Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

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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The local paper’s headline posed the question, “Do renters have the upper hand in Las Vegas right now?” “[The apartment project] offered us two weeks of no rent to get us moved in on the timeline we wanted,” said a renter who was also given passes to the Life Is Beautiful music festival as part of the deal. “They also throw resident events every month providing food and entertainment,” she added. Las Vegas Review-Journal business reporter Patrick...

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Daniel Ellsberg died on June 16, and he remains one of the nation's most prominent whistleblowers who leaked secret government information to the public. Upon his death the general consensus among the writers of memorials for Ellsberg was that he was right to leak government secrets. As the editorial board at The Orange County Register recently put it, he was "a true American hero."  They're right about Ellsberg. During the Vietnam War,...

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One hears this kind of thing from modern monetary theory (MMT) advocates whenever their economic theories are attacked: “We say not spending constrained,” they grumble, “We don’t mean ‘now spend’.” However, what politicians hear is that they can have anything they really want because they can just print the money for it. “It’s a fact,” an MMTer might say. “Sovereign governments with their own currencies can never go bankrupt. They can always print...

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For the past ten weeks, American conservatives have been boycotting Bud Light in response to a beer can featuring transgender figure Dylan Mulvaney. Since then, sales of the beer have been plummeting. However, this week, a new benchmark has been passed: Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Bud Light is no longer the top-selling beer in the United States. Instead, it has been overtaken by Modelo, as the following graph from the Wall Street Journal shows: Source:...

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