Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

As long as states are around, money will never be sound. But first, some clarity. Sound money, per Ludwig von Mises, has two aspects: It serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange, while also making it difficult for governments to meddle with it. We can see immediately that sound money is nowhere to be found in today’s world. All the current rhetoric about banks and their systemic risks are about money that’s subject to political expediency,...

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When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in his office ...were guilty of criminalizing technical offenses. . .. Many of the prosecution theories we used were novel. Many of the statutes that we charged under . . . hadn’t been...

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Because his actions were so outrageous, perhaps it is impossible to satirize the former president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, but perhaps I can describe him. As a shout-out to all my neighbors in the Asia Pacific, let us not forget the Sun Tzu tradition to “know the enemy.” For an analysis of the Zimbabwe hyperinflation, see Jayson Coomer and Thomas Gstraunthaler’s article in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Below, I draw similarities...

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Left Is Not Wokeby Susan NeimanPolity Press, 2023; 155 pp. There is much to dislike in this book. Susan Neiman, a former philosophy professor who now heads the “Einstein Discussion Group” in Potsdam, is a socialist who has good things to say about Communist East Germany and parrots every anticapitalist cliché in the book. I have blasted some of her work in earlier reviews. In Left Is Not Woke, though, she makes some good points, and I’m going to...

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Credit Suisse, one of the fifty largest banks in the world, has joined the long list of Western banks over the past two decades that have been rescued from the brink of failure and subsequently acquired by a larger financial institution. After comments from the chairman of the Saudi National Bank triggered the evaporation of almost a third of the megabank’s market capitalization, the Swiss National Bank (SNB) announced the creation of a new...

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The Mises Wire depends on unaffiliated contributors for a significant proportion of its content. We welcome submissions from everyone, regardless of educational achievements and other credentials, so please send us your essays! We’re looking for short articles that approach real-world economic issues from an Austro-libertarian perspective (read: not just theory). We also accept history and sociology pieces that make use of Austrian or libertarian...

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On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. The results were—or at least should have been—stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it. The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. That’s the highest level requested since World War II, except for the peak moment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when the United States had nearly 200,000...

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As the financial ripples following the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) continue to run through the financial sector, a predictable voice has weighed in on the affair, and, as always, giving bad advice. Elizabeth Warren, never one to skip a chance to publicly gnaw on a financial carcass, writes in the New York Times that the entire problem is lack of government regulation. Of course. The US senator from Massachusetts has spent most of...

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It has been proposed that praxeology has potential not only as the foundation for growing the Austrian school of economics but other sciences as well. The utility of Austrian economics is immense, and similar achievements in other domains would be welcome. However, it seems like a difficult task, as demonstrated by a recent effort to expand praxeology to psychology. The present article discusses the scope and power of praxeology and the conditions...

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