Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

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...

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...