The Political Response to our Banking Crisis

2023-03-21

Murray Newton Rothbard, perhaps the greatest enemy of the state in the second half of the twentieth century, would have recently celebrated his ninety-seventh birthday had he lived.
Men are not salmon, those unique creatures that swim against the current. Most people “go with the flow” and allow the pace of events to dictate their lives, at least in that few consciously choose to reject the current order of things, declare it to be profoundly wrong, and act on it. Rothbard was one of those few.
The State qua State
Rothbard’s greatest practical achievement was the demystification of the state: an entity that must be cloaked in apologias and ringed with armed men in order to survive. Before his classic piece, The Anatomy of the State, there was a serious lull in substantive writing on the

2023-03-20

Ludwig von Mises wrote Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, a small book published in 1922, which demonstrated that economic calculation in a socialist commonwealth is impossible. Of course, Mises assumed that the purpose of an economy, even a socialist one, was supposed to produce goods and services, which determined its success or failure.
Alain Besançon wasn’t an Austrian or a Misesian, but he wrote Anatomie d’un spectre: l’Économie politique du socialisme réel, also a small book the size of Mises’s own Socialism, in which he also observed that the Soviet economy couldn’t perform economic calculation; thus, the Soviet economy performed poorly, very poorly by Western standards.
The Soviet economy was wasteful and chaotic. Besançon believed that economic planning induced

2023-01-02

I first became aware of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) after moving to Montana and was immediately intrigued by their work. The more I dug into PERC’s research, the more I realized they aligned with my worldview of free market conservation.

2022-12-30

The latest estimates from consensus for the main Latin American economies show a continent facing a lost decade. The region GDP growth has been downgraded yet again to a modest 1.1% for 2023, with rising inflation and weakening gross fixed investment. Considering that the region was already recovering at a slower pace than other emerging markets, the outlook is exceedingly worrying.
The poor growth and high inflation expectations are even worse when we consider that consensus estimates still consider a tailwind coming from rising commodity prices and more exports due to the China re-opening.
How can a region with such high potential as Latin America be condemned to stagflation? The answer is simple. The rise of populist governments in Colombia, Chile and Brazil have increased the concerns