Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

[This piece is an excerpt from The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.] The notion that the world can be replicated and replaced by a simulated reality says a great deal about the beliefs of those who promote the metaverse [treated in the previous chapter]. The conception is materialist and mechanistic at base, the hallmarks of social engineering. It represents the world as consisting of nothing but manipulable matter, or rather, of digital...

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In his excellent new book In Defense of Capitalism (Republic Book Publishers, 2023), the historian and political scientist Rainer Zitelmann asks a vital question about inequality. In asking this question, he makes a move characteristic of his work. Demands to reduce inequality of wealth and income are widespread, and often debates about proposals to do this are centered in political philosophy. Do people have natural rights to their property that...

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The past few weeks, major countries have been moving away from the US dollar, raising doubts about the dollar’s long-dominant role in the world. Eight weeks ago, it was just pariah nations like Iran or Russia trying to de-dollarize. Now it’s Brazil, France, even Saudi Arabia—the lynchpin of the decades-long “petrodollar” arrangement. If the dollar does lose its position as the global reserve currency, it will be catastrophic for the American...

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Among the many facts of modern life that are accepted without question by most ordinary people is that it is somehow perfectly natural, expected, and unremarkable that every sovereign state should have its own currency. We see this everywhere in names such as "the U.S. dollar" or "the Chinese yuan" or "the Japanese yen." Indeed, among the 203 sovereign states of the world, there are nearly as many separate national...

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As we know, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was taken over by the Feds after a bank run. Despite assurances from SVB that they were sound, they obviously failed to understand their precarious situation. Based on SVB’s balance sheet, it was technically insolvent. The regulators shut it down and pondered what to do next. A bank run? How could this happen in modern financial America? Doesn’t the government (the Fed and the Federal Deposit Insurance...

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While we were being distracted by the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war – and Washington’s increasing involvement in the war – tremendous developments in the Middle East have all but ended decades of US meddling in the region. Peace is breaking out in the Middle East and Washington is not at all happy about it! Take, for example, the recent mending of relations between Saudi Arabia and formerly bitter adversaries Iran and Syria. A China-brokered deal...

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