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Cutting Red Tape: the Government’s Progress


The Government claim progress on cutting red tape for businesses. They have provided the ticker, right, which gives a running update of the red tape scrapped. Under the previous Government, the equivalent of six new regulations every working day were passed, or over 1,500 in a year. In 2011, the Government cut that flow to 89 measures of which just 19 imposed any cost to business. In addition the Government have: Capped the cost of new regulations, through the One […]

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This is a crisis of state intervention


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In the past few posts, I reproduced the economist Ludwig von Mises’ 1949 explanation of “the crisis of interventionism”, which insisted that the “third way” is a system of economic organisation which cannot last. We must choose between either state socialism or a free society. State socialism would be chaos but “Nothing suggests the belief that progress toward more satisfactory conditions is inevitable or a relapse into very unsatisfactory conditions impossible.” Many seem to believe we are in a crisis of […]

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The Crisis of Interventionism, part 3: The End of Interventionism


Blogging will be light for a few days for reasons which will become apparent when I return to it. In the meantime, I wanted to offer some prescient writing from Mises’ 1949 masterpiece, Human Action on the crisis of well-intentioned economic intervention. Via Human Action chapter XXXVI: The End of Interventionism, including the “third way”: The interventionist interlude must come to an end because interventionism cannot lead to a permanent system of social organization. The reasons are threefold. First: Restrictive measures […]

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The Crisis of Interventionism, part 2: The Exhaustion of the Reserve Fund


Blogging will be light for a few days for reasons which will become apparent when I return to it. In the meantime, I wanted to offer some prescient writing from Mises’ 1949 masterpiece, Human Action on the crisis of well-intentioned economic intervention. Via Human Action chapter XXXVI: The Exhaustion of the Reserve Fund: The idea underlying all interventionist policies is that the higher income and wealth of the more affluent part of the population is a fund which can be freely […]

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The Crisis of Interventionism, part 1: The Harvest of Interventionism


Blogging will be light for a few days for reasons which will become apparent when I return to it. In the meantime, I wanted to offer some prescient writing from Mises’ 1949 masterpiece, Human Action on the crisis of well-intentioned economic intervention. Via Human Action chapter XXXVI: The Harvest of Interventionism: The interventionist policies as practiced for many decades by all governments of the capitalistic West have brought about all those effects which the economists predicted. There are wars and […]

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Inflation Must End in a Slump – Mises Institute


It was briefly fashionable to admit that interest rates were too low for too long, leading to a boom built on expansionist monetary policy. Unfortunately (related link my own): Economic theory has demonstrated in an irrefutable way that a prosperity created by an expansionist monetary and credit policy is illusory and must end in a slump, an economic crisis. It has happened again and again in the past, and it will happen in the future, too. If one wants to […]

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New Deal in Old Rome


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From the Mises store: How Government in the Ancient World Tried to Deal with Modern Problems What a fantastic way to learn ancient history: via the parallels with modern times. H.J. Haskell was a journalist with a huge background in ancient history, and here he does what everyone has wanted done. He details the amazing catalog of government interventions in old Rome that eventually brought the empire down. He shows the spending, the inflating, the attempt to fix prices and […]

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Is Budget Austerity Modern-Day Hooverism? – Robert P. Murphy – Mises Daily


With the debate over the federal government’s budget as the hot topic of the day, the proponents of big spending have gone into overdrive with their mantra that Herbert Hoover was a small-government liquidationist. As often as this myth is repeated, it’s important to show that it is wrong: Herbert Hoover was a big-government man who did not trust the free market. Ironically, I can use the evidence provided by some of these progressive writers themselves to demonstrate this point. […]

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Atlas Shrugged on the big screen


As I have reported before, there’s much in Ayn Rand’s writing that I do not like: As an articulation of what goes wrong when government and other coercive institutions intervene in the economy and in society, it is a masterpiece. As an articulation of the timeless morals which have sustained human society, it leaves something to be desired: magnanimity. Ironically, Aristotle, who made magnanimity “the crowning virtue”, was the only philosopher to whom Rand would acknowledge a philosophical debt: it […]

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Alternatives to capitalism: Nikolai Bukharin on the division of labour


A favourite brought forward. Thinking about the pressures on capitalism — or rather, on the interventionism that passes for capitalism today — and on the alternative which was most comprehensively implemented, I discovered this recipe for chaos and failure from Bukharin: Under communism people receive a many-sided culture, and find themselves at home in various branches of production: today I work in an administrative capacity, I reckon up how many felt boots or how many French rolls must be produced […]

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