civilization is revealed in small steps, tiny, bit-by-bit improvements in the things we have and do. In the same way, seemingly small government regulations can cause a reversal of the magnificent world that enterprise has built. …

Where would the European economy be today without Germany? Compared with all the other states in the European Union, Germany is the viable cash cow for the rest to milk, and that’s only because of the economic reforms that took place before the Great Recession hit. It was the Social Democrats, led by Gerhard Schroder …

Christine Lagarde, the head fixer at the International Monetary Fund, says U.S. policymakers need to be more aggressive in dispensing medication to boost America’s punk recovery. Washington bureaucrats, she believes, have all the fiscal and monetary tools they need to get the job done. Ben Bernanke’s printing press is collecting dust, she thinks, and legions …

One of the great pleasures of releasing an ebook every week is this: I face the pressure to edit, read, and digest books at a regular pace, rain or shine. I prepare videos and articles on them and send announcements, which means that I must know the material well. The demands can be intense but …

Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine (this week’s Club release) was one of four magisterial libertarian works to be published in the dark days of 1943. Also released that year were Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man; Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom; and, by far the most famous, Ayn Rand’s …

It is the strangest dysmorphic transformation of any holiday in history. The day that overthrew a government, July 4, 1776, now celebrates the power of a government that is far more vast, predatory and imperialist than the one overthrown. Not only is the real meaning of Independence Day forgotten; it has been turned on its …

Government finance at all levels seems to be unraveling. The city of Stockton, California, declared bankruptcy. North Las Vegas, Nevada, would be in the same boat if the state of Nevada allowed for it. Michigan’s state government has taken over the management of four cities, and the state’s largest city — Detroit — has a …

Lara-Murphy Report Interview With Jeffrey Tucker June 2012 Jeffrey Tucker is the executive editor of Spy Briefing Books and the founder of the Spy Briefing Club, an online digital society of liberty. He is the author of three books, including, and most famously, Bourbon for Breakfast. He has also written thousands of articles that explore …

The Department of Energy, which is the Supreme Court of your home appliances, thinks you might be wasting precious energy. And the bureaucrats have a plan for doing something about it. They want to take away the clock on your microwave oven. You know, that’s the little digital display that we oddly depend on to …

Nothing starts a fistfight like the health-care debate. The market for what is just a basic service has been contorted and mangled by government intervention for more than a century. The average person wouldn’t know a free-market health care system if they saw one. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” must include health care, …

The Supreme Court will soon issue its decision in response to Obamacare litigation. It’s anyone’s guess how this will turn out, and that’s a tragedy. A plain reading of the Constitution gives no authority to the federal government to administer a vast enforcement apparatus that profoundly affects everyone’s life and economic well being of the …

Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. There is a certain cast of mind at work here. This is my attempt to frame it up and identify its main features. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably …

Those of us in our 50s grew up going to the movies. But only occasionally does Hollywood take its eye off the 2 to 24 age group to make movies about something other than vampires, superheroes and animated whatever. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is different. It is a sweet story acted by a stellar …

Some writings have turned the world upside down. They toppled tyrannies. They sparked revolutions and ennobled humanity. The Magna Carta. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” Great scholarship can do the same. In the 20th century, there was Ludwig von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” This 1920 essay astonished the …

I was just reading about how the median wage is lower today than it was a decade ago. Ouch. The cause, says this article, is inflation. Inflation? That’s interesting. Hardly anyone talks about that anymore. I can’t remember the last time I read a mainstream article that so much as mentioned it as a problem. …