Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Austrian economics properly understands the ability of commercial banks to create money by mismatching their depositor liabilities with their issuing of money substitutes (i.e., the creation of credit). One possible place for further exploration is the role that nonbank or foreign financial institutions play in the creation of credit and the broader implications on business-cycle creation. Let us take the dollar as an example. Say Deutsche Bank...

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Recent news reports mention the possible bankruptcy of the privately owned company Thames Water (TW) in the United Kingdom, with a history of very high debt repayments, high dividend payouts to shareholders, mismanagement, and underinvestment of capital spending. TW supplies water and wastewater services to the southeast of England, including London. The problem for TW is that almost half of their debt is floating rate, in which the interest rate...

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After ninety-nine years in business, Yellow, one of the nation’s biggest trucking companies, shut down. The company has more than twelve thousand trucks and employed thirty thousand, with twenty-two thousand of those jobs held by Teamsters. If you are a taxpayer, you know all this, your government being a 29.6 percent shareholder of Yellow and all. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act dished out...

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Can computers plan a socialist economy? The idea is not new; it first appeared in the debate over economic calculation, which began in 1920 with Ludwig von Mises’s first article on the topic and continued until 1949. This was a time when computers had recently emerged. Computers were not widespread, but their possibilities were evident. Oskar Lange considered the market economy to be a “crude and soon to be obsolete computing machine.” More...

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How do you cover up an atomic bomb? The same way you cover up anything else: you don’t allow people to know what really happened. Of course, the magnitude and power of a mushroom cloud are plainly unmistakable. However, the effects of that bomb can be concealed and obfuscated from the general population. For over a year after the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the full extent of the bomb’s killing power was kept secret from the...

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Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes adorning the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, tell a timeless tale of governance. They portray a city flourishing under just laws and crumbling under misrule. The latter side of this allegory rings alarmingly relevant today as the recent riots in France paint a destructive urban tableau, mirroring the narrative of government failure. The situation has deteriorated so drastically that widespread use of force is now...

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Up from Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right after a Generation of DecayEdited by Arthur MilikhEncounter Books, 2023; 328 pp. The contributors to Up from Conservatism, most of whom are associated with the Claremont Institute, think that “movement” conservatism has failed, in large part through acceptance of the premises of the Left. The Right needs to carry the battle to the enemy, aiming at its destruction and its replacement by a sounder regime....

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A friend of mine works for the public sector, in transit specifically. When I asked him to tell me what value he saw in “public transit” for society, he replied, You must be from the stone ages! Public transit fulfills an important function. It provides transportation for folks who can’t afford the private solutions, and also solves the problem of congestion and pollution in crowded cities. And it can do some of this better than private enterprise,...

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