Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Goodby Alexander William SalterCatholic University of America Press, 2023; xiii + 238 pp. Distributism attracted considerable attention during the 1920s and ’30s among people who wished to apply Catholic social teaching to the modern capitalist economy, and it has recently had a revival. The appearance of The Political Economy of Distributism is particularly welcome for those...

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Jamaica is at a critical juncture in its history, and the world is watching. Long seen as a powerhouse in the developing world, Jamaica is on track to become a republic. Like in the 1950s and ’60s, decolonization is brewing, so Britain’s ex-colonies want to sever ties with their former overlord. Jamaica has therefore established a constitutional reform committee to fast-track the process of becoming a republic. As a political process,...

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Every day, Americans feels the costs of the political capture of the economy. Inflation, taxes, and regulatory costs hit our paychecks and savings. The regulatory capture of medical industries, food and energy production, and the various instruments of Big Tech empower the regime with new tools to promote their latest ideological cause. The ever-growing burden of government debt has become a crisis without any political will to address it. This...

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It is as if the average human assumes that a coercive governance must be established or assigned despite the fact that such a government is often not very efficient or even involved in the outcomes we ultimately want, peace and prosperity. —Walter Block and Stefan Sløk-Madsen, “Who Should Own the North Pole?“ In many oil-producing countries, governments own the resource (namely, oil) that they’re extracting. Whether this is a favorable state of...

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The US dollar has been the world reserve currency since 1944. At the Bretton Woods Conference, the dollar was pegged to gold and every other currency was pegged to the dollar. The fixed exchange rate system that emerged provided a stable environment for international trade and investment, as all countries had a currency value that was, directly or indirectly, tied to a fixed gold price. The system began to unravel in the 1970s due to economic...

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Politics is of its very nature biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman” version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities — or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place. The state never...

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Keynesian economists believe that recessions occur because of a weakening in aggregate demand, so boosting demand will end the downturn. Whenever an economy shows signs of weakness, most experts believe that increasing aggregate demand will prevent the economy from sliding into a recession. Since private spending is declining, Keynesians say the government should counterbalance this decline by increasing government spending on goods and services....

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