Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Major representatives of the European Central Bank—including ECB president Christine Lagarde—continue to warn against bitcoin. In a recent article, addressed to the inflation-adverse German audience, the ECB representative Klaus Masuch together with the former ECB chief economist Otmar Issing has stressed five risks of bitcoin: a lack of intrinsic value, risks to financial market stability, the use in financing organized crime, high energy consumption, and the...

The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars, and revolutions is its anti-capitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. It is an almost unchallenged dogma that capitalism is done for and that the coming of all-around regimentation of economic activities is both inescapable and highly desirable. Nonetheless capitalism is still very vigorous in the Western Hemisphere....

Market reforms in Africa can be thwarted because of propaganda asserting that markets are a Western import. Notwithstanding the currency of this belief, it is patently absurd. Markets flourished in Africa prior to colonialism, and wherever they are repressed, the result is social immiseration, as economist William Hutt points out in his pathbreaking study, The Economics of the Colour Bar. Merchants in precolonial Africa organized large-scale trading networks that...

In discussions surrounding of the world’s monetary systems today there is usually one thing almost everyone can agree on: that money should be controlled by the organizations we call “states” or “sovereign states.” Nowadays when we say “the US dollar” we mean the currency issued by the US government. When we say “the British pound” we mean the money issued by the regime of the United Kingdom. This assumed need to have state-issued money has not always been the...

In Canada, inflation hit 4.7 percent in October, and is expected to go even higher. According to a recent survey, 46 percent of Canadians are struggling to feed their families because of the rising cost of living. Perhaps they are also struggling to understand the logic of the Bank of Canada’s (BOC) mission statement: “We work to preserve the value of money by keeping inflation low and stable.” That’s the BOC’s objective, but it’s impossible to achieve. Preserve...

Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom by Rob Larson Zero Books, 2018, 233 pp. Rob Larson, who is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington, does not agree with Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Friedman that the free market promotes freedom and prosperity and that socialism is the “road to serfdom.” That is an understatement, and you won’t find any understatements in this book. To the contrary, the book abounds in wild accusations. For...

According to the Marxists and their fellow travelers, inflation is good because it transfers wealth from creditors to debtors, and debtors are “the 99 percent.” But inflation doesn’t work that way. Original Article: “No, Inflation Is Not Good for You” With the recent rise in inflation—with subsequent increases in both consumer and producer price levels—one suspects that sooner or later people on the left either would downplay it or find a way to spin the bad...

For the Wall Street sequel, the subtitle was Money Never Sleeps. But the Oliver Stone reprisal of Gordon Gecko was the stuff of 2010. In America, a decade plus ago, money slept. Now, it truly doesn’t, with cryptocurrency prices gyrating 24/7/365. This frantic activity has spread to other asset markets. Once real estate was stable and slow moving. Buyers would walk through a home, and walk it again with someone they trusted, before making an offer. But, as Francesca...

Sergeant Javier Esqueda of the Joliet Police Department in Illinois thought he was doing the right thing by leaking a video recorded from inside of a squad car that showed a black man, Eric Lurry, in medical distress from a drug overdose being slapped and having a police baton forced in his mouth. Lurry later died from the overdose. Sergeant Esqueda received an award from the Lamplighter Project, an advocacy group for police whistleblowers. After an internal affairs...

Since the very beginning of the covid panic, the narrative has been this: implement severe lockdowns or your population will experience a bloodbath. Morgues will be overwhelmed, the death total toll will be astounding. On the other hand, we were assured those jurisdictions that do lock down would see only a fraction of the death toll. Then, once vaccines became available, the narrative was modified to “Get shots in arms and then covid will stop spreading. Those...