Interventionism

Part of the Authors Forum, presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D, Organized Labor) has put paid to the possibility of our use of the reductio ad absurdum. With her $22 per  hour minimum wage (or is it $33?) she has seen us, raised us, doubled down, and in every other way possible demonstrated that she is impervious to logic and basic economics.

The people of Colorado and Washington have effectively nullified US drug laws in their states, with respect to marijuana. Moreover, the people of Colorado and Washington are also effectively nullifying an international treaty on drug prohibition.

Needless to say, those who benefit from bubble activities are not going to like this, since the diversion of real wealth to them from wealth generators will slow down or cease all together. A fall in economic activity in this case would in fact be the demise of various bubble activities.

This week’s quote(s) highlights why an explanation of a general boom-bust pattern of economic must be a monetary theory of the trade cycle.

Calvin Coolidge, on spending and taxation, was quite Rothbardian well before Rothbard. According to Amity Shlaes, “Coolidge didn’t favor tax cuts as a means to increase revenue or to buy off Democrats. He favored them because they took government, the people’s servant, out of the way of the people.”

The actual aim of the recent flood of laws rendering cash transactions less convenient or limiting or even prohibiting them is to force the public at large to make payments through the financial system in order to prop up the unstable fractional-reserve banks and, more importantly, to expand the ability of governments to spy on and keep track of their citizens’ most private financial dealings.

The indigent
    segment of society, those who receive social welfare aid from the state, are not necessarily foremost among the parasites of the political means. Rather, in the statist economy of theft and wealth
    redistribution, it is the elite — powerful, entrenched commercial players — who most benefit.

The only way out of this impasse is to abolish the state’s monopoly on the production of law and law enforcement.

The ultimate responsibility for the poker boom lay with the Federal Reserve.