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 […]
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This is a crisis of state intervention
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 […]
Read MoreThe 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, […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
Read MoreInflation 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 […]
Read MoreNew Deal in Old Rome
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 […]
Read MoreIs 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 […]
Read MoreAtlas 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 […]
Read MoreAlternatives 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 […]
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