Category Archive: 6b) Austrian Economics

Philip Goff’s new book Why? The Purpose of the Universe is an outstanding investigation of cosmic purpose written from the author’s panpsychist point of view. It’s an impressive contribution to metaphysics, but, you may ask, why I am talking about it in this week’s column? The answer is that the author includes an appendix, “P.S. Is Taxation Theft?,” in which he raises some very relevant points about libertarianism. You may now wonder why a book on...

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Cryptocurrency is failing. Or so it seems. Last week, the arrest of Su Zhu, cofounder of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, brought to light the integrity issues which have plagued the crypto landscape. Along with cofounder Kyle Davies, the fund faced $3.5 billion of creditor’s claim, making its collapse one of the largest hedge-fund collapses of all time. Zhu’s arrest came from a long line of incidents. The JPEX scandal, the 2022...

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Many economists, including Milton Friedman, have claimed that reality is elusive and that one cannot know its true nature. Most mainstream economists also believe that data gives us the state of the economy. By inspecting numbers such as gross domestic product (GDP) or the consumer price index, only then can an economist accurately assess the state of economic conditions. Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School of Economics have had a different...

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Throughout my life, a specter developed by the state has been used to haunt and cajole the world’s politics to favor centralized technocracy. I remember it first being called “global warming,” complete with apocalyptic prognostications meant to occur by specific years. Sometime after those predictions failed to materialize, it was rebranded as “climate change,” and the technocratic class’s predictions became more ethereal and vague. The craze made...

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Americans live in a complex world. That has made those who argue for ever-growing statism to often claim that “the more complex the society, the more government control we need.” One major reason is that this claim allows them to assert that even if liberty was appropriate in a long-past, simple “horse and buggy” age (as when America began as a country), it cannot possibly be so now. When I hear such an assertion, the first thing I think of is...

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Last week, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) announced he would not seek reelection in 2024. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Manchin explained his reasons for leaving. He starts with a relatively noncontroversial assessment of the problems facing America—rising costs, dangerous drugs crossing the border, a large national debt, unsafe communities, and foreign wars that threaten to pull the United States in. After some platitudes about these not being...

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The United States regime has picked sides in the Israel-Hamas war and has committed to funding Israel's ongoing bombing of non-combatant men, women, and children in the Gaza strip. Northern Gaza's infrastructure is now all but destroyed, with millions of Gazans displaced and homeless. Nearly ten times more Gazans than Israelis have now died in the conflict. Many Gazans have fled to the southern portion of Gaza, but homelessness and abject poverty...

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The TSA has been promising to end its boneheaded ways for more than 20 years. Flying out of Dallas International Airport last week, I ruefully recognized that all TSA reform promises are malarkey. As I neared the end of a TSA checkpoint line, I saw two women loitering behind a roped off section for CLEAR, a new biometric surveillance program that works with 35 airports and coordinates with TSA. CLEAR involves travelers standing in photo kiosks that...

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