Category: Economics

gold

Economics · Featured · Government

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Gold, Government and Monetary Freedom

For more than two hundred years, practically all of the leading advocates of individual liberty and free markets have assumed that money and banking were different from other types of goods and markets. From Adam Smith to Milton Friedman, the presumption has been that competitive markets and free consumer choice are far better than government control and planning – except in the realm of money and financial intermediation. They have been wrong on this important issue.

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french inflation

Economics · Featured

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Lessons from the Great French Inflation

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in their wake. The political economy of the French Revolution is a tragic example of this.

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recession

Economics · Featured

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The Bitter Harvest of Obama’s Transformation

In campaigning for the presidency, Barrack Obama inspired popular support of millions of voters by eloquently promising to “transform” America with “fundamental” change. Now his popularity is at its all-time low, his signature legislation, Obamacare, has been a disaster, his highly touted—and extremely expensive—stimulus program has failed. He has done nothing to lower the federal debt or tackle the future insolvency of Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.And the economy continues to stumble 58 months after the recession officially ended.

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inflation

Economics · Featured

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Lessons from the Great Austrian Inflation

This year marks one hundred years since the beginning of the First World War in the summer of 1914. The Great War, as it used to be called, brought great devastation in its wake. Millions of human lives were lost on the battlefields of Europe; vast amounts of accumulated wealth were consumed to cover the costs of combat; and battles and bombs left a large amount of physical capital in ruins. But the “war to end war,” as it was called, also resulted in another weapon of economic mass destruction – an orgy of paper-money inflations.

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Crisis

Economics · Featured · FIRE · Regulation

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Free-Market Solutions to Financial Crises

The banking crisis of 2008 and its attendant deep recession have been hailed by statists the world over as the ultimate demonstration of capitalist greed and a justification for more and more regulation and government control of the economy, particularly the financial sector. Their argument boils down to an accusation that private actors in the marketplace are incapable of dealing with systemic crises and that government is the only agent that can address the market as a whole in order to combat panics and economic shocks. That argument won out in the aftermath of the recession, leading to a raft of new regulations, most notably the voluminous Dodd-Frank Act.

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