Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

As someone who teaches public finance (better termed the economics of government), I can’t count how many times I have heard politicians promise “comprehensive” reforms to some major problem. But what such efforts actually produce is always different from what is promised, because such achievements are beyond government’s competence. The more comprehensive the “reforms” (say, measured by the number of pages in a bill), the more adverse incentives undermining social...

 The best that mankind ever knew: Freedom and life are earned by those alone Who conquer them each day anew. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1 According to many economists, we need the state to provide public goods.2 The assertion seems to be so crystal-clear that it is not even worth discussion in the mainstream. One typical and popular example of public goods in Germany is the case of dikes or levees. In Vahlens Kompendium der Wirtschaftstheorie und...

The price of the euro in terms of the US dollar closed at 1.135 in November, against 1.156 in October and 1.193 in November last year. The yearly growth rate of the price of the euro in US dollar terms fell to –4.8 percent in November from –0.7 percent in October. Some commentators are of the view that the US dollar is likely to weaken against the euro (i.e., the price of the euro in US dollar terms is likely to increase). The reason for this is the massive US...

If the Senate follows the House of Representatives's lead and passes the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act (HR 550), Americans who do not get the recommended number of covid vaccines can look forward to receiving a text like this: “This is Dr. Anthony Fauci. According to government records you have not yet received your monthly covid booster shot. Until you prove you are following vaccine protocols, your vaccine passport will be revoked, resulting in loss...

When Ronald Reagan officially announced his candidacy for president of the United States in November 1979, he called for the establishment of a large free trade zone encompassing the USA, Canada, and Mexico. Not surprisingly, the so-called free trade agreement better known as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) resembled the usual “managed trade” that falls much more into the category of what Randall Holcombe calls “political capitalism.” Politics has a...

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank. When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is...

A Democratic state lawmaker in Illinois has introduced legislation requiring unvaccinated residents to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare services. It’s all part of an effort to come up with new and creative ways to punish people who refuse to get the covid jab. WBBM Radio in Chicago reports: [Jonathan] Carroll’s legislation would amend the state’s insurance code so that “a person who is eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine and chooses not to be vaccinated shall pay...

For many, income inequality is a disease ravaging the fabric of capitalist societies. Therefore, curing this ailment, according to progressives, necessitates an injection of welfare benefits and higher taxes on the wealthy. Guided by a zero-sum outlook, critics believe that the success of the affluent is gained at the expense of the poor. To remind voters that he takes income inequality seriously, during his presidential campaign, Joe Biden expressed concern that the...

According to the popular narrative, the role of the central bank is to navigate the economy along the so-called path of economic stability. By this way of thinking if various shocks cause the economy to deviate from this path, then it is the role of central bank policy makers to offset these shocks. This is done by means of suitable monetary policies. In line with this way of thinking to counter the shocks from covid-19, the US central bank, the Federal Reserve...

Interest has a title role in many pre-Keynesian writings as it does in Keynes’s own General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Eugen Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest (1889), Knut Wicksell’s Interest and Prices (1898), and Gustav Cassel’s The Nature and Necessity of Interest (1903) readily come to mind. The essays in F.A. Hayek’s Profits, Interest, and Investment (1939), which both predate and postdate Keynes’s book, focus on the critical role that...