Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

America’s federally sanctioned entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, each face bankruptcy in the next few years. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Social Security was created in 1935 to provide retirement income for Americans who reached the age of sixty-five. These three entitlement programs consume about fifty cents of every federal budget dollar,...

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[A selection from For a New Liberty.] If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors. But for some odd reason, liberals have systematically tried to deprive innocent persons of the means for defending themselves against aggression. Despite the fact that the Second Amendment to the...

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“La commedia è finita!” summarizes where the United States and Europe now stand in the Great Phony Postpandemic Disinflation. Why phony? Reported consumer price index (CPI) inflation has been falling in the US and Europe; but this has little to do with the advertised monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank (ECB), and Bank of England. Rather, the decline in reported CPI inflation is consistent with a natural downward rhythm...

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It won’t be long before governments around the world, including the one in Washington, self-destruct. Strong words, but anything less would be naïve. As economist Herbert Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it has a tendency to stop.” Case in point: fiat money political regimes. Interventionist economies of the West are in a fatal downward spiral, comparable to that of the Roman Empire in the second century, burdened with...

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Since the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, the dollar has been the world’s preferred reserve currency—the major trading nations of the world were willing to hold dollars in vast amounts to satisfy their need for a readily accepted worldwide payment medium. Even when, in 1971, the United States violated its solemn promise to redeem its dollars for gold at thirty-five dollars per ounce, nations were still willing to hold dollars. Germany Shies Away...

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Some analysts contend that size can be a deterrent to economic prosperity, so as a result, small states are particularly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks. Usually, small states are discussed in light of their limitations and challenges. Even leaders of small countries earnestly paint size as an obstacle to future progress. The idea that smallness is an impediment to be overcome has become gospel in some quarters. Caribbean leaders...

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In all the media and regime frenzy over the Janaury 6 riots and the Pentagon Leaker in recent months, it is interesting to examine the contrast between how the regime treats "crimes" against its own interests, and real crime committed against ordinary private citizens.  Witness, for example, how the Biden administration and corporate media have treated the January 6 riot as if it were some kind of military coup, demanding that draconian...

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The Constitution “is not a suicide pact,” said Justice Arthur Goldberg in the court’s opinion in the 1963 Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez. His statement highlights a fundamental truth: in times of crisis, governments often feel compelled to take extraordinary measures to protect their citizens and maintain order. However, this desire to act swiftly and decisively can lead down a perilous path where the expansion of government...

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