Based Economics

       Having recently passed the centennial of the end of the Russian Civil War, it is hard not to lament the fact that the Red Army ultimately won and it wouldn't be until 1989 that Russia had any prospect for liberty. All the same, this does not mean that the war's fate was sealed by the time the Bolsheviks first took over. Far from it. The main opposition force, the White Army had numerous heroes, such as the Black Baron, General Pyotr Wrangel, who worked valiantly to keep Crimea out of Bolshevik hands and helped 100,000 people flee for their lives when it tragically fell to the Reds in November 1920. Nestor Makhno's Black Army were a mixed bag in some respects due to their far-left economics, but at least the average rural Ukrainian could feel free in the Free Territory, and the fight they put up against Leon Trotsky could certainly be described as heroic. The Green Armies were certainly the most blameless group in the war, as they were simply fighting...

  In a Politico article that seemed to be more about promoting interventionist government policies than it was about honestly explaining history or economics, Professor Jacob Soll of the University of Southern California recently made a hackneyed comparison between now former Prime Minister of the U.K. Liz Truss’s proposed tax reform that has since been largely reversed and the decision of 1775 France’s Minister of Finance, Jacque Turgot, to liberalize the economy with regards to grain trading and the events of the Flour War that same year which were ostensibly created by his actions. The fact that markets were “reeling” from Truss’s diabolical plan to lower the U.K.’s top income tax rate bracket from 45% to 40% is rather cynically compared to the real hardship that occurred in France in 1775. Whether the former is even the actual cause of Britain’s current problems is a very contested theory, as the expansionary monetary policy, high taxes, and large budget deficits of the last de...

  On October 28, 1993, then Representative Bernie Sanders was on the floor of Congress advocating for the United States to adopt a Canadian-style agricultural supply management system in order to boost the prices that dairy farmers across the country received for their produce. He then specifically lamented that the number of farms in his state of Vermont had decreased from over 8,000 in 1960 down to 2,200 by 1993. Aside from mentioning how young people there ostensibly did not want to follow in their dairy farmers footprints because of low milk prices, he doesn’t give any evidence showing this to be the result of agribusiness, but he all the same suggests that it is those dastardly more efficient farms offering a lower price to the consumers that accounts for his state’s decrease in their number of farms. He claims this story to be the same across the nation and makes the dubious claim that relying on agribusiness and “foreign nations” (as though their governments had nationalized...