Mises Daily

Mark Brandly asks what might have happened to prices if the money supply had been fixed since 1959. According to the CPI, the 2005 price level was 6.7 times higher than it was in 1959. However, in the absence of an expanding money supply, the price level would have been one-fifth as high as it was in 1959. Due to economic growth, the price level in this period would have fallen by 80 percent. Therefore, the expanding money supply over the last 46 years has resulted in a current price level over 34 times higher than it otherwise would have been.

However, even though the Federal Reserve's monetary excesses may occasionally lure too many into day trading and real estate investing, both are worthy entrepreneurial activities. There is nothing inherently slimy about trading real estate, and certainly nothing warranting the state's regulation of this market.

Otteson has restated in exemplary fashion a key argument made by Frédéric Bastiat in The Law: the state does not acquire new rights not possessed by individuals.

Every human being, by his nature, is free; he controls himself. But in the Old World, men believe that some Authority controls them. They cannot make their energy work by any such belief, because the belief is false.

A real cultural transformation, which not only addresses the façade, but more importantly the roots can happen only through discussions, a thorough churning in the realm of ideas, something a society has got to go through to evolve.

There are no short cuts, and inherent in this understanding is a lesson for those who want to force freedom or whatever virtues on others.

My disagreement with Ms. Baum regarding central banking is at base a disagreement about what exactly is money and credit.

For both of our modern wings of politics, Iraq is a lesson in government, and not the one either of them wants to learn. It proves the assertion that the best way to keep the state down is to get everyone a weapon.

Generally, radicals are dismissed by psycho-historians as people with Oedipal problems, people who, in their unresolved hostility to "the father," are lashing out at the State, or at contemporary institutions.

Income equality and prosperity are not the same things. It is theoretically possible for the state to make all incomes equal; Lenin and his cohorts tried to do that in Russia from 1917-1921, and we know the horrific results of that experiment.

But as long as people can be led to believe that running the printing press and issuing fiduciary media can substitute for saving and capital accumulation as a way to achieve prosperity and create wealth — or, yes, prosecute a war — government will continue to get away with this particularly insidious and underhanded form of expropriation.