Ryan McMaken

The National Socialists Were Enemies of the West

I've been writing professionally in various capacities for over twenty years. The jobs have come in many different forms: press releases, white papers, studies on home prices, and more recently, over...

The Rise of the Western Nuclear Family and the ‘European Miracle’

Opponents of the Trump campaign are having fun this week with some year-old comments from vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

FacebookTwitter For centuries, advocates for greater state power have claimed that modern sovereign states are like families.

FacebookTwitter Opponents of the Trump campaign are having fun this week with some year-old comments from vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Apparently, in a Senate hearing during March 2023, Vance stated that car seat laws have an impact on the number of children parents feel they can afford. As quoted in the Ohio media site cleveland.com:

Indeed, in recent years we have repeatedly seen how the Federal Reserve's much-touted two-percent price-inflation goal is little more than a political slogan.

This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Albuquerque Mises Circle in New Mexico, September 14, 2024. Listen to an audio version, here. Throughout its history, liberalism—the ideology today called “classical liberalism” or “libertarianism”—has suffered from the impression that it is primarily against things. This is not entirely wrong. Historically, liberalism coalesced as a recognizable ideology in opposition largely to mercantilism and absolutism throughout western Europe. Over time, this opposition extended to socialism, protectionism, imperialism, aggressive warfare, and slavery as well. In this regard, liberals have for centuries fought against a wide array of moral and economic evils that spread poverty, injustice, … Continue reading →

For decades, the US Federal Reserve has carefully cultivated and promoted the idea that it is somehow separate and independent from the US regime that created it.

The Federal Reserve is skilled at creating roundabout means of funneling money to the Treasury via third parties such as commercial banks. But the outcome is always more cheap money for the state. The mechanism was even more direct during the Second World War, and the Fed was explicitly directed by the U.S. government to finance the war with direct purchases of government bonds: