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… your $200,000 ten years ago has been halved in terms of purchasing power. However, in terms of planning purposes, your anticipated retirement amount has been reduced by 75%. Given these outcomes, who will be able to retire? And for those already retired, how many will “unretire?”...
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It is now time to move from a case where credits are given to producers to where consumers are being given credits. Indeed, the general effects of an increase of money via consumers' credits, which will result in an increased relative demand for consumers' goods compared to producers' ones...
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Once again, as done in previous lectures, we shall analyze the results of a scenario where consumers decide to save, and accordingly invest a larger portion of their income than before; however, here we shall see the effects the price of goods will have on the entire structure of production. As in the...
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At last we are ready to begin the main problem of this lecture, that is the problem of how a transition to a more capitalistic structure of production, or vice versa, is brought about, and what are the conditions that must be fulfilled for a new equilibrium to be brought about. The first of the two is...
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It is now time to add the flow of money into Hayek's theoretical apparatus. While the Hayekian triangle is used to illustrate the movement of goods through the economy's structure of production, it is just as legitimately utilized as a schematic to elucidate the flow of money. When the goods...
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Welcome to my new blog here on Mises.org. It's been a few years since I've had the inspiration to speak to the world on a regular basis. When I last blogged regularly, the future looked brighter than ever as capitalism was spreading across the planet in a seemingly-unstoppable avalanche. China...
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The most renown theory of the French economist, Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832), the eponymous Say’s Law has been one of the most important contributions of Classical economics even though it was but a minor facet of Say’s own economics. He introduced it in Chapter XV of Book I of his A Treatise...
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[ Update below] George Will has gifted us with a thoroughly confused op-ed in the Sunday WaPo . Will predictibly trots out the 1980 bet that Paul Ehrlich lost to Julian Simon over the prices of minerals and commodities - but fails to note that the reason that Simon won that bet was that people own land...
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A post on the Wall Street Journal`s enviro blog, Environmental Capital , reports on one disgruntled reaction to a recent school play called “Santa Goes Green” , and reports on a new children`s book (and website) by the same name. The post closes with the sarcastic note, "No word yet...
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Speaking at the Asia-Europe summit Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao recently said , “The biggest responsibility is to stabilise the financial order as soon as possible. We need to use all available tools to prevent the crisis from harming real economies.” The Premier's comment is hardly in...
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[Update below] My last piece (on Bret Stephen 's straight-faced but ridiculous dismissal in the WSJ of all concerns about climate change as a "sick-souled religion" and a "nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God") brought the...
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Yingling Liu , manager of the China Program at the Worldwatch Institute , has praised recent steps by Chinese water authorities to clarify rights to water and to encourage water trading as a means to resolve serious issues over the use of water. Here are a few key excerpts for the article ("Water...
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[Updated, as noted] My attention was drawn today to a letter to the editor published by The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) , an organization of free-thinkers who pioneered what is now known as " free market environmentalism " and which is the nation's oldest and largest...
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It is a cliche to compare political collectivism to insect behavior or a "hive mentality." The imagery is efficively simple; that people are nothing but expendable indentityless drones slaving away for the lazy Queen. But the analogy is amazingly shallow, since insect swarms are entirely devoid...
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Dan McLaughlin asks the first of these interesting questions on the Mises blog, http://mises.org/story/2718 . The second question is mine, and I addressed it briefly in the blog responses to Dan. I take the liberty of posting that response here (revised slightly and with a few further comments): Too...