“I wanted to save a half million boys on our side…. I never lost any sleep over my decision.”—Harry Truman, (quoted in Alfred Steinberg, The Man From Missouri (New York, 1962), p. 259)It is estimated that there were 416,480 American military deaths in WWII. Thus, what we are invited to believe by Truman’s assertion that the atomic bombs saved 500,000 (or many more) American lives is that, had the US invaded Japan, more Americans would have died in such actions than in all the theaters of WWII combined. Further, that prior to the bombs, Truman, Stimson, and Marshall would have approved an invasion plan (as those of Honshu and Kyushu) had they actually believed that 500,000 American deaths would have resulted, as opposed to more likely alternatives prior to

Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.—RothschildThe real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson…—FDRThe American people are suckers for the word “reform.” You just put that into any corrupt piece of legislation, call it “reform” and people say “Oh, I’m all for ‘reform,’” and so they vote for it or accept it.”—G. Edward GriffinThough there had been steady steps toward centralization of the monetary and financial system in the United States—especially since banking and the federal government were connected by the National Banking System during and after the Civil War (ca. 1863-1913)—the financial-banking elite,

Modern monetary theory (MMT) is not convincing to most trained economists of various schools of thought. This causes many to balk at MMT and mock it, some of which is warranted as a reductio ad absurdum, especially given some of MMT’s more outlandish claims. In fact, my own thesis was an Austrian critique of MMT.But there is also a fair amount of hypocrisy in the non-Austrian (e.g., mainstream, Keynesian, monetarist) critiques of MMT by mainstream economists. The truth is that most, if not all, of these economists share the same faulty presuppositions regarding what is euphemistically called “monetary policy.” The difference between mainstream and MMT economists is usually one of degree, not of kind.Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman (1987–2006) and

Several months ago, I was on a long car trip with my dad, and we listened to a podcast that gave some commentary on the following headlines from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn” and “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction’ on Par with Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn.”Obviously, this was in the wake of new AI technologies like ChatGPT and others. This is also not a new issue. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal also published “Protecting Against AI’s Existential Threat.” Of course, AI has been impressively more developed recently, bringing the usual reactions—assumptions that this technology will totally change everything, amused interest, reasonable concerns (e.g., students cheating), and the

Our present cultural landscape is filled with the language of class conflict, ideology, bias (conscious or unconscious), and the politicization of everything. While there are many contributors to this, we can largely thank (or blame) Karl Marx and his theory of class consciousness and class conflict. While not necessarily following Marx in his economics, these concepts have captured the imagination of many, especially in the modern Western world.The claim is rather simple: people are inherently biased in favor of their own “class,” whether consciously or unconsciously; therefore, whatever they claim to be “true” or “right” is simply special pleading in their own favor. In other words, people are not in search of objective truth, nor is this possible; rather, they

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One of the first laws of economics—in fact, the condition that makes economics possible and necessary—is scarcity. On page one of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell wrote, “Without scarcity, there is no need to economize—and therefore no economics.”While defining scarcity and its critical role in economics, I like to ask my students in a Christian school a question to tease this out: Would scarcity have existed in the Garden of Eden?Apparently Bob Murphy has tackled just this question in his podcast episode titled “Would the Laws of Economics Be True in the Garden of Eden?” Christian theologian and professor Abner Chou identifies economics and scarcity as having entered the world during the Fall of Genesis 3. Economists use the language of the “veil of tears” from the

There are others, besides the Austrians, who acknowledge the crucial role of monetary policy and even blame the Federal Reserve for the Great Depression. Some scholars, which we can greatly appreciate, even go so far as to rightly criticize Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies for prolonging the Great Depression: Jim Powell’s book FDR’s Folly, Burton Folsom’s book New Deal or Raw Deal?, and the scholarly work of University of California, Los Angeles economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian “How Government Prolonged the Great Depression.”Economists from Paul Krugman to Milton Friedman critically misdiagnose the causes of the Great Depression, even if they rightly blame the Fed and government. They, and many others, simultaneously diagnose the cause of

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​Why did you want to attend RGS?
I attended the Rothbard Graduate Seminar (RGS) in 2023 for several reasons. For one, it fulfilled a requirement as one of the final classes to complete the Mises graduate program. Additionally, RGS was part of the Mises summer fellowship program, which I was also a part of this year. That said, I wanted to attend RGS because of the unique format it provides for graduate-level reading, lectures, and discussions with the professors and fellow attendees.
The readings, both required and supplemental, informed me of things I didn’t even know I needed to read. One of the underappreciated benefits of assigned reading is being told what to read by those who are well-read in the subject. For example, the supplemental reading made me aware

One of Ludwig von Mises’s important contributions to economics was demonstrating the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. He did it by showing three necessary preconditions for the generation of meaningful market prices in the factors of production—private property, freedom of exchange, and sound money. Since socialism would, by definition, socialize the factors of production, there would be no nonarbitrary and meaningful way to calculate the prices of various factors of production, the costs of alternative plans in money prices, and expected future profits of a given plan minus the costs.
In short, when factors of production—producer goods (tools, machines, etc.)—are privately owned, there is freedom to trade property. When the economy has

Words matter and definitions often become imprecise and “slippery.” There is a natural evolution of language wherein words gradually change over time, but often a key meaning gets lost and there no longer remains a single word to describe a concept. This has been the case with the common word “inflation.”
Over the last few years, I have kept a list of quotes about the accurate definition of inflation (and I am always looking for more quotes). What inspired this list was the recognition that what most people mean and understand by the word “inflation” is price inflation—increasing consumer prices. But this is not inflation; it is a consequence of inflation. In fact, a former coworker and friend asked me during the time of massive covid spending by the government,

Dieser Artikel ist bereits am 23. März 2022 bei Mises.org unter dem Titel erschienen «The Statist ‘Sollution’ Really Is a Non Sequitur». Übersetzt von Johannes Beifuss.
Ein Non sequitur ist ein grundlegender, aber häufiger logischer Fehlschluss, der auftritt, wenn eine vermeintliche Schlussfolgerung nicht zwingend aus der vorherigen Argumentation folgt. Im Lateinischen bedeutet der Ausdruck «non sequitur» wörtlich «es folgt nicht». Ein Non sequitur ist einfach eine unberechtigte Schlussfolgerung. Es wird angenommen, dass es eine Verbindung zwischen Argumenten und einer Schlussfolgerung gibt, obwohl dies in Wirklichkeit nicht der Fall ist.
Dieser Denkfehler ist häufig und leichter zu begehen, als wir gerne zugeben möchten. Zwischen etwas, das in unserer

It may come as a surprise—though it should not—that one of the very first acts of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was a tax program at least as great as the one imposed on the colonies by Great Britain. It turned out that taxation with representation could be just as oppressive as taxation without representation or worse.
It is supreme irony that the very first major act of the new Congress was taxation at a level that would have made Britain proud. The only thing that happened on June 1, 1789, contained in the first chapter of the first session was an act to fix a time for US government officials—senators, house members, judges, etc.—to take their oaths. The real business took place over the next month, and a new bill was signed into law by George