Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Taxes are not a contractual obligation between the state and the individuals it governs. By definition, taxes are noncontractual debts in which the state is the creditor, and the payment of these debts is demanded through coercion and violence.

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To the Chinese reader: It is safe to say that economics suffers at least as many fallacies and misunderstandings as any other field of study. Had physics suffered the same level of issues, we would not have seen much—if any—of the progress that we have made over the past centuries. Yet, economics—the queen of the social sciences—keeps being misrepresented, if not abused, and we suffer the consequences. Those consequences are primarily in the form...

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Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome “Jay” Powell, recently sent mysterious shock waves into financial markets with comments that suggested that Fed rate cuts might come sooner than expected. Stock and bond markets took this as a good sign. They were already in a Santa Claus rally and broke out to new highs for the year. The interest rate on ten-year government bonds, which had already fallen by almost 1 percent since October, threatened to...

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According to a new report from the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics last Friday, the US economy added 216,000 jobs for the month while the unemployment rate held at 3.7%. NBC news was sure to tell us that this "beat expectations."  Market estimates suggested total jobs added at 170,000 with the unemployment rate at 3.8%.  The media's general consensus on the report is that the jobs economy is "robust" and...

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Donald Trump, Julian Assange, Alex Jones, and Rudy Giuliani are in deep trouble with the US state. How about you? Most likely you feel safe because your voice hasn’t attracted a large following. What would the state’s enforcers gain by attacking a little guy? They’re big-game hunters. Pull the plug on the big guys and their everyday followers float away like bathtub water down a drain. Possibly you believe you aren’t really attacking the state with...

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Markets closed 2023 with the strongest rally for equities, bonds, gold, and cryptocurrencies in years. The level of complacency was obvious, registering an “extreme greed” level in the Greed and Fear Index. 2023 was also an unbelievably bad year for commodities, particularly oil and natural gas, something that very few would have predicted in the middle of two wars with relevant geopolitical impact and significant OPEC+ supply cuts. It was also a...

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Back when I was a construction lender, I thought the perfect construction loan would pay off after one day, just long enough to collect the loan fee. After all, time is your enemy in construction lending. Any of a myriad of unknowns can keep construction from being completed: the market may evaporate for what is being built, interest rates may rise to make a loan uneconomic, construction costs could increase to require a loan modification or more...

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The nineteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hill Green was one of the key figures in the transition from classical liberalism to “modern” liberalism, in which the state, no longer a mere “night watchman,” if it ever was that, takes on a much more active role. The state in Green’s view ought to aid people in realizing their “real selves,” and doing this often involves supplying them with various goods and services. For this reason, Green is...

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