Mises Daily

If a regime of complete economic freedom be established, social and political freedom will follow automatically; and until it is established neither social nor political freedom can exist.

The drive of the New Deal toward war once again reshuffled the ideological spectrum and the meaning of Left and Right in American politics.

The government is thus able to anesthetize the public to tolerate — and indeed expect — decisions that are made without regard to right or wrong, but solely on the basis of the relative political influence of rent seekers and property owners.

Mr Greenspan: Please send a $100 bill to the Hubris in Monetary Policy Award Committee and write Bernanke or Shiller's name on the back. After all, since both men promote the myth that that inflation is only sometimes and only in some places a monetary phenomenon, they have your back as well.

The course that we will be giving is what you would have gotten in contemporary colleges and universities had this tragic diversion not occurred.

Praxeology takes an actor's goals, and his beliefs on how to satisfy them, as the starting point of analysis. If people erroneously believe that a certain root possesses medicinal properties, it will command a price on the market. The economist must take people as they are to explain market phenomena.

Of course Podhoretz's argument is wrong: it does not follow from the instability of a government that a successor regime can be easily established.

In the Austrian view, the boom-bust cycle is caused by the Fed's maintenance of artificially low interest rates, which causes businesses to expand, hire workers, buy other resources, and so forth, even though these projects are not justified by the true supply of savings in the economy. The greater the "stimulus" the worse the malinvestments.

You may say it another way: that the intentions of mass production cannot be realized unless management and labor are both free. So long as that freedom existed in the motorcar industry, the cost of an automobile went lower and lower until it became, pound for pound, the cheapest manufactured thing in the world, not the Ford car only but all cars; and automobile labor at the same time was the highest-paid labor of its kind in the world.

No doubt, the costs of a return to "sound money" — that is ending the government money-supply monopoly and returning the supply of money to free-market forces — would most likely be substantial. It would most likely entail a severe loss in output and employment, given that inflation has been allowed to have a say in the allocation of scarce resources for decades.