Mere inflation—that is, the mere issuance of more money , with the consequence of higher wages and prices—may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.—Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
Money is among the most important forms of technology. It solves the fundamental human problem of barter and allows us to transfer value across geography and time. By enabling efficient trade—and thereby profit and capital investment—money has been as critical to human development as fire and the wheel.
This money technology arose in the marketplace, without design by central authorities. Carl Menger explained the origin of money as the most saleable commodity. Ludwig von Mises explained its value as flowing from an earlier

I am excited to tell you about a new book project from our brilliant Senior Fellow, Jörg Guido Hülsmann.
I just finished the manuscript, and let me tell you: this is a remarkable work.
That is why I’m writing you—as part of a select group of Mises Institute Supporters and fans of Dr. Hülsmann’s work. We know you will want to be listed in the book as a Supporter!
I’ll introduce the book with some simple questions: Why are people mostly good? Why do they help each other? Why do they cooperate? Why are they charitable?
Guido’s new book answers these fundamental questions in a profound way. I know you will love it, and hope you will take a moment today to help us publish it right away!
This book is nothing short of a revelation.
You already know Guido Hülsmann’s great work on the cultural

Resources are scarce even when money is not.

Original Article: "A Permanent Wartime Economy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

“Governments create money all the time. We do that for war.”
“This whole notion that you run government like you run a household…is a complete myth”Economist Prof Mariana Mazzucato tells #Newsnight Government’s should address social issues through taxhttps://t.co/P0zxS1DNGF pic.twitter.com/I6NLtXgDqN— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) March 6, 2023This is the argument for more money printing, and perhaps unlimited money printing, recently advanced by Professor Mariana Mazzucato on prime-time BBC.
Channeling Warren Mosler, the godfather of modern monetary theory, Dr. Mazzucato argues against “austerity”—by which she means any natural restraints on government spending. In order to spend, sovereign states need not “earn” tax revenue like a household must earn money, nor do they need to

Recorded in Tampa, Florida on February 25, 2023.

Money is simple. The political program of monetary "policy" is not.

Original Article: "Money versus Monetary Policy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

With all due respect to Niall Ferguson, whom I’ve heard of, and Huw van Steenis, whom I’ve not, this tweet is quite preposterous.  I’ve personally met more than five people who understand money just in my own circles.
What they mean is “monetary policy,” which is in fact very difficult to understand—given it effectively operates as a political program within the muddled field of macroeconomics. Monetary policy, unlike money per se, is ad hoc, highly technical, reliant on vast amounts of data, and dictated by political expediency.
As for money itself, there is nothing so difficult about it conceptually. A hundred and fifty years ago Carl Menger explained how money arose as the most saleable commodity in the marketplace, with the best properties to be a store of value and medium of exchange.

Only Father Time helps us cut through the policy nonsense and understand interest rates conceptually.

Original Article: "Father Time versus Central Bankers"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Dear Friend,
In the midst of this busy Christmas season, I want to make sure you received our year-end letter from Lew Rockwell.
If you already responded, thank you! But if not, will you take a minute today to make your most generous contribution and support the Mises Institute?
We are all thankful to have the political season of 2022 over, but now the 2024 presidential election looms like a bad moon. The midterms solved nothing and brought no relief to a divided and angry America.
But as a supporter of the Mises Institute, you know a better world is possible.
Democrats are insane and full of hate, doubling down on their every failed idea. Conservatives, for their part, are clueless about money, markets, property, and the crucial need for peace. Democracy itself is a huge failure, despite

An excellent new book from Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time, sets out to explain both the theory and history of interest rates across five millennia and countless cultures. The theory is frequently bungled by economists; the history is frequently glossed over by historians. But thankfully Mr. Chancellor is up to the task. He is an excellent and engaging writer, owing presumably to his long career as a financial journalist.

“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.”

The bishop was correct, in his time and ours. Spain proceeded to become the most powerful empire in the world over the following century, spreading her mother tongue across the Americas—just as the Roman army had imposed Latin across its sweep and just as the British Empire would bring English to India and Africa.

Who frames the “climate” debate in this country? Or any political debate, for that matter? We all know the answer. Left progressives have mastered the emotive art of posing supposedly good intentions as actual arguments. They enjoy a childlike state of suspended disbelief that allows them to insist reality can be legislated.

Remember the quaint old days of 2019? We were told the US economy was in great shape. Inflation was low, jobs were plentiful, GDP was growing. And frankly, if covid had not come along, there is a pretty good chance Donald Trump would have been reelected.

Congress enjoys exorbitant political privilege in the form of cheap deficit spending—but it may soon come to an end.

Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background. He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy—and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social distancing to masks to vaccine efficacy.

First, in a certain sense medicine in America is broken. Doctors and patients are unhappy, the quality of care deteriorates, and costs keep increasing. Even before covid, US life expectancy declined three years running. Even before covid, too many Americans were sick, depressed, fat, and unhappy with their physical and mental health.

The recent spate of bombing violence in Israel’s West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza demonstrates the enduring attachment both Israelis and Palestinians have to physical land in the country. Both sides make claims—legal, moral, and political—to land within Israel, from the southernmost tip of Gaza to the northernmost tip of the Golan Heights.

Niall Ferguson holds a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, taught history at Harvard and NYU, and wrote perhaps the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger. So, naturally, Bloomberg hired him to write on economics.

The GameStop saga—can we call it an insurrection?—wants easy heroes and villains. Both are available. The populist version of the story goes like this: a few thousand angry gamers, colluding via the now infamous WallStreetBets subreddit, brought at least one powerful hedge fund to its knees.

Paraphrasing the late Murray Rothbard, the "two party" system in America during the twentieth century worked something like this: Democrats engineered the Great Leaps Forward, and Republicans consolidated the gains. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson were the transformative presidents;

In the early 1980s few outlets existed for anyone interested in the Austrian school of economics or robust libertarian scholarship. Few universities taught Hayek, much less Mises or Rothbard. Libraries and bookstores carried little of interest for serious economists and thinkers in the old liberal tradition.

Mobilization and separation, not persuasion, is the way forward.

Why don’t elections bring harmony and closure rather than ever greater political friction? Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained all of the fundamental problems with mass democracy more than 20 years ago in Democracy: The God That Failed.

Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump "tested positive" for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers "got" covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy. 

Last time we met in Orlando, Bob Murphy mentioned how much worse our political and social divide would be if the economy crashed like 2008. Now we face this very problem—with COVID-19 lockdowns and George Floyd protests decimating the economy and social media exposing raw animosity along racial and "woke" lines.

Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to the Fed Board of Governors, may not have coined the excellent term "Fed Bug," but she used it to delicious effect in this 2019 Financial Times interview:
“People call me a goldbug, and I think, well, what does that make them? A Fed bug,” she says.

A no-holds-barred discussion of the economy after the coronavirus shutdown and George Floyd protests. Are we facing another Great Depression? Can there be a V-shaped recovery or is this wishful thinking? What will all the new money and credit created by Congress and the Fed mean for the dollar? What kind of economic mess will Trump or Biden inherit in 2021? How far will Fed chair Powell go to keep markets propped up?

How bad is it? That is the question on everyone’s mind as we come to grips with the economic carnage caused by global economic shutdowns, supply chain disruptions, and ongoing quarantines of million of people. Do we face another Great Depression, or simply a deep recession more like 2008? And equally important, are soft Americans prepared for either? Have we started to process all of this psychologically?

[This text is excerpted from the introduction to The Anatomy of the Crash, a Mises Institute ebook to be released in April 2020.] The Great Crash of 2020 was not caused by a virus. It was precipitated by the virus, and made worse by the crazed decisions of governments around the world to shut down business and travel. But it was caused by economic fragility.

South Dakota is not New York City. A seemingly innocuous statement, made last Wednesday by Governor Kristi Noem in response to calls for her to issue a coronavirus shutdown across a state with the motto “Under God the People Rule.” South Dakota, after all, is one of the least densely populated states in the vast American West.

[This article is excerpted from a talk delivered on February 22, 2020 at the Austrian Student Scholars Conference, hosted by Grove City College in Pennsylvania.] I. Introduction What a wonderful gathering of students today, on this impressive and beautiful campus. We can see why Hans Sennholz loved this place, and why Drs. Herbener and Ritenour so enjoy living and teaching here.

TOM WOODS: This is the Tom Woods Show, and today I welcome Jeff Deist. Everybody wants to know the sheer nuts and bolts of how somebody becomes Ron Paul’s chief of staff. I’ll tell a little story most people don’t know. About ten years ago, Dr. Paul was approached about doing an autobiography; he would have gotten a huge advance. There was big demand for it!

Dr. Bob Murphy joins the Human Action Podcast to discuss one of the most important issues of all: how money and credit work in today’s society. Jeff Deist recently commissioned Murphy to write a series of articles on money mechanics, an exceedingly important topic for critics of the Fed—and today’s podcast serves as an introduction to the project.

Negative interest rates are now entrenched reality in Europe, and not just for buyers of sovereign or corporate debt – even retail savings accounts are affected. What does this mean for real people trying to save for retirement? And more broadly, what does it mean for Europe culturally? Not to mention America, since Alan Greenspan tells us negative rates are coming here soon?

Marketing guru and fund investor Hunter Hastings joins the Human Action podcast for a look at Economics for Entrepreneurs, a new platform which uses Austrian theory to teach actionable entrepreneurship. Can business acumen be taught, or is it innate? Hunter and Jeff examine consumer sovereignty, value creation, and the theory of the firm, all from a unique Austrian perspective.