Is there an alternative to this Big Brother approach to managing homeland security? I think there is: private defense agencies offering competitive services on an open market.
More and more journalists and economists are calling for a return to "sound money." Joseph Salerno's new book provides a rigorous examination of what sound money really means.
If the Fed had been tracking repos in 2007–2008, what they would have seen was the unfolding of the financial crisis one full year before it went critical. Instead, Bernanke stopped collecting the data because he decided to abolish M3.
Raico's historical essays are not for the faint of heart nor for those whose loyalty to the US or British state outweighs their devotion to truth and humanity. Yet Ralph did not invent the ugly facts he recounts here, as his ample documentation attests.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has <a href="http://store.mises.org/Democracy-The-God-That-Failed-P240.aspx">noted</a>, democracy is owned by no one. But neither is representative government. Both are marked by infantilized societies: time preference shortens, current consumption trumps wealth-producing capital formation, tax burdens increase, and government debt swells.
The claim that monetary policy has nothing to do with inflation is nothing new. The Conference Board said the same thing in 1957, and here is Henry Hazlitt's response — from his Crisis and How to Resolve It — to the notion that it is not money expansion but costs of business that is pushing prices.
If a handful of large US banks will be the major beneficiaries of the Panama Canal treaty, have they also had any role in lobbying for or negotiating the treaty itself? Or will their gains be merely a lucky windfall from decisions made by the US government for very different reasons?
The strength of Whalen's book is that his monetary history, like Rothbard's, is about people, not policies. While Keynesians talk about unknowable constructs like aggregate demand, Whalen's story turns on the actions of people.
It's not as if TSA officials had said all along, since 2001, that they needed full-body scanners in order to do their jobs properly. Had they said that in the beginning, then the public probably would've protested enough such that the "small-government" George Bush wouldn't have nationalized airport security.
Why is unemployment stuck at 10 percent in the narrowest measure and as high as 30 percent for some demographics? The usual answer is that the broad economy is not recovering. That's true but superficial; it explains nothing. We have a problem of a specific kind with the job market.
