Why the G-word is taboo? Reviewing this period in gold’s history makes evident the extreme difficulties experienced by the monetary authorities in controlling the price of gold. The typical flat $35 line on charts gives the illusion that the dollar was a stable store of value. In actuality, market prices […]
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Why the Downturn? – T E Woods, Jr
It’s not exactly clear how the Federal Reserve’s policy of pushing interest rates well below where the free market would have set them, thereby inflating the biggest asset bubble in the history of the world, could be the fault of the free market, or attributable to “laissez faire.” But since […]
Read MoreReconciling ourselves to capitalism
Reflecting on aspects of the debate about capitalism, I picked this out of Liberalism, the Classical Tradition: To advocate private ownership of the means of production is by no means to maintain that the capitalist social system, based on private property, is perfect. There is no such thing as earthly […]
Read MoreBureaucracy
Bureaucracy: from Stalin and Trotsky to David Cameron, we all know we loathe it. What is it? In “Bureaucracy”, Ludwig von Mises explains: Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body. The task of the bureaucrat is to […]
Read MoreRisk and reward as the Bank cuts the base rate to 1.5%
Via Bank of England cuts base rate to 1.5% | Business | guardian.co.uk : The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee (MPC) has cut interest rates by half a percentage point to 1.5% – their lowest level since the central bank was founded more than 300 years ago. And so […]
Read MoreMoney, the free market, circulating credit, deflation and sound money
Via A Golden Way Out of the Monetary Fiasco – Thorsten Polleit – Mises Institute, essential reading for anyone interested in the financial crisis, its causes and a route out (despite its use of the G-word!): The government-controlled monetary regime — the most destructive force set into motion by state interventionism […]
Read MoreThe Murray Rothbard Institute
With a hat-tip to mises.org, the Dutch go Austrian: The institute dedicates itself to research and education regarding the Austrian school of economics, natural law, praxeology, philosophy, history, and the social sciences in general, which are directly or indirectly related to the life, work or methodology of the American economist […]
Read MoreAre you an Austrian?
Economics is not a natural science. Unlike physics, you cannot reliably say things like: For a fixed amount of an ideal gas kept at a fixed temperature, P [pressure] and V [volume] are inversely proportional. (That is, halve the volume and the pressure will double.) Unfortunately, many economists and other […]
Read MoreDominic Lawson: It all went wrong when we left the gold standard
Thanks to Graham for pointing out this article by Dominic Lawson promoting Austrian-school economics: As the chief economic advisor to the Austrian government in the 1920s, Mises put his theories into practice and slowed down inflation in his native country (which, as a Jew, he later fled). He used his […]
Read MoreThe mocking of an Austrian-school economist, 2006-7
See also: Housing: Too Good to be True — 4 Jun 2004 America’s Unsustainable Boom — 8 Nov 2004 Is There a Glut of Saving? — 4 Aug 2005
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