Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

One of history’s greatest ironies is that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic. In fact, the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction. The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the nineteenth century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, or so the story goes. As the Great War began, Europe turned from prosperity to destruction, or more...

In his 1922 book, Gemeinwirtschaft, Ludwig von Mises unmasks the intellectual distortion that is social Darwinism. Based on determining the dynamics of socialization through the principle of the division of labor, Mises shows that society is cooperative; that peace, not war, is the father of human progress. Socialization Mises believes socialization proceeds through expansion and deepening. Through societal expansion, people are increasingly drawn into the system of...

Energy is a highly regulated industry across the world. There is less debate about the need for government control when it comes to the oil and gas sector. The arguments that most people accept for government intervention in energy, whether in the name of energy access, national security, or climate change mitigation, all share the same general premise: that energy is too important to be left to the whims of the free market. But this year, the world has been thrust...

At least since 2008, the financial world has been in a financial spiral caused by central banks’ growing monetary impression. As a consequence, key economic concepts (e.g., that business cycles are caused by credit expansion, and higher prices by monetary expansion) started to be considered just “old ideas” and their defenders prophets of the apocalypse. Some economists, especially the modern monetary theory (MMT) defenders, attempted to substitute these ideas with...

There are many mistakes in the G7 agreement to put a cap on Russian oil. The first one is that it does not hurt Russia at all. The agreed cap, at $60 a barrel, is higher than the current Urals price, above the five-year average of the quoted price and higher than Rosneft’s average netback price. According to Reuters, “the G7 price cap will allow non-EU countries to continue importing seaborne Russian crude oil, but it will prohibit shipping, insurance, and...

The Federal Reserve is sowing the seeds for its central bank digital currency (CBDC). It may seem that the purpose of a CBDC is to facilitate transactions and enhance economic activity, but CBDCs are mainly about more government control over individuals. If a CBDC were implemented, the central bank would have access to all transactions in addition to being capable of freezing accounts. It may seem dystopian—something that only totalitarian governments would do—but...

In the laboratory of history, great inflation followed by great disinflation opens the road to monetary regime change. Sometimes the road leads to a better place. Think of the US return to gold in 1879 following the inflationary issue of greenbacks during the Civil War; or the era of the hard deutsche mark when the German Bundesbank responded to the great inflation and bust of the late 1960s and early 1970s by insulating its money from continuing US inflationary...

In the midst of excessive US economic and geopolitical uncertainties due to rampant inflation and the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 7.7 percent October inflation report comes as a small relief. The unemployment rate touched 3.7 percent in October, remaining near the 3.5 percent prepandemic level and slightly above the 3.4 percent natural rate of unemployment of the fourth quarter of 2021. The Covid Inflation The general increase in price levels, most...

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.” —Ludwig von Mises, 1962 (emphasis added) F.A. Hayek is back in the public eye, thanks to a promising and weighty new biography from Professors Bruce Caldwell and Hansjörg Klausinger. Predictably,...

Ludwig von Mises published Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus in 1922 (translated into English as Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, 1951). In more than five hundred pages, the most prominent representative of the Austrian school offers a comprehensive and deep analysis of the “socialist phenomenon.” Despite the catastrophes associated with the attempt to install a socialist system, this ideology has lost little of its appeal....