Statism Is the Cause of the Israel-Hamas War

2023-11-17

Cryptocurrency is failing. Or so it seems.
Last week, the arrest of Su Zhu, cofounder of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, brought to light the integrity issues which have plagued the crypto landscape. Along with cofounder Kyle Davies, the fund faced $3.5 billion of creditor’s claim, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund collapses of all time.
Zhu’s arrest came from a long line of incidents. The JPEX scandal, the 2022 crypto crisis, and perhaps most infamously FTX’s downfall have elicited criticisms from prominent financial experts and created a sense of apprehension in the general public. A recent poll found that 75 percent of Americans who have heard of crypto are not confident in its safety and reliability.
To combat deteriorating trends, policymakers around the

2023-08-19

Since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar has been the world’s preferred reserve currency—the major trading nations of the world were willing to hold dollars in vast amounts to satisfy their need for a readily accepted worldwide payment medium. Even when, in 1971, the United States violated its solemn promise to redeem its dollars for gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce, nations were still willing to hold dollars.
Germany Shies Away from Monetary Leadership
In the mid-2010s, I was certain that Germany would abandon the euro and reinstate the deutsche mark. It was clear, especially to some German central bankers, that Germany was being cheated by the European Central Bank. Germany’s TARGET2 surplus represented a vast excess of German exports to other European Union members,

2023-08-18

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
—Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition
Mises controversially stated this quote in his book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition. This seemingly profascist line is routinely taken out of context and used to justify tremendous amounts of outrage. Previous Mises Wire articles have done a much better job than I ever could at putting these words in their proper context to explain just how misguided these criticisms are. However, the quick answer is to simply read the lines immediately

2023-08-17

It feels like a silly thing to say, but board games are not real life. Playing a few rounds of Operation does not make you a surgeon. Unlike in Battleship, real-world battleships do not sit still on a ten-by-ten grid.
Similarly, Monopoly does not correlate to “free-market capitalism,” despite anticapitalist claims like this tweet with over a million views:
There’s literally a children’s board game that demonstrates that “free-market capitalism” always leads to one person controlling everything.— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) July 26, 2023 The rhetorical strategy is obvious: anticapitalists want people to associate capitalism with Monopoly, the game that results in extreme wealth inequality as players bankrupt each other through zero-sum exchanges and often ends with family members storming

2023-08-16

The price of a McDonald’s hamburger in the United States has inflated 3.75 percent annually over the last seventy years. McDonald’s has grown from a tiny hamburger stand in Des Plaines, Illinois, to the second largest fast-food chain on earth. Scale economies alone (never mind process and productivity improvements) should’ve allowed the price of a burger to decline materially over this period.
Why didn’t it? What forces and institutions have conspired to inflate the cost of a simple meal by more than thirteen times over two generations? Many Mises Wire readers know the answer, but few Americans are economically astute enough to understand or describe what Vladimir Lenin called the “surest means of overturning the existing basis of society.”
Simply put, inflation is a giant