Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Ageby Naomi WolfChelsea Green Publishing, 2023; 232 pp. Naomi Wolf was, until the covid era, “a well-known feminist nonfiction writer for thirty-five years . . . privileged to be part of the cultural ‘scene’ made up of influencers on the progressive Left.” With great courage, she rejected the masks, lockdowns, and vaccines urged upon us by the state, viewing them as totalitarian...

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Every mainstream school curriculum and state narrative regarding American history includes a common story between the years 1919 and 1941, and it is the myth of American isolation. Americans, as they say, foolishly forgot that they too were part of the world and so left themselves and their allies vulnerable as totalitarianism swept across Europe and Asia. The conclusion that is being pushed with this fictitious tale is shockingly unsubtle....

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The US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) is flush with debt. The NFIP owes the US Treasury roughly $25 billion. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the NFIP will pay $280 million in interest in 2022. “The program was never intended to generate a profit. It was established because due to the nature of flood risks, commercial insurance was not generally available.” Congress created the NFIP in 1968 to make...

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According to a relatively new economics field called Behavioral Economics (BE), one’s emotional state rather than reason influences their economic decisions. Vernon Smith, the BE economist who won a Nobel in economics, wrote: People like to believe that good decision making is a consequence of the use of reason, and that any influence that the emotions might have is antithetical to good decisions. What is not appreciated by Mises and others who...

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The alarming events taking place in the Middle East are growing worse and have more than a small potential to entangle the United States in another foreign war. Hamas’s well-coordinated, surprise attack on Israel from Gaza clearly blindsided Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. However, Israel is now responding with overwhelming force—as it has to previous, smaller-scale attacks over the decades. The bombing of civilian neighborhoods in...

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Fiscal explosion is not in the economic dictionary. But in the foreign exchange markets and bond markets this intuitive concept has sometimes powered a narrative which drives long-term US interest rates and the dollar upward in tandem. The puzzle to explain at such times, whether the early 1980s, or autumn 2023, is why the dollar shrugs off the inflation danger of so much red ink in the government accounts. Let’s start with the proposal for a new...

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A central bank is not a natural product of banking development. It is imposed from the outside or comes into being as a result of government favors. —Vera Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative Anarchy, the absence of coercive government, must not be confused with chaos. —Robert P. Murphy, Chaos Theory The Federal Reserve is dying from monetary mischief. The Fed recently made a woke mandate that will only...

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