Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

Murray Rothbard died in January 1995, long before this year’s coronavirus scare. But the principles this great thinker taught us can help us answer questions about the coronavirus outbreak which trouble many of us. Would the US government be justified in imposing massive involuntary quarantines in order to slow down the spread of disease? What about vaccines? If government scientists claim that they have discovered a vaccine for the coronavirus, should we take it? If...

A unique feature of the Swiss Federal Constitution is the fact that the central government’s power to impose direct taxes on citizens expires every decade or so. In fact, the current taxing authority expires at the end of 2020. Fortunately for the Swiss republic’s central government, voters approved an extension (the “New Financial Regime 2021“) for another fifteen years in a March 2018 election. This was not a big surprise, since voters have approved extensions of...

An old red barn in London, Ontario was recently given heritage protection by City Council. Two days later, after dark, the barn was demolished. Owner John McLeod, citing legal advice, wouldn’t comment when asked if he’d demolished the barn but said, “I’m delighted that it’s down.” McLeod had fought the heritage designation for the Byron barn, calling the push for it at city hall “complete stupidity.” City Hall responded to the demolition by issuing a stop work...

On December 12, Christine Lagarde introduced her goals and vision in her first rate-setting meeting as the new president of the European Central Bank (ECB). On the actual policy front, there were no surprises. She remained committed to the path set by her predecessor, Mario Draghi, and kept the current monetary stimulus unchanged. The central bank kept its deposit rate at the present record-low –0.5 percent and pledged to continue its €20 billion bond purchases every...

The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Global Cases Monitor shows that the mortality rate of the epidemic is very low. At the writing of this article,1 there have been 92,818 cases, 3,195 deaths, and 48,201 recoveries. It is normal for the media to focus on the first two figures, but I think that it is important to remember the last one. The recovered figure is more than ten times the deceased one. This should not make the reader ignore the epidemic, but it is...

The Federal Reserve this morning slashed the target federal funds rate by 0.5 percent today. According to CNBC: The Federal Reserve moved to an enact an emergency interest rate cut after officials saw the coronavirus having a material impact on the economic outlook, Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday. Powell held a news conference following the central bank’s decision to cut overnight interest rates by half a percentage point. He said the Fed “saw a risk to the...

Some years ago, there was published a book in the German language with the title L.T.I. These three letters stood for three Latin words, lingua Tertii Imperii, the language of the Third Reich. And the author, a former professor of Romance languages at one of the German universities, described in this book his adventures during the Nazi regime. And his thesis was that all people, without any exception, in Germany of course, were Nazis—not because they had accepted...

The false notion that the US has eliminated virtually all of its barriers to foreign imports has been repeated more and more in recent years. The claim is made both by advocates for free trade and by critics of free trade. For instance, Patrick Buchanan has claimed only American elites “are beneficiaries to free trade” while implying the US either has free trade, or something close to it. Rather than insulate US companies from global competition, Buchanan insists,...

All too often, discussion over trade deals focuses almost solely on tariffs. It’s true that tariffs—i.e., taxes—are always a significant barrier to free exchange at all levels, but there are also plenty of ways to block or lessen trade that are not primarily tariff-based. Recent conflicts over the pending negotiations between the UK and the EU are a reminder of this. For instance, The Guardian reported yesterday “The EU will demand the right to punish Britain if...

This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020. In chapter 5 we reviewed the textbook analysis of how a central bank buys government debt in “open market operations” to add reserves to the banking system, with which commercial banks can then advance loans to their own customers. However, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve and other central banks...