Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

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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It is not uncommon to encounter political theorists and pundits who insist that political centralization is a boon to economic growth. In both cases, it is claimed the presence of a unifying central regime—whether in Brussels or in Washington, DC, for example—is essential in ensuring the efficient and free flow of goods throughout a large jurisdiction. This, we are told, will greatly accelerate economic growth. In many ways, the model is the United...

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The term “rent seeking” is a derogatory term that implies companies and people seek to take more than they earn. It hearkens to some Marxist ideology as well. However, especially when combined with regulatory capture and bureaucratic corruption, rent seeking is a valid concept. What happens when the shoe is on the other foot and people and organizations engage in rent seeking from a social justice perspective? Is it rent seeking or corruption for...

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Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it. —Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), before the US House of Representatives, February 15, 2006 In the mid-sixties, having read about gold in Atlas Shrugged, I decided to find out something about inflation and wrote to the United States Treasury Department to request a brochure that purported to lay inflation out in terms anyone could...

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Investor sentiment is clearly bullish. The CNN Fear and Greed Index for June 18th, 2023, stood at 82, which signals “extreme greed”. This is a drastic optimistic move after closing at “greed” (56 over 100) a month before and “extreme fear” (17 over 100) only one year ago. However, in the same period, the Citi global economic surprise index has declined twelve points, with the euro area component collapsing 123 points. The US economic surprise index...

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The carbon capture pipeline is the result of the latest gift to rent-seeking “titans of industry” and interestingly, may be used on some existing projects that came to be, years ago, due to rent seeking. More on this below. As we’ve heard for years and years now, sometimes delivered in memorable ways, the continuing elevation of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases, and the rising global temperatures that follow, is the...

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