Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

In March, at the National People’s Congress, Beijing set its annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth target. Since 1985, in every year but one, China has met or exceeded its official projections, raising doubts about whether or not Beijing’s claims of rapid growth can be believed. The New York Federal Reserve issued a report in 2020 that challenged the numbers, saying that China’s GDP growth chart was too smooth for the data to be authentic....

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Market implied Fed Funds rate discount a string of cuts starting in January 2024 and culminating in a 4.492 percent in January 2025. These expectations are based on the perception that the Federal Reserve will achieve a soft landing and that inflation will drop rapidly. However, market participants who assume rate cuts will be bullish may be taking too much risk for the wrong reasons. The messages from the Federal Reserve contradict the previously...

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In an October column, Paul Krugman admonished people who are not all in on the Joe Biden economy and declared that we are headed at worst for a “soft landing” in which an economic slowdown—if it happens at all—will be short and shallow. He wrote: The most important reason for optimism is that an ever-widening range of indicators suggests that the conventional wisdom—that we needed a recession to bring inflation under control—was wrong. Instead, we...

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Despite the numerous permanent problems faced by public healthcare systems, a significant number of people (such as citizens, politicians, and doctors) still seem to deem them necessary and believe that the problems associated with them can be solved by, for example, better management, increased expenditure, or central planning. Therefore, in this essay, the main arguments in favor of a gradual departure from public systems will be presented...

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In his new book Only a Voice: Essays (Verso, 2023), the critic and essayist George Scialabba brings to our attention the wisdom of two authors who analyzed the dangers of war: Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss what Scialabba says about them. Bourne will be a familiar name to many readers owing to Murray Rothbard’s praise of him, but he was not a libertarian. Like John Dewey, he was a Progressive and a...

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Most people have a negative view of business monopolies. Whether for allegedly exploiting workers, causing inefficiency, or crowding out potential challengers, most government-granted monopolies undoubtedly hurt entrepreneurs and customers. This basic distrust of monopolization disappears as soon as one enters the floors of the United States Senate or Congress. Government-forced monopolization arises in virtually every industry, but nowhere is it...

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Dear Friend, In the chapter of The Road to Serfdom entitled “The End of Truth,” F.A. Hayek wrote that in a totalitarian society “truth” is not determined by scholarship, research, discussion, and debate but by pronouncements by the government “authorities.” Anthony Fauci’s notorious “I am science” declaration is a perfect example of such totalitarian thinking, as is Al Gore’s “settled science” declaration regarding global-warming research. Of...

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In my experience of public policy discussions, one of the most frequent weasel words used as an intended trump (not Trump) card has been “fair.” Like another commonly played political trump card, “need,” fairness does not have a clear meaning. That provides a great deal of wiggle room for equivocation, almost always used to justify forcing some Americans to pay for what someone else wants. Fairness has no universal meaning beyond “more for me or...

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[The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything, by Ruth Goodman, Liveright Publishing Corporation; 2020. xxi + 330 pp.] The subtitle of Ruth Goodman's book The Domestic Revolution doesn't come close to describing what this book is really about. Yes, this book tells us a lot about coal and how it affected Victorian domestic life. But this book is really about how what we eat and how we prepare food has...

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